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Arch Sci (2013) 13:95120DOI 10.1007/s10502-012-9180-7
ORIGINAL PAPER
Evidence, memory, identity, and community: four shifting archival paradigms
Terry Cook
Published online: 28 June 2012 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012
Abstract This essay argues that archival paradigms over the past 150 years have gone through four phases: from juridical legacy to cultural memory to societal engagement to community archiving. The archivist has been transformed, accordingly, from passive curator to active appraiser to societal mediator to community facilitator. The focus of archival thinking has moved from evidence to memory to identity and community, as the broader intellectual currents have changed from pre-modern to modern to postmodern to contemporary. Community archiving and digital realities offer possibilities for healing these disruptive and sometimes conicting discourses within our profession.
Keywords Archival theory Paradigm shifts Evidence Memory
Professional identity Community archiving
In todays globalised, multicultural society, it remains a critical task in both academic research and public discourse to question historical and cultural myths and re-evaluate traditional paradigms.The deconstructionist and interdisciplinary enthusiasm of the last decades has challenged the founding epistemological myths as well as the methodologies of traditional academic disciplines. But does this paradigm shift run the risk of creating a new academic orthodoxy? Will myth-breaking emerge as a destructive or founding gesture?
T. Cook (&)
University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, Canada e-mail: [email protected]
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96 Arch Sci (2013) 13:95120
This published call for papers is for an international conference on Myth-Making and Myth-Breaking in History and the Humanities.1 It applies equally to archives and archivists, and the central nostrums of our own professional orthodoxies, and how these dene our identity and our role in society. Such rethinking, as advocated in the above epigram, was anticipated, in fact, by an international conference of archivists, historians, artists, philosophers,literarycritics, museum curators, and others, hosted by the University of Dundee in December 2010. Sponsored by the Centre for Archive and Information Studies, the Dundee conference had as its theme, Memory, Identity, and the Archival Paradigm. And no few speakers demonstrated that terms like memory, identity, and archive are now seen both as problematic and, as used in much archival literature, as illdened, not only when taken in isolation, but also and especially when considered together and used in combination, let alone in shaping an...