The New Temples to Mnemosyne – Have Archives Undermined Memory?

“[Writing] will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”

– Socrates (Recalling what King of Egypt Thamus says to Theuth
following Theuth’s demonstration of the invention of writing) [1]

The Titananess Mnemosyne; the Greek personification of memory. (Mnemosyne, Dante Gabriel Rosetti, 1881)

In the Western tradition writing is the exalted form of communicating human thought. Yet it was this same form of communication that King Thamus in Plato’s Phaedrus was convinced would make us forgetful and only offer a semblance of truth.

Archives underpin many of society’s functions – accountability, efficiency, evidence, and the creation of cultural and national narratives and identities. This paper will consider that latter function – if archives are now the constructors of memory, have archives like writing, in Socrates’ words, made us forgetful and, in this sense, have archives undermined society’s memory?

Archives have a complicated relationship with memory. Archival institutions – houses of writing – have claimed to “be”, “contain”, “inspire”, and “support” memory: conversely memory has been said to be “found in”, “contained by”, and “created by” archives.[2] Steven Roger Fischer argued that writing and recording is rooted in human beings’ fundamental need to store information for communication, be it immediately or in the future.[3] Laura Miller suggests a likening between the processes of creating, storing and retrieving memories and the way archives capture, preserve and make available records and archives.[4] Many of the world’s cultures built systems around this principle and where archives find their place in society – as repository stores for this ‘information’. Records, for the most part, represent a tangible form of communication. In contrast oral traditions and the recalling of memories are intangible and fluid in their transmission making them essentially un-archivable.

One of the major ongoing debates in archival science is whether the primary role of the archive is to support evidence or to support memory. Terry Cook examined the various archival paradigms and how they have developed over time to reflect societal trends and expectations. Originally the focus was on the evidentiary nature of archival collections and their use in supporting accountability, but this has now shifted to an identity and community oriented focus.[5] Community and identity paradigms put less emphasis on the authenticity and reliability of records and more what they mean to people personally.

It is important to assess why archivists claim such a bond with memory. Etymologically there is a strong connection between records and memory – the word ‘record’ derives from the Latin recordari combining re and cord to mean to recall ‘by heart’. To record was originally the process of committing to memory, and memory was the capacity for remembering.[6] For a long time archives have monopolised the term ‘memory’, claiming to support, be and create it. There is a prioritisation of an archival interpretation of memory over individual memory and recollection. This comes down to the common conception that tangible primary source material is more valuable as evidence than intangible recollections. In 2012 it came to light that the government had hidden 1.2million sensitive documents in a secret archive in Hanslope Park, in what was deemed to be a sacrilegious attack on data protection laws. Some of the documents related to atrocities during the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya during the. However it wasn’t only the blatant illegality of the secrecy that was disturbing –  the fact that the government bodies sought to hide these documents demonstrated an assumption that the victims would have no ‘evidence’ or ‘proof’ based on their memory alone; that individual testimony would not be trusted by itself. Josias argues that the implications for giving or denying legitimacy to past events is when the tension between written and oral sources is often most visible.[7] Trying to combine memory and evidence has historically been a problem for example oral traditions, seen in Aboriginal societies, were only accepted as legal evidence in Canada as recently as 1998.[8] In this sense archives support memory, but only their own archival formulated memory. As Terry Cook argued, “[w]ithout reliable evidence set in rich context, memory becomes bogus, false, wishful thinking, or is transformed into imagination, fiction, ideology.”[9] Archives argue they support memory but really they seek to validate memory, finding comfort in ensuring that memories are true.

Archives’ claims that they ‘are’ or ‘can be’ memory are complex. Memory is an inherently personal practise,  unique to what created it, so how can archives claim to control the intangible? Memory is not an unchanging vessel for carrying the past into the present; memory is a process, not a thing, and it works differently at different points in time.[10] Instead of archives claiming to ‘be’ memory, perhaps a better term would be ‘to perpetuate memory’. Isabel Allende claimed that “[d]eath does not exist; people only die when we forget them” and this is perhaps another case where archives support and perpetuate memory.

An individual’s memories can only exist whilst they are alive – in oral traditions what failed to survive in an individual’s memory or be passed on died forever. People’s memories, their own internal records, must have been their most treasured, but most fragile, possessions.[11] Archives are able to ensure that memory, or at least traces of memory, can exist beyond the life of the memory creator. As Jeffrey Wallen puts it, “[o]ur identities are also woven for us, and the archive is the loom.”[12]

A seal discovered in the 1850s led to the discovery of the ancient Indus Valley civilisation. It is suggested that deforestation and a series of invasions contributed to the decline and eventual obliteration of the civilisation.[13] As a consequence of this there is no ‘memory’ of the civilisation, only physical artefacts that need interpretation. This poses the question of what happens when there is evidence but no memory? People can choose to forget – individually or collectively. Whilst it is now recognised that records are products of society and the multitude of structures, biases, systems and agendas that accompany said society, and there is acknowledgement that what has been recorded has been recorded for the purpose of posterity,[14] it is still the intention of archivists to impartially keep records of all history. This can be seen in the Canadian ‘Total Archives’ project – the concept of collecting, or at least attempting to collect, “all aspects of historical development, seeking the records not just of officialdom or of a governing elite but of all segments of a community.”[15] Wallen argues that archival material is imprinted by bureaucracy, that which has been institutionally preserved – “traces of the dead, evidence of the past that has been recorded but not (yet) brought into the public space of the published book, of the library or museum.”[16] Much as the Indus Valley seal connects the present with a lost civilisation, archives connect the present with lost or forgotten individuals and memories. Immortality can be found in the archive.

Within Terry Cook’s community paradigm of archival focus it is clear that archive users want to find their place in their community – to construct a personal identity that also connects them to their surrounding society. Here there is a debate about who’s heritage, or who’s memory is held in archives – the individual or the collective, the elite or the marginalised. The community paradigm also begs questions about formats in archives – oral vs written traditions. For the most part archives privilege what Cook and Schwartz call “mainstream, white, European – North American, logocentric, text-based” archival records[17] over oral testimony, community archive projects, and other non-traditionally created records. As these fall outside the traditional archival boundaries they are often branded as makers not of evidence, but of memory. There is an active movement in archival science to supplement current holdings with oral history projects and other collecting projects that are aimed creating a more ‘complete’ history and memory of various communities.

Many archival processes and theories are underpinned by the life-cycle model which describes a linear projection for the life of a record. From creation to either retention or destruction the role of the record can only exist in one frame of the life-cycle at a time. The records continuum proposed by Australian archivists expands the meaning and use of a record, allowing the record to be both dormant and active at the same time. This pluralisation of properties means a record can exist to support bureaucratic functions and be ‘a memory’ simultaneously. Sue McKemmish argues that there is a perception that records managers are concerned with corporate memory while archivists are concerned with collective memory.[18] McKemmish suggests that the continuum balances these roles.

Mark Greene argued that history is based around reinterpreting the facts of memory, because history, and by extension archives, are inherently untrusting of the merits of memory.[19] The fluidity and continuity of memory does not sit right with archives, who instead demand fixed storage-box models of history.[20] Clearly archives have a relationship with memory but it is troubled and so a particular archival interpretation of memory has developed. This interpretation is much more closely aligned with much of the literature on mnemonic devices – after all, as discussed earlier, it is physically impossible to archive something as abstract as a memory. This paper will now examine archives as mnemonic devices and as repositories of mnemonic devices.

Memory tools and mnemonics vary from society to society. As Laura Miller argues a society that values the art of storytelling may approach the preservation of memories differently to a society that values the written above an oral tradition.[21] The Inca of ancient Peru used knots, each knot holding a specific value, to record their empire, from daily transactions to long-term tributes.[22] This mnemonic was used instead of the Western development of writing. Similarly in the 19th Century the Luba tribe of central Africa created memory boards as mnemonics to Luba history. These boards would be ‘read’ by experts and idiosyncrasies in the patterns, colours, materials and general shape would aid the ‘reader’s’ memory, evoking different interpretations by different ‘readers’ or even by the same expert upon different ‘readings’.[23]

The Incan practice of Quipu was a system for record keeping using cords and knots to record data.

Much of archival and memory literature uses such terms as traces, touchstones, goads, totems, and aides to describe a record’s relation to memory. Wallen describes archives as containing “droplets of time – observations, registrations, notations, pieces of data that can reawaken a memory.”[24] Similarly Miller calls the ’bits and pieces’ found in archives ‘engrams’, as being the stored fragments of an episode.[25] In this mnemonic sense records are not tangible memories but tangible artefacts for reconnecting with memories. Lowenthal argues that records (he uses the example of a photograph) are aids to memory but also a verification tool that our recollections are faithful to the past.[26] Psychologist Ulric Neisser likens the reconstruction of the past to the paleontological reconstruction of dinosaur skeletons – “[o]ut of a few stored bones …we remember a dinosaur.”[27]

Miller uses the example of a legal contract to expand the concept of archival traces as mnemonic devices. Whilst a contract is a legal agreement to ensure compliance between two parties it is also an “antidote to false remembering” as evidence of a transaction. More than this, the contract also recalls the parties’ own episodic memories.[28] In a Proustien sense archival documents are the physical representations of transactions and memories – the ‘madeleine’.

Archives now seek to create these ‘madeleines’ for under-recorded communities or for communities that don’t associate with a written tradition. Community engagement has become a central focus for archival institutions. By creating ‘traces’ in a multitude of media – photographs, sound recordings, moving images, visual art, monuments – archives are allowing communities to control how they wish to transmit their heritage, their memories.[29] Susan Sontag argues that the totemic properties of media, in particular photographs, can be more likely to resonate with individuals than a verbal slogan.[30] The Western focus on writing as the primary means of information and memory transmission is egotistical and lacks diversity in its vision of inclusivity.

Sontag argues that all memory is unique: that, as it dies with each individual, it is unreproducible.[31] Memories are literally a biological phenomenon literally only existing in a living individual. By extension mnemonics require an individual to read or interpret them and it is here that there is a need to separate the roles of individual and collective memory. Miller likens this experience to the fallen tree metaphor – that, like the tree, a records ‘sound’ may only be heard when there is someone there to hear it.[32] From a Western perspective we have disassociated ourselves from our own personal memories, giving control of them to archival and records management institutions for ‘safe-keeping’. Modern individuals have developed a symbiotic relationship with archives – donating their information and memories for safe-keeping and easy retrieval in out of body/off-site storage, and in return they contribute to a collective narrative. Wallen argues that in this sense autobiography is in part constructed out of the archive, that there is a “haunting” suspicion that someone or something knows us better than we know ourselves.[33] Archives allow individuals to connect with elements of their own past that has either been forgotten or was never registered as a memory, in what Olick and Robins call “graveyards of knowledge.”[34]

Biologically speaking memory traces in the hippocampus are thought to critically depend on stress steroid activation in the amygdala.[35] What this means is that the strongest memories that individuals keep tend to be created from emotionally charged situations. These individual memories of significant circumstances reflect well in a collective memory setting but this also means that individuals fail to capture more trivial memories. Archives are capable of capturing the most minute transactions on both an individual and a collective scale, something which human memory struggles to cope with.

To archives an individual memory is essentially irrelevant but it’s role in collective memory and narratives is essential. The fabric of collective memories is woven in the recording of individual memory strands. Sontag expanded on her argument about individual identities by stating that collective memory is not about remembrance but about stipulation – stipulation “that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.”[36] Archives build on this by allowing individuals to integrate their various persona pasts into a single common past that all members of a community come to collectively remember.[37] In the 19th Century it became a popular idea that the body could retain traces of the memories of ancestors, that memory and heredity were essentially the same thing.[38] Freud built on this concept through ‘ancestral memories’, his belief that organic memory theories could be psychoanalytically used to understand human culture.[39] Freud believed that the human unconscious was a repository for all past experiences and that it was forgetting, rather than remembering, that took [work] in the form of repression.[40] Darwin argued against this Lamarckian methodology. Stepping away from the biological feasibility of being able to connect with an ancestral memory, archives offer a very similar experience – archival records and documents grant access to an ancestral era that as Freud would argue, society has ‘consciously’ forgotten about.

Collective memory has implications for Terry Cook’s observation of archival paradigm shifts. The current focus on identity and community has led to the use of archives for the construction of broad collective narratives and an over-reliance on ‘history’. Before this paradigm shift ‘the past’ would impact and direct collective memory not evidentially but mythologically. Now society uses collective memory, in the form of ‘history’ to shape the past. This presentist view argues that the past is moulded to suit present interest.[41] The Jungian perspective would argue that, because of this lack of mythology, society now looks to archives to create the necessary archetypes. In this sense memory is no longer a social practise. As Pierre Nora said, “There are lieux de memoire, sites of memory, because there are no longer milieux de memoire, real environments of memory.”[42] Society has lost its “memorial consciousness” because individuals have abandoned it.[43] King Thamus’ claim that those who adopt the practice of writing appear to have been accurate. Society adopted writing and as a result created institutions that could control their memories for them. This is what Derrida meant when he described the archive as hypnomnesic.[44]

In Charlie Brooker’s acclaimed TV series Black Mirror the episode entitled ‘Entire History of You’ exemplifies what dystopia might be created if individuals had constant access to their memories – making it impossible to forget, and possible to obsess. The unbearable weight of memory becomes overwhelming for individuals. There is too much injustice in the world, and too much remembering embitters humanity. As Sontag argues, “To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited.”[45]

In many ways archives have supplanted memory. Archives claim to contain memory, but only the archival definition of memory. Artist Šehovic created an immersive piece to commemorate the Srebrenica massacre. In the aftermath of the event the archival record will show numbers of victims, personal information about them, and data relating to their lives.

‘Cups of Coffee’ by Aida Sehović’s is an installation consisting of coffee cups collected from Bosnian families around the world.

piece was designed to capture what eludes an archive – the lived experience. The project, called ‘Why are you not here?’, focused around the Bosnian tradition of sharing coffee. While archives will hold the data relating the victims’ lives they will never truly be able to capture the act of sharing coffee or, post-Srebrenica, not being able to share that coffee with a lost loved one. The archival record will be devoid of that emotional experience and will instead just capture a series of events and actors.[46] As Martine Hawkes argues, “[h]ow can a life reduced to a short line on a list – only admissible as a short line – be testified or borne witness to in its full weight and meaning?”[47]

It is not only in the area of capturing the un-capturable elements of memory that archives have struggled. As Olick and Robins argue, it is often difficult to reach a mnemonic consensus.[48] If we are to treat archives as the houses of mnemonic touchstones, society’s tangible collective memory, society should be ensuring that it truly is a collective memory. Sontag argues that there is no such thing as collective memory but instead there is ‘collective instruction.’[49] Archival interference extends much further than acquisition policies. Archivists now actively engage with records, leaving layers of procedural traces on them. Archives tend to reflect an elite and anti-populist world view. Firstly this means that the story represented is of national or international activity rather than local or regional experiences;[50] and secondly that various social groups – women, LGBT, ethnic minorities – can be sidelined, intentionally or otherwise, from the archival record. That is not to say that a mythologised collective memory would resolve the problem of elitism of social groups. Archival collections, according to Hillary Jenkinson, should be delivered to the archives whole and the archivist is not to meddle or adulterate the collections – but Jenkinson worked in an era before mass information production. In the 1950s Schellenberg revised Jenkinson’s premise and introduce appraisal in a move to control the sheer quantity of information being handled by archives. Eric Ketelaar invented the term archivalization [sic] meaning “the conscious or unconscious choice (determined by social and cultural factors) to consider something worth archiving.”[51] This element of the appraisal process identified records and memories and prioritised those which are deemed ‘worthy’. As a result of this archives were no longer holding ‘complete’ collections and as a consequence their ability to accurately reflect their societies was undermined.

Furthermore the practises of description and arrangement alter user interpretation of archival records. Archivists layer their own interpretations on a document or a series of documents, guiding a user to a certain conclusion. The archive represents the end of a certain kind of creative innocence, inferring self-consciousness and self-reflexivity onto records.[52] Archival interference has destroyed any notion that archives are capable of entirely recording the past.[53] With this in mind it is deceptive for archives to claim to hold memory, or even a complete set of untouched touchstones for accessing said memory – archivists are not clairvoyants, they cannot predict what records will trigger what memories in the future.[54]

The archival struggle with memory stems in part from the fact that archives simply don’t trust memory. Fixity is fundamental to archival records, cementing information in a stable and unchangeable format for transmission. Luciana Duranti examined the elements that underpin what makes a record factual, arguing that “[a] record is considered reliable when it can be treated as a fact in itself, that is, as the entity of which it is evidence.”[55] In addition to this Duranti proposed another element – authenticity – which requires that the record has not been manipulated or falsified after its creation and is therefore what it (the record) claims to be.[56] Matthew Innes argues that “oral tradition[s] can be very radically reshaped by changes in social, political and cultural contexts, and can fall into oblivion without acts of conscious destruction.”[57] Furthermore authentic records can trigger inauthentic memories. When Bruno Dössekker published his memoirs as a camp survivor of the Holocaust few had reason to doubt his account. Yet during the 1990s it was debunked as having been entirely fabricated. Dössekker had constructed an identity, Binjamin Wilkomirski, by absorbing accounts of camp life, the stories of extreme violence, the testimonies and histories and photographs, and they finally became him.[58] Dössekker’s exposure to Holocaust media had consumed him, having been so deeply affected by the event that he became an inadvertent victim. It is this element of uncertainty about the evidential quality of oral testimony and oral history that sits uncomfortably with archives. To paraphrase Franklin Roosevelt, records cannot be killed by fire, people die, but records never die, records are weapons[59] – whilst human memory can be eradicated, the physical counterparts to memory will remain. As previously mentioned, there is now a conscious effort to work through this problem and develop archival oral history projects to capture a greater selection of formats for collections. Perhaps archives will overcome this fear of fluidity in records, after all, as Greene puts it – “History is interpretation, and as such it is subject to exactly those same societal biasses that are supposedly the weakness of “memory”.”[60]

Whether archives have undermined memory is very much a Platonian vs. Aristotilian debate. King Thamus argued that society would become forgetful as a consequence of the invention of writing, an idea that Nora believes has become reality in the modern world. Conversely Aristotle believed that individuals, born like blank slates, would amass memories and be bettered for this amassing. Should, or even could, a society capable of creating such large amounts of ‘memory’ entrust its preservation to human minds? Conversely, should this responsibility be given to archives? Derrida vehemently sides with King Thamus, arguing that archives “incite forgetfulness, amnesia, the annihilation of memory, as mnēmē or anamnēsis” and that the rigid formula of the archive eradicates what cannot be archived.[61] Conversely Sontag argues that too much value has been assigned to memory but not enough to thinking.[62] Perhaps the act of writing and recording has freed the human mind from its bonds of memory to fulfil a greater potential of ‘knowledge’.

There is an elitist element of archival thought which values the tangible over the intangible and so, fundamentally, archives have undermined memory –  intangible memory created by a human no longer has the value that it once had. Society should question the archival monopoly on memory and ask why a document of an event is apparently more representative than a human that actually experienced it? But society does not consciously remember and as a consequence society is subconsciously forgetting much of its cultural and collective memory. Archives have depersonalised memory and made it own-able, the classic oral traditions eroded by modernity.

Archives have however created and preserved tangible mnemonic devices in order to help recall the intangible memories of the past. Like Cicero’s ‘treasure-house of all things’ and St. Augustine’s ‘inner chamber, vast and unbounded’, archives have become society’s memory repositories,[63] not society’s memory. Miller argues that archives and archivists risk professional marginalisation if they continue to use the outdated metaphors of ‘archives as memory’ instead of archives as mnemonics.[64] Derrida described the conflict between writing and speech as a ‘pharmakon’[65] – that which whilst healing, also poisons. Archives have undermined the human ability to ‘remember’, but at the same time have found a way to reconnect society to their forgotten memories. The archival relationship with memory needs to be symbiotic – obliged to collect humanity’s memories in whatever format they may be and, in return, society can outsource their memory functions. Archives house society’s mnemonics so that society can not necessarily remember but recollect.

Ginny Dawe-Woodings, BA

1. Plato, Phaedrus, (Edited by Harvey Yunis, 2011)
2. Terry Cook, ‘Evidence, memory, identity, and community: four shifting archival paradigms’ in Archival Science, (Springer, 2013), Vol. 13, p. 101
3. Steven Roger Fischer, History of Writing, (2001), p. 11
4. Laura Miller, ‘Touchstones: Considering the Relationship between Memory and Archives’ in Archivaria, (2006), Vol. 61, p. 106
5. Terry Cook, ‘Evidence, memory, identity, and community: four shifting archival paradigms’ in Archival Science, (Springer, 2013), Vol. 13, p. 96
6. Laura Miller, ‘Touchstones: Considering the Relationship between Memory and Archives’ in Archivaria, (2006), Vol. 61, p. 111
7. Anthea Josias, ‘Toward an understanding of archives as a feature of collective memory’ in Archival Science, (Springer, 2011), Vol. 11, p. 109
8. Terry Cook, ‘Evidence, memory, identity, and community: four shifting archival paradigms’ in Archival Science, (Springer, 2013), Vol. 13, p. 104
9. Ibid, p. 102-103
10. Jeffrey K. Olick, Joyce Robbins, ‘Social Memory Studies: From “Collective Memory” to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practises’ in Annual Review of Sociology, (Annual Reviews, 1998), Vol. 24, p. 122
11. Steven Rose, The Making of Memory, (Anchor Books, 1992), p. 60
12. Jeffrey Wallen, ‘Narrative tensions: The Archive and the Eyewitness’ in Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, (2009), Vol. 7, No. 2, p. 269
13. Neil MacGregor, A History of the World in 100 Objects, (2012), Chapter 13
14. Rachel Hardiman, ‘En mal d’archive: Postmodernist Theory and Recordkeeping’ in Journal of the Society of Archivists, (2009), Vol. 30, No. 1, p. 32
15. Society of American Archivists, Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology – ‘Total Archives’, (http://www2.archivists.org/glossary/terms/t/total-archives, accessed 29th March 2015)
16. Jeffrey Wallen, ‘Narrative tensions: The Archive and the Eyewitness’ in Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, (2009), Vol. 7, No. 2, p. 261
17. Terry Cook, Joan M. Schwartz, ‘Archives, Records, and Power: From (Postmodern) Theory to (Archival) Performance’ in Archival Science, (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), Vol. 2, p. 179
18. Sue McKemmish, “Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow: A Continuum of Responsibility” in Proceedings of the Records Management Association of Australia 14th National Convention, RMAA, Perth, Australia, (1997) referenced in Brien Brothman, ‘The Past that Archives Keep: Memory, History, and the Preservation of Archival Records’ in Archivaria, (2001), Vol. 51, p. 56
19. Mark A. Greene, ‘The Messy Business of Remembering: History, Memory, and Archives’ in Archival Issues, (2003-2004), Vol. 28, No. 2, p. 97
20. Anthea Josias, ‘Toward an understanding of archives as a feature of collective memory’ in Archival Science, (Springer, 2011), Vol. 11, p. 100
21. Laura Miller, ‘Touchstones: Considering the Relationship between Memory and Archives’ in Archivaria, (2006), Vol. 61, p. 121
22. Steven Roger Fischer, History of Writing, (2001), p. 14
23. Ibid, p. 22
24. Jeffrey Wallen, ‘Narrative tensions: The Archive and the Eyewitness’ in Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, (2009), Vol. 7, No. 2, p. 261
25. Laura Miller, ‘Touchstones: Considering the Relationship between Memory and Archives’ in Archivaria, (2006), Vol. 61, p. 111
26. David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country, (1985), p. 257
27. Laura Miller, ‘Touchstones: Considering the Relationship between Memory and Archives’ in Archivaria, (2006), Vol. 61, p. 111
28. Ibid, p. 115-116
29. Anthea Josias, ‘Toward an understanding of archives as a feature of collective memory’ in Archival Science, (Springer, 2011), Vol. 11, p. 97-98
30. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, (Penguin Group, 2003), p. 76
31. Ibid, p. 76-77
32. Laura Miller, ‘Touchstones: Considering the Relationship between Memory and Archives’ in Archivaria, (2006), Vol. 61, p. 116 Jeffrey Wallen, ‘Narrative tensions: The Archive and the Eyewitness’ in Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, (2009), Vol. 7, No. 2, p. 269-270
33. Jeffrey K. Olick, Joyce Robbins, ‘Social Memory Studies: From “Collective Memory” to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practises’ in Annual Review of Sociology, (Annual Reviews, 1998), Vol. 24, p. 111
34. Adam K. Anderson, Yuki Yamaguchi, Wojtek Grabski, Dominika Lacka, ‘Emotional memories are not all created equal: Evidence for selective memory enhancement’ in Learning & Memory, (2006), Vol. 13, p. 715
35. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, (Penguin Group, 2003), p. 76-77
36. Anthea Josias, ‘Toward an understanding of archives as a feature of collective memory’ in Archival Science, (Springer, 2011), Vol. 11, p. 99
37. Daniel Punday, ‘Foucault’s Body Tropes’ in New Literary History, (2000), Vol. 31, No. 3, p. 518-519
38. Ibid, p. 519
39. Jeffrey K. Olick, Joyce Robbins, ‘Social Memory Studies: From “Collective Memory” to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practises’ in Annual Review of Sociology, (Annual Reviews, 1998), Vol. 24, p. 109
40. Anthea Josias, ‘Toward an understanding of archives as a feature of collective memory’ in Archival Science, (Springer, 2011), Vol. 11, p. 96
41. Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’ in Representations, (University of California Press, 1989), Vol. 26, p. 7
42. Ibid, p. 12
43. Jaques Derrida, Archive Fever, (The John Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 11
44. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, (Penguin Group, 2003), p. 103
45. Martine Hawkes, ‘Containing testimony: archiving loss after genocide’ in Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, (Routledge, 2012), Vol. 26, No. 6, p. 937
46. Ibid, p. 939
47. Jeffrey K. Olick, Joyce Robbins, ‘Social Memory Studies: From “Collective Memory” to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practises’ in Annual Review of Sociology, (Annual Reviews, 1998), Vol. 24, p. 127
48. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, (Penguin Group, 2003), p. 76
49. Terry Cook, ‘Evidence, memory, identity, and community: four shifting paradigms’ in Archival Science, (2013), Vol. 13, p. 106
50. Eric Ketelaar, ‘Tacit Narratives: The Meanings of Archives’ in Archival Science, (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), Vol. 1, p. 132-133
51. Stuart Hall, ‘Constituting an archive’ in Third Text, (2001), Vol. 15, No. 54, p. 89
52. Terry Eastwood, ‘What is Archival Theory and Why is it Important?’ in Archivaria, (1994), Vol. 37, p. 130
53. Laura Miller, ‘Touchstones: Considering the Relationship between Memory and Archives’ in Archivaria, (2006), Vol. 61, p. 122-123
54. Luciana Duranti, ‘Reliability and Authenticity: The Concepts and Their Implications’ in Archivaria (1995), Vol. 39, p. 6
55. Ibid, p. 7-8
56. Matthew Innes, ‘Memory, Orality and Literacy in Early Medieval Society’ in Past & Present, (1998), Vol. 158, p. 34
57. Amy Hungerford, “Memorizing Memory’ in The Yale Journal of Criticism, (The John Hopkins University Press, 2001), Vol. 14, No. 1, p. 88
58. ‘Books are weapons in the war of ideas’, Library of Congress Prints and photographs Division, Washington D.C., Reproduction number: LC-USZC4-4267
59. Mark A. Greene, ‘The Messy Business of Remembering: History, Memory, and Archives’ in Archival Issues, (2003-2004), Vol. 28, No. 2, p. 97
60. Jaques Derrida, Archive Fever, (The John Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 11
61. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, (Penguin Group, 2003), p. 103
62. Laura Miller, ‘Touchstones: Considering the Relationship between Memory and Archives’ in Archivaria, (2006), Vol. 61, p. 107
63. Laura Miller, ‘Touchstones: Considering the Relationship between Memory and Archives’ in Archivaria, (2006), Vol. 61, p. 108-109
64. Jaques Derrida, Plato’s Pharmacy in Dissemination, (1981)

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You may have seen archivists on television helping people to discover their roots in old records or talking to historians (or detectives!). But you might be wondering what archivists do the rest of the…

Heritage Baking – Making a First World War Centenary Trench Cake

This year is a very important year for global heritage – the centenary of the start of the First World War. In light of this I thought I might take a break from academic considerations of heritage and instead do something more proactive and vocational to engage with my own heritage. As Xmas was approaching I was looking for slightly different – and ideally inexpensive – presents I could make for my extended family. One of my friends had previously worked at the Postal Museum and Archives which, as the name implies, has collections relating to the history of the postal communications. He posted a link about a blog post they had created about ‘Trench Cake’ – an eggless Xmas cake that was sent by families of soldiers serving in the trenches. The idea stuck and now I am eagerly awaiting reviews from my aunts, uncles and cousins as to how it tastes.

The recipe used came from the Telegraph and contains:

1/2lb flour

4 oz margarine

1 teaspoon vinegar

1/4 pint of milk

3 oz brown sugar

3 oz cleaned currants

2 teaspoons cocoa

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

nutmeg

ginger

grated lemon rind

Now I am a fairly proficient baker, but I always get stuck when something just tells me to add an ingredient without any quantities attached to it, or worse when somebody suggests a ‘pinch’ of something – who’s pinch? Because I have quite small hands! Noticeably the recipe doesn’t contain eggs and so relies on the vinegars reaction with the baking soda to make the cake rise.

The recipe’s method is to:

Grease a cake tin. Rub margarine into the flour in a basin. Add the dry ingredients. Mix well. Add the soda dissolved in vinegar and milk. Beat well. Turn into the tin. Bake in a moderate oven for about two hours.

It was interesting to make something that has so much history attached to it. I remember at school making cardboard mosaics and cellophane stained glass windows as a way of ‘connecting’ with the past, but there is something wonderfully messy about cooking that makes connecting with the past much more rewarding. I think far too often with the world wars exploration of life on the home front is neglected. Having now done history A-level and completed a History undergraduate degree, I have written more essays than I care to remember about home life, yet nothing has come close to helping me understand ‘home life’ as making these cakes did. I became aware of rationing; of not just food, but also brown paper and string. The Postal Museum and Archive had found out how much it would have cost to post one of these cakes to the front line -1.s 4d to send a cake over 3lb between 7lb and would have cost 1s. 7d to send a cake between 7lb and 11lb – in case you were wondering. But it also made me realise that even though there was a war on, people still valued Xmas and wanted soldiers to experience that too. So I set about baking…

Dry Ingredients

Wet Mix

It is not the most complicated recipe to follow, though I was wary about adding the vinegar to the baking soda – I have seen enough cardboard volcano models to know what happens there. Given the rationed ingredients I did not hold high hopes for it working, let alone tasting nice, but actually the cake batter was easy to mix and actually tasted delicious.

Now another problem is when something tells me to bake in a ‘moderate oven’? Presumably as opposed to an extremist oven. Anyway, whenever dealing with unusual weights and measures or outdated terms I turn to my grandmother’s cookery books which nearly always offer a solution. I used her well thumbed copy of ‘Family Favourites’ which explained that ‘moderate’ is to be considered “approx. 350-375 F”.

Ready for baking

So I split the batter into six small 3” cakes and cooked them for roughly an hour and a half. And this is what came out!

Baked Cakes

Wax paper and string

All wrapped and ready to go!

I wanted them to look as authentic as possible, so wrapped them in wax paper and string, no collate, followed by outer layer of brown paper and string. I think they look adorable!

So thank you very much to the British Postal Museum and Archive for their idea, and to the Telegraph for their recipe. The cakes turned out wonderfully! Bring on the family critics…

Ginny Dawe-Woodings, BA History

Artefacts in the Ashes – 9/11’s Impact on Cultural Heritage

“I had just finished saying the 8.30 mass at St. Michael’s in Brooklyn. The pager went off and said that a plane had crashed into one of the towers of the Trade Center. I called the emergency operations centre and said I was responding, and I left for the Trade Center … when the second plane hit, I was still in Brooklyn. I was trying to get through the tunnel on Hamilton Avenue. We saw the plane but I never saw it hit. I remember saying to myself, boy, that guy is awful low in the pattern. I remember saying something really stupid like, you know, did he come down to see what happened with the first one? It never dawned on me that he was heading for the other tower, but that’s where it was headed.”

– Testimony of Father John Delendick (1)

“Perhaps it is because I see my own mortality in the collapse of the bridge, not in the death of the woman. We expect people to die. We count on our own lives to end…The bridge [however] was built to outlive us…it transcended our individual destiny. A dead woman is one of us – but the bridge is all of us”

– Slavenka Drakulic, 1993 (2)

The Twin Towers

As American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 flew into the World Trade Center towers on 11 September 2001 they left behind not only human bodies and twisted steel: nearly 3000 people lost their lives and over 6000 were injured but the cultural heritage of New York City, if not the wider Western world, was also severely compromised. Not only had the buildings themselves, iconic elements of the visual fabric that is the Manhatten skyline been destroyed but also the many artworks and private collections they held. As the skyscrapers collapsed they crushed or, as John Berman puts it, “perhaps atomised”, almost everything within (3). A Library of Congress information bulletin produced two years after the attack highlights that, whilst being “overwhelmed by the loss of human life on September 11th, few Americans realise that the terrorist attacks also destroyed an important segment of America’s cultural and historical legacy.” (4)

Designed by Minoru Yamasaki and completed in 1973, the two tall, grey oblongs still dominated the Manhatten skyline in 2001. Had the Twin Towers been half the height they might have been unremarkable, possibly even bland, but their absurd size meant that they loomed over the rest of New York. Their construction had coincided with the end of the Brutalist architectural era and so the towers were explicitly aesthetically ‘of their time’.

Saul Wenegrat, the former art director for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, when describing the area said “The World Trade Center was not just a collection of buildings … it incorporated the creative energies of a lot of magnificent people” (5).  Leslie E. Robertson,  the lead engineer on the World Trade Center project, reflected on their construction – “The two towers were the first structures outside of the military and nuclear industries designed to resist the impact of a jet airliner, the Boeing 707. It was assumed that the jetliner would be lost in the fog, seeking to land at JFK or at Newark. To the best of our knowledge, little was known about the effects of a fire from such an aircraft, and no designs were prepared for the circumstance.” (6) But he explains, with feelings of guilt and sorrow, that the WTC engineering was of its time and the prospect of a terrorist attack such as 9/11 could never have been anticipated.

The Twin Towers played a massive role in the tourism of NYC; they sought to represent the economic success of America or, with classic American grandiloquence, the world. When the buildings were designed, 1% of the budget was designated for artworks and heritage with specific spaces to draw people into the area (7):  while iconic in design the buildings were unique in their content.

The WTC is known to have held works by artists including Alexander Calder, Louise Nevelson, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Roy Lichtenstein, Paul Klee, Auguste Rodin, and Le Courbusier (8). The global securities and financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald had its New York headquarters there. Its founder, B. Gerald Cantor, was a renowned private collector of works of art by Rodin, a passion continued after his death by the firm which displayed works in a 4000-square-foot gallery on the 105th floor of the North Tower: proudly described as its “museum in the sky” (9) and which held casts of Rodin’s ‘Hand of God’, ‘the Kiss’, ‘the Thinker’, and the ‘Burghers of Calais’. There were libraries and archives: notable collections included the Helen Keller, with first editions of her books, photographs and correspondence; Broadway Theatre Archive’s 35,000 photographs; the entire Port Authority Archives; as well as 40,000 Jacques Lowe negatives documenting the presidency of JFK (10). In the subterranean rooms beneath the towers was a collection of important archaeological artefacts from African burial grounds to 19th Century social archives. Then there was the unknown content, held in private collections or safety deposit boxes throughout the complex.

Most cultural heritage sites have positive connotations, celebrating the peaks of civilisation and history. However the 20th Century saw an increased interest in traumatic and difficult heritage. In 1997 UNESCO listed both Auschwitz and the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Dome as World Heritage sites (11), representing a shift away from the normally celebratory to a more memory based focus. A 2002 ICOMOS conference explored the “nuanced meaning and memory of [traumatic] heritage places … resonat[ing] with strong emotional themes of tragedy, injustice, endurance and sometimes redemption” (12). Difficult or traumatic heritage is now best defined by Macdonald as “a past that is recognised as a meaningful in the present but that is also contested and awkward for public reconciliation with a positive, self-affirming contemporary identity” (13).

What motivates groups to attack buildings? In the 1960s Michael Moorcock coined the term ‘urbicide’ to describe violence or destruction of a built environment. Whilst his reference at the time was fictional it has now become associated with the resettling of Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip and the devastating of Sarajevo.

Buildings have consistently been targets for cathartic destruction, be it political, religious, anarchic or ideological. They are mostly targeted for what they symbolise rather than the intrinsic nature of the structure or contents. However Robert Bevan argues that there is something about skyscrapers that suggests “man’s over reaching hubris”, that they are naturally vulnerable, citing the Tower of Babel and the Towering Inferno as examples (14). In some instances the buildings are secondary targets or collateral damage. As Rebecca Knuth argues, the cultural losses resulting from strategic Allied bombing of German cities during World War Two, whilst not the primary target, led to a feeling of the culpability amongst the nations who attained victory as a result of these egregious attacks (15).

Regardless of the motive or the means, the destruction of architecture and other cultural heritage is an emotive subject although, as Teresa Stoppani argues, “the symbolic role of architecture is not erased by the disaster, but reconfirmed and emphasised by negation.” (16)

The Stari Most

The example of the destruction of the Stari Most bridge highlights an important element of ‘urbicide’ when constructing a framework for assessing the loss of the WTC. When the Bosnian-Croat army destroyed the Stari Most in November 1993, the local city of Mostar lost not only an integral piece of infrastructure but also a key example of Ottoman and Bosnian cultural heritage (17). Croatian write Slavenka Drakulic later wrote about her feelings: juxtaposing a photograph of the empty space left between the banks of the Neretva and a photograph of a Bosnian woman with her throat cut, she posed the question ‘Why do I feel more pain looking at the image of the destroyed bridge than the image of the woman?’ (18) Her answer is that the woman represented only one person, the bridge represented every citizen: the communal feeling of attachment to heritage can outweigh the more personal human aspects. With the Twin Towers, the sheer loss of life often overshadows the loss cultural heritage but in reality people often connected more with the attack on the building than the attack on the humans inside. The building was targeted by Al-Qaeda for what it represented.

News reports from the time touched briefly on the loss of artwork but the scale of the attack, with thousands of people missing, overshadowed a search for paper artefacts. Jane Stapleton, managing director of the AON Huntington T. Block insurance agency”, said that “we’re not going to comment on [the loss of art] at this point…it’s way too soon” (19). Christopher Santarelli of The Blaze depicts a bleak scene for the cultural heritage contained within the WTC, saying that “in some cases, the inventories were destroyed along with the records … [and] a decade later dozens of agencies and archivists say they’re still not completely sure what they lost or found, leaving them without much of a guide to piece together missing history.” (20)

To compound this, while some splinters and fragments have been recovered there are suggestions that pieces which had miraculously survived the impact, fire, and plummet were then stolen from the wreckage. The Cantor Fitzgerald copy of ‘the Thinker’ is still missing (21), presumably taken by an opportunistic looter aware of the value of the find and the benefits of stealing from such a chaotic environment.

Whilst much of the discourse in this paper has been concerned with arguing that it was primarily the tangible heritage that was affected by the September 11th attacks, there is another side to the story. Laurajane Smith puts forward the premise that ‘heritage’ is not a physical ‘thing’, it is not a ‘site’, building or other material object. Rather heritage is what goes on at these sites, and while this does not mean that a sense of physical place is not important, the physical place or ‘site’ is not the full story of what heritage may be (22). Perhaps the intangible heritage of the towers, the lives and activities both of survivors and those who died felt an impact as well.

Thomas Elsaesser questions how to represent the unrepresentable? (23) Dealing with traumatic heritage is a difficult area and The WTC suffered problems in coming to terms with the trauma: should it be a symbol of defiance in the face of terror? should it commemorate those lost or attempt to move on? to rebuild or conserve? Traumatic heritage sites are about creating meaning, and any memorial or monument should organise memory. “A site of trauma embodies the dead buried there, yet the interpretive story transcends the moment, capturing the unity and spirit of New Yorkers, and the diversity of victims, workers, families, and volunteers” (24).

Would it ever have been possible to restore the WTC, and if would it have been a suitable undertaking?  In most cases when assessing neglected or damaged cultural heritage there are three possible courses of action: restoration, conservation or inaction. However the Twin Towers and their contents were not neglected, nor were they damaged in the normal sense – they had been violently obliterated.  This called for a different course of action – memorialisation.

This is precisely what America did, in much the same way as the Croation reconstruction of the Stari Most. The creation of the One World Trade Center acts as both a memorial and as a functioning building – a way of commemorating whilst showing that life goes on.  The best preserved piece of recovered artwork – ‘The Sphere’ by Fritz Koenig – was also restored and now sits as a memorial to the day the Twin Towers fell.

A most important feature of the destruction of the WTC is that it is not only traumatic heritage, it is now lost heritage – irrecoverable and irretrievable. “The Cantor Fitzgerald bond trading firm and its chairman Howard W. Lutnick, have refused to discuss in any depth the loss of its art collection. What did any of that matter when 695 of the company’s 960 employees (including Mr Lutnick’s brother) working in the building perished in the collapse?” (25). Bevan posits though that the destruction of ‘physical fabric’ is just as immensely demoralising as the loss of human lives (26). The WTC was a tangible structure and, arguably, that was the target just as much as the workers inside.

Before September 11th the Twin Towers represented the cultural heritage of financial workers, Manhattan, New York, America, the West, and all those which supported any of those ideals. Following its destruction and subsequent memorialisation, the cultural heritage was changed from a celebration to a tribute to the resilience of these values. The structure may have been destroyed but the principles associated with it live on. A quotation from John Berman of ABC News best summarises the contemporary cultural heritage of the WTC – “The art and the buildings were meant to last forever. Now…it will be as a reminder of one of history’s most horrifying events”. (27)

Ginny Dawe-Woodings, BA History

References:

(1) World Trade Center Task Force Interview with Father John Delendick (Transcribed by Laurie A. Collins), 6th December 2001

(2) Slavenka Drakulic, ‘Falling Down: A Mostar Bridge Elegy’, The New Republic (December 1993), p. 14-15 referenced in Martin Coward, ‘Against anthropocentrism: the destruction of the built environment as a distinct form of political violence’ in Review of International Studies (British International Studies Association, July 2006), Vol. 32, No. 3, p. 419-420

(3) John Berman, ‘Millions in Artwork Destroyed at WTC’, ABC News, 23rd December [Unknown Year], (www.abcnews.go.com, accessed 1st February 2014)

(4) Donna Urschel, ‘Lives and Treasures Taken, 9/11 Attacks Destroys Cultural and Historical Artifacts’, The Library of Congress Information Bulletin, November 2002, Vol. 61, No. 11 (www.loc.gov, accessed 10th January 2014)

(5) John Berman, ‘Millions in Artwork Destroyed at WTC’, ABC News, 23rd December [Unknown Year], (www.abcnews.go.com, accessed 1st February 2014)

(6) Leslie E. Robertson, ‘Reflections on the World Trade Center’ in The Bridge (National Academy of Sciences, 2002), Vol. 32, No. 1, p. 7

(7) John Berman, ‘Millions in Artwork Destroyed at WTC’, ABC News, 23rd December [Unknown Year], (www.abcnews.go.com, accessed 1st February 2014)

(8) Donna Urschel, ‘Lives and Treasures Taken, 9/11 Attacks Destroys Cultural and Historical Artifacts’, The Library of Congress Information Bulletin, November 2002, Vol. 61, No. 11 (www.loc.gov, accessed 10th January 2014)

(9) Maev Kennedy, ‘Rodin treasures destroyed with ‘museum in the sky’, The Guardian, 21st September 2001, (www.theguardian.com, accessed 1st February 2014)

(10) Donna Urschel, ‘Lives and Treasures Taken, 9/11 Attacks Destroys Cultural and Historical Artifacts’, The Library of Congress Information Bulletin, November 2002, Vol. 61, No. 11 (www.loc.gov, accessed 10th January 2014)

(11) William Logan, Kier Reeves, Places of Pain and Shame: Dealing with ‘difficult heritage’ , (Routledge, 2009), p. 3

(12) William Logan, Kier Reeves, Places of Pain and Shame: Dealing with ‘difficult heritage’ , (Routledge, 2009), p. 3

(13) Sharon Macdonald, Difficult Heritage, Negotiation the Nazi Past in Nuremberg and Beyond (Routledge, 2009), p. 1

(14) Robert Bevan, The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War (Cromwell Press, 2006), p. 61

(15) Rebecca Knuth ‘To Extremists, Books are Trojan Horses’, History News Network (hnn.us/article/29272 accessed 16th November 2013)

(16) Teresa Stoppani, ‘The Architecture of Disaster’ in Space and Culture (2012), Vol. 15, No. 2, p. 135

(17) Martin Coward, ‘Against anthropocentrism: the destruction of the built environment as a distinct form of political violence’ in Review of International Studies (British International Studies Association, July 2006), Vol. 32, No. 3, p. 419-420

(18) Slavenka Drakulic, ‘Falling Down: A Mostar Bridge Elegy’, The New Republic (December 1993), p. 14-15 referenced in Martin Coward, ‘Against anthropocentrism: the destruction of the built environment as a distinct form of political violence’ in Review of International Studies (British International Studies Association, July 2006), Vol. 32, No. 3, p. 419-420

(19) Kelly Divine Thomas, ‘Aftershocks’, ARTnews, 11th January 2001, (www.artnews.com, accessed 1st February 2014)

(20) Christopher Santarelli, ‘Thousands of Records, Irreplacable Historical Documents and Art Still Missing From 9/11’, The Blaze, 30th July 2011, (www.theblaze.com, accessed 1st February 2014)

(21) Dan Barry and William K. Rashbaum, ‘Born of Hell, Lost After Inferno; Rodin Work From Trade Center Survived, and Vanished’, The New York Times, 20th May 2002, (www.nytimes.com, accessed 1st February 2014)

(22) Laurajane Smith, Uses of Heritage (Routledge, 2006), p. 44

(23) Karen Randell, ‘Speaking the Unspeakable: Invisibility and Trauma after 9/11’, Graham Coulter-Smith, Maurice Owen, Art in the Age of Terrorism (Paul Holbert Publishing, 2005), p. 196

(24) Setha M. Low, ‘Lessons from Imagining the World Trade Center Site: An Examination of Public Space and Culture’ in Anthropology & Education Quarterly, (American Anthropological Association, 2002), Vol. 33, No. 3, p. 401

(25) Dan Barry and William K. Rashbaum, ‘Born of Hell, Lost After Inferno; Rodin Work From Trade Center Survived, and Vanished’, The New York Times, 20th May 2002, (www.nytimes.com, accessed 1st February 2014)

(26) Robert Bevan, The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War (Cromwell Press, 2006), p. 66

(27) John Berman, ‘Millions in Artwork Destroyed at WTC’, ABC News, 23rd December [Unknown Year], (www.abcnews.go.com, accessed 1st February 2014)

“Restoration is a lie from beginning to end” – Restoring Heritage

“The partly-perished work of the ancient craftsmaster has been made neat and smooth by the tricky hand of some unoriginal thoughtless hack of today” – William Morris, The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (1877)(1)

The deterioration of our physical and monumental heritage creates a very visible problem in today’s heritage industry. For any heritage in a state of decline there are four possible courses of future action: restoration, de-restoration, conservation, and inaction.

Monuments or artefacts having national symbolic value; in continuing function or re-use; important for education or research; of use for tourism promotion; and where site preservation is important are all posited(2). The booming heritage tourism industry proves that the public have a great interest in heritage, so should they be deprived of aesthetically pleasing (and historically accurate) interactions for the sake of the ethics of restoration?

John Ruskin stated that restoration is a “lie from beginning to end”, that “it means the total destruction which a building can suffer… accompanied with a false description of the thing destroyed”(3). The topic of restoration has caused much, often polarised, debate. Nicholas Stanley-Price has also argued against reconstruction on various grounds – the evocative value of ruined buildings; the difficulty, nay impossibility, of achieving authenticity; the ethical issue of conveying erroneous information that can then mislead and be reproduced; the destruction of original evidence; the disruption of landscape values; distorted site interpretation where elements of sites with long history are obscured if they are reconstructed to feature a single period; and finally the associated financial burden(4). Restoration is also undoubtedly a subjective action; those who restore or design restorations have the ability impose an ideological, historical or personal focus.

The restoration of Kenwood House is an example of restoration for the benefit of function. Kenwood House was left to the nation by Lord Iveagh in 1927. Much of the original paintwork has been restored through stripping and the structure has been repaired for safety(5). In this case the restoration acted as rehabilitation for the mansion, not so much a ‘lie’ as ‘sprucing up’ – something that would have been expected to happen in the normal “life” of the building when originally constructed.

Montage of St. Michael’s Mount, Cornwall

A recent visit to St. Michael’s Mount, the tidal island off the Cornish coast highlighted the current restoration problem. The site, run by the National Trust, is comprised of a small fishing village, a set of gardens, and a medieval castle and abbey. It is a beautiful island to explore, with endless cobbled warrens and historical portraits. Yet, inspection of the castle and abbey shows the less than subtle restoration of parts of the building. Whilst it is the facade that has been restored (as shown in the below picture) it plainly looks out of place. Camillo Boito advocates conservation over restoration, and any intervention should be kept to an absolute minimum. Boito is particularly against ‘stylistic reconstruction’ and argued that any new construction (when completely necessary) should be “visually different from the original material”(6). The use of a contrasting stone type causes the restoration to be incredibly obvious, however it lacks any explanatory context as to why it was restored in the first place.

The Chevy Chase frieze highlights another problem with the building’s restoration. St Michael’s Mount is still an inhabited house, and displays rooms done in Victorian, Edwardian, Medieval, and modern styles. The Chevy Chase frieze was accompanied by an explanation – “Specialist conservators…are undertaking a full survey of the frieze that will advise on long-term restoration and conservation plans specifically looking at stabilising the original plaster work and restoration of the figures and paintwork”. This implies that despite centuries of occupancy after the creation of the frieze, there is still a desire to de-restore the room to one specific era; which effectively ignores any history post-17th Century. This highlights that both creators and visitors prioritise older history, often at the expense of newer heritage.

The role of restoration and conservation is to keep heritage accessible. These institutions have a responsibility to visitors, so it cannot always be about what the institutions want to show, but what the public want to see. Camillo Boito’s views echo a Japanese phrase – ‘Kintsukuroi’, which means to repair with gold. It is the act of repairing pottery with gold or silver lacquer to highlight that the piece is more beautiful for being broken. In this sense, restoration should be used to highlight that the building has experienced decay and that the restored section is purely an interpretation. Any building or monument has had a ‘life’ and a representation should reflect that.

‘Kintsukuroi’ – To repair with gold. The act of repairing pottery with gold or silver lacquer to highlight that the piece is more beautiful for being broken

History is becoming increasingly as much about enjoyability as it is about accuracy, as David Lowenthal puts it – “In the public view, plausibility is as good as the truth, and historians are worthy of their heritage hire”. Heritage is personal history and leaving monuments and artefacts to decay shows a lack of humanity: heritage needs to be preserved, however restoration is ultimately a lie, and a fabrication. Viewers should enjoy the full history of an object, as Alïos Riegl summarises – “The modern viewer of old monuments receives aesthetic satisfaction not from the status of preservation but from the continuous and unceasing cycle of change in nature”.

Ginny Dawe-Woodings, BA History

(1) William Morris, ‘Manifesto of the Society for the protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB), (www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works, accessed 23rd November 2013)
(2) Nicholas Stanley-Price, ‘The Reconstruction of Ruins: Principles and Practise’ in Conservation: Principles, Dilemmas and Uncomfortable Truths (2009), p. 35-37
(3) Nicholas Stanley Price, Mansfield Kirby Talley, Alessandra Melucco Vaccaro, Historical and Philosophical Issues in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage (1996), p. 269
(4) Nicholas Stanley-Price, ‘The Reconstruction of Ruins: Principles and Practise’ in Conservation: Principles, Dilemmas and Uncomfortable Truths (2009), p. 37-40
(5) Maev Kennedy, ‘Priceless art collection reopens after restoration of Kenwood House’, The Guardian, 26th November 2013 (www.theguardian.com, accessed 26th November 2013)
(6) Ascensión Hernández Martinez, ‘Conservation and Restoration in Built Heritage: A Western European Perspective’ in Brian J. Graham, Peter Howard, The Ashgate Research Companion to Heritage and Identity (2008), p. 249
(7) Nicholas Stanley Price, Mansfield Kirby Talley, Alessandra Melucco Vaccaro, Historical and Philosophical Issues in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage (1996), p. 73

Iraq’s Cultural Heritage in Crisis

 

U.S. Army soldiers from 1st Squadron, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment provide security for a provincial reconstruction team and representatives of the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization as they visit the ancient city of Ashur in Iraq on Nov. 21, 2008

With conflicts and crises come casualties. More than often they are human beings, and whilst the loss of life is not comparable to the loss of heritage, the loss of heritage can be just as devastating. The current crisis of ISIS militants overrunning cities and provinces in Iraq poses a serious threat to the heritage of the country. The militants have threatened to destroy monuments, graves, and other cultural heritage that contradicts their extremist views(1).

Having a celebrated iron and bronze age archeological history; the ‘cradle of civilisation’, in the 7th Century [the territories that now form the country of] Iraq became the centre of the Islamic Golden Age, which enhanced the artistic, scientific, and philosophic culture of the region. The region has absorbed external cultures, feeding off neighbours in Asia and the Middle East. Centuries of progress and adulterating from external sources has created the amalgamation of cultures that represents Iraqi cultural heritage in the 21st Century. However, all of this is now under direct threat.

In times of conflict cultural heritage becomes particularly valuable but also particularly vulnerable. As a 2013 report by the BIICL highlighted, “Cultural property reflects the life, history and identity of the community, its preservation helps to rebuild a broken community, re-establish its identity, and link its past with its present and future”(2).

The destruction of material is often a result of collateral or accidental damage, but sometimes it can be a coordinated effort carried out for sinister purposes. Hostility over nationalism, identity, borders, and history has driven nations and organisations to remove and destroy material they believe to have a disputed claim to: during the First Gulf war, Iraqi bureaucrats looted the Kuwait public collections and National Archives, making off with critical documents(3). There is also evidence suggesting that during the Second World War, the Nazi Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce, which was dedicated to the forced removal of artefacts, was also acting to confiscate material which the Germans believed was culturally theirs and had been stolen from them in previous wars.

Preventing destruction of cultural heritage during a conflict is often easier when the conflict is between two warring nations where supra-national institutions can mediate, as opposed to a civil war where sides cannot be so easily distinguished. Iraq knows all to well the consequences of armed confrontation and their monuments. Following the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003, and the entering of Baghdad in April 2004, monuments became direct participants in the conflict. There were warnings, as early as January 2003, about the implications for heritage, but the US Department of Defence only protected the Ministry of Oil, the Palestine Hotel, the airport, and other militarily strategic locations(4), demonstrating the constant prioritising of military success over other interests. However, despite the failure of the protective measures, there is now at least a feeling of culpability for the consequences of these failures. This scenario was governed by several factors: the moral responsibility of the invading forces to global heritage; the responsibility of the invading forces to a higher institution, in the form of the UN; and also the rational and secular nature of the invasion. In the current scenario though, ISIS holds themselves responsible to nobody.

Protecting cultural heritage in any circumstance is a difficult task: justifying intervention during peace time is controversial enough but the chaotic circumstances of war often mean that a blanket policy for protecting cultural heritage becomes impossible.

Institutionalism has proven effective, not necessarily as a preventative or protective measure, but definitely as a means of monitoring and analysing the risks associated with cultural heritage in conflict. The Syrian crisis is a strong and recent example, similar to what might occur in Iraq. ICOMOS has been involved with the Syrian conflict and stated that they are “permanently and neutrally monitoring the situation of cultural heritage sites and is in contact with experts from the region(5).” This creates a system for precedence but also a usable system that can lead to preventative and recovery measures too. Director General of UNESCO Irina Bokova has expressed a fear that the events of 2003 will be repeated. Bokova has appealed on an individual level for Iraqi leaders and citizens to protect their cultural heritage, but has also proposed assistance from UNESCO(6).

Spiral minaret at Abu Dulaf

Crises such as what is occurring in Iraq create an interesting debate: who is responsible for protecting cultural heritage? The global community, an institution, a government, an NGO, or the individual? Bokova’s comments and ICOMOS’s actions suggests that the motivation should be a bottom up process. It needs the people of Iraq to want to protect and preserve their heritage, at which point institutions and then perhaps greater intervention can be made, but only if necessary.

Wars though are rarely fought over the protection of monuments, endangered people or assets are much better motivators for action.

Painfully, a google search for ‘iraqi heritage’ now returns images of explosions and ruins, and not the glorious monuments that should define Iraq as a country. It would be a devastating loss if ISIS’s goals of monument and shrine destruction were to come to fruition. This of course is a perspective that comes of living in a society where it is possible to dedicate time and resources to the appreciation and protection of monuments. Iraq at present does not have this luxury.

Some recent pictures showing the demolition of religious monuments and shrines:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-28177841

Ginny Dawe-Woodings, BA History

(1) Matt Bradley, ‘Iraq Conflict Menages Heritage Sites’ in the Wall Street Journal, (27th June 2014), (http://online.wsj.com/articles/iraq-conflict-menaces-heritage-sites-1403901541, accessed 28th June 2014)
(2) British Institute of International and Comparative Law, ‘The Protection of Cultural Heritage in Conflict, Seminar Report’, (23rd April 2013), p. 3
(3) Rebecca Knuth, Burning Books and Levelling Libraries, (Praeger Publishing, 2006), p. 184
(4) Sanja Zgonjanin, ‘The Prosecution of War Crimes for the Destruction of Libraries and Archives during Times of Armed Conflict’ in Libraries & Culture, (University of Texas Press, 2005), Vol. 40, No. 2, p. 140
(5) ‘Protection of Syria’s Cultural Heritage in Times of Armed Conflict: ICOMOS – ICCROM’ in ICORP International Committee on Risk Preparedness, (http://icorp.icomos.org/index.php/news/40-protection-of-syria-s-cultural-heritage-in-times-of-armed-conflict-icomos-iccrom-e-learning-course-for-syrian-cultural-heritage-professionals, accessed 28th June 2014)
(6) ‘Iraqis Urged to Protect Cultural Heritage’ in RTT News, (17th June 2014), (http://www.rttnews.com/2338254/iraqis-urged-to-protect-cultural-heritage.aspx, accessed 28th June 2014)

Hello there!

Hello there!

So my name is Ginny and this is probably about my fifth attempt at a blog.
I’ve been blogging since I was about thirteen years old, only none of them particularly stuck.

I pretty much love everything. There is nothing in this world that doesn’t fascinate me.

Let’s begin…

Gin x