Reflections on the editorial

Abstract

How do we conceive ‘the canon’? The editorial draws across the writings that comprise this Special Issue to articulate a particular sense of the canon. Here, it is not just the foundations and principles that define and govern theoretical and professional discourses but also something that excludes and erases. It suggests tradition but also invites challenge and critique. It stimulates and generates questions and responses, asking: what does this mean to me? How do I respond to this? Whether deliberately conceived or not, the canon is nonetheless influential in shaping thought and practice. Perhaps most easily defined as the core texts of archival theory and practice, this body of writing can take on the character of a concrete and monolithic body of work, a static corpus of conventions or tenets. The rereading of these texts suggests the ‘loading of a weight’ and, in this sense, they can seem reified and fixed; yet they are, in fact, things that are contingent and subjective. Not only has their writing emerged from (and been shaped by) different social, political, and cultural contexts and conventions, but their canonical status has likewise been constructed over time. Looking to literary criticism or art history, for example, reveals the constructing, legitimizing, and ongoing re-evaluation of socalled canonical works. How, then, to respond to the canon? Perhaps one way is to think of the canon less as a ‘body of work’ and more as something that develops, evolves, and emerges, and which shifts and changes depending on our own situatedness. It is something to which we can therefore respond through ‘dialogue and interaction,’ as the editorial suggests, and to position ourselves in relation to it and to other perspectives. To think through how certain ideas and concepts come to define a professional body of practice is to reveal how the canon has been constructed, why it is the way it is, and what this means for us. This Special Issue marks the centenary of the publication of Sir Hilary Jenkinson’s Manual of Archive Administration. Consolidating earlier concepts, the Manual was produced within a context of technological and bureaucratic change and worked to define and bound the practice of recordkeeping; written at a time of increasing professionalization in archives, it thus emerged as a ‘viable archival theory.’ These contexts gesture towards how the Manual became understood as a foundational text; yet, this is something that readjusts over time. Jenkinson’s ideas were soon to be questioned In particular, by framing the role of the archivist in strict terms – his primary and secondary duties – Jenkinson’s