A scholar's personal archive as a historical identity phenomenon

Lately, the theory of modern culture has given much attention to the transformation of national, local and individual memory. In this connection, the issue of archives as cultural phenomena and memory storage, on the one hand, and means of memory regulation and legalization and of oblivion, on the other hand, is becoming topical. A greater control over archives contradicts the tasks of historical science, aiming to comprehend the past drawing on a wide range of sources. This paper deals with scholars' personal archives created in the last century. Its creators expected that these documents would be preserved and studied; moreover, they put their own meanings in them and attributed the implications we should read. The paper considers the mechanism of making scholars' personal archives as a manifestation of historical identity. Creation of archives by scholars is qualified as a need for social, cultural and professional identification. It is attributed to the desire to emphasize individuality at the expense of expanding the identifying descriptions, which are materialized in a variety of evidence. Since the historicity of agents can be translated by means of narratives, they are created by the individuals themselves or by their biographers on the basis of historical sources an archive comprises. The examination of using the archives revealed a way to historical studies and allowed the researchers to trace "replacing" an individual with the artifacts from his/her archive. At this stage, a narrative agent is constructed using the method of biographical research and reading the meanings the individual has put into his/her collection of artifacts, an archive. The interior phenomenon of identity in its manifestations of existential and social-disciplinary nature -personal and professional - has been traced through the exterior phenomenon of scholars' personal archives. This will allow us to combine the studies into various problems of personal identity, including identifying an individual with a certain reference group, which shows in forming criterion behavior within the group. A factor of such criterion behavior is the creation of a personal archive - a body of artifacts associated with a specific professional activity. In addition, the activity-presentational approach takes you into a historical retrospective, replacing an individual connected reflexively with a certain reference group with the artifacts of its archive - an archive related to the real social and cultural practices not of the authentic but of a narrative agent whose construction is the purpose of the biographics.

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