社会学视角下档案的三重角色

The Triple Roles of Archives in Sociological Perspective

从社会学视角看,档案扮演着因变量、自变量和经验材料三重角色。在这一分析框架下,档案既是可被社会因素解释的对象,又是解释某些社会因素的关键,同时还为社会学研究提供了独特且丰富的经验资料。在档案的三重角色的讨论与回顾中重点分析了三个核心概念:权力结构、社会记忆和秩序“涌现”。对应三个核心概念,档案分别扮演不同角色并成为不同的重要议题。权力结构是解释作为结果变量的档案的关键社会因素;档案作为解释变量,是构建和解释社会记忆的核心概念;秩序“涌现”则是档案作为经验材料角色为社会研究可以发挥的关键贡献。三重角色的划分有助于理清社会学视角下档案研究的方向,促进档案学和档案工作服务于当代中国社会的现代化事业。

Sociological perspective offers insights that archives play triple key roles such as being independent variable,dependent variable,and empirical data in social studies.This analytical framework means that archives are objects that social factors explain,they are also one of the key interpretive factors of social phenomena,and they provide unique and rich empirical data for sociological studies.The literature review stresses three core concepts:power structure,social memory,and social order“emergence”.For each of these three concepts,archives play a different role and form a different important issue.Power structure is the key interpretive factor of archives as outcome variable;archives as explanatory variable is the core concept in constructing and explaining social memory;and social order“emergence”is the important contribution that archives as empirical data can make to social studies.Categorizing triple roles of archives helps having a clear direction for archives study from sociological perspectives,and has important implications for archival work serving the Chinese society modernization.