Archival and Canon Memory: Understanding Our Present Through Our Past

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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 excerpt from Aleida Assmann's "Canon and Archive". In her writings Assmann emphasizes how forgetting and negligence of information is essential to the memory of a group. She discusses how societies are constantly evolving and acquiring new information, so it is imperative to "forget" memories that are no longer useful in the present. Assmann therefore distinguishes two categories of memory: the canon, which refers to memories that are actively celebrated and remembered, and the archive, which pertains to memories that are deemed no longer currently useful and therefore pushed into the background of society. Another interesting concept Assmann touches on is the use of these two forms of memory in different types of cultures and histories. For example, cultures in which they use solely oral history will not have extensive archival or passive memory. They do not write things down or create many physical artifacts, so to maintain all historical memories they must participate in canonization, which is the constant act of speaking or performing memory in order to keep it in the forefront of a society.

Through the readings and artifacts we examined this week, we can infer that this edition of The Collegian is a part of archival/passive memory. This is evidenced in a part of Assmann's writings, in which she says, "These are not unmediated; they have only lost their immediate addressees; they are de-contextualized and disconnected from their former frames which had authorised them or determined their meaning (Assmann, 336). The topics discussed in this edition, especially the article about the BFEC, have lost their importance and function in relation to our present knowledge of the environmental center. We have moved on as a society to focusing on other aspects of the BFEC and improving new parts of it. We are not focused anymore on solely erecting a primary building. This article details past events and voices that are no longer relevant to the Kenyon community, making it an archival artifact instead of a canonized one. However, one can still look back on this Kenyon Collegian and use it as a reference of the past for understanding the significance of historic events in the present. 

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