A COLLECTION A N D I T S M A N Y R E L AT I O N S A N D C O N T E X T S Constructing an object biography of the police historical/archival investigative files EXCERPTED FROM INTRODUCTION AND OBJECT BIOGRAPHY OF THE PAPER
BY KATHY CARBONE INTRODUCTION A record is a trace of living behavior left behind that someone deems important to save in a manner that stabilizes its structure and content so that the rec ord remains reliable, authentic, and accessible over time and across space, “whether that be for a nanosecond or millennia” (McKemmish, 2001, p. 336). Records bear witness to, serve as evidence and memory of, and reflect in some fashion the original activity and contexts that gave rise to them. And although archival processes and systems preserve or “fix” the structure and content of records, by being put to new uses in new contexts and subject to different interpretations, records are continually shifting—they are always “in a process of becoming” writes McKemmish (2001, p. 335), a notion Brothman echoes, stating that over time, a “record is an object that occurs as something that is the same as and different from itself” (2006, p. 260, italics in original). Archivists have long been interested in the activations and itineraries of records in order to understand the contexts—social, cultural, political, technological, institutional, and ideological—in which people create, interact with, and find and make meaning with records. Ketelaar urges archivists to reconstruct the paths records take from their origins to the archive, recovering and recording the voices of “the authors of documents, the bureaucrats, the archivists, and the researchers who all used and managed the files” to discover the manifold meanings that become connected to records through their use and reuse (2001, p. 141). Object biography, from the field of anthropology, is one method for uncovering the activations of records as well as how people experience, interact with, and ascribe meaning to records, and for contemplating the physical, mental, and social aspects of records and their effects on human endeavors and lives across contexts and temporalities. Anthropologist Igor Kopytoff introduced object biography in 1986, which centers on the idea that an object cannot be fully understood if regarded from only one point or stage in its existence and offers a way to study the production, use, exchange, and disposal of an object as well as the connections that occur between people and an object over its lifespan. Moreover, object biography explicitly focuses on unearthing what kinds of relations, understandings, and significances evolve between people and objects through social interactions in shared contexts. This paper is an object biography of the Police Historical/Archival Investigative Files, a collection of police surveillance records that reside at the City of Portland Archives & Records Center (PARC) in Portland, Oregon, USA.
28 UCLA Ed&IS FALL 2020