Institutional filing practices shape historical memory by highlighting some events and obscuring others

Evidence

Institutions create shadowed places in which nothing can be seen and no questions asked. They make other areas show in finely discriminated detail, which is closely scrutinized and ordered. History emerges in an unintended shape as a result of practices directed to immediate, practical ends. To watch these practices establish selective principles that highlight some kinds of events and obscure others is to inspect the social order operating on individual minds. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 153

Categorization

• XREF: Directly connects to the reader’s stated focus on epistemic anxieties in colonial archival settings; dovetails with Ann Stoler’s ‘Along the Archival Grain’ and with work on records dispossession as infrastructure. — connects to: Political movements weakened by nostalgia for obsolete forms need institutional memory to learn — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2232