Abstract
This article explores the relationship between records and various expressions of political and social power. Records are often made and used for explicit, instrumental purposes, designed to put into effect the plans and desires of those with the upper hand in certain relationships. They may also be used to enhance subtler forms of symbolic, emotional, and psychological power. Drawing on a selection of historical examples, the essay argues that record making itself can sometimes be as potent as any particular records resulting from that process. The essay concludes with some speculations on how these powers inherent in records may be changing in the context of current technological developments.
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William Hickling Prescott,History of the Conquest of Mexico (New York: Modern Library, 1980; orig. publ., 1843), p. 153.
Ibid.,, p. 154.
Though it is not without its critics, the best introduction to many of these issues remains Walter J. Ong,Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, (London: Routledge, 1982).
On this point, see Richard Lee Marks,Cortes: The Great Adventurer and the Fate of Aztec Mexico (New York: Knopf, 1993), pp. 48–49. Still useful in placing Cortes in his own context is Howard Mumford Jones,O Strange New World: American Culture, the Formative Years (New York: Viking, 1952), pp. 137–139.
Hugh Taylor, “‘My Very Act and Deed’: Some Reflections on the Role of Textual Records in the Conduct of Human Affairs”,American Archivist 51 (Fall 1988): 456–469. I have also explored some of these issues in James M. O'Toole, “The Symbolic Significance of Archives”,American Archivist 56 (Spring 1993): 234–255.
David Lowenthal,The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), chs. 2–3. I have described this compound scroll in “Symbolic Significance of Archives”,American Archivist: 244–245, which also contains a photograph of it, draped down three flights of stairs.
On the persistent power of seals, see M. T. Clanchy,From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066–1307, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 308–317. The sometimes problematic absence of seals in present-day Vermont was conveyed to me in a private communication from D. Gregory Sanford, 18 December 1989.
See the very useful discussion of paper money in David M. Henkin,City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), pp. 137–165.
Still the best general survey of Domesday and its changing uses and meanings is Elizabeth Hallam,Domesday Book Through Nine Centuries (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986).
Phaedrus, R. Hackworth (trans.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), pp. 274e-275e. For a useful discussion, see also Henri-Jean Martin,The History and Power of Writing, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 90–94.
On the impact of anonymity, see Henkin,City Reading, pp. 16–17, and elsewhere.
On the critically important matter of coming to trust writing, see Clanchy,From Memory to Written Record, pp. 294–327.
H. C. Teitler,Notarii and Exceptores: An Inquiry into the Role and Significance of Shorthand Writers in the Imperial and Ecclesiastical Bureaucracy of the Roman Empire (Amsterdam: J.C. Gieben, 1985), pp. 34–36. On the problems of extending literacy in cultures without elaborate systems of schools, see William V. Harris,Ancient Literacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), esp. pp. 96–102 and pp. 233–248.
John Steinbeck,The Grapes of Wrath (New York: Penguin Books, 1992: orig. pub. 1932), pp. 73–74. For a graphic image of how records may help take advantage of the weak, see the nineteenth-century engraving, entitled “A Flaw in the Title”, reproduced in James M. O'Toole,Understanding Archives and Manuscripts (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 1990), p. 14.
For a description of these records and the ways in which Western scholars are discovering and interpreting them, see Dawne Adam, “The Tuol Seng Archives and the Cambodian Genocide”,Archivaria 45 (Spring 1998): 5–26, and David Chandler,Views from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). For another example of careful record keeping as a tool of repressive regimes, see Bruce P. Montgomery, “The Iraqi Secret Police Files: A Documentary Record of the Anfal Genocide”,Archivaria 52 (Fall 2001): 69–99.
Timothy Garton Ash,The File (New York: Random House, 1997), pp. 7–10.
Garton Ash makes this point ibid.,, pp. 221–222. For examples of both the abuse and preservation of these records, seeNew York Times, 6 and 8 December 1989, and 16 January 1990. See also Ernst Posner, “Some Aspects of Archival Development Since the French Revolution”,American Archivist 3 (July 1940): 159–172, and Judith M. Panitch, “Liberty, Equality, Posterity? Some Archival Lessons from the Case of the French Revolution”,American Archivist 59 (Winter 1996): 30–47. For another example of the destruction of records (and, in this case, the record-keeper himself), see Richard Brown, “Death of a Renaissance Record-Keeper: The Murder of Tomasso da Tortona in Ferrara, 1385”,Archivaria 44 (Fall 1997): 1–43.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,Invisible Allies, Alexis Klimoff and Michael Nicholson (trans.) (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1995), pp. 30, 55.
See, for example, Sven Birkerts,The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994); Barry Sanders,A is for Ox: The Collapse of Literacy and the Rise of Violence in an Electronic Age (New York: Vintage, 1994); Michael Heim,Electronic Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); J. David Bolter,Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing (Hillside, NJ: Erlbaum Associates, 1991); Nicholas Negroponte,Being Digital (New York: Knopf, 1995); and Phil Mullins, “The Fluid Word: Word Processing and Its Mental Habits”,Thought 63 (December 1988): 413–428.
On the legal validity of electronic signatures in the United States, see the news reports surrounding the passage of federal legislation on the subject:New York Times, 15 and 17 June and 1 July 2000.
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O'Toole, J.M. Cortes's notary: The symbolic power of records. Archival Science 2, 45–61 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02435630
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02435630