archive

Property—in the private or state realm—simply could not function as a set of societal relations without archives. W. E. B. Du Bois in his 1920 essay “The Souls of White Folk” noted that “whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!” Archives are both the invocation and the benediction to possession and dispossession. The earth, its lands, and its bodies could not be owned if they could not be inscribed. If archives provide the answer to Du Bois’s prayer, for nonwhite peoples they represent the angel of death. It is at the moment of death, when the blood no longer pumps through the body, that archives accomplish their most practical purpose in capitalist societies: to proscribe the transfer of property, as outlined above, across generations (inherit ←→ disinherit). Bloodlines and documentary proof thereof dictate the legitimacy of claims made on the materials—the land, the bodies, the archives left in one’s wake. The will, the inventory, and other probate records survive from centuries ago not simply as a result of their historical value but due to their integral role in authenticating whiteness.

(Drake 2021)

Kinship is, of course, a preoccupation of anthropologists and has been for decades. Rather than simply a substitute for the word family, kinship refers to the structural, systemic, and symbolic elements of the relationships shared among people who identify as kin, whether that be on the basis of blood, obligation, or a mixture of both (Fox 1967). The earliest social science studies of kinship emerged in the British mold of social anthropology, based on observations of so-called primitive societies (e.g., Evans-Pritchard 1940, Radcliffe-Brown 1952, Fortes 1953), mostly on the African continent, where political and kinship structures intertwined in ways inconsistent with the bureaucratic apparatus of Europe and the United States. The anthropological study of kinship has been critiqued by many scholars within and beyond the discipline, chief among them David Schneider. Schneider argued that the anthropological approach to kinship relied on an unstated assumption that “blood is thicker than water.” He called this assumption part of the “ethnoepistemology of European culture” (1984, 175) and concluded that anthropologists must confront this tacit assumption or abandon the study of kinship altogether.
Schneider’s argument can be extrapolated to archival praxis. In the U.S., Drake contends, the field has likewise assumed that the family is the primary social entity around which to collect, arrange, and describe records. Archival practice in the United States, he writes, “has a family fetish evident through three avenues”: the founding of archival institutions, the composition of their user base, and the technological infrastructure that serves that base.

(Drake 2019)

The dominant archival standards—like EAC-CPF, which encodes “corporate bodies, persons, and families”—inscribe the family as a stable and natural entity, a fiction that rarely holds true for those who have had to reforge kinship under conditions of enslavement, imprisonment or forced migration (Drake 2019). ¹

The rights that accompany membership in a family suggest a secondary role of archives in the United States: the cultivation of a citizenry. Archives keep, among other sets of records, the constitutions, the declarations, and the laws that govern a democratic society. The accessibility of the archive, so the argument goes, reflects the fact that citizens can contest grievances on the basis of documents stored within. People have indeed used archives to hold governments accountable for abuse, detention, and other forms of violence. Yet the profession’s rhetoric—repeated by organizations such as the Society of American Archivists—casts archives as “linchpins of a democratic and thus legitimate state.” Without them, it is said, citizens become mere subjects, incapable of holding power to account.

(Drake 2019)

In his address to the Society of American Archivists, “Secrecy, Archives and the Public Interest,” Howard Zinn argues that the notion of archivists as neutral custodians of records is untenable. He observes that archival work—collection, preservation, access—is deeply shaped by the distribution of wealth and power, meaning that those who dominate society (governments, corporations, the military) also dominate the archive. Zinn contends that when archivists claim neutrality, they in fact support the status quo: the “existing social order” is perpetuated simply by doing the job “within the priorities and directions set by the dominant forces of society.” (Zinn n.d.) Secrecy, selective access, and bias in what is collected ensure that archives protect the powerful by obscuring the ordinary lives and struggles of the less powerful. Zinn’s argument is thus that archivists should see their role not as passive stewards but as active participants in a democratic project: challenging secrecy, expanding what is collected, and attending to the voices ordinarily excluded from the record. Drake echos this, calling for a “liberatory memory work,” (After Chandre Gould and Verne Harris) in place of professionalized archival work.

1. Drake, Jarrett Martin. 2021. “Blood at the Root.Pdf.” Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies 8.
2. Drake, Jarrett M. 2019. “‘Graveyards of Exclusion:’ Archives, Prisons, and the Bounds of Belonging.” Sustainable Futures.
3. Zinn, Howard. n.d. “Secrecy, Archives, and the Public Interest.” Howard Zinn. Accessed October 23, 2025.