Against Dismemberment: Relationality and the Re-membering of Documentary Heritage

Since the late nineteenth century, many archivists and other custodians of documentary heritage have referred to aggregated records as ‘organic wholes,’ emerging from and reflecting the lives and work of people, families, and organisations. As a result, this heritage is often managed in silos that are arranged and described by archivists, records managers, librarians and related professionals using particular standards, systems, and sector-specific ways of working. Such practices, carried out in the name of ‘memory,’ often result in a dismembering, a dissociation of records and the information they contain from their contexts. In this paper, we focus on archives and documentary heritage, not as organic wholes, but as the essential ‘connective tissue’ in living, complex, and continually evolving systems of remembering and re-membering meaning. Using museum and anthropological records as case studies, we explore the continuing risks of dissociation and argue for more relational, interdependent ways of working within and beyond memory and heritage institutions. Embracing relationality and the multiple re-membering of archives and collections reveals that the contemporary relevance of documentary heritage lies not just in items themselves, but in their essential connective role within wider cultural, historical, social and political processes.