Heritagization of memories and digital commons of the archive
February 14, 2024
Seminar from 10:00 to 12:00, followed by a guided tour of the BNF from 12:00 to 13:00
Bibliothèque François-Mitterrand, site Tolbiac, Quai François Mauriac Paris 13e
Aquarium in Hall Est, small room in Haut-de-jardin
& in visioconference
Registration link
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INSHS



Introduction ⇡
In a well-known passage from The Lost [1], Daniel Mendelsohn relates a no less famous episode from Virgil’s Aeneid, itself based on Odysseus’ visit to Alcinoos in Homer’s Odyssey. Following the fall of Troy, Aeneas wanders across the Mediterranean and arrives in Carthage. There, he finds frescoes on the walls of a temple depicting the Trojan War. Aeneas bursts into tears:
“For the Carthaginians, the war is just a decorative motif, something to adorn the walls of their new temple; for Aeneas, of course, it means much more, and as he stands looking at this picture, which is a picture of his life, he bursts into tears. […] What Aeneas says, as he looks at the worst moment of his life decorating the wall of a shrine in a city of people who do not know him and had no part in the war that destroyed his family and his city, is this: sunt lacrimae rerum, “There are tears in things.”
What makes the past into an archive? How to share these archives and the knowledge around, about, from, drawn from the past? What modes of collective organization and what technical tools make it possible to reclaim it, in the present of memorial struggles? On the one hand, there are the traditional institutional venues that disseminate the archive on a large scale – at the risk, sometimes, of its heritagization. There are also those who seek to further democratize its distribution and production. On the other hand, more recently, the digital commons have developped, which attempt to connect a greater heterogeneity of actor-ice-s and produce a more horizontal governance. Not to mention the “spontaneous” mode of circulation of the past on the social networks of large digital capitalist companies, such as Instagram or Facebook.
Transmitting memory involves constituting the trace as archive, moving from the spontaneity of an immanent life form to its reflexive registering and indexing. Depending on the amount of time that passes, the memory at stake, the political issues attached to it, the sociological properties of those interested in its production and uses, but also on the state of the socio-technical devices that organize the archive and its circulation, the passage from lived experience to its archived form can give rise to a multiplicity of uses, aesthetic, political, memorial, speculative, patrimonial etc.., sometimes quite different from the immediate experiential context whose traces the archive collects. This gap presents a number of risks and promises. As Enzo Traverso said of the Shoah : ” the risk is not [to forget it] but to make a misuse of its memory, to embalm it, to lock it up in museums and neutralize its critical potential, or worse, to use it as a means to an apology of the current world order “[2].
Memorial issues are still vivid and plural in France. Just think of the memory of the Algerian War, which still haunts millions of descendants of Algerian harkis, conscripts, Muslims and Jews, and pieds-noirs [3], [4]. This recently gave rise to the Stora report [5] (followed by a few diplomatic stirrings) despite archives that are still all too often classified and inaccessible. Or to the memory of the Shoah, which was at first silenced by the resistancialist myth, and was then reframed into a moral duty and even perhaps, as some say a “civil religion” [6] and whose principle of moral edification (remembering the past so it doesn’t happen again) has been heavily criticized for its ineffectiveness [7], as much as its characteristic tendency to seem more concerned with how Jews died rather than how they’ve lived [8]. Let us think, finally, of the LGBT memory, in the throes of change, increasingly valued and captured by state-linked cultural institutions [9], [10] which, until 1982 in France, nevertheless criminalized homosexuality (something it now wishes to redress [11]).
In these three cases, the constitution and circulation of archives and memories raise numerous questions : far from being mutually exclusive, these can continue to inform contemporary identities in a cumulative way, not least because one can be queer, Jewish and Arab and therefore experience the complex coexistence of various memorial legacies within oneself:
“What relationships should we have with the dead? How do we last through time? Do AIDS, gender or sexuality have a place in the museum? How can the memory of a social and political struggle or of a minority culture be constituted and transmitted? How can we keep this memory alive, active and meaningful? What does it mean to collect a trace? What do they tell us, what do they make us do? Can the state ingest without hiccups the archives and objects of groups and individuals who fought against it or exist on its margins, and can these groups and individuals give them to it without contortion?”[12].
[1 ] Mendelsohn, Daniel. The Lost : a search for six in six millions.
[2] Op. cit., p. 80
[3] Morin, Paul Max. 2022. « Leur guerre d’Algérie : enjeux de mémoire dans la socialisation politique des jeunes Français ». These de doctorat, Paris, Institut d’études politiques. https://www.theses.fr/2022IEPP0002.
[4] Branche, Raphaëlle. 2020. Papa, qu’as-tu fait en Algérie: Enquête sur un silence familial. 2020th edition. Paris: La Découverte.
[5] https://www.vie-publique. fr/rapport/278186-rapport-stora-memoire-sur-la-colonisation-et-la-guerre-dalgeri
[6] Enzo Traverso, Le passé, mode d’emploi, 2005, La fabrique
[7] Gensburger, Sarah, and Sandrine Lefranc. 2017. A quoi servent les politiques de mémoire? Paris: PRESSES DE SCIENCES PO.
[8] ” I made a point of asking the audience during my speeches if they could give me the names of three concentration camps, and then three Yiddish authors, the language spoken by over 80% of the death camp population. Why, I asked, are we so interested in how people died, when we care so little about how they lived ? ” in Dara Horn, People love dead Jews, XXI, introduction.
[9] https://expo-homosexuels-lesbiennes.memorialdelashoah. org/
[10] https://www.centrepompidou. fr/fr/magazine/article/over-the-rainbow-de-lautre-cote-des-luttes
[11] https://www. radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/le-temps-du-debat/quelle-reparation-pour-les-politiques-de-criminalisation-de-l-homosexualite-4644501
[12] Renaud Chantraine, ” La mémoire en morceaux. Une ethnographie de la patrimonialisation des minorités LGBTQI et de la lutte contre le sida”. https://www.ehess.fr/fr/soutenance/m%C3%A9moire-en-morceaux-ethnographie-patrimonialisation-minorit%C3%A9s-lgbtqi-et-lutte-contre-sida
Interventions (10:00 – 12:00)⇡
1. Alexia Levy-Chekroun (30 min)

Alexia Levy-Chekroun is currently preparing her PhD at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, under the supervision of Sebastien Tank-Storper (CéSor – CNRS). She holds a Master 2 in Public Affairs from the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and a Master 2 in Political Studies from the EHESS. She also completed an academic exchange at New York University.
Summary
I will present my ongoing researchs about to the controversies and conflicts of interpretations relating to the “decolonization” of Judaism, as observed since a corpus of data shared on Instagram, by actors who self-identify as jewish. In will explore the mobilizations and processes of memorial fixation and storytelling, as well as the differentiated political uses of past Jewish experiences and forms of life in North Africa and the Middle East.
2. Renaud Chantraine (30 min)

After studying art history and museology at the École du Louvre, Renaud Chantraine defended a thesis in anthropology in November 2021 on the heritagization of LGBTQI minorities and the fight against HIV/AIDS. His investigations are based on a three years’ experience at the Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée, an extensive fieldwork in the Netherlands and Germany, and his involvement in several activist projects – at the Collectif Archives LGBTQI in Paris and Mémoire des sexualités in Marseille. His current research, carried out as part of a post-doctoral contract (Sidaction Fellow) at SESSTIM in Marseille, proposes a mapping and analysis of the various arrangements used for making, preserving and transmitting archives and memories of the fight against HIV/AIDS.
Summary
For several years, I’ve been exchanging and working with Jean Marcel Michel, an activist involved in the 1980s and 1990s in Marseille in several associative projects at the crossroads of the homosexual movement and the fight against HIV/AIDS.
In 2013, before leaving the city and after sorting and organizing the archives linked to his commitments, he contacted the Bouches-du-Rhône Departmental Archives, who agreed to receive this collection of documents as a donation. This collection of private archives is exceptional: on the one hand, because there is no equivalent dealing with these political and social issues in the institution’s reserves; on the other hand, because it has the interest of complementing, by serving as a counterpoint, the funds from administrations and public organizations that the Public Archives already preserve.
Working on questions of heritage, memories and archives of the fight against HIV/AIDS in Marseille in particular, I contacted the Archives Départementales in August 2019, on the advice of Jean Marcel Michel in order to gain access to his archive holdings. This was the start of a series of disappointments I shared with him. Initially, we were told that the collection was not classified and therefore could not be consulted, before being informed, once the classification had been carried out, that due to the presence of documents “of a confidential nature” a delay of 50 years was imposed before the collection could be accessed.
In my intervention, I will seek to identify and analyze the different logics – of sharing or blocking – put forward by the patrimonial institution and by the donor. The conflictual nature of this case, where archival reasoning, legal issues, feelings of anger, dispossession and censorship come into tension, also questions the conditions under which it is possible to do research today on the memory of the “AIDS years”.
3. Discussion : Irene Bastard | (1h)

Project Manager on publics and uses at French National Librairy (BNF) | As a sociologist, I carry out studies on the public at the BNF. This work is rooted in sociological research activities, using appropriate theoretical frameworks and methods, and is integrated into the institution’s activities. The aim is therefore to explore the profiles of conference attendees, to explore the practices of researchers, to understand the paths taken by Internet users on Gallica and other websites, and to answer more specific requests of the BNF about its services and future developments.
Guided tour of the BNF (12:00 – 13:00)⇡
Media
A podcast will be made on site during the day.
Coordination

Centre Internet et Société | Simon Apartis | Simon Apartis is a researcher within the PathOS project, co-coordinator of the SAvoirs PArtagés program and project manager of the “Petite Encyclopédie de la Science Ouverte”. He is the administrator and regular contributor to this scientific blog.
He studied philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin. Before that, he worked as an administrator at CIS for one year and as a cook for two years. He is passionate about the intersections of queerness and jewishness and the issue of transmission of the Shoah and the Algerian War. He has also translated Siegfried Kracauer’s early work, Sur l’amitié.

Inno3 | Celya Gruson Daniel | Graduate of the École Normale Supérieure, with a master’s degree in cognitive neuroscience and a doctorate in social sciences (information and communication sciences and science and technology studies), her interdisciplinary background allows her to finely grasp the various conditions of production and use of data and scientific publications in digital knowledge regimes.
She frequently acts as a teacher in various research institutes and higher education institutions, providing training in digital methodologies (data collection, analysis, and management). Today, she leverages her diverse skills in consulting and research project for Inno3, following an open research-action approach.

OpenEdition Lab | Simon Dumas Primbault | Simon is a CNRS junior professor at OpenEdition and Aix-Marseille Université, associate researcher at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and associate research at the Laboratory for the history of science and technology (EPFL).
His research lies at the intersection of science and technology studies, ethnography, and media studies, and endeavours to shed light on the diversity of users and practices on Open Science platforms. More specifically, his current project is on the articulation between navigation practices and the discoverability of data across audiences.
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Simon Apartis (1 février 2024). [EN] SAvoirs PArtagés 4 / 8. Open Knowledge. Consulté le 10 février 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/135d1