(I realize that I had skipped ahead to next week’s readings in my previous processing post “Building Community Archives in the Digital Age,” so here’s my processing post for today’s class, which also addresses similar topics.)
In his talk “RadTech Meets RadArch: Towards A New Principle for Archives and Archival Description,” Jarrett Drake focused on the colonial history and the implications of what provenance means in archival practice, especially when it comes to preserving digital material and records. Much like the concept of respect des fonds, provenance denotes conserving the original order of things. That is, maintaining and having the record of ownership of a work of art or an antique, used as a guide to authenticity or quality.
Drake explains: “[A]t its most basic level, provenance thrives with the presence of a clear creator or ownership of records and with a hierarchical relationship between entities, both of which reflect the bureaucratic and corporate needs of the Western colonial, capitalist, and imperialist regimes in which archivists have most adhered to the principle. This principle, again, is the central organizing unit for description in most archival repositories and archivists must comes to terms with the ways in which we incorporate the privilege, power, and patriarchy of provenance into our everyday practices.”
I think Drake worded it best when he comprehensively and succinctly stated: “It bears mentioning that provenance emerged as a concept in the West at a time when most people were structurally if not legally excluded from ownership; ownership of their own bodies, minds, labor, property, and records. Its application in archives, which is close to 200 years old, reflects the limitation of state regimes in the West to recognize fully the human rights of indigenous Americans, black people, women, and gender non-conforming people.”
It’s easy to build something and write history according to one’s terms when the resources and the “right” to access those resources are well within one’s disposal. Drake terms these as (1) the legal privilege to create and own, and (2) the legal protection of that privilege. Skin color, ethnicity, and gender, for instance, were often used as walls that blocked privilege for those who were not typically white, male, cisgendered, straight, and wealthy. These arbitrary social indicators often defined one’s provenance and were used to justify the means of ownership, access to resources, and entry into particular social circles.
One example of archival information containing provenance, as Drake states, is the biographical note: “[A]rchivists often write massive memorials and monuments to wealthy, white, cisgendered and heterosexual men, including selective details about the creator that have minimal bearing on the records, and instead serve to valorize and venerate white western masculinity.”
By “valorizing” and “venerating” only a select few who represent a miniscule scale on the spectrum of humanity, we will never get the full picture of the history of the world. If we don’t try to make improvements in the patriarchal path of archival practice now and make efforts to create other types of archives that incorporate more diversity, then we run the risk of ignoring and even erasing entire populations’ stories, accomplishments, social contributions, traditions, and cultural diversity. It doesn’t matter how vast the collection; in the end we would all lose and miss out on untold stories and unshared cultural treasures simply because provenance dictates that we adhere to a patriarchal status quo.
Brilliant, Julianne! This is incredibly powerful: “It’s easy to build something and write history according to one’s terms when the resources and the “right” to access those resources are well within one’s disposal.” And I very much appreciate your call to action: “If we don’t try to make improvements in the patriarchal path of archival practice now and make efforts to create other types of archives that incorporate more diversity, then we run the risk of ignoring and even erasing entire populations’ stories, accomplishments, social contributions, traditions, and cultural diversity.” Drake and other archivists — including the Documenting the Now project we read about in Week 2, and many of the projects we’ll read about for next week — are aiming to do this important work.