Ordinary People and People forgotten by History
Their (shortfall in) Representation in Written Archives
Ian E. WILSON
National Archives of Canada
The "crisis of representation" first articulated in the social sciences in the mid-1980s carries profound implications for archives, in particular for the social accountability of archives, whether government, corporate, or private. What we remember and who we remember from our individual or collective past has a great deal to do with how we remember. In ancient Greece, the mnemon or "memory official" maintained the memory of heroes, cities, priests, and magistrates. But, as Jacques LeGoff has observed, "With the development of writing, these "living memories" are transformed into archivists." If, with the advent of writing, the form of memory changed, its social function did not, for it was still largely heroes, cities, priests, and magistrates which produced written records. Subsequent transformations in the exteriorization of memory involved evolution from manuscript culture to print culture to visual culture and most recently to electronic culture.
But what of those who leave few, if any written records? What of those who do not, or cannot, or choose not to write? What of those whose biographies are inscribed in their creative output -- their art, their negatives, their performances, their compositions? What of those whose culture embraces oral narratives over written records as the dominant form of social memory? What of those who are too young, or are too old, or for whatever reason are unable to write? And what of those who are written out of the official record -- those on the margins of society, those in non-traditional roles? How do archives acquire and select the "record" of their existence; indeed, what is the nature of the documentary evidence of their participation in, and contribution to, society?
The answers to these questions lie in the complex relationship between history and memory, between reality and representation, and ultimately in keeping with the theme of this meeting, between archives and society. In Canada, for example, archives face challenges on three fronts:
- how do we document the role of women in society, and in particular in such male-dominated professions as the military?
- how do we document the history of our native peoples whose own form of social memory is oral and fluid?
- how do we document the experience of immigrants whose written record of lives in a new land is in a language other than English or French?
In the first instance, we are challenged to recover a gendered or marginalized position from a hegemonic perspective. In the second instance, we confront a form of social memory which is dynamic, in which stories stay alive, one which freezes ideas rather than words, one which permits the moral or lesson or substance of a story to live on while permitting its verbal form to change, to be expressed differently, yet to remain pertinent as society develops. And in the third instance, we encounter linguistic diversity of a multicultural society. And, these challenges are by no means unique to Canada Nor, indeed are they unique to archives, but rather they are shared by other heritage institutions, most notably museums. Yet, these issues, so fundamental to what we acquire and select, are profoundly important because archival records -- usually written and now increasingly in electronic form -- have long been used to form and inform our national narratives, our sense belonging to a community which is more intellectually imagined than physically experienced, our traditions which are sometimes more invented than real.
Having raised questions concerning what to preserve, let me turn to issues of use and access, issues which must be addressed if archives are to serve the wider public beyond our conventional researcher-clientele. Archives have long been thought of as things -- as collections, as institutions. My predecessor, Sir Arthur Doughty, called archives the most precious of all national assets, "the gift of one generation to another." But archives can only be "precious assets ... the gift of one generation to another" when what they preserve remains meaningful and, indeed, is presented in a meaningful way to the next generation. To be precious, archives must be valued, and to be valued, archives must reach out to people. Indeed, if archives are to reach their potential as places where individual narratives and collective experience can mingle, where official narratives and personal experience can meet, where a sense of self and belonging can emerge from records of history, then mind and document must interact.
Archives are the site of that interaction. Archives allow history to be written in the first person, to be written as the stories of a family, a community, a people. And increasingly, where information and knowledge are the driving forces of the digital economy, the image of archives as fragile, irreplaceable, and inaccessible is being eclipsed by a dynamic concept of archives as the tangible social memory, a rich legacy of words and images, ideas and traditions, to be shared by all. It is then the role of the archives to reunite the public with the evidence of their past, to serve as a vital link in creating the social memory. And, by emphasizing memory rather than just collection or asset, archives assume a more active function in society.
We are poised at a critical intellectual and technological juncture where history bumps up against memory, where education, entertainment, and the Internet merge, where archives are empowered to touch the lives of everyone. This is an opportunity which demands new thinking and challenges the ways in which archival services are developed and managed. Just as we seek to document the margins, so must we seek to reach the margins -- to reach new audiences with innovative methods of presentation, new interpretations of collections, new partnerships with museums, libraries and learning specialists in order to preserve, not simply the names and facts and dates of history, but more importantly the values, culture, and heritage embedded in them.
The Internet now offers a host of new possibilities -- for opening archives to entirely new audiences, and for putting archives to entirely new uses. This is far more than an extension of that old debate about who archives serve and how. Today, when all citizens have a right of access, the issue becomes, how do we manage this demand? and how do we respond to it? and, perhaps key, how do we do this using descriptive systems designed primarily for control rather than user-friendly access? Our portals are now both real and virtual, and our new challenge is to find new ways to open them wide and keep them open -- to new users as well as to new uses.
Bibliographical References
- Svetlana Alpers, "The Museum as a Way of Seeing." In Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (eds.), Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991, pp.25-32.
- Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991.
- Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.). The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
- Patrick H. Hutton, History as an Art of Memory. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1993.
- Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory. trans. Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992 (originally published as Storia e memoria, Italian edition, Editions Gallimard, 1986; French edition, Editions Gallimard, 1988), p.63.
Ian E. WILSON
- National Archivist.
- Ian E. Wilson was appointed National Archivist of Canada in July 1999.
- Born in Montreal, Quebec, in April 1943, Ian Wilson attended the Collège militaire royal de Saint-Jean and obtained his Master's in History from Queen's University in 1974.
- Mr. Wilson has had a distinguished career in several areas including archival and information management, university teaching and government service. He began his career at Queen's University Archives, later becoming Saskatchewan's Provincial Archivist and Chairman of the Saskatchewan Heritage Advisory Board. He was Archivist of Ontario from 1986 to 1999.
- Ian Wilson chaired the Consultative Group on Canadian Archives on behalf of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. The Group's report, Canadian Archives, — generally known as the "Wilson Report" — was published in 1980 and has been described as "a milestone in the history of archival development in Canada".
- As National Archivist, Mr. Wilson serves on the Information Management Sub-Committee of Treasury Board. He is a member of the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada and the Canadian Permanent Committee on Geographical Names. In September 2000, Mr. Wilson was elected Vice-President of the International Council on Archives. He is an Adjunct Professor in the Faculties of Information Studies and Graduate Studies at the University of Toronto. He has also been President of the Champlain Society since 1995.
- Ian Wilson has been involved with the Canadian archival community for over 30 years and has worked diligently to make archives accessible and interesting to a wide range of audiences. He has helped safeguard the integrity of archival records while at the same time encouraging an active use of them by the public. In addition, he has published extensively on history, archives, heritage, and information management and has lectured both nationally and abroad.
- Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory. trans. Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992 (originally published as Storia e memoria, Italian edition, Editions Gallimard, 1986; French edition, Editions Gallimard, 1988), p.63.
- Patrick H. Hutton, History as an Art of Memory. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1993.
- Svetlana Alpers, "The Museum as a Way of Seeing." In Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (eds.), Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991, pp.25-32.
- Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991.
- Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.). The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.