I’ve started the formal study of records management this term, and we’ve quite reasonably started with definitions and some history. One of my first readings mentioned—and at first I assumed this was tongue-in-cheek, but it turned out not to be—that every generation of records managers must develop its own metaphysics of records. Records management, as a discipline, evolved from archival practice, which itself seems to have evolved from the necessities of an increasingly bureaucratic legal system, and has gone through a series of identity crises since its origins in the first half of the twentieth century. There are ongoing arguments about what a record even is, let alone how to manage one in any given context, and for what purposes. The discussions go from the dully practical implications of housing large volumes of paper to invoking the conceptual properties of spacetime, sometimes in the same paper. It’s utterly bonkers.
Among the most fascinating aspects of records management I’ve run across—and this whole post is a bit of a “drawn on the back of a napkin in a pub” kind of explanation, and is not to be taken as super rigorous—is how culturally specific the very concept of the record is. And I don’t mean that each culture has its own idea of what a record is—though of course memory making and keeping is definitely culture and context-dependent—I mean that the very concept of “records” as artifacts with particular evidentiary functions separate from artifacts with other functions barely exists outside the English-speaking world, and doesn’t look the same where it does exist. If you were to ask me prior to this term where I thought the English world’s obsession with records came from, I probably would have linked it to colonialism, or perhaps religion, and while the concept of the record certainly spread across the globe via colonialism and missionary efforts, it turns out it predates the colonial era by quite a long time, and has a much more interesting origin that is ultimately unrelated to the church.
As it turns out, our modern concept of “the record” evolved (and even took its name) from a type of evidentiary oral testimony left behind by the Romans that English kings adopted as part of their own legal system. Roughly, written records were originally attestations of evidentiary oral testimony kept as memory aids, and then gradually the need for the oral component was relaxed, until it became possible for a document to become a kind of act. The particular example given by my readings is that when someone sends a letter asking for aid, the letter itself is both the act of asking and the record of the request, but it isn’t is a representation of a spoken request. Combined with a few idiosyncratic principles of how English courts worked in the medieval period (by which I mean both royal courts and the law courts that emerged from them), this new kind of documentary evidence became very important for things like land rights, wills, precedents, and so on, in a way that wasn’t necessarily true in other places, or at least not true in the same way.
To say that the concept of the record is culturally specific is not to say that other cultures have no concept of evidentiary artifacts; of course they do. However, records, not just as evidentiary artifacts, but as a special class of artifacts, is culturally specific. Even other Western cultures with large bureaucratic systems don’t classify “records” as separate conceptual entities from other types of documentation (the French, for instance, don’t have a separate category for records). As an English-speaking white guy it’s often easy for me to look at things in my culture and see them as culturally “neutral” rather than culturally specific, and that seems to be what’s happened with “records.” I can’t help but think that the English concept of the record wound up being an enabling factor in their unfortunate success as a colonial power. Certainly it was not the only factor, and I’m not even arguing that it was the defining factor, but it’s a framework for managing information at scale, with its origins in the culture’s legal system, designed to operate based on institutional, rather than personal, authority. When the English decided that colonialism was a thing they wanted to do, they already had a culturally-specific information management metaphysics for empire ready to slot into place. It’s frankly a bit horrifying.
