Aleida's Archivology: Between the Kenyon Canon and the Kenyon Catalogue

By


The archival work this Friday consisted of learning the protocols for retrieval of materials from boxes, as well as how to navigate the library's organization system to schedule and appointment in the archives, and to this end select some boxes of materials we wished to see removed. Sometimes it turns out memory lane already bears a lot of traffic, and in this process we took a few speculative detours. In a short session going through the catalogue of ar we discovered a great number of student organizations we'd never even imagined existed. Even within the limited section we were assigned to look through, namely Series IV, Sub-series 2, the one covering student organizations there was a staggering number of different organizations and documents attached to them. Everything from the self-evidently named Banjo and Aerobics Clubs, to organizations of vague purpose like "Birkenstocks" and the "Newman Club," to regrettable or repugnant parts of Kenyon's History like the "Kenyon Klan" (it seems "Kenyon 'K'" alliteration is an old tradition). A lot of this arrived to us if a message in a bottle, decontextualized and from an unclear sender. It was in some senses a vaguely magical experience.

Aleida Assman's assertion that archives are the "paradigmatic institution" of passive or inert cultural memory, "situated halfway between the canon and forgetting" is in many ways a compelling lens through which to view this experience (1978: 335). Within the database were folders full of documents, and even assuming the smaller or less relevant ones were less well stocked, it brings to mind a vast ocean of inert information that is only converted into canon by their retrieval from collective memory. And yet, the nature of this is equally about collective forgetting, a process shaped in part by cultural selection criteria that in the end dictate what can and cannot be remembered collectively (Assman 1978: 335-336).

While I can't vouch for the others, I noticed quite clearly we had already collectively decided or inherited a set of criteria based on our topic. Something like "Inclusion" is so broad it can cover a wide variety of groups, so we decided to sample from that wide variety of materials from different groups. And yet, this itself shows a certain kind of prioritization of some things over others, some groups, documents, etc. After all, the "Kenyon Klan" is probably an artifact best relegated to the past, even if it is a "structural mechanism of exclusion" that is responsible, though it may be useful as a tool for retrospection (Assman 1978: 337). The selection process is definitely different in this light. I guess the main question that lingers in my mind is about agency in relation to memory, collective and otherwise. Do we ever know exactly what the criteria that determine what we want society to remember? Can we ever know for certain where these judgements come from?


References

Assman, Aldeida. 1978. "Canon and Archive." Pp. 334-337 in The Collective Memory Reader. Edited by J. Olick, V. Vinitzky-Seroussi, and D. Levy. New York: Oxford University Press.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Junzo Shono: How We Remember Gambier

By
Image
When I entered the Special Collections room, I had no idea where to start or what to do. We were given large files of several notable Kenyon alumni, and it was overwhelming. Without a clear understanding of the responsibilities we were tasked with, we each selected a different file without giving reason or pause as to who we selected. For one reason or another, Junzo Shono’s name caught my eye. I had never heard of the man, but after taking a class on Japanese Literature last fall, I was curious as to who he was and his involvement with the College. Junzo Shono, an acclaimed Japanese writer, first came to Gambier in 1957, where he spent a year in the College capturing and describing the mundane moments of everyday life (Creel, 2022). He would eventually publish these memories in the form of a novel titled “Gambia Taizaiki” (Sojourn in Gambier. He was born in Osaka, Japan on February 9th, 1921, and studied at Osaka University of Foreign Languages for four years, and later studied at Kyu...
Read more

Archival and Canon Memory: Understanding Our Present Through Our Past

By
Image
  This week, one of the many artifacts my group examined, was an old issue of The Collegian. The main story of this issue was the reconstruction of the Brown Family Environmental Center. This edition of the Collegian was significant because it detailed certain transformations being made to the center that would give it more focus on academics and incorporating student education as a part of the BFEC. For example, the article focuses on the construction of a new building that will operate as a hub for both student labs, as well as environmental education programs for the public, which the BFEC is now well known for. This article is also historically significant as it was written right after the BFEC was renamed to the Brown Family Environmental Center. It is important to examine sources like these, as they offer what the earliest perspectives and actions of what the BFEC were, which is interesting to compare to modern activities of the environmental center. This week we also read an...
Read more

Hope, Suffering, and The Kenyon College Campus Guide

By
Image
  Attached above is a screenshot of “The Kenyon College Campus Guide”, which is a near-comprehensive list of buildings that have belonged to the College and Village of Gambier since 1824. Although my group is curating something about the future of the Hill, our first meeting mainly involved discussions of its past. To this end, we tried to develop a picture of what the Hill physically looked like in the past 100 years by reviewing photographs of buildings, construction plans, and the Campus Guide, which you can see above. If you were to review the entire guide, you’d see that under the name of every building is a description of when it was built, what it was used (or being used) for, and when (if) it was destroyed. In the context of this week’s reading, these descriptions call the terms “communities of memory” and “communities of hope” to mind. According to Bellah et al. (1985, 2011), a “community of memory…tell[s]...stories of shared suffering” and orients us towards “future co...
Read more