This post aims to fill one logical gap in my project, as was pointed out by our language tutor Roger two weeks ago, through answering the question: why participatory archiving is adopted in this project to explore the cultural significance in the modern society rather than disclose cultural history in the past?
Archives are supposed to document what happened in the past.
As Spohnholz (2014) stated, archives ‘were seen to offer the most direct access to voices from past centuries’ by the new academic historians in the early 19th century.
Spohnholz also mentioned political or religious institutions in the Middle Ages, which used archives as tools to preserve their authorities. These archives not simply functioned as descriptive content, but influenced people’s thoughts at that time as well as affected later generations. For example, historians might ‘have sometimes overemphasized the importance of centralized states and official churches in the pre-modern era, or have treated as marginal those people who those officials wanted to treat as marginal’.
Such references to the archives reflect people’s ‘thinking about history’, an act of a general meaning making of the history (Tosh, 2008). It might values the outcome over the process, just focusing on the influences that history have brought to the modern society.
However, to take full advantage of histories or archives, it might be better to ‘think with history’, as was advocated by Carl Schorske (2014), to help people ‘be alert to the implications that many of its findings have for public understanding’ (Tosh, 2008).
As was explained by Schorske, there are two modes of ‘thinking with history’. First, the images of the past help us position ourselves – are we different from the past, or sharing some similarities with it. Second, the temporal flows revealed by history demonstrate narratives of change and subsequently form our historical present. Based on my understanding, through placing ourselves in the temporal flow and thinking about how the present relates to the past and future, we might find the distinctiveness and potentials opportunities in the contemporary era.
That is the reason why I am using ‘cultural significance’ rather than ‘cultural history’ in the research question while introducing the word archive in this project. Even though people participating in my project are encouraged to recollect and share their experiences in the past to contribute to the archive, the objective is to help people understand their influences on reinvigorating the potentials of abundant cultural assets, either being passed on from the past or emerging in recent years, during the process of recalling and archiving.
Then it is easier to relate the project to participatory archiving. Participatory archive encourages users to ‘be reconceptualized as active participants in the co-production of historical understanding’ (Benoit & Eveleigh, 2021), which facilitate active exploration of culture rather than knowledge input in a passive mode.
I will also translate the answer above into Chinese and share it on Xiaohongshu.
Bibliography
Benoit, I.E. and Eveleigh, A. (2021) Participatory archives: Theory and practice. London: Facet.
Schorske, C.E. (1998) Thinking with History: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Tosh, J. (2008) Why History Matters. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
University of Cambridge (2014) Q&A: how archives make history. Available at: https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/discussion/qa-how-archives-make-history (Accessed: 19 October 2024)