This post is part of the Intergenerational Conversations series.
Review of Elisabeth Kaplan, “We Are What We Collect, We Collect What We Are: Archives and the Construction of Identity,” American Archivist 63, no.1 (2000): 126–51, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.63.1.h554377531233l05.
By Lori Podolsky, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi [PDF Full Text] | [PDF Article + Full Text]
Community and belonging have long been a central focus in archives. However, more recently, archivists have been examining the construct of identity as it relates to archives, archivists, and archival practices. This increased awareness has illuminated how archivists shape individual and community identities by curating the records and collections in their care, and in turn how records and collections can create frameworks establishing who belongs in a community and who does not.[1] Archivists mediate the framework of identity through appraisal, collection, and preservation, cumulating in the documentation of social development and change, and through their impact in reconceptualizing archives beyond the concepts of heritage, history, evidence, and memory.[2] Selection, organization, interpretation, and presentation affect the validation and justification of a record’s and collection’s authoritative truth, which in turn constructs and reconstructs the meaning of identity for each community, across time and space.[3] Elisabeth Kaplan’s 2000 article, “We Are What We Collect, We Collect What We Are,” explores one example of archives and archivists constructing identity and is the focus in this intergenerational conversation.
Using the American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS), one of the oldest ethnic historical societies in the United States, as a case study, Kaplan illustrates how the social and cultural processes used in identity politics shaped the image of the American Jew.[4] Kaplan connects archival work to these processes by asserting that archivists are the “major players in the business of identity construction and identity politics” (p. 147). In fact, throughout her article, she questions the prevailing archival (or professional) assumption that archivists are neutral and objective and critically analyzes archivists’ subjective position, thus starting a new discussion in the archival literature about the impact of archival work on the relationship between archives and identity. Kaplan calls upon archivists to recognize that ethnicity and identity are social constructs and to find ways to document their own points of view and the social and historical forces that affect and validate identity.
AJHS was founded on June 7, 1892, to “address the most basic philosophical dilemma of American Jewish life—the fusion of Jewish ideals and perceived American values into a viable, public, American Jewish identity” (p. 136). The early years of AJHS witnessed differing opinions on the identity of the American Jew as recorded in AJHS’s minutes; the official record described a cohesive and confident image whereas the unofficial and closed full transcripts contained the political challenges surrounding their identity. These discussions attempted to resolve how AJHS would construct a singular identity that protected and preserved their heritage and identity for future generations. To do so, AJHS decided that its fundamental purpose was “to establish an organization dedicated to collecting and publishing ‘material bearing upon the history of our country’ [in which] ‘the objects for which this society [is] organized … are not sectarian but American’” (p. 127). Within the framework of these actions, AJHS began to “mold a cohesive and positive image of American Jewry, one which would combine their understandings of themselves as American Jews and of Judaism with their perceptions of Americans and America, and … [provide] the natural means by which that image could be constructed and presented to the American public” (p. 130). Subsequently, the society actively collected, preserved, and published materials to support and publicly present a singular identity, and the founding members created the myth of the American Jew that engaged in scholarly activities in identity politics.
Within the article, Kaplan explores the history of AJHS and the construction of American Jewish identity by examining the roles of archives and archivists within historical societies through the lens of identity politics. Within the archival framework, AJHS members played an integral role not only in the development of the society and its mission, but also in aligning their documentation with the political and social constructs. Subsequently, AJHS, along with other historical societies and archives, are perceived as sites of historical truth. However, these truths are not neutral; rather, they are subjective and are shaped by identity politics and sites of power. Kaplan presents her premise that the archival record “is created by individuals and organizations, and used, in turn, to support their values and missions, all of which comprises a process that is certainly not politically and culturally neutral” (p. 147). This is evidenced in how AJHS constructed the American Jewish identity in response to external conditions and needs, and the contrast with otherness and the non-exclusivity to other individual groups.
Through AJHS, the American Jewish identity has gone through changes; “shifting, evolving, continually negotiated and renegotiated, individual and group identities co-exist, although their characteristics may not always be consistent” (p. 129). In particular, Kaplan analyzes how differences and similarities were shuffled and reshuffled through time as AJHS evolved into a new historical consciousness with a new modern Jewish identity. At times this led to tension in the creation of a singular construct within a multiverse of identities. As Kaplan writes, AJHS “evinced an unquestioning faith in the ability of the historical record to meet and to overcome the political and social forces that confronted them. Through the manipulation of historical materials, their fears about the current threats to American Jewry might be alleviated, and their hopes for a more optimistic future met” (p. 137, emphasis mine). Consequently, documentation and records would form the American Jewish identity and thus are “an extraordinary testament to the extent to which power can be invested in archives” (p. 137).
Since Kaplan’s article and over the past quarter of a century, archivists have moved from a position of perceived neutrality to one that recognizes and responds to the power relationship arising from identity politics and memory culture in archives.[5] Today, archivists know that they are not neutral when they are appraising and managing collections; rather, they are critical in shaping history because archives hold power, and history is written by those with power. In heeding Kaplan’s premise that archives are not politically or culturally neutral, Ketelaar also cautions archivists to “be vigilant and ensure that the appropriation of archives by a particular group or for a particular cause does not endanger the integrity of the archives and the rights of other users, now and in the future.”[6] He further argues that the construction and reconstruction of archives is a political act and that “the archivist cannot pretend to be outside the politics of memory.”[7] Ketelaar provides a theoretical foundation for identity, meaning, and assigning value to records. While his foundation provides a solid understanding, it remains dated in its subjective approach. Other advancements have been made in cases studies such as Feng and Brown. Feng analyzes the role of archives in supporting identity politics for migrant Chinese workers. In her study, archives “may provide a psychological support for transforming the identity of citizens and to help them form a new identity.”[8] Brown takes a slightly different approach with the LGBTQ2+ community archives to illustrate the nuances to support the inclusivity and identity of trans and Black, Indigenous, and BIPOC histories within the queer community. She sees the need for a deeper understanding of the impact of LGBTQ2+ history on the structure of gay identity within their archives.[9] Ketelaar, Feng, and Brown’s perspectives, along with Kaplan’s, have been intermingled and incorporated throughout this intergenerational conversation.
Feng demonstrates the need for archivists to be more aware of the social constructs and biases that are embedded in the power relationships found within the archives and archival collections. She analyzes the creation of place for the identity of undocumented Chinese migrant workers while examining the changing landscape of the archives itself. Like Kaplan, she links the process of social development and identity politics with the transformations arising in the social integration and support of a unified community history and subsequent identities. In her case study, Feng extends Kaplan’s argument that archivists and archives can provide legitimacy in identity politics and further develops Kaplan’s argument by stressing the need for archivists to have a stronger understanding of the values and sense of belonging of the community groups. Feng states that archivists and archives also need to establish a strong system to manage and maintain dynamic interactions that shape social construction and social structure without banishing archives and marginalized communities to the outskirts of society and downplaying relationships and the process of recognition.[10] In this manner, archives and archivists become more centrally integrated in an inclusive and harmonious repository of social and community memory. This approach, as Feng states, will not only promote social integration and identity but will also improve the archival profession’s depth by closing the distance between archival institutions and the communities.[11] As archivists become more active in their roles, they are more equipped to reflect on the complex functions of archival custody and their influence on societies and identities. This change allows archivists to leave the myth of the neutral role and embrace active participation in shaping social life.
Brown’s case study of the LGBTQ2+ community boosts the recommendations from those found in Kaplan, Ketelaar, and Feng and more explicitly links identity to self-determination in archives. She also expands upon the dimensionality of identity to create a more inclusive framework. In her case study, Brown illustrates the multiple layers found throughout identity politics by using The ArQuives as an example: “when a community archive can be understood—simultaneously—as both an activist, radical archive (from the perspective of the state and/or mainstream archives profession) and as the epitome of a mainstream, white, cisnormative archive (from the perspective of many others, such as queer women, trans people, and people of colour).”[12] Hence, her case study is an excellent example of dedication made by archivists working with communities to better understand the meaning and identity of its members. Although Brown rejects the neutrality of the archivist and acknowledges archivists’ role in creating and stewarding records and collections,[13] she expands her critique from a warning to a call for empowerment when she employs Susan Pell’s use of radical archives to “offer critically important spaces of empowerment and self-determination for marginalized groups, who use these archives in contemporary social struggles in order to intervene in dominant discourses about power, belonging, and knowledge production.”[14]
Over time, archivists have become more conscious of their role in cultivating meaning and legitimacy through identity politics. Both the archivists’ role in cultivating meaning and their increased awareness of their actions are iterative processes in which identity continues to be constructed and reconstructed. Borrowing from Cook’s third paradigm,[15] Feng sees the archivist’s impact through direct historical scholarship, collective memory, and identity, where identity shifts from cultural heritage to societal, and becomes key for an established archives.[16] An established archives provides a foundation for legitimizing a society’s identity. In this framework, the evidential and knowledge value of the archives supports marginalized groups, such as AJHS; thus, “archives are recognized as an undividable part of collective memory, an important element of identity, and further become a solid base for structural and historical methodologies.”[17] As Nesmith and Craven note, however, the meaning of identity changes across time and space as the relationship between the self and the records continuously evolves.[18] Additionally, Ketelaar connects the “mediation [of identity to the] definition, selection, organization, interpretation, and presentation of meaning.”[19] While both Kaplan and Ketelaar view the archives and records as subjective, Ketelaar approaches the record as identity through representation. As such, the different meanings can be “assigned to the same resource by different people at different times, and … ‘the’ conventional meaning of a given resource is a matter of intersubjective consensus.”[20] Archivists document what is kept, and both the archivist and the researcher impact the subjectivity of the record and collection through their understanding of the collection, their personal perspectives, and their interpretations, leading to different identities. As a result, the manner in which the archivist and researcher interact with the record shapes and constructs the meaning of the record, and identity becomes multifaceted through these frameworks and actions.
Archivists need to be more than just aware of their role in shaping identity and identity politics. It is also critical that archivists do not perpetuate stereotypes, racial and other discrimination, and colonialism. Both Feng and Brown argue that archivists must actively resist reproducing dominant narratives that support anti-racist and anti-colonial forms of community identity. The descriptions of their processes share many similarities. In Feng’s analysis of the creation of a community archives to help marginalized migrant workers establish their legitimacy and collective identity, migrants were able to contribute, record, and preserve their own histories, thereby making their experiences more visible. This visibility pushed back against their treatment as an “‘amnesia’ group” and consequently shifted colonial power away from the dominant government institution.[21] Brown warns that archivists have to have a greater consciousness when applying a default historical formation onto cultural and ethnic groups, which leads to overdetermining the identity and norms of the dominant members over the more marginalized ones. Such overdetermination results in archivists mirroring colonial relations in their effort to acquire new collections and perpetuate the homogenization of marginalized communities under one identity.[22] In turn, these dominant norms and their homogenizing effects shape how communities understand their own histories and how they are able to articulate their identities. Archivists need to engage in “deeper conversations at all levels about how structural forms on inequality shape organizations.”[23] Brown recommends that archivists hold deeper conversations with organizations, people, and networks about records and collaborate through the sharing of an archival ethic that “privileges anti-racist … collecting practices over extractive logics that reproduce structural inequalities and relations of power.”[24]
At the heart of this conversation, the question remains: Have archivists improved their understanding of identity politics or have they, as Kaplan puts it, “failed to recognize identity for the social construct that it is, or to find ways to deal with the inevitable presence of point of view in our efforts to document it” (p. 147)? Over the last twenty-five years, archivists have become more cognizant of their role in creating identity and have made some gains in becoming more vigilant to avoid social constructs and biases in their effort to collect and document communities’ histories. Brown offers a post-custodial approach to strengthen identity or at the least not let it disappear. According to Brown, “[a] post-custodial archival approach means that the care and custody of the records does not occur in the archive itself but is the responsibility of the organization, person, or network that generated the archival material, where the materials remain.”[25] She further recommends that community archival members gather and organize their collections and decide what is collected through an understanding of their specific interests and values. In this approach, a post-custodial relationality would exist between archivists and community recordkeepers or members to address the structural inequalities of identity and support greater stewardship. The community would manage and curate their identity, and archivists and community members would document the context creating the constructed identities. Still, do these case studies provide evidence that archivists succeeded in Kaplan’s call? I believe that the groundwork exists and archivists are making progress; yet more work needs to be done. As archivists travel this path, I would like to end with a quote from Kaplan to guide us:
History constantly reminds us that the reification of ethnic identity does not foster tolerance or acceptance; it constructs communities and then draws hard, arbitrary lines between them, creating differences and making them fixed, constricting the freedom of the individual to define or understand him or herself in multiple ways. We have seen the bloody, horrible results of this process. That archives can be used as props or tools in this process is a sobering thought. And no matter how attractive the hopeful, naïve faith in documentation was to the founders of the AJHS and is today to the archival profession, there is always the potential for destroying the very diversity that our efforts hope to sustain. (p. 151)
[1] Eric Ketelaar, “Cultivating Archives: Meanings and Identities,” Archival Science 12 (2012): 27, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-011-9142-5.
[2] Huiling Feng, “Identity and Archives: Return and Expansion of the Social Value of Archives,” Archival Science 17 (2017): 97, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-016-9271-y.
[3] Ketelaar, “Cultivating Archives,” 28; Feng, “Identity and Archives,” 98.
[4] Kaplan defines identity politics as the study of “identity construction and the historical and cultural forces that shape that process” (p. 145). She also notes that “many studies of identity construction have turned on concepts of difference and power” (p. 145).
[5] See, for example, Ketelaar, “Cultivating Archives”; Feng, “Identity and Archives”; Terry Cook, “Evidence, Memory, Identity, and Community: Four Shifting Archival Paradigms,” Archival Science 13 (2013): 95–120, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-012-9180-7; Elspeth H. Brown, “Archival Activism, Symbolic Annihilation, and the LGBTQ2+ Community Archive,” Archivaria 89 (2020): 6–33, https://archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/article/view/13729.
[6] Ketelaar, “Cultivating Archives,” 30, in reference to Richard J. Cox, “The Archivist and Community,” in Community Archives: The Shaping of Memory, eds. Jeannette Bastian and Ben Alexander (Facet, London, 2013): 109–32.
[7] Ketelaar, “Cultivating Archives,” 30.
[8] Feng, “Identity and Archives,” 100.
[9] Brown, “Archival Activism.”
[10] Feng, “Identity and Archives,” 109.
[11] Feng, “Identity and Archives,” 110.
[12] Brown, “Archival Activism,” 9.
[13] Brown, “Archival Activism,” 11.
[14] Brown, “Archival Activism,” 11.
[15] Cook outlined the shift of the archivist’s role from that of a passive, neutral position to a more participatory community one through four paradigms or frameworks: evidence, memory, identity, and community. The earliest paradigm—evidence—focused on the traditional role of archivists as keepers of the record with records used for administrative and legal evidence. The second paradigm—memory—sees the archivist focus on the cultural and historical value of records as the archivist shifts into more of an appraisal role. The third paradigm—identity—centers on the societal and activist aspect of archives as archivists advocate for social justice, human rights, and accountability. The final paradigm and the most current one—community—further shifts the archival role and focus away from institutional and traditional values and places the archivist more as a facilitator and empowers communities to be curators of their records. See Cook, “Evidence, Memory, Identity, and Community.”
[16] Feng, “Identity and Archives,” 98.
[17] Feng, “Identity and Archives,” 103.
[18] Tom Nesmith, “Reopening Archives: Bringing New Contextualities into Archival Theory and Practice,” Archivaria 60 (2005): 259–74, https://archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/article/view/12523; Louise Craven, “From the Archivist’s Cardigan to the Very Dead Sheep: What Are Archives? What Are Archivists? What Do They Do?,” in What Are Archives? Cultural and Theoretical Perspectives: A Reader, ed. Louise Craven (Routledge, 2008), 7–30.
[19] Ketelaar, “Cultivating Archives,” 28.
[20] Ketelaar, “Cultivating Archives,” 23.
[21] Feng, “Identity and Archives,” 107.
[22] Brown, “Archival Activism,” 30.
[23] Brown, “Archival Activism,” 30.
[24] Brown, “Archival Activism,” 31.
[25] Brown, “Archival Activism,” 30.
