Responsibility of Memory in the Social Role of Archival Science

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to study the social role of archival science as one of the contributing elements in the constitution and epistemological delimitation of the boundaries of the discipline. The social role is understood as the awareness that archival practice must have in terms of being responsible for memory, as it is its duty to decide or implement policies of memory, policies of preservation of documents that will become legacies for future generations. Accordingly, this paper is developed as follows: general considerations will be made about some epistemological criteria in order to assess the delimitation of archival science as a science; the purpose is to clarify what we understand by memory and its relationship with the file, appealing to the conceptualizations developed from philosophy, particularly based on Ricoeur and Derrida; finally, a reflection is presented on the challenges currently faced by archivists regarding the policies of memory at issue.