Beyond the traditional
bounderies of archival theory:
An interview with Eric Ketelaar1
arnoud glaudemans, rienk jonker and frans smit
EDITORS: Before going into discussing the key issues of the articles in the book, we
would like to start with a more general question. We entitled the book 'Archives in
liquid times', because we have the impression that on many levels - concepts,
fundamentals, ethics - our profession is in so much movement, that the metaphor
of being 'liquid' that we derived from sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, is an
appropriate one. What is your opinion on the state of affairs in our profession and
in archival theory? Would you agree that we live in liquid times?
ERIC KETELAAR: On the one hand I agree that it is a time of different views. You
know that I have been influenced by postmodernist thinking. So, I would agree that
nothing is stable, and things are always changing. In my view a record is never
finished and is always actual. As to the metaphor of 'liquid', for me it sounds slightly
negative: as if nothing can be taken for granted, nothing is sure, and nothing is
stable. As far as our profession is concerned that is a bit 'too much' and too negative.
The fact that nearly all the essays in your book treat basic concepts of archivistics -
like context, provenance, etc. - shows that these concepts still are 'places to reside'.
They are not so strict and immutable as some people would think, but you can trust
those concepts. Each of them has a history. Of course, our profession is undergoing
a lot of changes, as can be read in the essays in your book. Also, the fact that you,
editors, started the whole exercise of making a book shows that you yourself are not
as insecure as Baumann's metaphor suggests!
As I have been arguing for a long time already, our profession as such, and even more
than the library profession, tends to be quite on the conservative side. This is what
Van der Gouw already stated in his inaugural address about forty years ago. In the
case of the Netherlands, the fact that the archival profession was so early
professionalised, and that we 'had our bible before our church', caused that for a
very long time the profession did not really evolve. Also, recall that Fruin stayed on
as National Archivist until his seventies; he controlled the State Archives and indeed
the whole profession as President of the Society of Dutch Archivists, as archival
educator (he founded the School of Archives (Archiefschool) and held the chair of its
examination board) and, after 1920, as the only surviving author of the Manual.
Together with Muller, he had a very conservative influence and view on the
profession. It took quite a while for younger professionals, in the 1980s, to liberate
themselves from a one-dimensional view of archivistics. This is also to be coupled
with the natural tendency of any professional - in for example medicine, law, etc. -
of being cautious in his or her treatment of theory. Recall that in my Leiden and also
1 The interview was held on September 22th, 2017 at the Dutch National Archives in The Hague.