Postmodern archival turn and «archive fever» of the Belarusian folklore community

Abstract

The article deals with the concept of an archive, which is seen in postmodernism as an ordered, power-determined representation of the past within a certain community. This kind of archive is full of ambiguities, lacunas and distortions, which makes the past unavailable in some objective, pure form. According to J. Derrida contemporary culture is gripped by «archive fever», the desire to find out what of the events, objects, ideas of the past was intentionally or accidentally cashed and hidden. Conceptually, this «archive fever» is an expression of such trend of contemporary culture as its orientation towards the past. This tendency is manifested in Belarus as well, in particular, through increasing attention to Belarusian traditional, or folk cultural forms. In today’s Belarus there is a folklore movement, which responds to global and foreign tendencies. Its representatives in the «archive fever» turn to the lost, displaced cultural forms (such as traditions of amateur photography, village non-professional music, naive drawings on glass), investigate what place they occupied in the past and how they can be actualised in the present.