Information Technology seminars

The Genealogical Gaze: Family Identities and Family Archives in the 14th-17th centuries

Date and time:

25/07/2008, 12:00pm

Location:

Building: 11(Menzies), Room: W 614（School of Historical Studies Staff Room）, Clayton Campus

Presenters:

Eric Ketelaar, Professor of Archivistics, University of Amsterdam, and Honorary Professor, Faculty of Information Technology, and Centre for Organisational and Social Informatics

Abstract:

Record creators have always thought about the future and showed an awareness of the need to transfer recorded information through time. This entails an awareness of a longue durée stretching well into the future. But this is different from the notion that records created for current business may be transferred as a heritage to future generations who will value these records as cultural assets. Some records are transfigured into archival and cultural patrimony. Albeit that the term cultural patrimony was not used before the 19th century, we can throw out a sort of net into the deep waters of history, to catch and to recognize “fragments of a patrimony consciousness” in societies of the past. This metaphor is used by Jean-Michel Leniaud (2002) who uses four criteria to identify the “paradigm of Patrimoine”: 1. criteria of conservation: the intentionality of the creator of a monument; the scientific, artistic etc. interest; the importance for social life; the economic value. 2. motivations which lead to accept the past or to reject it: a patrimony not only needs a testator and a will, but also an heir who accepts the conditions. 3. the modalities by which Patrimoine has been appreciated, preserved, and transferred: inventorization, restoration, reutilization. 4. the media for diffusion within society: publications, tourism, etc. Applying Leniaud's four parameters I propose to search European history for values, appropriations, processes and media which construct records/archives as cultural patrimony. In an earlier article the nation and the state were the object of interest (Eric Ketelaar 2007), now I want to focus on the family as a space where identities and archives are constructed. Using Susan Crane’s concept of the “historical gaze” which, through interacting with its object, creates a monument (Susan Crane 2000), I argue that in Renaissance Florence, early modern England, and the Netherlands in the Golden Age the “genealogical gaze” transfigured family archives into a cultural patrimony to be preserved, expanded and transferred to future generations. Descendants, by appropriating the object of that genealogical gaze, embraced the values and modalities of the “paradigm of Patrimoine”. Crane, Susan. 2000. Collecting and historical consciousness in early nineteenth-century Germany. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Ketelaar, Eric. 2007. Muniments and Monuments. The Dawn of Archives as Cultural Patrimony. Archival Science 7: 343-357. Leniaud, Jean-Michel. 2002. Les archipels d

Research group website:

http://www.infotech.monash.edu.au/research/centres/cosi/