Archival Limits

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This week, my group and I worked on collecting materials that align with our theme of Global Politics. In a manner true to the nature of archives, some folders and topics had more content than others because the entire process is dependent on others' donations. When examining the folder about The Gambier/Knox County El Salvador Solidarity Committee, I only had one element to review: the founding document of the organization. Compared to folders for organizations such as Kenyon Students for Justice in Palestine (KSJP), which was full of several items since it is such a recent organization, my folder was sparse. One of my peers asked the Archives Specialists if it was because the folder was new, but it was actually a few decades old, but the content within it was limited to what had been donated to the archives.


This reminds me of Michael Schudson's "The Past in the Present versus the Present in the Past," specifically the idea that the ability to reconstruct the past is limited by others and what is available. Schudson (2011:287) explains how for someone "individual seeking legitimation from the past, there are just so many things to work with; the available materials are far from infinite," meaning that the task of building an accurate image of the past depends on which resources can be accessed. Not only are the available resources limited, but the way in which one constructs the past depends on if other people belief if that is a valid retelling (and it is difficult to have everyone agree on one version of the past). Schudson (2011:287) writes, "The full freedom to reconstruct the past according to one's own present interests is limited by three factors: the structure of available pasts, the structure of individual choices, and the conflicts about the past among a multitude," which takes into account a few impactful aspects of this reconstruction process. 


For our project, we aim to take pieces of Kenyon's history that all align with one theme in an attempt to connect the dots of what has happened. However, it is difficult to combine these elements into a fully accurate showcase of Kenyon's history within global politics if the elements we have to choose from our limited in terms of access but also in terms of representation. For example, one of the items in our folder is a packet explaining the purpose of KSJP. When examining the very recent history of this group, our perspective on what they have done includes what we found in folders but also what we have witnessed firsthand. We do not have this same observational opportunity with pieces of history from the '80s because we simply were not there. So, not only are we limited in terms of access to material but also limited in what that material can provide for us in our reconstruction process.

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