Just a quick thought to put an end to over a month-long silence.
I’ve been wondering if there are some extensive studies made on the role of archives and archivists in nation-building and even as gate keepers of history and thus altering the human thought and ideas, which – according to Collingwood – history is all about. Question is, that shouldn’t archives be construed as a construction or an interpretation itself? It is always a conscious decision which documents are to be kept safe and which destroyed. Destruction of national heritage is also a widely used mean of warfare, recently used in e.g. the savagery of Bosnia in 1990′s.
Deliberate disposal of information on behalf of political goals is widely recognised phenomenon, but the formation of archives should be put under closer scrutiny, as well. An example: I was in the archives of Finnish foreign ministry looking for information on the Finnish-Hungarian relations and how Finnish diplomats used to emphasise the idea of a special kinship between Finns and Hungarians. An interesting notice was, that there is a specific dossier for the documents concerning the “kindred nations” (mainly Hungary and Estonia) although the whole idea of kinship between separate nations is nowadays rather disputable.
In addition to state archives there is the daily, grass root level archive forming where the archivist doesn’t serve any political or national goals. Even so, it is up to her/him how the future historian will construe the thoughts and ideas of her/his time. It would be interesting to compare archives from different decades and see if there are some patterns which could be derived from the zeitgeist of the respective time, assuming that deriving something from the “zeitgeist” is even possible.
The issue is fairly topical on a state-level scale, as some form of state-building is constantly taking place somewhere. Frederik Rosén has come up with an interesting article (Off the record: outsourcing security and state building to private firms and the question of record keeping, archives, and collective memory. Archival Science, vol. 8, 1/2008 p. 1-14), on which he raises a question on how privatisation of post-war recovery and security governance causes a lack of proper record keeping and archiving. He argues that this might severely affect future dynamics of societal memory and cause black holes in the history of a nation.
In my point of view, it isn’t enough to treat a single document as a subjective source of information, but the whole archives as well. Questions like who formed the archives, how it was formed, how the dossiers were named and what kind of documents were put in certain dossiers are not to be neglected. Archives itself can reveal suprisingly lot about thought and ideas of the time of its formation. It would be intriguing to read more on that particular subject.
Posted by Antti Halonen 
