4 - Why Do We Give Paper So Much Power?

Birth certificates. Death certificates. Marriage licenses. What is it about written documents that occupy such a powerful place in how we situate ourselves in society? Why do they matter? What does their perceived importance tell us about ourselves? I’ve been thinking a lot about these questions over the past four years. Most of my family’s history can be traced to the 1600’s in the Mexican states of Chihuahua, Guanajuato, and Jalisco. The most important record keeper for much of this history is the Catholic Church. They closely documented the names of parents, witnesses, specific locations (such as a city or church), who married the couple, and even during the colonial era—the perceived race of the child. If we can visualize history as an endlessly large book with many, many blank pages, Catholic Church officials could be described as the official pen with which most things were written down.

The vast majority of documents that I am able to find are birth certificates and marriage licenses. These are pretty straight forward, and their format hasn’t really changed in hundreds of years. So, if you pick up a birth certificate from 1721 and compare it to one from 1905, the structure is going to look fairly similar. The content might be a little bit different in terms of how it’s presented, but the overarching structure is almost the same.

The harder questions to answer, in my mind, is: why do we give paper so much power? #BridgeBetweenPodcast