” …. “Archivalism” refers to the idea that the world is made up of discrete “cultures” or “civilizations” and that each of them possesses a core of founding knowledge on which everything that has enduring value must build. For those persuaded by archivalism, the past can take on a quasi-sacred character: figures from antiquity may loom large, while contemporary people look like pygmies by comparison. If archivalism is an ideology that tells us what should count as genuine knowledge, “specialization” is a way of organizing work that enables us to reproduce and extend the knowledge we happen to value. Specialization is certainly possible in the absence of an archive: long ago the sciences gave up on the idea that physicists or microbiologists should study their fields historically, starting with the earliest discoveries and working their way up to present. Alternately, we can treat any archive as a body of general knowledge that every person ought to know. Until quite recently, all literate Westerners were expected to study the Latin classics; among the Chinese, every scholar had to range across the whole Confucian canon.
Archivalism defined
In subtle but far-reaching ways, archivalism shapes the ways we teach. Many people automatically believe, for example, that we cannot think clearly about politics today without having first read Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Politics, Augustine’s City of God, Machiavelli’s The Prince, and so on. Needless to say, these works have enormous value: not only do they bring to light the sources of beliefs we probably take for granted now, but they also restore to us useful paradigms our more recent predecessors have thrown away. Nevertheless, it is still quite possible to understand contemporary politics without a knowledge of these works. Plato, after all, had never read Plato, and many people who have never heard of ancient Syracuse–the site of his proposed Republic–can readily grasp the dangers of a “tyranny of virtue,” a tyranny created by those who believe that their fellow citizens must be protected from themselves.
In effect, archivalism tells us that before we can know one thing, we must first know something more basic. And “knowing,” for the archivalist, is a painstaking activity that involves holding fast to every scrap of information. It’s simply not enough to get the main idea when we read: we need to trace out in fine detail how each step in the author’s thinking leads to the next. From the standpoint of archivalism, we cannot be said to understand a text until we can restate it in our own words–until we can prove, in other words, a “mastery” or “command” that signifies the fusion of our consciousness with one small portion of the archive. ….”
This definition was written by Kurt Spellmeyer and Richard E. Millerin “Teaching the Action Horizon”
