Reflections, Silences, Ghosts: From the Archive as a Norm to the Archive as a Problem in History

Abstract

Roughly since the transition to the current century, archive’s theoretical, epistemological
and cultural status has been widely valued, placing the archive at the core of a multidisciplinary debate within the human and social sciences. This development contradicts a secular and nevertheless not yet overcome representation of the archive as an unquestioned object, mainly framed within a practical and applied type of thought and reasoning.
In this essay we proceed to an incursion into a growing and multidisciplinary bibliographic corpus that problematizes the archive as a concept and the archives themselves, leading to new perspectives on archives’ relation with their socio-historical surroundings. Through the exploration of themes such as memory, power and social and political uses of the archive, this incursion highlights contributions that allow a new focus on the history of the archives and an appreciation of its specific historicity. Looking to the archive and collective memory as two interrelated and commonly grounded problems, the usefulness of the study of archives for a historical sociology of mnemonic practices is suggested.

Keywords

Archive Concept; Archives’ History; Power; Collective Memory; Interdisciplinarity.