When Memory Lives

This post is part of a series that examines how colonial knowledge systems in libraries, archives, and museums erase Indigenous, oral, and ecological ways of knowing — and explores how they might be dismantled and reimagined from the perspective of the Global South and the margins. Check all the posts in this section's index.

Rethinking the Foundations of the Archive

Modern archival infrastructure has been built around certain epistemic assumptions: that knowledge is best stabilized through inscription; that memory requires fixity to endure; that authority is derived from provenance, completeness, and retrievability. These assumptions are rarely questioned, yet they underpin most of what memory institutions do — from classification and metadata design to digitization and preservation.

They also delimit what counts as an archive. Objects that cannot be filed, texts that cannot be fixed, and systems that resist standardization tend to be excluded — or else domesticated into forms that fit institutional protocols. What results is a narrowed view of memory — one that privileges the document over the gesture, the record over the relationship, and the frozen artifact over the living process.

But across many Indigenous, rural, and community contexts, archives do not behave this way. They are not places or platforms. They are systems of embodied memory that operate through repetition, performance, reciprocity, and responsiveness. They are what might be called living archives — not metaphorically, but functionally.

Living Archives as Memory Infrastructure

A living archive is not defined by shelves or servers, but by circulation and enactment. Knowledge is not stored; it is activated under the right conditions — a chant sung at a specific moon phase, a medicinal recipe shared in the presence of a particular tree, a story told only during mourning. These are not "oral traditions" in the folkloric sense. They are procedural protocols for knowledge governance.

In such systems, memory is not passive. It is situational, embodied, and negotiated. The archive is not a container but a choreography. Authority does not come from documentation but from alignment: between the teller and the told, the season and the practice, the speaker and the land.

There is no fixed version — only contingent instantiations. Each act of remembering is a renewal of memory, not a retrieval of it. In this model, the binary between record and use collapses. Knowledge survives not by being stabilized but by being made relevant again and again.

Why Archival Standards Fall Short

Conventional archival tools —taxonomies, metadata schemas, descriptive standards— are largely unequipped to accommodate such epistemologies. These tools are built on the idea that knowledge can be separated from context and made legible through standardized terms.

But living archives resist that abstraction.

They depend on relational indexing: knowing who told the story, when, where, why, and under what ethical or cosmological terms it can be shared. These dimensions cannot be captured by MARC fields or Dublin Core elements. And they cannot be forced into ISO categories without collapsing the logic that sustains them.

Attempts to do so —however well-meaning— often reproduce extractive structures: converting living memory into "resources," reformatting community protocols into datasets, and subjecting dynamic practices to static preservation logic.

The problem is not technological. It is epistemological.

The Politics of Memory Infrastructure

Living archives challenge not only the tools of the profession, but its power structures. Who gets to define what counts as knowledge? Who controls access? Who decides when a memory is valid, and in what form?

These questions require a shift from custodianship to co-stewardship. Memory institutions cannot continue to hold unilateral authority over classification, framing, and access policy. Community memory systems are not incomplete versions of institutional archives — they are autonomous infrastructures with their own logics of legitimacy.

Recognizing this means relinquishing control. It means accepting archival authority as relational rather than custodial — negotiated through trust, reciprocity, and mutual intelligibility. It also means allowing knowledge to remain partial, contingent, and sometimes opaque — not because it is deficient, but because that opacity is part of its ethical structure.

Preservation Without Freezing

Preservation has long been framed as the prevention of loss. But in living archives, memory is not preserved by freezing it in place. It is preserved by keeping it usable, meaningful, and aligned with the community's present. Continuity is maintained not through stability, but through responsiveness.

This demands new preservation models: ones that allow for re-annotation, reinterpretation, seasonal variation, and situated correction. Instead of privileging a definitive version, these models recognize memory as layered and iterative — shaped by shifting relationships and evolving conditions.

Preserving a chant means preserving the conditions under which it can be sung. Preserving a ritual means preserving the social and ecological relationships that give it coherence. Without these, what remains is not memory — it is artifact without function.

Learning to Move With the Archive

The challenge for memory professionals is not to expand their categories or digitize more comprehensively. It is to reorient their frameworks. To accept that not all knowledge systems aspire to inscription. That some archives breathe, adapt, and refuse to stand still. And that these forms of memory do not need institutional validation to be legitimate — only space, respect, and the right to remain in motion.

A library or archive committed to epistemic justice must be able to support memory systems that do not look like its own. It must learn to move — not to mimic the forms of living archives, but to hold space for their difference. To design infrastructures that are flexible, relational, and accountable to the communities they serve.

Ultimately, the future of archives will not be built solely through protocols or platforms. It will be built through humility — and through partnerships with those who have kept knowledge alive without needing to be remembered by us.

  This entry mirrors the chronicle "Building the Living Archive," a narrative reflection on the same theme.