The weavers of memories (09)
V. An archive in the Galapagos. The shuttle on the loom (and B)
[This post is the nineth 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].
From its beginnings, the CDRS dedicated a corner of one of its small buildings to maintain a small collection of books and “papers.” The library ended up being officially inaugurated on October 28, 1979 in a space of its own, although, according to the earliest documents preserved, it had already been providing loan and reference services since at least 1971. Over the years, one of its sections, the historical archive, got its own place to store both those “papers” and the abundant audiovisual material produced by the many resident scientists and visitors interested in Galapagos. A third section, the museum, took a little longer to gain its independence.
Today, the CDF Library, Archive & Museum is an institutional area with its own policies, whose work is fully in line with the overall mission of the organization: “to provide knowledge and support through scientific research and complementary actions to ensure the conservation of the environment and biodiversity of the Galapagos Archipelago.” As indicated in much of the specialized literature, conservation is an objective to be achieved with the direct collaboration of the communities involved. In this sense, no matter how great the scientific work, without outreach, training and information, all this effort is useless. And knowledge and memory management institutions play an essential role in this process.
The CDF library is the oldest, largest, and most active of all the islands; at certain times it has been, in fact, the only one. It maintains the most complete bibliographic collection on Galapagos in the world, including unpublished reports on scientific work carried out in the archipelago. The collection includes books, encyclopedias, journals, theses, reports, articles, and manuscripts, some of which can be found nowhere else. Unique in its kind, this collection is used mainly by CDRS staff, but also by naturalist guides, National Park rangers, teachers, professors, visitors, and the local community in general.
On the other hand, valuable textual and audiovisual documents are kept in the archive, which reflect the memory of the CDF and document the history of the institution and of science in the islands. In addition to audiocassettes and videotapes, there is an enormous collection of original photos and slides, hours of unpublished films, CDs and DVDs, diskettes and ZIPs, technical reports, administrative papers, historical documentation, notebooks, memorabilia, maps, plans, posters, three-dimensional materials, and all the raw data that gave rise to almost all of the pioneering books and articles on the island’s nature.
Finally, the museum holds three collections of archaeological artifacts found on the Galapagos coast, including pottery and ceramic fragments from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
While the library had been inventoried, processed, catalogued and classified since its inception in the 1960s — with successive updates to its media and organizational schemes, adapting them to the times — the archive and museum did not undergo these necessary technical processes until 2018. After an initial, quick and superficial audit carried out on that date, both proved to contain an invaluable collection, with important documents that until then were waiting to be identified and analyzed. In parallel, the review of the (scarce) usage statistics showed that both were underutilized — or directly unknown — places within the ECChD. They were, in short, spaces of knowledge and memory as rich as they were invisible.
***
As of October 2018, the physical processing, inventorying, cataloging, classification, indexing and description performed on the library’s materials throughout its six decades of life was extended to the rest of the CDF’s documents: those of the archive and the museum. It is a multidimensional procedure that is still under development today, and will probably be extended in the years to come, with the arrival of donations from former scientists and relevant people in the community, and the production of new documents by the current staff of the CDRS.
The recognition and identification of materials completed so far in the CDF Library, Archive & Museum have progressively yielded a series of interesting results. Among others, they have brought to light a series of items that, because of their context and content, are highly suggestive when it comes to (re)thinking, understanding and, above all, discussing, criticizing and even contradicting the past and present activity of science in Galapagos (and its products). These are fragments of memory that, consciously or unconsciously, seem not to have been taken into account when constructing the official history of Galapagos science, and that can present other views, other versions, and other options.
Reviewing what has been done, how, and, above all, why and for what purpose in terms of scientific work can lead to observing this activity from other positions, asking new questions, restructuring entire projects, reformulating research questions, changing subjects (and verbs, and tenses) and, above all, raising a necessary debate about academic work in a given territory. Such a debate is essential when talking about conservation, especially when there are local communities involved and economic (such as mass tourism) and political interests involved, which is usually the case, particularly in the Galapagos Islands. This is an area, by the way, where scientific activity, in very general terms, has always been praised — how can we disapprove of those who protect such a jewel of global biodiversity — and has therefore maintained a sort of monolithic discourse without too many gaps in its intentions and results.
The “dissonant” documents found in the CDF collections suggest the opportunity to review, analyze and weave memories, opening the door to the construction of new discourses and narratives. Such work can be promoted from the archive. From an archive that dialogues with the library and the museum (and with other spaces, and with the community itself) and that is aware of the materials it houses and manages, of the power that this memory has to generate changes, and of its institutional capacity to suggest (and even construct) new discourses and other histories. An archive that is willing to think critically about what it does, to experiment, to take risks and to move decisively away from stereotypes.
A rogue, emancipatory and speculative archive. An archive that is a loom.
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Taking as a framework the ideas of critical archival science already reviewed, I proceeded to analyze, documentarily and hermeneutically, a handful of CDF documents and tried to weave those memories. The intention was to check whether such an exercise allowed the CDF archive to assume a different role from the usual one in terms of recovery and management of scientific knowledge: a more active and proactive role. The conclusions derived from the results of this exercise were generalized in order to transform them into a set of recommendations that could be used by other knowledge and memory management spaces, both within and outside the scientific context.
The selection criterion was based on the fact that these documents reflect, in one way or another, facts that differ from the dominant scientific narrative and the usual archival practices.
The analysis applied to them was twofold: documentary and hermeneutic. The former concentrated on a brief description of the containers, i.e., on the identification of the physical characteristics of the materials. Hermeneutics (an umbrella term that includes several analytical methods, all based on understanding and interpretation) focused on the contents. The hermeneutic strategy was chosen because it is located at the antipodes of research methodologies based on objectivity and independence of interpretations. Qualitative and subjective, this strategy allows us to apprehend, in a personal and flexible way, the ideas and practices codified in the documents.
[To be continued…].
