The weavers of memories (01)

I. Initial ideas. Memory as weaving

[This post is the first of a series in which I will share a text entitled Los tejedores de memorias (“The weavers of memories”), which I produced as the final work for my master’s degree in Historical Archives and Memory at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogota (Colombia). All posts can be viewed on my website, while the original text, complete with quotes and notes, can be downloaded here].

Is the archive an intrinsically passive space, condemned to the mere collection and preservation of past remains? Or can it be a proactive entity?

These questions, which have apparently been answered in the affirmative, both in theory and in practice, in the field of social and humanistic disciplines, do not seem to have been answered so clearly in the natural sciences. At least that was the feeling I had when I started working at the Charles Darwin Research Station, a privileged research space located in the Galapagos Islands and managed by the Charles Darwin Foundation (CDF). There I took charge, among other areas, of the scientific archive: a collection with unique contents, relatively well preserved despite the adverse climatic conditions prevailing in the area, and largely ignored by the researchers working at the Station: a multicultural group of academics belonging to various branches of the natural sciences, and leaders in their respective specialties at the international level.

From my professional perspective, that archive was a space full of potential in terms of knowledge and memory management. But, at the same time, it seemed to be a static place, totally devoid of a voice and proposals of its own.

These suspicions, the result of an initial cursory approach, were confirmed after my first contacts with resident scientists and visiting professionals working in the Galapagos Islands. For them, with very few exceptions, the CDF archive was not a source of information. It was a place of reception, storage, or conservation, always qualified with adjectives related to ideas of passivity, or even stagnation, or the end. One did not go there to seek or construct objective knowledge: one went there — in the hypothetical case of going there — to rummage through subjective and dusty memories. And that task was not an activity proper to professionals of the natural sciences: it was reserved for historians and other professionals of the social “sciences”.

All these opinions, collected during my first weeks in the Galapagos, were not new to me. The clash between the “pure” sciences and the humanities, and the condescending superiority that the former sometimes employ towards the latter (which they generally do not consider “sciences”), is a long-standing issue. As is the disconnection between the more orthodox natural sciences and the surrounding human context (including social and collective memory): a split that has been highlighted on many occasions. From this position, archives are seen as storehouses of anecdotes and past details; they are useful from a historical point of view, practical at some point in the different research processes (for example, when locating a missing piece in the background), but not very effective, or just unnecessary, when it comes to “doing science” — that is, to constructing purely scientific knowledge and narratives.

And yet, after more than two decades working in libraries, archives and other mixed and intermediate institutions that deal with managing knowledge and memory, I was fully aware of the many latent possibilities that often await, hidden or not, in those spaces. Possibilities of change: change of perspective, of paradigm, of opinion… With all that this means and entails.

It was then that the questions that open this text arose. Questions certainly biased by my own lack of knowledge that, at first, were addressed to archives in general, but later, as a result of readings, talks and exchanges of opinions, were progressively focused on scientific spaces and, more specifically, on those working with natural sciences and biodiversity conservation.

Spaces like the one I was lucky enough to lead at the Charles Darwin Research Station, on the very south coast of Santa Cruz Island, in the Galapagos archipelago. A place where, I was sure, memories could be woven.

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Is the archive, then, an irremediably passive space? Or can it be proactive? Can a scientific archive become a place where memories are woven? These questions, grouped together, were the ones that guided the writing of this paper, to the formulation of a decalogue of recommendations, and to the creation, in 2019, of a digital project called Galapagueana.

A project where the memories of science in the Galapagos were woven. Or, at least, threaded.

The idea of “weaving memories” is not new. In my case, I picked it up from the title of a fascinating text that Julia Huang wrote after her work with the nomadic women of the Qashqa’i people in Iran between 1991 and 2004. In its pages, Huang opines that “…weaving and its products are essential threads in the vibrant social fabric.”

In the archival world there are parallels. Sue McKemmish notes that “archives are a web of recorded information, and always have been … Archives are shaped by the nature of the threads that bind different communities together.”

The metaphor is highly visual: the process of weaving includes the careful selection of materials, the interweaving of different thicknesses and colors to assemble patterns and textures, the many contacts of one strand with all the others, the weft that depends on the solid presence of all its threads, the progressive growth of the fabric, the many possibilities of enlargement, reduction, and connection… All this can be applied to various essential elements of human life: from society itself and its multiple interactions to the construction of identities and memories.

Collective memory has received a plethora of definitions over the last half century. Most of them coincide in pointing out that it is the sum of the memories of a group of individuals: a fragment of everything lived, thought and imagined by different human groups over the course of centuries. A fragment, only, because of everything experienced by our species, we have been able to preserve only a tiny, almost derisory part: we have reached the present day with scraps of what was, what we did and what we knew. On the basis of those scraps we build that series of conjectures more or less close to reality that we call “history”, and we erect that unstable edifice that we know as “identity”.

Part of this memory has been patiently woven through the comings and goings of intangible orality, one of the oldest forms of codification and transmission of information. The other part has been captured in a series of documents — from books to photographs, and from tapestries to masks — which, over time, have been managed in institutions such as libraries, archives and museums.

This management activity bears (or, at least, should bear) many similarities to that of weaving: it is concerned with creating warps and weaving together memories — tangible and intangible — to link and entangle them. Historically, archives have played an essential role in the collection, reorganization, resignification, preservation, transmission, and visibility of collective memory: they have acted as authentic weavers.

Although unfortunately, as we have seen, this is not something that can be said of all of them.

[To be continued…]