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Arch Sci (2010) 10:141189
DOI 10.1007/s10502-010-9118-x
ORIGINAL PAPER
Brien Brothman
Published online: 21 May 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010
Abstract In 1924, Canadian Dominion Archivist Arthur Doughty (18601936) characterized archives as the gift of one generation to another. This essay takes these words seriously. It sets aside the common habit of thinking of archival work in terms of keeping and preserving and experiments withre-imagines archives as a form of gift giving. However, as a growing body of scholarship across numerous disciplines is discovering, gift giving is a complex social act. Thus, construing archives as a form of gift opens up new avenues of critical inquiry into archives unique temporal consciousness and its importance to accounts of the establishment and unmaking of any social order. This article explores the nature of archival consciousness and its place in social theory.
Keywords Archives Gift Sacrice Time Memory Pragmatism
Forty-two years ago (to me if to no one else
The number is of some interest) it was a brilliant starry night And the westward train was empty and had no corridorsSo darting from side to side I could catch the unwonted sight Of those almost intolerably brightHoles, punched in the sky, which excited me partly becauseOf their Latin names and partly because I had read in textbooks How very far off they were, it seemed their lightHad left them (some at least) long years before I was.
This is an expanded version of a keynote address delivered at the Society of Archivists annual conference held in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 2007.
B. Brothman (&)
Rhode Island State Archives, 337 Westminster Street, Providence, RI 02093, USA e-mail: [email protected]
Perfect present, perfect gift: nding a place for archival consciousness in social theory
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And this remembering now I mark that what
Light was leaving some of them at least then, Forty-two years ago, will never arriveIn time for me to catch it, which light whenIt does get here may nd that there is notAnyone left alive (William Macneice 1967, p. 544)1
Mais larchive cest aussi ce qui fait que toutes ces choses dites ne samassent pas indniment dans une multitude amorphe, ne sinscrivent pas non plus dans une linarit sans rupture, et ne disparaissent pas...