Archival contexts

Abstract

Discussing archives as a cultural phenomenon entails viewing archives as epistemological sites rather than as sources. In the past two decades, this “archival turn” has been made in many disciplines. Anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, philosophers, cultural and literary theorists, as well as artists, have developed various “archivologies”. Historians, however, by and large upheld the primacy of documents as historical sources, maintaining the tenet “No documents, no history” coined 125 years ago, in 1897, by the French: archivist Langlois and historian Seignobos, and translated into Polish in 1912. However, understanding archives as a cultural, social and political phenomenon also entails shifting attention from the actual archival document to its contextual history, a history encompassing the why, who, what, and how of archiving, all determined by societal challenges and technologies.