Cultural archive is a term associated with social anthropologist Wendy James referencing the repository of knowledge found in everyday interactions that individuals reference to validate their existence in the world.
The term first appears in reference to Rudyard Kipling's Kim and Said suggests the cultural archive is a major site where investments in imperial conquest are developed.
"[2] Said emphasizes the role of the Western imperial project in the disruption of cultural archives, and theorizes that disciplines such as comparative literature, English, and anthropology can be directly linked to the concept of empire.
Gloria Wekker's 2016 book White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race utilizes a scavenger methodology by "work[ing] with interviews, watching TV and reading novels, analyzing email correspondence..." in order to develop a clear understanding of the Dutch cultural archive.
In a general nineteenth-century European framework, Edward Said describes the cultural archive as a storehouse of "a particular knowledge and structures of attitude and reference .