Professor Richard J. Cox posted a long summary/review of the special issue Archival Science 2, issue 1-2 (2002), edited by Terry Cook and Joan Schwartz, titled "Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory." From a quick reading of his e-mail, it looks as though the authors got sucked into the morass of post-modernism that many historians only started extricating themselves from in the late 1990s. Not having access to the journal, I can only react to Professor Cox's excellent summary in which he quotes various observations and claims by Cook and Schwartz. Many of these statements are written in the inscrutable jargon favoured by post-modern writers. One might be accused of taking these phrases or quotations out of context, but since one of the central tenants of post-modernism is that everything is relative and evidentiary value is meaningless since all readings of a text are equally privileged, quoting out of context is itself allowed since a true post-modernist does this all the time.
I wonder how many of the claims, including this one from the introductory essay by the editors,
"central professional myth of the past century that the archivist is (or should be) an objective, neutral, passive . . . keeper of truth" (p. 5)
are supported by evidence. No educated archivist should ever make this elementary mistake. So if it is a myth, it's a pretty damning one.
I hope to have more to say on this provocative publication in the months to come....
Abstracts of the individual articles can be read at the journal's home page; subscribers can access the full-text of individual articles as Adobe PDF files: http://www.kluweronline.com/issn/1389-0166
