To Represent Us Truly: The Job and Context of Preserving the Cultural Record

Abstract

The preservation of government records has been a natural activity of governments since the establishment of the first government. The earliest libraries were really archives of government documents, includ ing the records of rituals that kings performed to assure the favor of the gods. Those documents made up the collections of the first libraries in Mesopotamia, dating to about 1500 bc, and of the classics on which Chinese civilization has rested for more than three thousand years. Historians rely on the government records preserved in those librar ies and classical works?truly they are anthologies?to reconstruct the ancient cultures that produced them. For them, government records are cultural records. They still are, but when we moderns talk about the cultural record, we have in mind a much broader range of cultural productions than those produced by government, even a government that had religious as well as secular functions. The word "culture" now calls forth notions of social class and func tion. We speak of political cultures, of the arts, of social practices, and of mentalites, to borrow a useful French term. We speak of high-, middle-, and low-brow culture. To a significant extent "culture" has become a weapon of mass distinctions of the social sort, and in the United States the reaction of some people to the word is a product of our egalitarian ism and populism. The word bears the burden of what its user thinks of academics, of aesthetes, of modern artists and composers, of all those big-city folk who don't think life exists beyond the city limits?or, con versely, of blue-collar workers, rural folks, and Lawrence Welk and his musical descendants. The William and Margaret Kilgarlin Center for Preservation of the Cultural Record must establish a meaning for the term culture in order to organize and carry out its work. Its definition of the word must sail above social and political value judgments and find a meaning that is broader than one that only denotes the arts or the peculiar mores of