The Ashgate Research Companion to Heritage and Identity

THE ASHGATE RESEARCH COMPANION TO HERITAGE AND IDENTITY ASHGATE RESEARCH COMPANION The Ashgate Research Companions...

126 downloads 1620 Views 4MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!

Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

THE ASHGATE RESEARCH COMPANION TO HERITAGE AND IDENTITY

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

The Ashgate Research Companions are designed to oﬀer scholars and graduate students a comprehensive and authoritative state-of-the-art review of current research in a particular area. The companion’s editors bring together a team of respected and experienced experts to write chapters on the key issues in their speciality, providing a comprehensive reference to the ﬁeld.

The Ashgate Research Companion to Heritage and Identity

Edited by BRIAN GRAHAM University of Ulster, UK PETER HOWARD University of Bournemouth, UK

© Brian Graham and Peter Howard 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmied in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Brian Graham and Peter Howard have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identiﬁed as the editors of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Cro Road Aldershot Hampshire GU11 3HR England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA

Ashgate website: hp://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data The Ashgate research companion to heritage and identity 1. Cultural property 2. Group identity 3. Historiography I. Graham, B. J. (Brian J.) II. Howard, Peter, 1944III. Research companion to heritage and identity 306 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Ashgate research companion to heritage and identity / edited by Brian Graham and Peter Howard. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-7546-4922-9 1. Cultural property--Protection. 2. Cultural policy. 3. Historic preservation. 4. Group identity. 5. National characteristics. 6. Ethnicity. 7. Memory--Social aspects. 8. Antiquities--Collection and preservation. 9. Historic sites--Conservation and restoration. 10. Landscape protection. I. Graham, B. J. (Brian J.) II. Howard, Peter, 1944CC135.A79 2008 363.6’9--dc22 2007027828 ISBN 978 0 7546 4922 9 Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall.

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

Contents List of Figures List of Contributors

ix xi

Introduction: Heritage and Identity Brian Graham and Peter Howard

1

PART I

THE CONTEXT OF HERITAGE AND IDENTITY

1

The History of Heritage David C. Harvey

19

2

Heritage, Memory and Identity Sara McDowell

37

3

Personal and Public Histories: Issues in the Presentation of the Past Hilda Kean

55

PART II

MARKERS OF HERITAGE AND IDENTITY

4

‘Natural’ Landscapes in the Representation of National Identity Kenneth R. Olwig

73

5

Heritage and ‘Race’ Jo Liler

89

6

‘We Are Here, Yet We Are Not Here’: The Heritage of Excluded Groups Keld Buciek and Kristine Juul

105

7

The Contestation of Heritage: The Enduring Importance of Religion Rana P.B. Singh

125

8

Heritage from Below: Class, Social Protest and Resistance Iain J.M. Robertson

143

T A R C

H I 9

Heritage, Gender and Identity Laurajane Smith

PART III

159

PRACTICES OF HERITAGE AND IDENTITY

10 The Communication of Heritage: Creating Place Identities Peter Groote and Tialda Haartsen

181

11 Place, Naming and the Interpretation of Cultural Landscapes Derek H. Alderman

195

12 Commemoration of War Paul Gough

215

13 The Memorialization of Violence and Tragedy: Human Trauma as Heritage G.J. Ashworth

231

14 Conservation and Restoration in Built Heritage: A Western European Perspective Ascensión Hernández Martínez

245

15 Heritage Tourism: Conﬂicting Identities in the Modern World Benjamin W. Porter

267

16 Museums and the Representation of Identity Fiona McLean

283

PART IV

THE CHALLENGES OF A POSTMODERN AND POST-COLONIAL WORLD

17 Plural and Multicultural Heritages John E. Tunbridge

299

18 Heritage Transformation in Central and Eastern Europe Monika A. Murzyn

315

19 The Heritage of Post-colonial Societies Sabine Marschall

347

20 The Contestation of Heritage: The Colonizer and the Colonized in Australia Roy Jones and Christina Birdsall-Jones

vi

365

C

21 The Heritage of Mundane Places David Atkinson

381

22 New Museologies and the Ecomuseum Peter Davis

397

23 An Exploration of the Connections among Museums, Community and Heritage Elizabeth Crooke

415

24 European Landscapes: Heritage, Participation and Local Communities Werner Krauss

425

25 Cultural Diversity, Heritage and Human Rights William S. Logan

439

Index

455

vii

This page intentionally left blank

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

List of Figures Figure 3.1 Figure 3.2 Figure 3.3 Figure 3.4 Figure 3.5 Figure 4.1 Figure 8.1 Figure 8.2 Figure 8.3 Figure 10.1

Figure 11.1

Figure 11.2

Figure 11.3 Figure 14.1 Figure 14.2 Figure 14.3 Figure 14.4 Figure 15.1 Figure 15.2

Figure 15.3

Sambo’s grave, Sunderland Point, Lancashire Forms of commemoration on Sambo’s grave, July 2005 ‘Captured Africans’ Calling all Women, newsleer of the Suﬀragee Fellowship Advert for ‘Hello Sailor!’ outside Merseyside Maritime Museum, November 2006 The Swedish twenty-crown note Lewis: Location of memorials The memorial located in Gress to the land agitation in Coll and Gress The memorial to the Bernera riot Posters, campaigning for the church at Vierhuizen to win the Dutch version of ‘Restoration’, pasted over those for the national Parliamentary elections, Groningen, November 2006 The intersection of Shire Drive and Tabard Road in the Canterbury housing subdivision in Winterville, North Carolina (USA) The entrance of Colleton River Plantation, an exclusive gated community in Hilton Head, South Carolina (USA) Members of Coalition against Racism march along Martin Luther King Jr Drive in Greenville, North Carolina (USA) Design for the restoration of the walls of Carcassonne Sagunto, restoration of the Roman theatre Restoration of the old church of Escuelas Pias, now a public library, Madrid, Spain Contemporary Art Museum, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin The ruined palaces of Herod the Great at Masada, Israel Visitors to Colonial Williamsburg watch an historical re-enactment by ‘Thomas Jeﬀerson’ in the garden of the Governor’s palace Dancers celebrate the summer solstice at a 1984 ‘free festival’ at Stonehenge

56 57 58 63 65 78 151 152 154

189

202

203 207 248 256 257 261 271

273 276

T A R C

H I Figure 18.1 Figure 18.2 Figure 18.3

Figure 18.4

Figure 18.5 Figure 18.6 Figure 18.7 Figure 19.1 Figure 19.2 Figure 19.3

Figure 19.4 Figure 22.1 Figure 22.2 Figure 22.3

Millennium Exhibition and Park grounds Budapest– an adapted post-industrial site Freedom Monument – the symbol of Riga, Latvia The UNESCO World Heritage site including a Jewish quarter and a Romanesque basilica in Trěbič, Moravia, Czech Republic Commodiﬁcation of heritage – gingerbread boxes in the shape of the city’s most important monuments sold in Krakow, Poland Kliczków Palace in Lower Silesia (Poland) Tangible proofs of ‘ostalgia’; miniature Trabant cars sold at a souvenir stand in Dresden, Saxony (Germany) Dissonant heritage of communism; the monumental Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw Equestrian statue of King Leopold II in Kinshasa, Congo Monument celebrating the 20th anniversary of Kenya’s independence, Nairobi, Kenya Ncome monument and museum in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, commemorating the fallen Zulu warriors of the ‘Bale of Blood River’ Great Zimbabwe archaeological ruins, World Heritage Site, near Bulawayo, Zimbabwe The ‘necklace’ model for the ecomuseum Traditional drumming, Lihu Ecomuseum, Guangxi, China Trappa di Sordevolo, Ecomuseo della Valle Elvo e Serra, Italy

x

320 322

325

326 332 336 338 349 353

358 359 403 405 409

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

List of Contributors Derek H. Alderman is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at East Carolina University, USA. Gregory Ashworth is Professor of Heritage Management and Urban Tourism, Department of Planning, Faculty of Spatial Science, University of Groningen, the Netherlands. David Atkinson is Reader in Geography, Department of Geography, University of Hull, UK. Christina Birdsall-Jones is Research Fellow, John Curtin Institute of Public Policy, Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Western Australia. Keld Buciek is Associate Professor in Geography, Roskilde University, Denmark. Elizabeth Crooke is Senior Lecturer in Museum and Heritage Studies, School of History and International Aﬀairs, Magee campus, University of Ulster, Northern Ireland. Peter Davis is Professor of Museology, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. Paul Gough is Professor of Fine Arts at the University of the West of England, Bristol, UK. Brian Graham is Professor of Human Geography, School of Environmental Sciences, University of Ulster at Coleraine, Northern Ireland. Peter Groote is Lecturer in Cultural Geography, Faculty of Spatial Science, University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Tialda Haartsen is Lecturer in Cultural Geography, Faculty of Spatial Science, University of Groningen, the Netherlands. David C. Harvey is Senior Lecturer in Historical Cultural Geography, University of Exeter, UK. Peter Howard is Visiting Professor of Cultural Landscape, Bournemouth University, UK, and founder-editor of the International Journal of Heritage Studies.

T A R C

H I Roy Jones is Professor of Geography, Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Western Australia. Kristine Juul is Associate Professor in Geography, Roskilde University, Denmark. Hilda Kean is Director, MA in Public History, Humanities, Ruskin College, Oxford, UK. Werner Krauss is Associate Professor, Department of Germanic Studies, University of Texas at Austin, USA. Jo Liler is Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies, Middlesex University, UK. William S. Logan is Alfred Deakin Professor, UNESCO Chair of Heritage and Urbanism and Director of the Cultural Heritage Centre for Asia and the Paciﬁc, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. Sara McDowell is Lecturer in Human Geography, School of Environmental Sciences, University of Ulster at Coleraine, Northern Ireland. Fiona McLean is Professor of Heritage Management, Glasgow Caledonian University, Scotland, and editor of the International Journal of Heritage Studies. Sabine Marschall is Co-ordinator of the Cultural and Heritage Tourism Programme, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Ascensión Hernández Martínez is Professor in the Department of History of Art, University of Zaragoza, Spain. Monika A. Murzyn is Associate Professor in Economic and Social History, Krakow University of Economics, Poland. Kenneth R. Olwig is Professor of Landscape Theory at the Landscape Architecture Department, the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences at Alnarp. Benjamin W. Porter graduated with a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2007. He is a co-director of the Dhiban Archaeology and Development Project, Jordan. Iain Robertson is Lecturer in Heritage Studies, Faculty of Education, Humanities and Science, University of Gloucestershire, UK. Rana P.B. Singh is Professor of Cultural and Heritage Geography, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India. Laurajane Smith is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Heritage Studies, University of York, UK. John E. Tunbridge is Professor of Geography, Carleton University, Oawa, Canada. xii

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

Heritage and Identity Brian Graham and Peter Howard

The overall aim of this Research Companion is to examine in depth the myriad interconnections between two slippery and ambiguous yet dynamically important concepts, heritage and identity. In a world in which identity is fundamental to politics and contestation at a global scale, understanding the means of articulating oen vague feelings and senses of belonging becomes quite crucial. Heritage in its broadest sense is among the most important of those means, even more so because identity can no longer be framed primarily within the national context that has so deﬁned it since the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. At the outset, it should be emphasized that the function of the book is to focus on elaborating the concepts, ideas and practices that inform the entwining of heritage and identity rather than discussing in depth the management methodologies employed in puing these into eﬀect. For the laer to have any import, it is, however, vital that we have a critical and nuanced understanding of the ways in which the two commonly but oen imprecisely used terms, heritage and identity, interact and build upon each other. We begin by deﬁning each of these key concepts as they are understood in the book and then elaborate on the key interconnections between them. The chapter then further establishes the structure and themes of the book.

Heritage The chapters in this Research Companion are framed through a very concise deﬁnition of, and perspective on, heritage. Even within a single society, pasts, heritages and identities should be considered as plurals. Not only do heritages have many uses but they also have multiple producers. These may be public/private sector, oﬃcial/ non-oﬃcial and insider/outsider, each stakeholder having varied and multiple objectives in the creation and management of heritage (Ashworth and Graham, 2005). In addition, societies, notably in Western countries, are experiencing greater socio-spatial segregation as they become more culturally diverse (and more selfconsciously so), a fragmentation which raises issues as to how this heterogeneity should be reﬂected in heritage selection, interpretation and management. As Liler and Naidoo (2004) argue, the deﬁnition of heritage has ‘morphed’ over time. In this

T A R C

H I present context, we adopt a constructionist perspective which regards the concept as referring to the ways in which very selective past material artefacts, natural landscapes, mythologies, memories and traditions become cultural, political and economic resources for the present. This idea of present-centredness is a recurrent theme in the recent literature on heritage. For Lowenthal (1998, xv), ‘in domesticating the past we enlist [heritage] for present causes … [it] clariﬁes pasts so as to infuse them with present purposes’, one result being that, ‘heritage vice becomes inseparable from heritage virtue while under the aegis of national patrimony looms a multinational enterprise’ (Lowenthal, 1998, 5). This present-centred perspective is reiterated by Peckham (2003) who, citing Halbwachs (1992), argues that heritage is oen used as a form of collective memory, a social construct shaped by the political, economic and social concerns of the present. Thus the study of heritage does not involve a direct engagement with the study of the past. Instead, the contents, interpretations and representations of the heritage resource are selected according to the demands of the present and, in turn, bequeathed to an imagined future (Ashworth, Graham and Tunbridge, 2007). It follows, therefore, that heritage is less about tangible material artefacts or other intangible forms of the past than about the meanings placed upon them and the representations which are created from them (Graham, Ashworth and Tunbridge, 2000; Graham, 2002; Smith, 2004). Consequently, it is now largely agreed that most heritage has lile intrinsic worth. Rather, values are placed upon artefacts or activities by people who, when they view heritage, do so through a whole series of lenses, the most obvious of which are: nationality; religion; ethnicity; class; wealth; gender; personal history; and that strange lens known as ‘insideness’. The validity of a particular lens may also be situationally determined rather than a constant while the interpretations will vary depending on the situation of the observer in time and space. Thus, it is meaning that gives value, either cultural or ﬁnancial, to heritage and explains why certain artefacts, traditions and memories have been selected from the near inﬁnity of the past. The key word here is ‘selected’ in that a focused deﬁnition of heritage has to avoid the commonsense way in which the term is oen employed to refer to the totality of the inheritance of the past. Thus not all the past is heritage nor is it all culture. Meanings are marked out by identity, and are produced and exchanged through social interaction in a variety of media; they are also created through consumption. These meanings further regulate and organize our conduct and practices by helping determine rules, norms and conventions: ‘It is us – in society, within human culture – who make things mean, who signify. Meanings, consequently, will always change, from one culture or period to another’ (Hall, 1997, 61). To complicate maers further, any detailed investigation of a particular heritage item or site will soon reveal a vast array of actors and stakeholders (Schröder-Esch and Ulbricht, 2006). While the view of heritage in any given society will inevitably reﬂect that of the dominant political, social, religious or ethnic groups in what Smith (2006) refers to as the ‘authorized heritage discourse’, the sheer number of actual and potential participants and stakeholders in transnational societies means that there is no simple binary relationship of insider/outsider, colonizer/colonized, or 2

I

even hegemonic/resistant. In sum, therefore, heritages are present-centred and are created, shaped and managed by, and in response to, the demands of the present. As such, they are open to constant revision and change and are also both sources and results of social conﬂict. The quite unavoidable implication of heritage in the contestation of societies invokes the condition of dissonance which refers to the discordance or lack of agreement and consistency as to the meaning of heritage (Tunbridge and Ashworth, 1996). For two main sets of reasons, this appears to be intrinsic to the very nature of heritage and should not be regarded as an unforeseen or unfortunate by-product. First, dissonance is implicit in the market segmentation aending heritage when viewed as an economic commodity – essentially comprising tangible and intangible, oen place-centred, products, which are multi-sold and multi-interpreted by tourist and ‘domestic’ consumers alike. That landscapes of tourism consumption are simultaneously other people’s sacred places is one of the principal causes of heritage contestation on a global scale, because the processes of sacralization and sacralizing also involve the exercise of profane forces (Kong, 2001). Secondly, as Tunbridge and Ashworth (1996) argue, dissonance arises because of the zerosum characteristics of heritages, all of which belong to someone and logically, therefore, not to someone else. The creation of any heritage actively or potentially disinherits or excludes those who do not subscribe to, or are embraced within, the terms of meaning aending that heritage. While much of this disinheritance may seem to be, or actually is, relatively trivial, the processes of exclusion and forgeing involved in disinheritance may have profoundly important eﬀects. To cite but one example that demonstrates the enduring importance of a zero-sum view of heritage, in April 2007 the relocation from Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, of the ‘Bronze Soldier’, the Soviet Red Army World War II memorial, led ﬁrst to riots and then to a subsequent ‘cyber-war’ aimed allegedly at disabling the country’s government, news organization and ﬁnancial sector computers. Estonia, now a member of the European Union (EU) and NATO, was formerly within the Soviet bloc and the country still has a substantial Russian minority who see themselves as being disinherited by the portrayal of the Red Army, not as the country’s liberators from Nazism but as just another occupying force. Despite the growth since the 1960s of many manifestations of individual heritage such as genealogy (fostered, not least, by popular television programmes), Lowenthal (1998) claims that heritage has moved from the private to the public realm and that, more and more, it denotes that which we hold jointly. He observes, too, the legacy of ‘oppression’ in validating present identity, and the national being replaced or supplemented by the local and ethnic. Heritage conﬂict has thus become a global issue because it is so deeply implicated in the processes of social inclusion and exclusion that deﬁne societies characterized by ever more complex forms of cultural diversity. While its origins can be linked to the nineteenth-century rise of ethno-nationalism and Romantic notions of aachment to place, heritage can also function as a form of resistance to such hegemonic discourses and a marker of plurality in multicultural and plural societies (Ashworth, Graham and Tunbridge, 2007). 3

T A R C

H I The content of heritage is commonly seen as embracing both the material or tangible – natural landscapes and the selements, buildings, monuments and the like of the built environment – and the intangible. The laer term is deﬁned in the criteria set out in the United Nations Educational, Social and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) criteria for World Heritage Sites as the ‘expressions, knowledge and skills that communities … recognize as part of their cultural heritage’, a ‘living cultural heritage’ expressed in a number of ways including oral traditions and social practices (www.whc.unesco.org/en/glossary). Intangible heritage, itself a contested concept, is ‘interactive, dynamic and cohesive’ and ‘transmied from generation to generation’ to provide ‘people with a sense of identity and continuity’ (UNESCO, 2005). Logan (2000, 261) points, for example, to the Ancient Quarter of the Vietnamese capital, Hanoi, where the key elements are pagodas, temples and communal buildings that have a symbolic worth linked to the intangible heritage of myths and legends, rather than a ‘value based on the authenticity of their physical fabric’. Intangible heritage is no less powerful than material forms as Marschall (2006) establishes in her reading of the Hector Pieterson Memorial in Soweto, South Africa, where simple signiﬁers have the power to evoke similar emotional responses across time, space and cultures. Logan (2005) also observes that protecting intangible heritage is particularly diﬃcult, especially given that it is impossible to ‘own’ people in the way that we can own, buy and sell, destroy, rebuild or preserve the tangible heritage of places and artefacts, and also because the veneer of self-consciousness, inevitably part of heritage designation, can destroy the meaning of the intangible – as seen so oen with the conﬂict between tourists and worshippers at sacred sites. While the debate on tangible and intangible heritage, particularly as expressed through international conventions, is important because of the implications of inclusivity and the recognition of the importance of the non-material world in representation and identity, it can nevertheless be argued that if the core content of heritage is deﬁned by meaning, then it is probably something of a false distinction. As Deacon (2004, 31) observes of the South African World Heritage Site at Robben Island, no heritage value is completely tangible; even the ‘tangible can only be interpreted through the intangible’. Material heritage sites may comprise no more than empty shells of dubious authenticity but derive their importance from the ideas and values that are projected on or through them. Thus, as Graham and McDowell (2007) remark in the context of the plans to preserve part of the prison site at the Maze (Long Kesh) in Northern Ireland, preservation in itself is a form of sacralizing place through its reconstitution as material heritage. Intangible heritage, therefore, can be made less ‘virtual’ by its transformation into (through tourism, for example) or interconnection with some form of material heritage. In turn, there is a wide and growing interest in the intangible interpretations that can be aached to sites which embody ideas of values, moralities and resistances. The International Coalition of Historic Site Museums of Conscience, for instance, comprises places where human rights and democracy have been embodied, aacked, defended or debated (www.sitesofconscience.org). The crucial questions are thus arguably less about tangibility or intangibility but with the identities and motives of those 4

I

projecting or commissioning meanings through heritage which, aer all, is meaning whatever its form. Consciously, therefore, the practices and markers of heritage discussed in this book are presented in a form that encapsulates heritage in its totality while deliberately eschewing an aempt to introduce and sustain a contestable distinction between the tangible and intangible realms.

Identity Heritage can be envisaged as a knowledge, simultaneously a cultural product and a political resource. In Livingstone’s terms (1992), the nature of such knowledges is always negotiated, being set within speciﬁc social and intellectual circumstances. Thus key questions include: why is a particular interpretation of heritage being promoted? Whose interests are being advanced or retarded? In what kind of milieu was that interpretation conceived and communicated? If heritage knowledges are situated in particular social and intellectual circumstances, they are time-speciﬁc and thus their meanings can be altered as texts are re-read in changing times, circumstances and constructs of place and scale. Consequently, it is inevitable that such knowledges are also ﬁelds of contestation that are neither ﬁxed nor stable (Graham, Ashworth and Tunbridge, 2000). Identity, too, is linked to ‘senses of time’ and atavistic fears in that it is not ‘secured by a lifelong guarantee’ and is ‘eminently negotiable and revocable’ (Bauman, 2004, 11). The term refers here to the ways in which markers such as: heritage; language; religion; ethnicity; nationalism; and shared interpretations of the past, are used to construct narratives of inclusion and exclusion that deﬁne communities and the ways in which these laer are rendered speciﬁc and diﬀerentiated (Donald and Raansi, 1992; Guibernau, 1996). Identity is about sameness and group membership and quite central to its conceptualization is the Saidian discourse of the ‘other’, groups – both internal and external to a state – with competing, oen conﬂicting, beliefs, values and aspirations. These aributes of otherness are fundamental to representations of identity, which are constructed in counter-distinction to them. As Douglas (1997, 151–2) argues: ‘identity is expressed and experienced through communal membership, awareness will develop of the Other ... Recognition of Otherness will help reinforce self-identity, but may also lead to distrust, avoidance, exclusion and distancing from groups so-deﬁned.’ If heritage is constructionist and concerned with the selected meanings of the past in the present, this suggests that the past in general, and its interpretation as history or heritage, confers social beneﬁts as well as potential costs in the construction and reproduction of identities. Lowenthal (1985; 1998) notes four traits of the past (which can be taken as synonymous with heritage in this respect) as helping make it beneﬁcial to a people. First, its antiquity conveys the respect and status of antecedence, but, more important perhaps, underpins the idea of continuity and its essentially modernist ethos of progressive, evolutionary social development. Secondly, societies create emblematic landscapes – oen urban – in which certain artefacts acquire iconic status because they fulﬁl the need to connect the present to the past in an unbroken 5

T A R C

H I trajectory. Thirdly, the past provides a sense of termination in the sense that what happened in it has ended, while, ﬁnally, it oﬀers a sequence, allowing us to locate our lives in linear narratives that connect past, present and future. The combined outcome of these traits is to see a past that, once translated into heritage, in terms of identity, provides familiarity and guidance, enrichment and escape. Also, and perhaps more potently, it provides a point of validation or legitimation for the present in which actions and policies are justiﬁed by continuing references to representations and narratives of the past that are, at least in part, encapsulated through manifestations of tangible and intangible heritage. The inevitable converse is that while some societies, such as post-Civil War Spain, have negotiated ‘pacts to forget’ (Tremle, 2006), heritage more commonly, perhaps, promotes the burdens of history, the atrocities, errors and crimes of the ‘past that is not the past’ that are called upon to legitimate not only the atrocities but also the everyday politics of the present. As in the former Yugoslavia and Northern Ireland, the contested heritage of victimhood constitutes an important resource in ethno-nationalist and ethnosectarian politics and undermines eﬀorts to elide the burdens of the past (Graham and Whelan, 2007).

Heritage and Identity Given the conceptual complexities aending both heritage and identity, the interrelationships between them are multi-faceted and both spatially and temporally variable. As we have already implied, not all identity markers are necessarily heritage in the deliberately constrained sense that it is deﬁned here. Heritage is not the ‘legacy of the past’ as is oen implied, for example, in the use of the term, ‘literary heritage’, to refer simply to past literature. There is a speciﬁc canon that becomes heritage, perhaps because it portrays a particular representation that is congruent, for example, with the imaginings of a certain nationalism. Again, music, art and language are not axiomatically heritage although they may become so, again as markers of nationalism or ethnicity. For example, when language is to the fore in the form of a revival or aempts to preserve a ‘dead’ or dying tongue, the debate is generally about the demonstration or preservation of the identity of particular voices and cultures, even if these are ‘already fading away’ (Drysdale, 2002). Equally, not all heritage is about identity, given that cultural tourism is one of the world’s largest service industries (Timothy and Boyd, 2003; Schröder-Esch, 2006). There remains, too, the question as to how far heritage and identity are interconnected with place and territoriality (see Ashworth, Graham and Tunbridge, 2007). This laer issue is obviously germane to some of the content of this present book, but we are less concerned here with place per se than with the complexity of identity markers aached to heritage and the ways in which these are articulated at a variety of oen-competing levels and scales. The interactions between the markers and levels of heritages are spatially and temporally variable and produce markedly diﬀerentiated heritages. 6

I

The self-conscious delineation of heritage as conceptualized here originated at the national scale and it still remains very much deﬁned at this level. The idea of a ‘national heritage’ was fundamental to the idea of the nation-state: Indeed nationalism and national heritage developed synchronously in nineteenth-century Europe. The nation-state required national heritage to consolidate national identiﬁcation, absorb or neutralize potentially competing heritages of social-cultural groups or regions, combat the claims of other nations upon its territory or people, while furthering claims upon nationals in territories elsewhere (Graham, Ashworth and Tunbridge, 2000, 183). Rather than reiterate the previous literature on national heritage, we largely take the challenge to the national as a starting point. The key theme of this present book is ‘beyond nationalism’, not in the sense of the disappearance of that level of identity but in its complicating by people’s adherence to other territorial scales of identity and to transnational forms to the extent that mainstream heritage agencies ‘now ﬁnd it hard to limn a national saga without causing ethnic or religious oﬀence’ (Lowenthal, 1998, 83). During the 1990s, it was fashionable for theoreticians to argue that identities were becoming ‘disembedded’ from bounded localities and the traditional frameworks of nation, ethnicity, class and kinship. At the core of such ideas lay the key assertion that global networks have diminished the importance of place and traditions, ruptured boundaries and created hybrid, inbetween spaces. In a sense, this is encapsulated in the idea that national heritage can be reconstructed as world heritage because certain sites and practices are of universal signiﬁcance (Harrison and Hitchcock, 2005; van der Aa, 2005). In the bleak epoch that has evolved since 2001, this all now seems something of an exaggeration. For Duncan and Duncan (2004, 638), the question of continuity over space and how it is achieved ‘despite the inherent unboundedness and historical dynamism of cultures’ remain key issues in understanding the coherence of those cultures. Hybridity and transnational identities may, for example, counter and complicate nationalist ideologies but the national framing of heritage and identity is seen once again as a defensible agenda. But neither should geographies of ﬂuidity be unquestioningly regarded as being progressive while the claims of rootedness explicit in various forms of place identity are seen as regressive (Nash, 2004). As Atkinson (2007) argues, the inﬂuence of Halbwachs (1992) and Nora (1996– 98) means that accounts of memory do tend to focus on ﬁxed, bounded places and sites of memory (as recognized in Nora’s now rather overused term, lieux de mémoire). Such locations have memories ascribed to them and, consequently, space, place and landscape are implicated in the business of memorialization and commemoration. But, Atkinson argues, an excessive focus on bounded sites of memory – and, by extension, a place-ﬁxated nexus of heritage and identity – risks fetishizing place and space too much and obscures the wider production of social memory throughout society. Dynamic, shiing memory is continuously productive rather then merely conﬁned within demarcated sites. The city, for example, is a

7

T A R C

H I typography of memories with, as Landzelius (2003) observes, multiple pasts and a continual remaking of memorial sites. It is assumed here that place identity remains important, but in this laer more dynamic and complex sense of multiple layers that entwine a globalizing world with the national and the local, while heritage as a knowledge is rooted in this same shiing hierarchy. Its narratives may communicate the local to the global network, for example, through the representations of international tourism and marketing imagery, but critically, they are oen far more intensely consumed as internalized, localized mnemonic structures. Inevitably, its constructs and representations will contradict those of aspatial communities identiﬁed, for example, by religious adherence, language or even high culture that are not necessarily deﬁned in terms of those same spatial divisions. But place also remains important, even in hybrid and transnational societies in another way, in that migrants oen ‘ﬁx’ identities in their homelands. In his perceptive analysis of the clash between Islam and Dutch culture, Ian Buruma (2006) describes the ‘dish cities’ of Amsterdam, Roerdam and Den Haag where the satellite aerials beam in television channels from Morocco, Turkey and the Middle East. Spatial displacement does not preclude identities being deﬁned back to another place, migrants being ‘wired to the Islamic world through satellite TV’ (Buruma, 2006, 54). One resultant dilemma is that migrant women may remain excluded from the host society by their own culture and also by their illiteracy. There is, however, another dimension to this, which is that heritage and identity arguably continue to privilege the national at the expense of other scales. While Amin (2004) may argue for an equal and empowered multiple public with no myth of origin or destination identiﬁed only by its commitment to a plural demos, ‘it is the nation which ultimately and inevitably returns as the backdrop to the liberal fantasy’ (Mitchell, 2004, 648) and ‘remains a potent rallying cry in Europe’ (Peckham, 2003, 2) and worldwide. This continuing privileging of the national compromises and constrains the eﬀectiveness of other forms of representing heritage and identity such as, for example, the European, and, most certainly, the idea of universal values embodied in the concept of world heritage. But, in turn, not only is the national scale as embodied in the nation-state compromised by transnational identities, but it is also undermined by regional, more local and even personal identities.

Structure and Themes In sum, therefore, this book is largely concerned with the ideas currently being deployed to examine the complex multi-faceted interconnections between heritage and identity. Inevitably, there are absences. The ideas and theoretical constructs included here are best regarded as a net which, taken together, can integrate the enormous range of heritage elements that may be used to uphold, or destroy, an identity, the range of geographical locations where this occurs and the variety of actors inevitably involved (even though some are involved by being ignored). The ideas contained within the Research Companion may be deployed across a vast terrain 8

I

of heritage objects and meanings and across numerous countries and innumerable groups. We have aimed at assembling a wide geographical range of examples, although that process must leave signiﬁcant gaps, most especially perhaps the Middle East (due to the multiplicity of voices demanding equality of aention) and Latin America (due to a dearth of accessible examples in the literature). We have included a focus on particular regions (Australasia, South Africa, Central and Eastern Europe) less to privilege them at the expense of other regions as because their experiences are of major general import for the conceptualization of heritage and identity. The interrelationships between these two packages of concepts are articulated through a set of practices – naming, memorialization, musealization and the like – but are also interpreted through a signiﬁcant number of disciplinary lenses that include: geography; history; museum and heritage studies; archaeology; art history; history; anthropology; and media studies. The study of heritage and identity is thus clearly multi-disciplinary but less obviously, perhaps, inter-disciplinary in the sense of bringing diﬀerent perspectives and methodologies to bear on elaborating more informed interpretations of a shared set of problems. More commonly, perhaps, particular disciplinary emphases skew heritage research in particular directions. Thus archaeologists may indeed pay lip service to intangible heritage, as do museums, but they are still wedded to physical artefacts; art historians inevitably are concerned largely with high (or ‘artiform’) culture; geographers usually only concern themselves with heritage that has a place dimension. Such biases lead to major inconsistencies; in the United States, for example, the material about native North American heritage vastly outweighs that dealing with African-Americans; in Scandinavia the weight is on the indigenous people of the north, the Sámi, but not on the more numerous Muslims. Similarly, white Westerners apparently have no intangible heritage. Even work that deals with the local scale, commonly inﬂuenced by ethnological methodologies, oen scarcely bothers with those having less than several generations of residency. This Research Companion, while not entirely free of such criticisms, is consciously interdisciplinary and inclusive. If that approach involves an inevitable degree of repetition, that is far outweighed by the advantages of examining the contexts, markers, practices, levels of interpretation, and challenges facing the study of heritage and identity through an interdisciplinary lens. The aim is to create an integrated array of disciplinary perspectives and eschew the more common ‘parallel tracks’ approach in which diﬀerent disciplines constantly ‘reinvent the wheel’ while pursuing their own research agenda. Just as there are spatial absences, so too there are elisions of speciﬁc aspects to heritage and identity, for no book of this type can be entirely comprehensive. There is, for example, comparatively lile about the ownership of, and stakeholders in, heritage, largely because the inclusion of these topics would have required a detailed consideration of heritage management and another array of contestations beyond the remit of this present volume. For the same reason, we have lile to say about the vexed issue of restitution of heritage objects. Rather, in foregrounding speciﬁc issues, the function of the Research Companion is to provide critical commentaries 9

T A R C

H I on key linkages interconnecting heritage and identity. The book comprises four sections: the context of heritage and identity; markers of heritage and identity; practices of heritage and identity; and the challenges of a postmodern and postcolonial world.

Part I: The Context of Heritage and Identity The three chapters in Part I provide a discursive underpinning to the interconnections entwining the two sets of concepts. In Chapter 1, David Harvey traces a particular perspective on the history of heritage, focusing on the politics of, and struggles over, the control of heritage in Britain. He grounds this account of the ‘British story’ in theories of heritage and history culture, processes of institutionalization, democratization, developing technology and themes of agency and social power. Chapter 2, by Sara McDowell, provides a detailed overview of the current debate on heritage, memory and identity, using the concept of cultural landscapes as the principal medium for discussion. Hilda Kean then moves on in Chapter 3 to examine the boundaries between ‘personal’ and ‘public’, ‘oﬃcial’ and ‘unoﬃcial’ heritage. She argues for a greater acknowledgment of the importance of personal experience and the possibilities for using this both to interrogate previous histories and to create new insights into the past.

Part II: Markers of Heritage and Identity Despite our sustained concentration on other spatial scales, we begin the discussion of the markers of heritage and identity at the obvious point of the national. One very important perspective is oen elided from discussions of heritage, that being the idea of national landscape. This is redressed in Chapter 4 in which Kenneth Olwig primarily uses the example of Sweden to focus on the interrelationships between nationalism, nature and national landscapes. The next ﬁve chapters successively discuss the key markers of: ‘race’; exclusion; religion; class; and gender. In Chapter 5, Jo Liler addresses the highly problematic relationships between ‘race’ and heritage, concluding that because of new paerns of migration, ethnic nationalisms, asylum and ‘long-distance nationalisms’, paerns of racialization and ethnic stabilization are being reconﬁgured so that heritage has to engage with these new, and yet old, stories. Keld Buciek and Kristine Juul pursue a related theme in Chapter 6 in which they examine the ability of heritage to capture and incorporate the multiple and oen contradictory cultural practices of diﬀerent groups of actors and, in particular, those of excluded or marginal groups. In Chapter 7, Rana Singh employs the geographical context of South Asia to discuss the idea that religious and political conﬂicts go side-by-side in the maintenance and destruction of the heritagescapes that play a symbolic role in identity. Just as religion invokes notions of hegemony and resistance, so too does socio-economic class. Although no longer a fashionable concept, Iain Robertson’s analysis in Chapter 8 demonstrates the possibilities for the expression of alternative forms of heritage that ‘work’ from below and within the hegemonic structures of the state. As such, he introduces what will emerge as a recurring theme in the 10

I

laer part of the book, the idea that heritage can be conceived for, from and by local communities with minimal professional help from without. Finally in Part II, Laurajane Smith examines the gendered nature of heritage in Chapter 9, exploring the ways in which gender identities are constructed and naturalized through ‘heritage’, but also ultimately contested and negotiated within the heritage process.

Part III: Practices of Heritage and Identity The markers of heritage and identity are translated into the material world through a set of interconnected practices, methodologies and institutions. In this regard, the entwined tangible and intangible manifestations of heritage can be regarded as a medium that carries speciﬁc messages to an array of audiences. In Chapter 10, Peter Groote and Tialda Haartsen argue that heritage research needs to pay aention to questions of representation and the politics of the communication of meanings. In a context in which heritage place meanings are contested, communication, and control over it, are potentially powerful weapons. So too is (re)naming, a powerful vehicle for promoting identiﬁcation with the past and locating oneself within wider networks of memory. Derek Alderman explores these issues in Chapter 11, drawing largely upon a range of examples from the United States to demonstrate how (re)naming in making claims to place functions both as a hegemonic and also a resistant strategy. The practices of heritage and identity are also linked inescapably to representations of histories of violence and atrocity. In Chapter 12, Paul Gough explores the commemoration of war as a crucial expression of the role of heritage in the shaping of identity while, in Chapter 13, Gregory Ashworth asks why past human trauma and violence can become a resource for the present and discusses the motives of individuals and public agencies involved in the presentation and interpretation of the heritage of violence. Less bellicose markers of heritage and identity include the material landscape and, in Chapter 14, Ascensión Hernández Martínez focuses on Western Europe to examine the long-contested interconnections between the concepts of conservation and restoration in the built heritage environment. Again, tourism has proved to be an evocative window through which to examine heritage as a powerful cultural force for social change. In Chapter 15, Benjamin Porter explores the intersections of heritage and tourism, identity and conﬂict. As Fiona McLean explains in Chapter 16, the practices of heritage and identity also have an institutional context, which is immensely complicated and operates at a variety of scales. She focuses on the ways in which the historical legacy of identity is negotiated through the museum which, it is argued, constitutes a potent force for engendering respect for diﬀerences in identities.

Part IV: The Challenges of a Postmodern and Post-colonial World Part IV addresses the repercussions of the postmodern fragmentation of identity and the ways in which this is still framed but not contained within a national lens. There are several dimensions to this: the renegotiation of national identities; post11

T A R C

H I colonial identities; and local identities themselves. In Chapter 17, John Tunbridge explores the role of heritage in plural societies, observing that ‘multiculturalism’ is far too constraining a term to reﬂect the complexity of today’s transnational states. The collapse of Marxist-Leninism in Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s and the reconﬁguration of the region’s states have led to an as yet unresolved fragmentation and contestation of identities and their interconnecting heritages. Monika Murzyn explores the myriad complexities of the reframing process in Chapter 18. Heritage has also been heavily revised in post-colonial societies as they negotiate new identities which, perforce, have to include the relationships with former imperial powers. In Chapter 19, Sabine Marschall focuses on heritage in post-colonial societies on the African continent, paying particular aention to the renegotiation of identities in post-Apartheid South Africa. A very diﬀerent postcolonial context is explored in Chapter 20 by Roy Jones and Christina Birdsall-Jones as they examine the clash between indigenous and seler cultures in Australia and the South Paciﬁc. The growing concern with localism which emerges as a persistent theme in Parts I–III of the Research Companion presages the direct focus here on the ways in which contemporary heritage renegotiations are also grounded at the local level, albeit one that interconnects with the other levels of human activity. In Chapter 21, David Atkinson explores the expanded ways that contemporary commentators theorize these emerging ‘new terrains’ of heritage and the role of plural, dissonant voices that intersect and collide in the constant reconstituting of space. These ‘new terrains’ are translated into the heritage landscape through a fragmentation of institutional structures, both oﬃcial and unoﬃcial. In Chapter 22, Peter Davis examines how community museology emerged in the early 1970s as a response to concerns that museums were failing to interact with, represent, develop and sustain local communities. His particular concern is with the ecomuseum and its role in the new museology. Conversely, in Chapter 23, Elizabeth Crooke considers community heritage initiatives which, despite their appearance of being local and grassroots activities, will oen reﬂect political agenda that extend well beyond the community group. The escalating emergence of the local as a counterpoint to the national demands diﬀerent ways of negotiating heritage. Werner Krauss explores these issues in Chapter 24, addressing the concepts of ‘participation’ and ‘local community’ under diverse political, economic, ecological and social conditions and the conﬂicts that, quite inevitably, ensue from such circumstances. Finally, the scale at which heritage and identity are negotiated switches from the local to the intersection with the global. In Chapter 25, William Logan employs a discussion of UNESCO to examine the interrelationships between heritage and human rights. His argument that heritage conservation can only be understood as a form of cultural politics provides a salutary conclusion to the Research Companion as a whole, as does his warning that academics, educators and practitioners working in the realm of heritage and identity, most particularly those from more developed countries, need to be mindful of the unintended impacts of their actions.

12

I

The Meaning of the Past In sum, as we have argued above, ‘heritage’ and its cognate, ‘identity’, must nearly always be pluralized, even if this oen remains an elusive goal in public policy: ‘Heritage is a word more widely used than understood … It is oen simplistically and singularly applied, and pluralised more commonly in rhetoric than reality’ (Ashworth, Graham and Tunbridge, 2007, 236). Yet, as the chapters in this book amply demonstrate, the interconnections of heritages and identities are all around us, entwining the local with the regional, national and global, everyday life with political ideology. The range of disciplinary perspectives involved and the very seriousness of so many of the issues and examples discussed here demonstrate that we must be conscious of the dangers inherent in the trivialization of heritage and of the constraints of the tangible/intangible dichotomy. The meaning of the past in the present that unites all heritage lies at the very contested core of who we are and of who others want us to be. Despite the shared symbolic and material form of the state, political processes oen fail to engage with cultural questions in its theorization. As this Research Companion demonstrates, the intersection of heritage and identity, which helps deﬁne the essence of the cultural realm, is fundamental to the political negotiation not just of the state, but also of polities and societies at a range of scales. In what is in some respects an increasingly heterogeneous transnational world, senses of national belonging and other scales of rootedness grounded in heritage remain potent sources of pluralization, diversity and hybridity, but also of dissonance, conﬂict and overt violence.

References Aa, B.J.M. van der (2005), Preserving the Heritage of Humanity? Obtaining World Heritage Status and the Impacts of Listing (Groningen: Rĳksuniversiteit Groningen). Amin, A. (2004), ‘Multi-ethnicity and the Idea of Europe’, Theory, Culture and Society 21, 1–24. Ashworth, G.J. and Graham, B. (eds) (2005), Senses of Place: Senses of Time (Aldershot: Ashgate). Ashworth, G.J., Graham, B.J. and Tunbridge J.E. (2007), Pluralising Pasts: Heritage, Identity and Place in Multicultural Societies (London: Pluto). Atkinson, D. (2007), ‘Kitsch Geographies and the Everyday Spaces of Social Memory’, Environment and Planning A 39, 421–40. Bauman, Z. (2004), Identity (Cambridge: Polity Press). Buruma, I. (2006), Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance (London: Atlantic Books). Deacon, H. (2004), ‘Intangible Heritage in Conservation Management Planning: The Case of Robben Island’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 10, 309–19. Donald, J. and Raansi, A. (eds) (1992), ‘Race’, Culture and Diﬀerence (London: Sage/ Open University).

13

T A R C

H I Douglas, N. (1997), ‘Political Structures, Social Interaction and Identity Changes in Northern Ireland’, in B. Graham (ed.), In Search of Ireland: A Cultural Geography (London: Routledge), 151–73. Drysdale, H. (2002), Mother Tongues: Travels Through Tribal Europe (London: Picador). Duncan, J.S. and Duncan, N.G. (2004), ‘Culture Unbound’, Environment and Planning A 36, 391–403. Graham, B. (2002), ‘Heritage as Knowledge: Capital or Culture?’ Urban Studies 39, 1003–17. Graham, B., Ashworth, G.J. and Tunbridge, J.E. (2000), A Geography of Heritage: Power, Culture and Economy (London: Arnold). Graham, B. and McDowell, S. (2007), ‘Meaning in the Maze: The Heritage of Long Kesh’, Cultural Geographies 14:3, 343–68. Graham, B. and Whelan, Y. (2007), ‘The Legacies of the Dead: Commemorating the Troubles in Northern Ireland’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25:3, 476–95. Guibernau, M. (1996), Nationalisms: The Nation State and Nationalism in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Polity Press). Halbwachs, M. (1992), On Collective Memory (Chicago, IL/London: University of Chicago Press). Hall, S. (ed.) (1997), Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Sage/Open University). Harrison, D. and Hitchcock, M. (eds) (2005), The Politics of World Heritage: Negotiating Tourism and Conservation (Cleveden: Channel View Publications). Kong, L. (2001), ‘Mapping “New” Geographies of Religion: Politics and Poetics in Modernity’, Progress in Human Geography 25, 211–23. Landzelius, M. (2003), ‘Commemorative Dis(re)membering: Erasing Heritage, Spatializing Disinheritance’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 21:2, 195–221. Liler, J. and Naidoo, R. (2004), ‘White Past, Multicultural Present: Heritage and National Stories’, in H. Brocklehurst and R. Phillips (eds), History, Nationhood and the Question of Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), 330–41. Livingstone, D.N. (1992), The Geographical Tradition (Oxford: Blackwell). Logan, W.S. (2000), Hanoi: Biography of a City (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press). Logan, W.S. (2005), ‘Hao Lo: A Vietnamese Approach to Conserving Places of Pain and Injustice’, in N. Garnham and K. Jeﬀery (eds), Culture, Place and Identity: Historical Studies XXIV (Dublin: UCD Press), 152–60. Lowenthal, D. (1985), The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Lowenthal, D. (1998), Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Marschall, S. (2006), ‘Commemorating “Struggle Heroes”: Constructing a Genealogy for the New South Africa’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 12, 176–93.

14

I

Mitchell, K. (2004), ‘Geographies of Identity: Multiculturalism Unplugged’, Progress in Human Geography 28, 641–51. Nash, C. (2004), ‘Post-colonial Geographies’, in P. Cloke, P. Crang and M. Goodwin (eds), Envisioning Human Geography (London: Arnold), 104–27. Nora, P. (1996–98), Realms of Memory I–III (New York City: Columbia University Press). Peckham, R.S. (2003), ‘Introduction: The Politics of Heritage and the Public Culture’, in R.S. Peckham (ed.), Rethinking Heritage: Cultures and Politics in Europe (London: I.B. Tauris), 1–13. Schröder-Esch, S. (ed.) (2006), Practical Aspects of Cultural Heritage – Presentation, Revaluation, Development (HERMES Project, volume 1) (Weimar: BauhausUniversität). Schröder-Esch, S. and Ulbricht, J. (eds) (2006), The Politics of Heritage and Regional Development Strategies – Actors, Interests, Conﬂicts (HERMES Project, volume 2) (Weimar: Bauhaus-Universität). Smith, L. (2004), Archaeological Theory and the Politics of Cultural Heritage (London: Routledge). Smith, L. (2006), Uses of Heritage (London: Routledge). Timothy, D. and Boyd, S. (2003), Heritage Tourism (Harlow: Pearson). Tremle, G. (2006), Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country’s Hidden Past (London: Faber and Faber). Tunbridge, J.E and Ashworth, G.J. (1996), Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conﬂict (Chichester: Wiley). UNESCO (2005), <www.whc.unesco.org/en/glossary>, accessed 22 December 2005.

15

This page intentionally left blank

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

PART I THE CONTEXT OF HERITAGE AND IDENTITY

This page intentionally left blank

1

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

The History of Heritage David C. Harvey

It is so customary to think of the historical past in terms of narrative, sequences, dates and chronologies that we are apt to suppose these things aributes of the past itself. But they are not; we ourselves put them there (Lowenthal, 1985, 219). When writing histories of institutions, one would, ideally, like to start at the beginning. With heritage, however, although one can insert various developments such as the Ancient Monuments Preservation Act of 1882, or the publication of John Ruskin’s Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) into a meaningful narrative, the deﬁnition of a strict chronology, let alone the resolution of a ‘beginning’, appear to be arbitrary. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, even the frequently cited notion that heritage is somehow inexorably connected to ‘modernity’ is problematical (Harvey, 2001). Heritage itself is not a thing and does not exist by itself – nor does it imply a movement or a project. Rather, heritage is about the process by which people use the past – a ‘discursive construction’ with material consequences (see Smith, 2006, 11–13). As a human condition therefore, it is omnipresent, interwoven within the power dynamics of any society and intimately bound up with identity construction at both communal and personal levels. It would, for instance, be impossible to date such a popular mnemonic device relating to the weather as ‘red sky at night, shepherd’s delight’. Yet the role of this saying as an item of heritage, the meaning of which is founded upon idealized representations of a collective past and which has purpose (or use value) in the present, together with a sense of projection into the future, is clear. Rather, what we can aempt to outline is a history of heritage in terms of a history of power relations that have been formed and operate via the deployment of the heritage process. This chapter, therefore, focuses upon the historical narrative of the changing forms of this process; its developing technologies, modes of representation and levels of access and control – in short, upon the history of the struggle to control the use of heritage within society. The link between heritage and identity within such a project tends to focus upon the control and use of heritage by oﬃcial powers, and oen concentrates on the nation as the primary vehicle for such a project. Indeed, Smith (2006, 11) sees a hegemonic ‘authorized heritage discourse’ that acts to validate a ‘set of practices and performances, which populates both popular and expert constructions of

T A R C

H I “heritage” and undermines alternative and subaltern ideas about heritage’. To paraphrase George Orwell’s much-quoted comment: ‘who controls the present controls the past’. As well as underscoring the ‘presentness’ and political purpose of heritage, however, this phrase also pushes to the fore the way in which heritage is used with an eye to the future, rather than allowing one-dimensional ideas of preservation to obscure our task. Although a ‘history of heritage’ will inevitably tend to focus upon the big identity politics of heritage control at an oﬃcial (and oen national) level, we should not forget the importance of the personal and local heritage – ‘small heritages’ if you like – about which it is impossible and largely meaningless to write such a general history. As well as being alternative or ‘subaltern’ or actively resisting authority, these small heritages can also be everyday and even banal. Indeed, in a recent oral history project in Devon (UK), for instance, a farmer recalled the familial saying that was associated with his farm: ‘further from the farm, closer to the clay’ (see Riley and Harvey, 2007). The farmer went on to explain how the deeper topsoil of the land close to the holding still dictated the way in which he could plant crops around the farm, and le the research team mulling over exactly how long such a saying had been in use – how many generations of people residing in that valley had farmed according to this localized heritage of intimate and personal memory of the past, formed in the present, and set for use in the future? As will be discussed below, it is towards such small heritages that much aention, policy and practice is focused at present; as conﬁdence in meta-narratives of heritage purpose is being questioned, it is through such small heritages that an answer may be at hand. Reﬂecting the experience of the author, the chapter focuses very much on the politics of, and struggles over, the control of heritage in Britain. By grounding the ‘British story’ in theories of heritage and history culture, processes of institutionalization, democratization, developing technology and themes of agency and social power, I hope to make this story of wider relevance.

Some Theoretical Terrain For this chapter, I have taken heritage to refer to ‘a contemporary product shaped from history’ (Tunbridge and Ashworth, 1996, 20). This concise deﬁnition conveys that heritage is subjective and ﬁltered with reference to the present, whenever that present actually is. It is a value-laden concept, related to processes of economic and cultural commodiﬁcation, but intrinsically reﬂective of a relationship with the past, however that past is perceived and deﬁned (Harvey, 2001, 327). The deﬁnition of heritage, not as the result of a movement or project (connected with modernity or otherwise), but as the product of a present-centred process would, on the face of it, seem to sidestep the whole issue of the need to delineate a history of it. Heritage resides in the here and now – whenever and wherever that here and now happens to be.1 In practice, however, the proclamation of the human need for heritage, shared by all societies, provides 1

This implied truncation of temporal depth is discussed in Harvey (2001). 20

T H H scope for a much greater engagement in historical analysis than was previously the case (Dodgshon, 1999; Harvey, 2001). Most importantly, the extending temporal scope that is implied overturns the traditional historical concern for imposing a supposedly objective chronology onto a linear past receding behind us, by foregrounding the importance of both contemporary context, and of concern for the future. ‘Every society has had a relationship with its past, even those which have chosen to ignore it’ (Harvey, 2001, 320). By extending the temporal scope of heritage both backwards and forwards, it becomes possible to conceive of a history of heritage – or ‘heritage of heritage’ – that has more power; heritage heroes such as William Morris, for instance, can be placed not as elements of an inevitable sequence of growing heritage concern, nor even in the context of their own time, but in the context of our needs and yearnings for a speciﬁc past and our desires for a particular future. In order to provide a historical narrative of heritage as a process (and I should emphasize that this is ‘a’ historical narrative, rather than ‘the history of …’), we need to deﬁne more clearly what is under review, and how it may be approached. As numerous authors have intimated, heritage is very diﬃcult to deﬁne (Graham, Ashworth and Tunbridge, 2000; Harvey, 2001; Larkham, 1995; Schouten, 1995; Tunbridge and Ashworth, 1996). ‘Far from being fatally predetermined or Godgiven, [heritage] is in large measure our own marvellously malleable creation’ (Lowenthal, 1998, 226). Emphasizing its lack of ﬁxity and the presentness of its creation, Lowenthal implies an innate sense of dispute – or dissonance – within heritage that other authors have underlined (Tunbridge and Ashworth, 1996). However, questions about agency (just who is doing the creating? Who is us?), together with questions about the means through which heritage is conveyed and knowledge produced, are le somewhat hanging. Drawing on the theoretical work of Holtorf (2002, 2.6), one can portray heritage as a vehicle (oen, but not only, a site) where cultural memory and various phenomena of history culture reside. Cultural memory comprises the collective understandings of the past as they are held by a people in any given social and historical context (Holtorf, 2002, 2.0). Ideas of cultural memory are, therefore, laden with politics and power relationships as statements about the past become meaningful through becoming embedded within the cultural and material context of a particular time. Nora (1989, 7) talks of processes of crystallization as memory ‘secretes’ itself around certain sites, objects, places, practices and concepts and is given value for particular ends. This retrospective memory, according to Holtorf (2002, 2.0) therefore, manifests itself through history culture – the ways that the past is ‘presenced’ in everyday life, supporting, augmenting and guiding collective identities that reﬂect both a conscious and unconscious ‘will to remember’. In addition, the sense of purpose with which people ‘remember’ the past serves to underline the importance of understanding how people situate themselves with respect to the future. In this respect, heritage may be understood in terms of a prospective memory, as tokens that represent a desired future – reﬂecting both future pasts and past futures. The act of conferring the label ‘heritage’ onto something – whether physical or otherwise – provides a sense of purpose. Resonant of Geary’s (1994, 12) observation that ‘all memory is memory for something’, this sense of purpose that heritage conveys must be 21

T A R C

H I recognized and its history understood, as purposes change with changing times (Holtorf, 2002, 2.8). This chapter, therefore, explores how cultural memory has developed over time – how collective understandings of the past have reﬂected changing social and historical contexts – and has been articulated through numerous places, objects, sites, sayings, concepts, traditions and practices that may be denoted as heritage. In terms of these changing contexts, this is a story of institutional dynamism, technological development, and changing access to the production, consumption and performance of heritage.

The Heritage of Heritage: Adding some Temporal Depth Heritage, as a present-centred phenomenon, has always been with us. In all ages people have used retrospective memories as resources of the past to convey a fabricated sense of destiny for the future. Heritage, in this sense, can be found, interpreted, given meanings, classiﬁed, presented, conserved and lost again, and again, and again within any age (Harvey, 2006). Taking a long historical view, one can ﬁnd ancient Romans venerating and actively aempting to emulate the heritage of ancient Greece (Lowenthal, 1985; Wardman, 1976), while the heritage of both cultures has formed a cornerstone of many social, aesthetic, cultural and political movements ever since. Most obviously, this can be seen through Renaissance and neo-Classical movements in early modern Europe. Even in the medieval period, however, invocation of Roman heritage helped to transform the city of Rome into Christendom’s foremost metropolis (Boholm, 1997), while more recently, its heritage enhanced the prestige and authority of Mussolini’s brand of fascism (Atkinson and Cosgrove, 1998). The heritage of Rome has obviously travelled far beyond its city walls and the Italian peninsula, with its inﬂuence being felt around the entire world, even if only through the language and practices of the senate and the forum. A consideration of its heritage, therefore, cannot be tied down either in time or space. Rome’s Pagan inheritance has been re-interpreted and used by the Catholic Church to enhance the authority of the Pope, while both democrats and fascists have sought Rome’s succour and protection in the present, together with guidance for a desired future, through models of government and law.2 A veneer of continuity, preservation and reverence for the past conceals a process of dynamic modiﬁcation, as external demands hegemonically reconstruct traditions in line with present authoritative desires (Boholm, 1997, 267). In medieval Europe, it was the Catholic Church that dominated the mediation of oﬃcial heritage through its control over access to, and interpretation of, symbolic heritage resources and the technology (especially through writing and monumental architecture) for conveying these resources to the population. As an enduring, immensely wealthy, hierarchical and extremely bureaucratic organization, the 2

Indeed, the word fascist derives from the fasces – the bundle of rods that, in ancient Rome, served as the symbol of authority for magistrates. 22

T H H Church invoked a particular view of the world that drew heavily on carefully mediated heritage in order to pursue its largely abstract and supposedly nonmaterial aims (Sack, 1986). From St Gregory’s instruction to ‘cleanse heathen shrines and use them as churches’ (Blair, 1988, 50), to the invocation of the Pope as a direct descendant of St Peter, the Church used heritage to mould a picture of the world that reﬂected the needs of the present (Harvey, 2001, 331). Some people may complain that in the early twenty-ﬁrst century, great cathedrals are now treated as museums and heritage theme-parks rather than sacred sites of personal faith and religious devotion. However, a visit to a cathedral has always been a highly mediated and controlled heritage-related event. Just like museums, their layout and architecture, ﬁxtures and ﬁings, practices and ritual, are carefully choreographed, replicated and constructed in order to convey messages about the ‘order of things’ as represented through a speciﬁc notion of the past (see, for instance, Frayling, 1995, 39–79). The history of this Catholic strand of heritage since the medieval period has, at least in an oﬃcial capacity, therefore, largely been one of dynamic power relationships. Over time there has been an increase in the level of what might be termed ‘democracy’ within the construction and consumption of heritage, and a shi towards the nation as the key axis through which heritage is replicated, together with an increasing role of the state as arbiter. The history of heritage is a history of the present, or rather, a historical narrative of an endless succession of presents, a heritage of heritage that can have no terminal point. The recognition of this view allows a much greater temporal depth, providing scope thereby to talk not only about a medieval heritage of Rome, or a Roman heritage of Greece, but also a prehistoric sense of heritage (Holtorf, 2002, 2.9). Although detailed speciﬁcs are necessarily sketchy, vague and oen hotly disputed, Holtorf (2002, 6.6) cogently argues that all archaeologists’ theories for understanding megalithic monuments can be read as theories about diﬀerent ‘prospective memories’ – prospective memories for the future that draw upon a reservoir of symbolic capital (or heritage) from the past. To add some ﬂesh to the bones of these quite abstract ideas, it is necessary to focus on a case study – that of Avebury – and trace some elements of its life history, as its meanings, its interpretations and even its physical appearances have been recycled, manoeuvred and redeployed countless times over many generations.

Avebury: a Recent (Life) History of Heritage Avebury is a World Heritage Site centred on a very large-scale megalithic complex in Wiltshire, southern England. Although only inscribed by UNESCO in 1986, it has been a site of special signiﬁcance for at least 4,000 years (Burl, 2002; Chadburn and Pomeroy-Kellinger, 2001). There has been much speculation about its purpose, with various accounts interpreting the site as a marker for the dead, a focal point for the living, an ideological statement, a ceremonial instrument, or a mnemonic marker. All such accounts interpret Avebury as being useful in the present, resonant of a past, and meaningful for a future time. In other words, Avebury can be viewed as 23

T A R C

H I an item of heritage that is expressive of prospective memories in whatever era one chooses (Holtorf, 2002, 6.6). Burl (2002, 225) notes that there is general agreement that Avebury was a religious centre for fertility cults linked with the earth, the sun, ritual objects and bones, but adds (226) that the ‘truths’ of the maer surrounding the building of the site must necessarily always be a maer of speculation. The nature and number of versions of Avebury as an item of heritage that existed prior to the modern era can only be guessed at, but that it represented an item of history culture, where the past was made present, seems certain. Burl (2002, 257) notes that it took ﬁve centuries and upwards of some 30 generations of men and women to build the original site – people whose collective cultural memories should be recognized as being embedded within the site, even if their meaning cannot be decoded. Instead, I now turn to Avebury’s place in the more recent history of heritage – its heritage biography over the last 300 years. UNESCO’s description of Avebury being of ‘outstanding universal value’ (Chadburn and Pomeroy-Kellinger, 2001, 1) underlines the present-centredness of its meaning as a vehicle of cultural memory in the late twentieth century. Avebury is now a site with a management plan that seeks to co-ordinate various interested parties and a research agenda for assessing the heritage resource and for uncovering the history of the site ‘from the lower Palaeolithic to the end of the medieval period’ (AAHRG, 2001, vi). This seems to have very lile to say about Avebury as a purposeful ‘memory factory’ since the end of the medieval period.3 The amateur archaeologist and court gossip, John Aubrey, visited Avebury in 1648 and drew a sketch of the site in 1663 (Harvey, 2003, 477). Schnapp (1993, 194) portrays Aubrey as a key ﬁgure in the early development of archaeological science, but if we place his work within the context of later seventeenth-century cultural memory, we see the stirrings of a history culture that is based on the idea of the nation as the key vehicle of collective identity. By the invocation of a distinctly British druidry as the original builders of Avebury, John Aubrey sought to support the Restoration monarchy and undermine the position of Rome as the singular arbiter of historical narrative (Harvey, 2003, 478). Whatever the truth of Avebury’s past, Aubrey’s enthusiasm for using the site as evidence for a distinct imagined national community represented a novel development in the history of how heritage resources were articulated. Even the notion that there was a ‘history’ before the Roman occupation of Britain was a new idea (Schnapp, 1993, 191–2; Trigger, 1989, 48). While not ‘anti-Biblical’ as such, this development does appear to represent a key moment in terms of the secularization of cultural memory and the breaking of a religious monopoly over the oﬃcial interpretation and use of what may be termed ‘heritage resources’. Although less interested in UNESCO’s notions of ‘universal value’ and preservation, John Aubrey’s work represents the beginnings of what might be termed a conscious fabrication of a national destiny that draws from a reservoir of heritage-related cultural capital (Harvey, 2003, 478). Although the process of deploying heritage in the service of nation building has been put forward for an earlier time (see, for instance, Hastings, 1997 and 3

The phrase ‘memory factory’ is from Dietler (1998). 24

T H H Bengtson, 1997), the conscious articulation of the nation as a horizontally imagined community of people with a distinct heritage and sense of destiny appears to gather pace from the seventeenth century (see Cressy, 1994). At Avebury, the interpretation and articulation of the site became, in the eighteenth century, a vehicle for William Stukeley’s brand of siege-mentality anti-Catholicism: We have no reason to think but that the Druids, in this island of ours, generally kept up to the purity of their ﬁrst and patriarchal institution. […] On the Continent, idolatry crept on by degrees. […] These temples [such as Avebury] used to be everywhere but only survived well in this island of ours (Stukeley, 1743, iii). Interestingly, although Stukeley is at pains to deploy the ancient remains at Avebury as a token of Britain’s Protestant providence, this was not a time in which all of the island’s population could share in the celebration of this constructed heritage, and, despite the personal joy shown over the survival of the monuments, Stukeley is not a heritage conservator in the modern sense: My intent is (besides preserving the memory of these extraordinary monuments, so much to the honour of our country, now in great danger of ruin) to promote as much as I am able to, the Knowledge and the practice of the ancient and true Religion (Stukeley, 1740, 1). Stukeley (1743, 16) chastises the local villagers for their ignorance and avarice in breaking up the stones, but what he ‘seeks to rescue before it is too late’ (Stukeley, 1743, iii) is not the preserved stones and physical remains, but the retrospective memory of the site, to be deployed in present-centred and future-oriented interjections into the identity and religious politics of the nation. In terms of the history of heritage, therefore, we see here an appeal to a sense of nationhood founded upon a distinct heritage. However, this is not an appeal to the masses for veriﬁcation and there is lile sentiment to preserve any physical remains. The heritage resource, then, is a vehicle of expression, but not one that may be described as at all democratic in either its production or consumption, whether in pretension or reality; the ‘wretched villagers’ get a mention (Stukeley, 1743, 16), but their understandings and uses of heritage remain of lile importance. The quasi-oﬃcial heritage accounts of the intelligentsia in the eighteenth century were produced and consumed by a very narrow section of society. While the newspapers and intellectual societies represented new media through which such heritage concerns could be articulated, the cultural memory that was sanctioned remained a tiny (yet inﬂuential) proportion of the total representative history culture. When the British Museum opened in 1753, for instance, a sample of heritage that represented elite culture was displayed to a discerning upper echelon of society more as a means to support and nurture a supposed natural order of things than as a means to educate. The opening of the British Museum does, however, reﬂect a growing concern for ‘collection’, for inventorizing and for 25

T A R C

H I public display that would evolve over the following 250 years to form one of the cornerstones of today’s heritage impulse. At Avebury, the early nineteenth century witnessed a movement towards greater direct public participation in heritage through the production of what must be one of the ﬁrst detailed heritage guide-books that was consciously produced for a mass audience. Henry Browne’s (1823) Illustration of Stonehenge and Abury, in the County of Wiltshire continues Stukeley’s concern with the site as being provided by God’s providence for the purpose of national celebration of Britain’s (Protestant) population (Harvey, 2007). Once again, a sense of destiny is prominent: [The preservation of Stonehenge and Avebury] gives an ascendancy in importance to this our country to all others – an ascendancy which we see paralleled at the present moment in its being alone selected to make known the revealed will of God throughout the earth. And is this lile spot, an island, … destined before all others to this great, this mighty, this most glorious of ends! (Browne, 1823, vii). Heritage, in this sense, tells us that it is not just Britain’s moral duty, but its destiny to bring its version of civilization to all corners of the world. Browne’s guide was republished many times throughout the nineteenth century, underscoring the increasing reach of such heritage interpretation through cheaper printing technology and wider distribution to an expanding middle class.4 Rather than dwelling on the need to conserve the universal heritage of ancestors (as in the UNESCO ideal), Browne’s brand of heritage is precise concerning its link to the present-centred identity politics of the nation. In contrast to earlier notions of heritage, it is also transparent in its call to preserve the physical remains: Do not then, my countrymen, let these testimonies to your unparalleled eminence, even from the beginning of time [that is, Avebury and Stonehenge] stand unprotected. Oh! Let not the rude and ignorant demolish what is le of these venerable piles, these truly precious relics of antiquity, – acceptable I cannot but believe, even in the sight of God himself (Browne, 1823, 41). Reading today almost as a ‘mission statement’ of an imaginary campaigning heritage organization, Browne’s words reﬂected wider views that matched a great feeling of certainty and faith in a sense of destiny, unease over the huge industrial, social, economic and political upheavals that were taking place in the present, and a nostalgia for a distant past that might act as a map to steer us to the Promised Land.

4

This is resonant of Anderson’s (1983) arguments about the importance of print capitalism for the expanding notion of an imagined national community. 26

T H H Placing Avebury into Context: Heritage Heroes and the Nationalization of the Past in the Nineteenth Century Technological advances in printing and distribution allowed such ﬁgures as Walter Sco to populate the historical landscape, revolutionizing the experience of the past for a newly heritage-literate popular audience (Brooks, 1998; Chiy, 1999; Mandler, 1997). The early nineteenth century also saw the increasing use of heritage not as a conﬁrmation of supposed natural order/superiority, but as a comparison to prompt action and social change. Resonant of Browne’s ‘call to arms’ (above), this notion of heritage as a campaigning totem developed within quite diﬀerent socio-political contexts. Augustus Pugin’s polemical Contrasts portrayed heritage as a reactionary answer to a supposed moral malaise, while John Ruskin sought a more progressive society through heritage – albeit one that sees social cohesion as part of an organically hierarchical society (Brooks, 1998, 8–10). As the nineteenth century progressed, heritage became the vehicle for both ‘conservative’ and ‘radical/progressive’ movements searching for an answer to the perceived evils of modern society. Cultural elites, as represented by ﬁgures such as George Gilbert Sco and the Cambridge Camden Society (and, indeed, as witnessed at many a provincial museum and amateur intellectual society) sought to maintain natural hierarchy and authority as a speciﬁc way of reading the world (Brand, 1998, 13–14; Miele, 1998, 106–7). William Morris, in contrast, used heritage as a means to encourage social and economic revolution. It is from ﬁgures such as Morris and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) that a concern for preservation (as opposed to restoration or ‘reconstitution’) comes. This tacit regard for absolute authenticity in one form or another has, in many respects, become one of the main touchstones (and some would say, red herrings) in heritage discussion ever since – and one which viewing heritage as a present-centred process in whatever age seeks to bypass (see, for instance, Harvey, 2001; Hewison, 1987). It is perhaps ironic that many modern conservation lobbies and societies inherited William Morris’s ideals of artefactual authenticity without his distinct dislike of many of the (Georgian and Victorian) artefacts and buildings that they now seek to conserve. Indeed, the invocation of absolute artefactual authenticity is more usually associated with conservative and reactionary social aitudes. In the mid-nineteenth century, the popularization of the past through heritage was connected very strongly to the nation, and was reﬂected in the founding of the Department of British and Medieval Antiquities and Ethnography within the British Museum in 1866 (MacGregor, 1998, 136). Following the Museums Act (1845) and the Great Exhibition (1851), provincial museums developed apace, with Britain having 90 museums in 1860, 180 in 1880 and 295 in 1914. However, MacGregor (1998) shows that this expansion of formalized and inventoried resources largely remained within the hands of the privileged and powerful. More provocative is Graham, Ashworth and Tunbridge’s comment (2000, 14) that the ‘will to conserve was the obsession of a passionate, educated and generally inﬂuential minority, and the social, educational and political characteristics of heritage producers have changed lile since the nineteenth century’. The Victorian museum, together with 27

T A R C

H I the expansion of archaeological and historical societies, may have held ideals of democratizing heritage through making the consumption of heritage resources more open, but access to and choices over the production and formal interpretation of this resource remained in the hands of the few. We have already seen how Walter Sco (for instance) opened up the beginnings of what may be termed a ‘mass market’ for popular national heritage (Brooks, 1998; Chiy, 1999). Mandler (1997, 33) identiﬁes this strand of heritage as one that was less interested in ‘real events’ and instead keen to consume what he describes as ‘oldentime’; a time between medieval rudeness and the over-reﬁnement of the aristocracy in the early modern period. Such processes of mass consumption witnessed the ﬁrst stirrings of popular heritage fashions. Elizabethanism and the popularity of Shakespeare as the national bard can be seen as expressions of a popular concern for the heritage of ‘merrie England’ (for instance, Howkins, 1986), while a fashion for Saxonism was supported by a cult of Alfred the Great together with the bestselling novel Hereward the Wake (1865) by Charles Kingsley. The institution that seems to bring all of these essentially nineteenth-century facets together is the National Trust (see Murphy, 2002; Newby, 1995; Weideger, 1994).5 Founded along campaigning lines in 1895 by Octavia Hill, Robert Hunter and Hardwicke Rawnsley, the Trust sought social change but was also wholly embedded within educated, privileged and inﬂuential circles. It had strong connections to a range of enlightened aristocrats, a unique relationship with the state (the Trust is constituted through a series of National Trust Acts, 1907–71) and a concern for popularizing a purposively ‘national’ heritage agenda. Although originally more interested in open landscapes and medieval buildings, the National Trust became increasingly involved in the maintenance and preservation of country houses and gardens, largely through laws of inheritance tax and the opportunism of James Lees-Milne (the Secretary of the National Trust’s Country House Commiee, 1936– 50). From its nadir in the 1930s and 1940s, the country house has transformed into being a public symbol of national pride (Mandler, 1997), and the National Trust was very much at the forefront of this process. ‘The great houses of England were brought into “public” ownership by conﬁdent delegation, by mild nepotism, … this was the old boy network’s ﬁnest hour; their noblest nationalization’ (The Times, quoted in Lowenthal, 1998, 65). In terms of our wider themes in the history of heritage, the work of the National Trust appears to extend the campaigning elements of Ruskin and Morris. However, it directs its eﬀorts not at social revolution, but at meeting and manipulating a public appetite for the ‘olden-time’. A carefully mediated past needs to be revered and conserved for the good of the nation, and an ideal (or veneer) of continuity – whether in physical presence or in terms of genetic lineage – should be adhered to (Wright, 1985). The achievement of this carefully mediated heritage product, however, has oen meant that some bits have had to be le out of the narrative

5

Formed as The National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty in 1895, the National Trust covers England, Wales and Northern Ireland. The National Trust for Scotland was established in 1931. 28

T H H – elided, covered over or simply destroyed – while what exists appears to support a conservative and backward-looking agenda of nostalgia that is a long way from the ideals of its founders.

Placing Avebury into Context: Moving into the Twentieth Century During the twentieth century, Avebury underwent more large-scale and rapid changes in its form and meaning than at almost any other phase of its existence. Mirroring some of the ideals of public exempliﬁcation and national pride that we saw in the later nineteenth century, during the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century there were eﬀorts to transform Avebury into a ‘public’ and ‘national’ monument on a grand scale. Carried by the ﬁnance and vision of the amateur archaeologist and marmalade magnate Alexander Keiller, the site was physically transformed, stones moved and reconﬁgured, ‘out of place’ buildings pulled down and an entire landscape moulded. On the one hand, Keiller seemed uneasy about the ‘onslaught of [the] minions of modernity’,6 yet he himself was at the forefront of thoroughly modern agendas and practices at Avebury, pioneering aerial photography, using bulldozers and dynamite for archaeological ‘reconstruction’, and pursuing a publicity-conscious programme of interpretation and display. Concrete posts marked the spots where stones once stood, roads were widened and car parks built to facilitate greater public access to the site. Keiller’s self-confessed sense of public duty was matched by a desire to engage the public that was perhaps ahead of his time: … the whole will be laid to grass, fences removed altogether (or transferred to more suitable situations). This part of the monument (which has hitherto been rigorously preserved as private property by Jenner) thrown freely open to the public, with appropriate notice boards to explain its signiﬁcance, as well as the layout of the site as a whole (Leer to Cookie, 6 April 1937: Alexander Keiller Museum [AKM], MS 20000639.3). Keiller’s manufacture of a ‘Neolithic’ landscape, supposedly untainted by all other inﬂuences, yet fully accessible to a burgeoning twentieth-century leisure and heritage market, meant that buildings from later periods – even medieval coages – had to go. In 1938, Keiller had placed one of his own men in a rented coage owned by someone else, so that a ‘form of dysentery which has smien his entire family’ could be used as a threat to the building’s owner in order to force a sale for the purposes of demolition.7 Although not outwardly pursuing such underhanded techniques, the Ministry of Works and the National Trust continued these practices aer Keiller’s death in October 1955.

6 7

Leer, 15 September 1923, to O.G.S. Crawford. Leer, 22 January 1938; AKM, MS. box 78510174 (88024128). 29

T A R C

H I In June, following the demolition of the Old Baptist Chapel in High Street and farm buildings in the adjoining yard, the whole of the site was converted into a much-needed car park. We have also completely cleared away the row of four coages which extended right up to the Cove, the Red Lion garage which stood on the corner opposite Perry’s shop, and the old Turnpike Coage. … Several more buildings, including the Manse and the farm buildings behind it are ear-marked to come down as soon as they become vacant (Leer from W.E.V. Young [site manager] to Mr Gray, 7 January 1957; AKM, MS. Files 88024572). What we witness at Avebury during the mid-twentieth century, therefore, is in line with heritage agendas elsewhere, with new techniques of presentation underlining more democratic and public consumption practices, but with production and formal heritage mediation still ﬁrmly in the hands of privileged and educated experts. The social elite, however, was now more commonly relegated to inﬂuencing agendas through their quasi-oﬃcial roles on such bodies as the National Trust or outlets of the formal state. In the laer half of the twentieth century, the standard description of heritage, no longer as a ‘social movement’, but an ‘industry’, became commonplace, as did its easy relation to conservatism both with a small ‘c’ and a big ‘C’ (see Hewison, 1987; 1988; Wright, 1985). However, these commentaries, while grasping a sense of fear and decline-driven nostalgia that seemed to be apparent in some elite heritage circles, nonetheless failed to understand the full scope of the heritage process. Raphael Samuel’s (1994) sharp criticism of the Hewison agenda, for instance, drew particular aention to the growth of aractions and practices associated with industrial heritage, painting a far more democratic and open-ended view of a heritage that was ‘of the people’ rather than ‘for the people’. This focus on industrial heritage, which had been largely ignored by bodies such as the National Trust for many years, was linked to the past campaigns of ﬁgures such as William Morris and Octavia Hill, but through celebrating the ordinary, the everyday and the anonymous over the high culture of the proverbial ‘great and good’, eschewed the concerns of the traditional heritage expert. Resonant with Ruskin or Pugin, lessons could still be learnt from the ‘heritage of our ancestors’, but these lessons no longer preached fear of industrial modernity. Rather, these lessons forsook the need to go back to a supposedly beer place, in favour of a sense of progression to a new and beer future in which the struggles of the past were celebrated rather than aped. For much of this work, a general appeal to ideas of the nation, a certain reverence to particular artefacts, objects, sites and buildings, together with a simpliﬁed historical narrative – albeit one that was increasingly conﬁdent in an ideal of progress – was commonplace, and all was set within a growing awareness that tourism and leisure time were the proper contexts for public consumption of heritage. However, the last two decades of the twentieth century saw important changes in all these assumptions.

30

T H H A decreasing appeal to the nation as the foremost container of identity mirrored the wider political, social and economic transitions of the time, and the trajectory of heritage towards the local, and even personal, became increasingly recognized. On an altogether diﬀerent scale, the recognition of a common or global sense of heritage though such schemes as the UNESCO system, for instance, particularly in relation to the natural world, also became important. In practice, these processes oen acted to turn aention away from revered objects and artefacts, and towards an emotional spectrum that had hitherto been largely unacknowledged. In some respects, the need to provoke in order to get a message across was a consequence of dealing with subject maer – such as the slave trade, for instance – for which there were very few meaningful or aesthetically pleasing objects and for which an emotional appeal could garner most purchase. In other respects, the expansion of what has been labelled ‘hot heritage’ (Uzzell, 1989) mirrored a wider transition within heritage practices and processes that may also be witnessed in the so called ‘new museology’ movement of the 1990s (Hooper-Greenhill, 1992; 2000; McDonald and Fyfe, 1996; Moore, 1997; Vergo, 1989). New subject maer, new techniques of display and curatorship, new technologies and a new sense of purpose characterizes this movement. For possibly the ﬁrst time since their inception, the worth and meaning of museums and their collections, interpretations and politics of display, have been critically examined. The heritage sector as a whole has repositioned itself slightly, eschewing mere entertainment and leisure and promoting its role in agendas of education and social cohesion.8 New heritage practices, such as live re-enactments, oral history projects and conservation volunteering, have blurred the boundaries between producers and consumers (see, for example, Orr, 2006). Meanwhile, in the UK, a government agenda of social inclusion, supported by a funding system that is epitomized by the Heritage Loery Fund’s (HLF) mission to ‘encourage more people to be involved in and make decisions about their heritage’, and in ‘widening participation among people of all ages and backgrounds – especially people from communities who have not been involved in heritage before’,9 has provided impetus for local communities and even individuals to become concerned with heritage.10 Bodies such as the National Trust still exist and, despite a broadening of their community appeal in recent years, largely remain at the forefront of an agenda that foregrounds nostalgia at the speciﬁcally national, aesthetically pleasing and elite-centred scale. The HLF has also hit some sticky patches over providing what some would argue is too much funding for what is seen as elite culture,11 but in their selfproclaimed mission to ‘listen carefully to the changing ways in which an evolving society values the past’ (HLF, 2002, 1), they reveal a refreshing aitude to heritage

8 9 10 11

Black History month is a good example of this. Heritage Loery Fund website, , accessed 26 October 2006. The increasing interest in genealogies is a good example of this. For instance, the HLF courted controversy over its decision to provide funds to acquire the papers of Sir Winston Churchill. 31

T A R C

H I as something that is never inert, but is made and moulded according to the needs of the present.

Looking Backwards to the Future: Some Tentative Conclusions Contrary to popular wisdom, the future does not lay out in front of you. The future is something that comes upon you from behind your back, with the past receding away before your eyes (Persig, 1974, 417). The recognition of heritage as malleable, present-centred and future-oriented appears to bring us full circle. Rather than catalogue a seemingly inevitable chronology of a ‘heritage movement’, I have aempted to sketch a historical narrative of how the heritage process has been deployed, articulated and consumed through time. We have seen important transitions in how oﬃcial heritage is carried, from obsessions over site, or over artefactual integrity, to viewing emotion and embodied practice as legitimate and valuable vehicles through which history cultures may be practised. We have seen how developments in technology – and the control of this technology – went hand in hand with developments over how heritage was produced and consumed. And we have seen huge changes in the politics of that production and consumption, with questions of access to the means to promote, display and enjoy heritage playing a crucial role. In all of this, a sense of purpose is critical. At present, this purpose is oen found in educational beneﬁts and community leadership, policies of social inclusion and even economic regeneration – goals which, on the face of it, seem a long way from the heritage agendas of the past. As Mason (2004) points out, however, the faith that heritage contains a power to transform is common to heritage in all periods. Despite Orwell’s statement that history is produced by the winners in society in order to support their moral, political and economic authority, heritage today appears to be far less strident in its claims. Indeed, some have noted that heritage today oen appears to be led by the losers in society.12 Certainly there appears to be greater cogency and value given to the heritage of those that have been deprived of agency in the past – the downtrodden, the exploited and the defeated – even if this only scratches at the surface of the hegemonic power structures of authority. An extreme relativism in the validity of heritage narratives can be witnessed at Avebury today, where one can ﬁnd the oﬃcial heritage story of the National Trust, English Heritage and the Alexander Keiller Museum competing with New Age interpretations of the site – the heritage of ley lines, mystical occurrences and spiritual healing. Narratives of archaeological science and dioramas that outline the story of Alexander Keiller’s plans are now joined by tea-rooms, nature walks and courses on water divining as means through which the past can be consumed. In many ways, however, it is the recognition that we all have agency in the production of cultural memory that is most important. 12

This theme is strong, for instance, in David Lowenthal’s lecture, entitled ‘Reparition, Restitution, Reparations’, at the British Academy, 8 December 2006. 32

T H H At the beginning of the chapter I highlighted the inevitable open-endedness of the everyday ‘pieces’ and ‘performances’ of heritage, which it is impossible to date or categorize – the ordinary, conscious and unconscious elaboration and repetition of cultural memory that has both history and prehistory, but which has no beginning or end. These are the ‘small heritages’ that have always existed, but which are rarely celebrated. At one level, heritage today is about: the promotion of a consensus version of history by state-sanctioned cultural institutions and elites to regulate cultural and social tensions in the present. On the other hand, heritage may also be a resource that is used to challenge and redeﬁne received values and identities by a range of subaltern groups (Smith, 2006, 4). While this chapter has necessarily concentrated on providing a narrative history of the ‘big heritage’, we must not forget the small heritages, which do not always have to take the form of overt resistance to oﬃcialdom. Indeed, with the present spread of blogs, podcasts and digital archives such as myspace.com and youtube.com on the internet, it is perhaps these small heritages that will form the basis of the material, the thoughts, practices and plans that we pass on to the next generation – our prospective memory if you like. What the next generation will do with this material, this eﬀort and these memories, however – their retrospective memories – is up to them.

References AAHRG (Avebury Archaeological and Historical Research Group (2001), Archaeological Research Agenda for the Avebury World Heritage Site (Trowbridge: English Heritage and Wessex Archaeology). Anderson, B. (1983), Imagined Communities (London: Verso). Atkinson, D. and Cosgrove, D. (1998), ‘Urban Rhetoric and Embodied Identities: City, Nation and Empire at the Viorio Emanuele Monument in Rome, 1870– 1945’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 88:1, 28–49. Bengtson, J. (1997), ‘Saint George and the Foundation of English Nationalism’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 27:2, 317–40. Blair, J. (1988), ‘Minster Churches in the Landscape’, in D. Hooke (ed.), Anglo-Saxon Selements (Oxford: Blackwell), 35–58. Boholm, A. (1997), ‘Reinvented Histories: Medieval Rome as Memorial Landscape’, Ecumene 4:3, 247–72. Brand, V. (ed.) (1998), The Study of the Past in the Victorian Age (Oxford: Oxbow). Brooks, C. (1998), ‘Introduction: Historicism and the Nineteenth Century’, in V. Brand (ed.), The Study of the Past in the Victorian Age (Oxford: Oxbow), 1–19. Browne, H. (1823), Illustration of Stonehenge and Abury, in the County of Wiltshire (Salisbury: Brodie and Dowding). Burl, A. (2002), Prehistoric Avebury, 2nd edition (New Haven and London: Yale University Press). 33

T A R C

H I Chadburn, A. and Pomeroy-Kellinger, M. (2001), ‘Introduction’, in AAHRG (ed.), Archaeological Research Agenda for the Avebury World Heritage Site (Trowbridge: English Heritage and Wessex Archaeology), 1–4. Chiy, G. (1999), ‘The Tradition of Historical Consciousness: The Case of Stokesay Castle’, in G. Chiy and D. Baker (eds), Managing Historic Sites and Buildings: Reconciling Presentation and Preservation (London: Routledge), 85–97. Cressy, D. (1994), ‘National Memory in Early Modern England’, in J.R. Gillis (ed.), Commemorations: The Politics of National Memory (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 61–73. Dietler, M. (1998), ‘A Tale of Three Sites: The Monumentalisation of Celtic Oppida and the Politics of Collective Memory and Identity’, World Archaeology 30:1, 72–89. Dodgshon, R.A. (1999), ‘Human Geography at the End of Time? Some Thoughts on the Notion of Time-space Compression’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 17:5, 607–20. Frayling, C. (1995), Strange Landscape: A Journey through the Middle Ages (London: BBC Books). Geary, P. (1994), Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Graham, B., Ashworth, G.J. and Tunbridge, J.E. (2000), A Geography of Heritage: Power, Culture, Economy (London: Arnold). Harvey, D.C. (2001), ‘Heritage Pasts and Heritage Presents: Temporality, Meaning and the Scope of Heritage Studies’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 7:4, 319–38. Harvey, D.C. (2003), ‘“National” Identities and the Politics of Ancient Heritage: Continuity and Change at Ancient Monuments in Britain and Ireland, c. 1675– 1850’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 28:4, 473–87. Harvey, D.C. (2006), ‘Landscape as Heritage and a Recreational Resource’, in R.J.P. Kain (ed.), Landscapes of South-West England (Volume 3 of ‘England’s Landscapes’ series: London: Harper Collins/English Heritage), 207–28. Harvey, D.C. (2007), ‘Cultures of Antiquity and the Practice of Archaeology in Britain and Ireland (c. 1700–1850): A Postcolonial Perspective’, in L. McAtackney, M. Palus and A. Piccini (eds), Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory (Oxford: BAR), 51–61. Hastings, A. (1997), The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Hewison, R. (1987), The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline (London: Methuen). Hewison, R. (1988), ‘Great Expectations – Hyping Heritage’, Tourism Management 9, 239–40. HLF (2002), Broadening the Horizons of Heritage (London: HLF). Holtorf, C. (2002), The Monumental Past (online e-book) (University of Toronto Press), , accessed 28 November 2006. Hooper-Greenhill, E. (1992), Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (London: Routledge). 34

T H H Hooper-Greenhill, E. (2000), Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture (London: Routledge). Howkins, A. (1986), ‘The Discovery of Rural England’, in R. Colls and P. Dodd (eds), Englishness, Politics and Culture 1880–1920 (London: Croom Helm). Larkham, P.J. (1995), ‘Heritage as Planned and Conserved’, in D.T. Herbert (ed.), Heritage, Tourism and Society (London: Mansell). Lowenthal, D. (1985), The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Lowenthal, D. (1998), The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). MacGregor, A. (1998), ‘Antiquity Inventoried: Museums and “National Antiquities” in the Mid-nineteenth Century’, in V. Brand (ed.), The Study of the Past in the Victorian Age (Oxford: Oxbow), 125–37. Mandler, P. (1997), The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (Yale: Yale University Press). Mason, R. (2004), ‘Conﬂict and Complement: An Exploration of the Discourse Informing the Concept of the Socially Inclusive Museum in Contemporary Britain’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 10:1, 49–73. McDonald, S. and Fyfe, G. (eds) (1996), Theorizing Museums (Oxford: Blackwell). Miele, C. (1998), ‘Real Antiquity and the Ancient Object: The Science of Gothic Architecture and the Restoration of Medieval Buildings’, in V. Brand (ed.), The Study of the Past in the Victorian Age (Oxford: Oxbow), 103–24. Moore, K. (1997), Museums and Popular Culture (London: London University Press). Murphy, G. (2002), Founders of the National Trust (London: The National Trust). Newby, H. (ed.) (1995), The National Trust: The Next Hundred Years (London: The National Trust). Nora, P. (1989), ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations 26, 7–25. Orr, N. (2006), ‘Museum Volunteering: Heritage as “Serious Leisure”’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 12:2, 194–210. Persig, R.M. (1974), Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – an Enquiry into Values (London: Vintage). Riley, M. and Harvey D.C. (2007), ‘Oral Histories, Farm Practice and Uncovering Meaning in the Countryside’, Social and Cultural Geography 8:3, 391–416. Sack, R.D. (1986), Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Samuel, R. (1994), Theatres of Memory: Volume 1, Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London: Verso). Schnapp, A. (1993), The Discovery of the Past: The Origins of Archaeology (London, British Museum Press). Schouten, F.F.J. (1995), ‘Heritage as Historical Reality’, in D.E. Herbert (ed.), Heritage, Tourism and Society (London: Mansell), 21–31. Smith, L. (2006), Uses of Heritage (London: Routledge). Stukeley, W. (1740), Stonehenge, a Temple Restored to the British Druids (London: W. Innys, R. Manby, B. Dod and J. Brindley). 35

T A R C

H I Stukeley, W. (1743), Abury, a Temple of the British Druids, with Some Others Described, in two volumes (London: W. Innys, R. Manby, B. Dod and J. Brindley). Trigger, B.G. (1989), A History of Archaeological Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Tunbridge, J.E. and Ashworth, G.J. (1996), Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conﬂict (Chichester: Wiley). Uzzell, D.L. (1989), ‘The Hot Interpretation of War and Conﬂict’, in D.L. Uzzell (ed.), Heritage Interpretation, Volume 1 (London: Belhaven), 33–47. Vergo, P. (1989), The New Museology (London: Reaktion). Wardman, A. (1976), Rome’s Debt to Greece (New York: St Martin’s Press). Weideger, P. (1994), Gilding the Acorn: Behind the Façade of the National Trust (London: Simon and Schuster). Wright, P. (1985), On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain (London: Verso).

36

2

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

Heritage, Memory and Identity Sara McDowell

As deﬁnitions of heritage become increasingly ﬂuid and wide reaching (Harvey, 2001), this chapter, informed by the literature on memory and identity, makes a return to the more traditional interpretations of heritage as a cultural product/ resource (with social and political functions) (Lowenthal, 1985; 1996). Widely accepted as the selective use of the past for contemporary purposes (Ashworth and Graham, 2005, 7), heritage can be seen as an aggregation of myths, values and inheritances determined and deﬁned by the needs of societies in the present. Exploring the connections between memory, identity and heritage through an examination of cultural landscapes (which are best understood as environments which reﬂect the interactions between populations and their surroundings), the overarching objective of this chapter is to work towards a more thorough and deﬁnitive understanding of the heritage process and its cultural uses. It begins with a detailed discussion of cultural landscapes and their ability to express contemporary relationships. It then considers the concept of memory, interrogating some of the reasons why people remember and how changing interpretations of the past shape the meanings and functions of heritage within any given group or community. Accepting that heritage is a highly political process, malleable to the needs of power and oen subject to contestation, the concluding part of the chapter draws on a number of examples to underline the potential of the past to validate and legitimate (as well as undermine) political and territorial ideologies in the present.

Expressing Meaning: the Cultural Landscape and the Heritage Process Only hours aer the bombing of the Alfred Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on 19 April 1995, people began to visit the site, bringing with them ephemeral paraphernalia such as ﬂowers, toys and messages of sympathy to try and mark the loss of 168 lives in what had been, at that time, the biggest terrorist act on American soil (Linenthal, 2001, 5). Such was the impulse to inscribe memory at and onto the site that thousands of unsolicited ideas for a physical memorial arrived at the

T A R C

H I Oklahoma oﬃces of the mayor and governor from all over the United States in the ﬁrst few days following the aack. Only two months later, a memorial task-force was set up, while the ﬁnal physical memorial was dedicated (aer much debate, deliberation and contestation) ﬁve years aer the bombing in April 2000. Writing about the place of the Oklahoma aack in American memory, Edward Linenthal argues that: ‘the bombing occurred at a time when memorialization had become a signiﬁcant form of cultural expression. Much more than a gesture of remembrance, memorialization was a way to stake one’s claim to visible presence in culture’ (2001, 5). The bombing then ‘revealed a remarkable American memorial vocabulary’ (2001, 5). This desire to represent memory through the marking of ‘place’ is a feature of all modern societies and is prevalent aer every conﬂict or tragic event. ‘Places’, as Kuusisto notes, constitute signiﬁcant sites which have been invested with meaning (1999, 15), oen representing the ‘heritage’ of a particular individual, group or community. They are locations with which people connect, either physically or emotionally (Creswell, 2004), and are bound up in notions of belonging (or not belonging), ownership and consequently identity. As Rose suggests: ‘One way in which identity is connected to a particular place is by a feeling that you belong to that place. It’s a place that you feel comfortable, or at home, because part of how you deﬁne yourself is symbolized by certain qualities of that place’ (Rose, 1995, 81). Moreover, a ‘sense of place’ relates to the ‘socially constructed perceptions and beliefs’ that individuals or groups hold about a particular location (Sumaratojo, 2004, 88). The overwhelming need to turn the site of the Oklahoma bomb into some kind of meaningful public memorial place was highly signiﬁcant for a number of reasons, and underscores the potential of cultural landscapes to act as tangible places to dissect the meanings and functions of heritage. By carving memory onto the site, ﬁrst through the laying of ﬂowers and toys, and then through the construction of a permanent exhibit (which has become the focus of annual commemorations), the Oklahoma community and the larger American public illustrated the need to preserve and sanctify the site (the past) for the future. These icons became expressions of private, local and national grief as well as symbols of American unity, identity and heritage. The memorials were also representations of intransigence, control and power, communicating the forceful message to terrorists that Americans were resistant and deﬁant. As exempliﬁed in the Oklahoma example, the cultural landscape, as Foote explains, acts as ‘a communicational resource, a system of signs and symbols’ (1998, 33). It is ‘never inert’ as populations ‘engage with it, rework it, appropriate it and contest it’ making it a key resource in the heritage process (Bender, 1993, 3). In a similar vein, Young et al. contend that landscapes are made up of ‘layers’ (in Anderson and Gale, 1992, 4). These layers stem from changing economic, political cultural and demographic factors aﬀecting a particular society and are testament to diverse histories and geographies, and as such they can be peeled away to reveal the cultural aspirations and struggles of society. Landscape then, like society, is in a constant mode of ﬂux, as it consistently develops and mutates. 38

H, M I A landscape, therefore, can be ‘a cultural image, a pictorial way of representing, structuring or symbolising surroundings’ (Cosgrove and Daniels, 1988, 1), so any reading of it must focus on the visual images and symbols that help create it. Suggestions that the ‘visual is central to the cultural construction of life’ (Rose, 2001, 6) and assertions that ‘what is potentially visible is omnipresent’ (Lowenthal, 1985, 238) reinforce the notion that the cultural landscape is a key resource in the interpretation and articulation of heritage. Visual images in the landscape are best understood by engaging primarily with the literature addressing semiotics or the study of signs (see, for example, Sebeok, 1991). Through the study of semiotics, populations can learn more about themselves and others, how they make and convey meanings (and heritage) and how they understand what happens in the world: ‘By identifying with the study of semiotics, we identify ourselves as interested in understanding such issues’ (Leeds-Hurwitz, 1993). Marschall’s (2006) application of visual methodologies to a reading of the Hector Pieterson Memorial in Soweto, constructed as part of a widespread commemorative programme to devise a new heritage for post-apartheid South Africa, underscores the importance of using semiotics to interpret meaning. She argues that simple signiﬁers have the power to evoke similar emotional responses across time, space and cultures. Symbols thus act as a kind of shorthand, conveying and condensing complicated values or sentiments (Turner, 1967). Natural elements such as ﬁre and water have universal understanding, while abstract or minimalist symbols (inherent to many memorials) are designed to inspire viewers to imagine meaning. Marschall, using the speciﬁc example of Holocaust memorials, suggests that many abstract designs are chosen in these instances because there is, as Theodore Adorno contends, no possible way of visually representing extreme suﬀering (cited in Marschall, 2006). Inherent to visual symbols is the context in which they are placed and the environment by which they are aﬀected. It is, therefore, important to consider the ‘wide range of economic, social and political relations, institutions and practices that surround an image and through which it is seen and used’ (Rose, 2001, 17). Thus, the way in which a visual symbol is received by its audience is largely determined by the current social, economic or political climate. As such, visual icons are paramount to our understanding of relationships within local communities and their subsequent relationships with the state. Forester and Johnson (2002, 525) believe that by contesting, supporting, ratifying or ignoring symbols in the landscape, political elites and communities engage with one another through ‘symbolic dialogue’. Through this analysis of ‘symbolic dialogue’, we can ‘map meaning’ in the cultural landscape (Whelan, 2005, 61). Cohen has argued that symbols do not carry meaning inherently, but give their audience the capacity to take meaning (cited in Buckley, 1998, 14). That meaning is ever-changing: There are so many symbols, from which one can choose; each symbol can be interpreted diﬀerently; a symbol can become ossiﬁed and can fail this year to evoke a reality, which it evoked last year; and the realities to which any social group refers are themselves subject to change. And above all, each social group 39

T A R C

H I and each individual is likely to shape reality in a diﬀerent way, bending the symbolism to their particular desires (Buckley, 1998, 14). Hence, populations reinvent signs and symbols and read them in diﬀerent contexts, transforming their reference and meaning. Landscapes, then, are consequently open to interpretation (and subsequently contestation). The visual features of the cultural landscape such as public buildings, monuments, plaques, plinths, graﬃti, and street names, which ﬁnd tangible representation in the landscapes around us, map selective interpretations of the past and present onto public places. As such, they articulate heritage and can be read as icons of identity and spatializations of history. The cultural landscape, therefore, is a fundamental resource for understanding the complex connections between heritage, memory and identity.

Remembering the Past Accepting that heritage is the selective use of the past as a resource for the present (and future) (Ashworth and Graham, 2005) it should be lile surprise to ﬁnd that memory and commemoration are inexorably connected to the heritage process. Writing in 1994, Huyssen noted: ‘As we are approaching our ﬁn de siecle, issues of time and memory haunt contemporary culture. Museums and memorials are being constructed as if there were no tomorrow’ (1994, 3). The study of memory has burgeoned in recent years (see, for example, Edensor, 1997; Johnston, 1999; Lahiri, 2003), almost to the extent that it is no longer suﬃcient to discuss memory as some kind of unitary entity. There are, for example, multiple types of memory: oﬃcial; unoﬃcial; public; private; collective; communal; local; national; societal; historical; emotional; postmemory; literal; and exemplary. Memories are oen thought of in terms of scale: from the individual or private which may involve personal experiences such as loss or suﬀering (Burk, 2003, 317); the local or communal, which draws on key events or experiences that have occurred within close-knit groups; to societal memory which describes narratives of the past that are sympathetic to a broader, loosely interconnected population. Also on that same scale is public and national memory. Bodnar (1992, 13) argues that public memory emerges from the ‘intersection of oﬃcial and vernacular cultural expressions’, while Shackel (2003, 11) believes that it is ‘a reﬂection of present political and social relationships’. Public memory is, as Till (1999, 254) argues, ‘a ﬂuid process’ that is not only negotiated by oﬃcial or national groups but also by the media, academics, heritage institutions and local community organizations. National memory, meanwhile, is frequently thought of in conjunction with oﬃcial memory that, in most societies, emanates from the state and its institutions, oen representing the hegemonic needs and values of the general public (Koshar, 1998). Nation-states play leading roles in the construction of heritage as they subscribe to a set of ideas that are consequently embedded through socialization and education. As a result, the state is usually the oﬃcial arbitrator of public commemoration and, therefore, of national heritage, and as such, it assumes responsibility over planning, 40

H, M I maintaining and funding memorial monuments, programmes and events. This is best exempliﬁed in the oﬃcial remembrance of Britain’s war dead in the immediate aermath of the Great War. By engraving ‘sacred landscapes of remembrance’ and by initiating a number of commemorative programmes across France and Belgium, the dead ‘were not allowed to pass unnoticed back into the private world of their families. To do so would have dramatically diminished their collective cultural impact’ (Heﬀernan, 1995, 313). As ‘oﬃcial property’ they not only served to acknowledge the country’s heritage of sacriﬁce, but allowed the British government to refute any ‘moral or political’ criticism of its handling of the situation. Tosh has argued that for any social grouping to have a collective identity, it has to have a shared interpretation of the events and experiences which have formed the group over time: ‘Sometimes this will include an accepted belief about the origins of the group, as in the case of many nation states, emphasis may be on vivid turning points and symbolic moments which conﬁrm the self-image and aspirations of the group’ (Tosh, 1991, 2). These collective beliefs play a fundamental role in securing a sense of togetherness and cultural solidarity which is vital in the formation and legitimization of any national identity (Lowenthal, 1985, 44). National cohesion, in other words, requires a sense of collective awareness and identity endorsed through common historical experience. Unoﬃcial memory is oen seen as a binary opposite to national or oﬃcial memory, but it remains a somewhat unambiguous and dangerous term. If oﬃcial memory is linked to national memory, then unoﬃcial must be equally applicable to anything that is not state-structured. This is, of course, not the case, as many groups and individuals regard their own individual, local or communal heritages to be just as valid and ‘oﬃcial’ as that of the state or other oﬃcially sanctioned forms of remembering. In discussing the relationship between memory and violence, Todorov (1996) introduced two more categories of memory, literal and exemplary. Literal memories, he notes, are those aached solely to a violent event which do not extend to other similar events. Exemplary memories, conversely, extend their reference to other similar occurrences, thus making it easier to abstract lessons from the past to inform the future (key to the development of heritage). Hirsch’s study of ‘postmemory’ also looks at the eﬀects of violence on memory. She argues that the term best describes a form of memory which has been circulated through other people’s experiences of a violent event (1997). In postmemory, memories are passed down through generations to be represented by people who have no personal aachment to the memory. Subsequently, they seek to re-use, re-enact and re-represent those memories in order to feel closer to their ancestors (Sturken, 1997). Edkins (2003, 46), meanwhile, uses the term ‘emotional’ memory to describe the transgenerational remembering of traumatic events. Yet what all of these typologies of memory have in common is the fact that they are all aached inexorably to certain places, making the cultural landscape paramount to our understanding of the various relationships and meanings they embody. When we remember September 11, for example, we are instantly transported to the site of Ground Zero. Sites of cultural heritage, therefore, such as 41

T A R C

H I buildings, monuments, plaques, museums and gardens of remembrance, incite our memories and reinforce our aachment to particular places. Remembering and commemorating the past is an essential part of the present and is important for a number of reasons. Not only is it tied inexorably to our sense of identity, but it is also an inherent part of the heritage process as we remember the past ‘in the light of our (present) needs and aspirations’ (Walker, 1996, 51). Without memory, a sense of self, identity, culture and heritage is lost. Through remembering, we create and suppress cultures and traditions, as memories are ‘conﬂated and embellished’ (Lowenthal, 1985, 1). Identities are validated as well as contested, and the adoption and cultivation of an aspect of the past serves to reinforce a sense of natural belonging, purpose and place (Lowenthal, 1985, 2). For Longley (1994, 69), remembering is a means whereby communities ‘renew their own religio: literally what ties them together, the rope around the individual sticks’. Identities and memories, like heritage, are inevitably selective in that they serve particular interests and political ideologies in the present (Gillis, 1994, 14). Gergen proposes that Americans and Europeans are compulsive consumers of the past ‘shopping for what best suits their particular sense of self at that time’ (cited in Gillis, 1994, 18). The idea that the past is chosen deliberately and subsequently consumed is appropriate but, arguably, demeaning in that it trivializes that which people consider sacred, as moments, events and themes from an array of histories are consequently ‘bought’ for present consumption or even to conform to the latest fashion. Again, memories are seen as selective and partial and used to fulﬁl individual, group or communal requirements of identity at a particular time and in a particular space: ‘Times change, and as they do, people look back on the past and reinterpret events and ideas. They look for paerns, for order, and for coherence in past events to support changing social, economic, and cultural values’ (Foote, 1998, 28). Lowenthal (1985), reﬂecting on the reasons for selecting particular aspects of the past, argues that societies change or alter the past because they oen need or want more than they have been bequeathed. He believes that most people exaggerate their cultural antiquity or conceal its relative recentness. Subsequently new, more appropriate, histories are ‘invented’: Invented traditions are taken to mean a set of practices normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inoculate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past. In fact they normally aempt to establish continuity with a suitable historic past (Hobsbawn and Ranger, 1983, 1). This use of the past is a characteristic of modern communities and groups as they continually retell their pasts. Tosh suggests that while social groupings need a record of prior experience, they also require a narrative of the past which serves to explain or justify the present, oen at the cost of historical accuracy. He observes: ‘memories are modiﬁed to suit particular situations or circumstances and do 42

H, M I not always correlate with historical truths’ (1991, 2). These histories can become distorted and permeated (oen deliberately) with inaccuracies and myths during the selection process, making the act of ‘forgeing’ in memory construction just as crucial for the cultivation of identity (Rowlands, 1999). Individuals, groups or communities in society all tend to remember diﬀerent aspects of the past, but they tend to do so in diverse ways and with alternative methods. Interpretation is predetermined by the social, economic, political and/or local context. Societies justify current aitudes and future aspirations by linking them to past traditions which helps bond and unify factionalism. ‘The landscape itself is an active agent in constituting that history, serving both as a symbol for the needs and desires of the people who live in it’ (Mitchell, 2003, 93).

Politicizing the Past (and Present) Heritage is a highly politicized process that is subject to contestation and bound up in the construction, reconstruction and deconstruction of memory and identity (Whelan, 2003). Memory always represents a struggle over power and is thus implicated in the ‘who decides?’ questions about the future. Power, as Voltaire noted, can be understood as making others act as one person or group chooses (cited in Arendt, 1986, 60). Russell (1975), meanwhile, deﬁnes power as the ‘production of intended eﬀects’, believing, for example, that it can be measured in terms of achievement, in how successful one person is over another at a particular thing. He questions whether or not power constitutes the actual production of eﬀects or the capacity to produce them. Building on this, Foucault suggests that power needs to be examined at the ‘point where its intention is completely invested in its real and eﬀective practices’ (1986, 239). There is a diﬀerence, then, between those who are perceived by others to hold power and those who see themselves as powerful (Lukes, 1987). Notions of power are central to the construction of heritage, and consequently identity, giving weight to the argument that heritage ‘is not given; it is made’ (Harvey, 2001, 336; Bre, 1996). Those who wield the greatest power, therefore, can inﬂuence, dictate or deﬁne what is remembered and consequently what is forgoen. Anderson and Gale (1992, 8) contend that: ‘our landscapes are valuable documents on the power plays from which social life is constructed, both materially and rhetorically’, illuminating their potential to reﬂect struggles within the heritage process. Many academics have wrien extensively on the speciﬁc capacity of sites of cultural heritage to represent power. Whelan, for example, argues that memorial icons of identity such as monuments, memorials, and buildings that have been invested with meaning, carry conscious and subconscious messages and are subject to competing interests. Their very public visual presence translates powerful ideological messages that are never apolitical, and ensures that the messages they convey are open to contested interpretations (2003, 14). Charlesworth (1994, 597) too, discussing the speciﬁc capacity of Auschwitz-Birkenau to evoke the memory of the Holocaust, argues that ‘memorial sites are open to various interpretations 43

T A R C

H I and malleable to the needs of power and inﬂuence’. The emergence of AuschwitzBirkenau as the symbol of the Holocaust is one of many examples of expressions of power at work within memorial landscapes. His examination of the contestation over symbolic space at Auschwitz highlights the individual aempts by both the Catholic Church and the former Polish communist state to claim ownership over the site for their own needs. A similar example can be found in South Korea. In May 1980, government forces under General Chun Doo Hwan killed 200 civilian demonstrators (marching for democracy) in the town of Kwangui. In the aermath of the massacre, families of the dead commemorated their loved ones locally in the Mangwol-dong Cemetery. Yet in recent years the deaths have acquired a new national meaning and signiﬁcance. Under the democratic government of Kim Young Sam (1993–97) the deaths were rerepresented as the catalyst for political reform in Korea (Yea, 2002). Kim announced the construction of a series of ‘oﬃcial’ memorials across the country, including the construction of a new Mangwol-dong Cemetery. These oﬃcial commemorations were imagined to complement and reinforce Kim’s democratic presidency (and power) and thus stripped ownership of the deaths from both the private grief of the families and the local grief of Kwangui. Notions of power, therefore, are paramount to our understanding of the representation of memory onto cultural landscapes. As Harvey (1989, 217) notes: ‘Social practices may invoke certain myths and push for certain spatial and temporal representations as part and parcel of their drive to implant and reinforce their hold on society.’ Those with the most at stake in political terms, and those with the greatest ability to exercise power, have a vested interest in the production of sites of cultural heritage and bring the past into focus to legitimize a present social order as exempliﬁed by the actions of the Kim Young Sam government. It is an ‘implicit rule’ that participants in any social order must ‘presuppose a shared memory’ which is integral for group or communal solidarity. The meaning of any individual or group identity, ‘namely a sense of sameness over time and space’, is sustained by recalling the past; and what is remembered is ‘deﬁned by the assumed identity’ (Connerton, 1989, 3). Bodnar’s (1992) examination of commemorative activity in America suggests that leaders use the past for a variety of political purposes. The nation’s heritage is therefore brought to the fore ‘to calm anxiety about change or political events, eliminate citizen indiﬀerence toward oﬃcial concerns, promote exemplary paerns of citizen behaviour, and stress citizen duties over rights’ (Bodnar, 1992, 15). Buckley (1998, 14) also supports this argument, noting that: ‘the questions as to which symbols will deﬁne any given situation, will largely be determined by the practical question of which people and whose interests predominate’. The selection process is carefully tailored and manipulated by individual members of a community or group with power or inﬂuence. Heritage is oen deﬁned by a dominant group within a particular society which, in many cases, tends to be national governments. Sites of memory such as monuments, plaques, museums and symbolic architectural spaces, as static and permanent reminders of the past concretized in the present, are oen constructed 44

H, M I by national governments to represent hegemonic values that cultivate notions of national identity and frame ideas and histories of the nation. Boyer (cited in Till, 1999, 254) has called such powerful sites ‘rhetorical topoi’, believing that as sites of civic construction, they instruct citizens what to value concerning their national heritage and public responsibilities. Such sites represent and embody power, greatness, resistance, memory and loss (Leerssen, 2001). Monuments, for example: ‘[m]ark the great pinnacles of human achievement selected from the past, they give an edifying sense that greatness was once possible, and it is still possible. They provide present generations with inspiration’ (Leerssen, 2001, 207). Building on Boyer’s work, Till (1999, 3) argues that the creation of ‘rhetorical topoi’ as powerful and oﬃcial landscape stages ‘is both a dramaturgical and territorial act’. Citizens re-enact and repeat the past in ﬁxed locales as suggested by their national governments. Wreath-laying and memorial services at these sites help reaﬃrm ownership of the space, reinforcing the power of the group. This both gives meaning to the site in question and also conﬁrms the particular claims to the memory being evoked. Such issues of power are evident in the oﬃcial/national remembering of the Finnish Civil War of 1918 which witnessed the population of Finland divide into two separate camps, White and Red. The Whites had orchestrated a ‘war of liberation’ from Russia, while the Reds wanted a more liberal socialist Finland, taking their lead from the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. The victory of the Whites (who lost 5,300 dead) over the Reds led to decades of oﬃcial remembrance omiing the narratives of 28,000 Red fatalities. According to Lehto, the state emerged strengthened and in a prime position to express power over its institutions: ‘As victors of the Civil War, the Whites were in a position to construct a past that they could not only live with, but one that also buressed the regime and its vision of an independent Finland’ (Lehto, 2002, 19). In the multitude of oﬃcial commemorations which ﬂourished throughout subsequent years, the Finnish government would not (and had the power so not to) recognize that the Reds represented a group with legitimate grievances and claims against the state. ‘Social amnesia’ within national heritage and the distortion of the enemy’s narratives became essential for the Whites if Finland was to maintain its independence from Russia: ‘Commemorative activity is by deﬁnition social and political, for it involves the co-ordination of individual or group memories whose results may appear consensual when they are in fact the product of intense struggle and in some instances annihilation’ (Gillis, 1994, 14). Heritage, then, not only serves to reinforce narratives of national identity but oen works to suppress the identity of minority or less powerful groups. Sites of memory and power are oen constructed in public spaces, where they can operate as dichotomous sites of uniﬁcation and sites of division. It is unlikely, therefore, that everyone in a community or within a nation gives equal support to the remembering of a particular aspect of the past. Meethan (2001, 240) has argued against collective notions of communal identity: ‘To think of communities as homogeneous entities is to assume that everyone in a speciﬁc locality will have the same wants and needs and expectations, and while some people may have a clear sense of aachment, others may not.’ 45

T A R C

H I While many national governments use space by constructing symbols to consolidate national identity and legitimize power, many other groups who contest the use of space and the memory being evoked (or forgoen) will work to undermine or manipulate the memorial site or create their own separate important place which is indicative of their own heritage. This is exempliﬁed by the memorialization of suicide bombers in Sri Lanka, which has a long history of conﬂict and civil war between the Sinhalese majority (74 per cent) and the Tamil minority (17 per cent) (Nadarajah and Sriskandarajah, 2005, 87). Formed in 1976 in response to ongoing antagonism between the Sri Lankan state and Tamil minority, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) embarked on a violent campaign to achieve an independent Tamil state. In 1987 the group stepped up their ‘liberation struggle’ by forming a suicide corps known as the Black Tigers. Suicide bombings carried out by men, women and children presented the state with a new lethal threat. Aer nearly three decades of violence, a volatile peace agreement was mediated by Norway in 2002. During the unstable peace that followed, the LTTE embarked on its own commemorative campaign to acknowledge its own narratives of identity which were completely separate from those of the state. Ad hoc shrines were erected sporadically around Tamil areas and an arrangement of photographs of suicide bombers was put on the back of a truck and driven around local neighbourhoods in memory of those who had killed themselves for the cause (). Black Tiger Day, held on 5 July, has become an annual commemoration and thus an expression of Tamil cultural heritage. Supporters ﬂy commemorative ﬂags in the Tamil colours of red and yellow, while others put up memorial posters to remember those who have given their lives for the ‘liberation movement’. These forms of alternative remembering challenge oﬃcial state narratives in Sri Lanka and consequently are not recognized as they pose a direct challenge to government power and authority. Eﬀorts to challenge oﬃcial interpretations of the past have also taken place in Guatemala which has been plagued by violence resulting from conﬂict between the state and guerrilla forces since the 1970s. On 25 February 1982, the Guatemalan army killed 177 women and children and buried them in a mass grave (the killings later became known colloquially as the Rio Negro Massacre). Twelve years later, in April 1994, the tiny community of Rabinal Baja Verapuz constructed a memorial entitled the ‘Monument of Truth’ which, for the ﬁrst time, told the ‘truth’ about the massacre and the government’s involvement in rape, maiming and murder (). Aer only two weeks the memorial was smashed by state forces. Undeterred, the community erected another memorial the following year on the 13th anniversary of the killings. The second memorial was constructed from steel and concrete, testament to the community’s wishes for its story to ‘be told’. Names of the 70 children who were killed were etched onto the steel front of the memorial, while the inscription on an accompanying plaque recalled the brutality of the event: ‘Children who were smashed against the rock’. The eventual siting of the memorial to the victims of the Rio Negro Massacre signalled the creation of new spatial arenas through which to challenge interpretations about violence (and more speciﬁcally about gendered 46

H, M I violence against women) in Guatemala (see, for example, Nolin Hanlon and Shankar, 2000). Writing about the power struggles within the heritage process, Till (1999, 253) suggests that: ‘These more localized territorial struggles over the meaning of the built environment oen reﬂect larger social (and power) disputes over who has the authority to create, deﬁne, interpret and represent collective pasts through place.’ Communities then oen clash over the physical representations of power in their landscapes. While some symbols may represent one group’s tangible deﬁnition of identity, they may similarly oﬀend or exclude another. Donnan and McFarland suggest that landscape is available to all who can see it, and is, therefore, owned communally rather than privately (1997, 21). This reading of landscape is paradoxical. The iconographic characteristics of the cultural landscape may be read communally in any society as they may occupy shared or public space. However, their construction and purpose are oen aimed at one particular group or to represent a particular hegemonic image. Powerful symbolic landscapes can function, then, as sites of resistance. Edkins (2003, 218) argues that the Mall in Washington DC, as a site of heritage and as a symbol of American imperial power, is oen the focus for resistance by many groups. Take, for example, Martin Luther King’s manipulation of the Lincoln Memorial on the west side of the Mall in 1963 to draw aention to racial inequality in the USA. The Mall has become the focus of resistance for many who oppose the state or hegemonic value systems. San Franciscan activist, John Cleve, constructed an AIDS Quilt which was also exhibited across the Mall in 1987. According to Edkins (2003, 19), the quilt, which comprised 1,920 panels commemorating the lives of AIDS victims, was an eﬀort to ‘call upon the conscience of the nation’. In recent years, the Mall has again become the focus of anti-war protests for those opposed to the American-led Iraq War. The struggle to remember the past reﬂects the power plays within society and is oen, as Burk (2003, 317) notes, ‘a tactic for political action’. There is an inherent complexity in achieving such a goal as universal consensus, and universal participation in the choice of commemoration is rarely sought. Additionally, open criticism is not always taken into account in the construction of commemorative sites: ‘the shaping of a past worthy of public commemoration in the present is contested and involves a struggle for supremacy between advocates of various political ideas and sentiments’ (Bodnar, 1992, 13).

Territoriality and Heritage Also inherent in the production of sites of cultural heritage is the concept of territoriality. Memory has been labelled a ‘metaphor of a physical location’ and, as such, is intimately bound up in eﬀorts to construct territory and place (Wright and Falconer, 1998). The concept of, or acts of, territoriality are bound up in notions of a demarcated geographic space (a territory) which usually contains some kind of homogeneous, collectivized community (Grosby, 2005) sharing a collective identity or heritage. Territoriality is needed to stabilize and mobilize groups or individuals 47

T A R C

H I and their resources inside demarcated boundaries. Within societies then, various groups insert symbols into the cultural landscapes which resonate with their sense of heritage and identity, and which simultaneously incite remembering and mark territory. For territoriality to work, the group oen places visual warning symbols around the agreed territory further to deny others access into the home area. As Buckley notes: ‘it is well known that symbols are found at boundaries. Most obviously these boundaries are physical and to do with territory’ (1998, 6). Not only does territoriality demarcate boundaries which are ultimately intended to exclude outsiders, but it is dichotomously aimed at seizing a shared public space and thus controlling those inside the territory. This argument is supported by Longley (1994) who contends that territorial markers are directed as much towards the local community as they are to outsiders. Flags, for example, which oen reﬂect the heritage of a particular group or nation, are good examples of territorial signiﬁers. They tell outsiders that the territory they are about to enter or pass is not theirs. Rather it belongs to those who live within the demarcated boundary or to those who empathize with what the ﬂag represents. This spatial practice is particularly prevalent in parts of Northern Ireland where divided communities place signiﬁers of their national heritage at interface areas to demarcate territory. Boundaries are constructed and maintained through the production of symbols, in the eﬀort to claim power for individual communities. Spatial practices which bolster and sustain the power of the dominant group are essential components for that group’s control over the hegemonic values that it represents or imposes (Passi, 1999). That dominant group is oen the nationstate. Tilly (1990, 1), for example, argues that secure territorial boundaries and a monopoly of violence (which are inexorably interconnected) are the two deﬁning characteristics of the present-day state. Ansell and Di Palma (2004) similarly argue that territorial boundaries are the foundations for institutions such as national sovereignty, citizenship, the modern welfare state and democracy. Graham (1998, 130), too, contends that: The interlinked concepts of nationhood and statehood share a dependence on the notion of exclusivity concerning sovereign rights over access to territory. The notion that landscapes embody discourses of inclusion and exclusion is closely linked to the idea that manipulated geographies also function as symbols of identity, validation and legitimization. Yet the continuing importance of territoriality and its seemingly intractable relationship with the nation-state at the turn of the century has been questioned. Jacobson (1997, 121), for example, has argued that globalization embodying transnational economics, politics and cultures, the melting of borders, particularly in Europe, and an increasing sense of belonging to a ‘global unit’, has led to a distinct lack of engagement with the unitary nation-state. Nevertheless, demarcating and protecting boundaries has remained of paramount importance in countries such as Israel, Estonia, Latvia and Sri Lanka. Yiachel and Ghanem, discussing territoriality in these ethnocratic states (ethnocratic meaning a regime that permits the expansion, 48

H, M I ethnicization and control of contested territory and state by a dominant ethnic nation), argue that such societies are driven by a ‘concerted collective project of exerting ethno-national control over a territory perceived as the nation’s exclusive homeland’ (2004, 651). While all four ethnocracies cited claim to be democratic, they are underpinned by autocratic leanings that are intent upon seizing contested territory and the power apparatus (Yiachel and Ghanem, 2004, 652). The heritage process is explicitly and implicitly important for reinforcing claims to territory in all ethnocratic states. In Latvia, for example, the annual commemoration of the Barricade Days (20 January 1988), which marks the restoration of the country’s independence, has become increasingly popular, while a signiﬁcant number of memorials in Riga, the capital, remember the sacriﬁces made by the hundreds of thousands of Latvians killed throughout the country’s history of occupation (by the Germans throughout World War II and then by the Soviets from 1944 to 1988) (Skultans, 2001). These practices are an integral part of the construction of a new identity and a separate heritage for many Latvians. By dismantling sites of heritage synonymous with Soviet occupation (which were constructed in the ﬁrst instance to reinforce Soviet control of Latvian territory) and replacing them with expressions and narratives of Latvian identity, the local population can validate their new-found independence. Similar processes have taken place in neighbouring Estonia, which is emerging too from a volatile history of occupation. Such examples illuminate the overlapping and complex connections between memory, territory and heritage.

Conclusion Heritage is not then solely ‘all things to all people’ (Larkin, in Bre, 1996, 319), devoid of any deﬁnitive deﬁnition. It is a process that draws on the past and which is intimately related to our identity requirements in the present. We manipulate it for validation, legitimization and unity and we call on it in order to challenge, refute and undermine. Heritage is political and oen territorial, serving certain agencies and groups through communicating narratives of inclusion and exclusion, continuity and instability. All in all it is a complex concept which cannot be separated from the interrelated concepts of memory and identity. In sum, this chapter has worked towards a more thorough understanding of the key conceptual debates and issues surrounding the connections between heritage, memory and identity, paying particular aention to these relationships within the cultural realm. Discussing the importance and signiﬁcance of cultural landscapes as tools for unravelling and dissecting the meanings and functions of heritage, it has illuminated the potential of landscapes to express not only relationships in the present but also a society’s changing relationship to its past. The examination of the various typologies of memory in the early part of the chapter further reinforces the argument that the study of memory is increasingly important in understanding how we acquire narratives of the past for present purposes. It has been emphasized

49

T A R C

H I that heritage is a dynamic and negotiable process, subject to contestation and malleable to the needs of societies and cultures in the present.

References Anderson, K. and Gale, F. (1992), Inventing Places: Studies in Cultural Geography (Melbourne: Longman). Ansell, C.K. and Di Palma, G. (eds) (2004), Restructuring Territoriality: Europe and the United States Compared (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Arendt, H. (1987), ‘Communicative Power’, in S. Lukes (ed.), Power (Oxford: Blackwell), 59–64. Ashworth, G.J. and Graham, B. (eds) (2005), Senses of Place: Senses of Time (Aldershot: Ashgate). Bender, B. (1993), Landscape: Politics and Perspectives (Oxford: Berg). Bodnar, J. (1992), Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Bre, D. (1996), The Construction of Heritage (Cork: Cork University Press). Buckley, A. (1998), ‘Introduction. Daring Us to Laugh: Creativity and Power in Northern Irish Symbols’, in A. Buckley (ed.), Symbols in Northern Ireland (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University Press), 87–108. Buckley, A. (ed.) (1998), Symbols in Northern Ireland (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University Press). Burk, A.L. (2003), ‘Private Griefs, Public Places’, Political Geography 22:1, 317–33. Charlesworth, A. (1994), ‘Contesting Places of Memory: The Case of Auschwitz’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 12, 579–93. Christie, R. and Cribb, R. (eds) (2002), Historical Injustice and Democratic Transition in East Asia and Northern Europe (London and New York: Routledge). Connerton, P. (1989), How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Cosgrove, D. and Daniels, S. (eds) (1988), The Iconography of Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Creswell, T. (2004), Place: A Short Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell). Donnan, H. and McFarland, G. (1997), ‘Cultural Perspectives on Public Policy’, in H. Donnan and G. McFarland (eds), Culture and Policy in Northern Ireland (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University Belfast), 1–14. Donnan, H. and McFarland, G. (eds) (1997), Culture and Policy in Northern Ireland (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University Belfast). Edensor, T. (1997), ‘National Identity and the Politics of Memory: Remembering Bruce and Wallace in Symbolic Space’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29, 175–94. Edkins, J. (2003), Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Flint, C. (ed.) (2004), Spaces of Hate: Geographies of Discrimination and Intolerance in the USA (London and New York: Routledge). 50

H, M I Foote, K. (1998), Shadowed Ground: America’s Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy (Austin: University of Texas Press). Forester, B. and Johnson, J. (2002), ‘Unravelling the Threads of History: SovietEra Monuments and Post-Soviet National Identity in Moscow’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 91, 524–47. Forty, A. and Küchler, S. (eds) (1999), The Art of Forgeing (Oxford: Berg). Foucault, M. (1987), ‘Disciplinary Power and Subjection’, in S. Lukes (ed.), Power (Oxford: Blackwell), 229–42. Gillis, J. (1994), ‘Memory and Identity: The History of a Relationship’, in J. Gillis (ed.) Commemorations, The Politics of National Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 3–24. Gillis, J. (ed.) (1994), Commemorations, The Politics of National Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Graham, B. (1998), ‘Contested Images of Place among Protestants in Northern Ireland’, Political Geography 17:2, 129–44. Grosby, S. (2005), ‘Territoriality: The Transcendental Primordial Feature of Modern Societies’, Nation and Nationalism 1, 143–62. Harvey, D. (1989), The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Malden: Blackwell). Harvey, D.C. (2001), ‘Heritage Pasts and Heritage Presents: Temporality, Meaning and the Scope of Heritage Studies’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 7:4, 319–38. Heﬀernan, M. (1995), ‘Forever England: The Western Front and the Politics of Remembrance in Britain’, Ecumene 2:3, 293–323. Hirsch, M. (1997), Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Hobsbawm, E. and Ranger, T. (1983), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Huyssen, A. (1994), Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (London and New York: Routledge). Jacobson, D. (1997), ‘New Frontiers: Territory, Social Spaces, and the State’, Sociological Forum 12:1,121–34. Johnston, N. (1999), ‘Framing the Past: Time, Space and the Politics of Heritage Tourism in Ireland’, Political Geography 18, 187–207. Koshar, R. (1998), Germany’s Transient Pasts: Preservation and National Memory (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press). Kuusisto, A. (1999), ‘Politics of Place and Resistance: The Case of Northern Ireland’, Nordia Geographical Publications NGP Yearbook 28:2, 15–27. Lahiri, N. (2003), ‘Commemorating and Remembering the 1857 Revolt in Delhi and its Aerlife’, World Archaeology 35:1, 35–60. Leeds-Hurwitz, W. (1993), Semiotics and Communication: Signs, Codes, Cultures (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum). Leerssen, J. (2001), ‘Monument and Trauma: Varieties of Remembrance’, in I. McBride (ed.), History and Memory in Modern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 204–22. 51

T A R C

H I Lehto, M. (2002), ‘Remembering the Finnish Civil War: Confronting a Harrowing Past’, in R. Christie and R. Cribb (eds), Historical Injustice and Democratic Transition in East Asia and Northern Europe (London and New York: Routledge), 198–209. Linenthal, E. (2001), The Unﬁnished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Longley, E. (1994), The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books). Lowenthal, D. (1985), The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Lowenthal, D. (1996), Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (New York: Free Press). Lukes, S. (1987), ‘Introduction’, in S. Lukes (ed.), Power (Oxford: Blackwell), 1–14. Lukes, S. (ed.) (1987), Power (Oxford: Blackwell). Marschall, S. (2006), ‘Visualising Memories: The Hector Pieterson Memorial in Soweto’, Visual Anthropology 19, 145–69. Massey, D. and Jess, P. (eds) (1995), A Place in the World? Places, Cultures and Globalisation (Oxford: Oxford University Press/Open University). McBride, I. (ed.) (2001), History and Memory in Modern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Meethan, K. (2001), Tourism in Global Society, Place, Culture, Consumption (Basingstoke: Palgrave). Mitchell, D. (2003), Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell). Nadarajah, S. and Sriskandarajah, D. (2005), ‘Liberation Struggle or Terrorism? The Politics of Naming the LTTE’, Third World Quarterly 26, 87–100. Nolin Hanlon, C. and Shankar, F. (2000), ‘Gendered Spaces of Terror and Assault: The Testimonio of REMHI and the Commission for Historical Clariﬁcation in Guatemala’, Gender, Place and Culture 7:3, 265–80. Passi, A. (1999), ‘The Social Construction of Territorial Identities’, Geography Research Forum 18, 5–18. Rose, G. (1995), ‘Places and Identity: A Sense of Place’, in D. Massey and P. Jess (eds), A Place in the World? Places, Cultures and Globalisation (Oxford: Oxford University Press/Open University), 87–131. Rose, G. (2001), Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials (London: Sage). Rowlands, M. (1999), ‘Remembering to Forget: Sublimation as Sacriﬁce in War Memorials’, in A. Forty and S. Küchler (eds), The Art of Forgeing (Oxford: Berg), 129–45. Russell, B. (1975), Power: A New Social Analysis (London: Allen and Unwin). Russell, G., ‘Dedication of the Rio Negro Monument’, , accessed 20 November 2005. Sebeok, T. (1991), Signs: An Introduction to Semiotics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). Shackel, P. (2003), Memory in Black and White (Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press). Skultans, V. (2001), ‘Arguing with the KGB Archives: Archival and Narrative Memory in Post-Soviet Latvia’, Ethnos 66:3, 320–43. 52

H, M I Sturken, M. (1997), Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the Aids Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press). Sumaratojo, R. (2004), ‘Contesting Place: Antigay and Lesbian Hate Crime in Columbus, Ohio’, in C. Flint (ed.), Spaces of Hate: Geographies of Discrimination and Intolerance in the USA (London and New York: Routledge), 87–108. Till, K.E. (1999), ‘Staging the Past: Landscape Designs, Cultural Identity and Erinnerungspolitik at Berlin’s Neue Wache’, Ecumene 6:3, 251–80. Tilly, C. (1990), Coercion, Capital and European States AD 900–1900 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell). Todorov, T. (1996), ‘The Abuses of Memory’, Common Knowledge 4:2, 6–26. Tosh, J. (1991), In Pursuit of History (London: Longman Press). Turner, V. (1967), The Forest of Symbols (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press). Walker, B. (1996), Dancing to History’s Tune (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University Belfast). Whelan, Y. (2003), Reinventing Modern Dublin (Dublin: Dublin University Press). Whelan, Y. (2005), ‘Mapping Meaning in the Cultural Landscape’, in G.J Ashworth and B. Graham (eds), Senses of Place: Senses of Time (Aldershot: Ashgate), 61–72. Wright, F. and Falconer, A. (1998), Reconciling Memories (Dublin: Columba Press). Yea, S. (2002), ‘Rewriting Rebellion and Mapping Memory in South Korea: The (Re) presentation of the 1980 Kwangui Uprising through Mangwol-dong Cemetery’, Urban Studies 39:9, 1551–72. Yiachel, O. and Ghanem, A. (2004), ‘Understanding “Ethnocratic” Regimes: The Politics of Seizing Contested Territories’, Political Geography 23, 647–76.

53

This page intentionally left blank

3

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

Personal and Public Histories: Issues in the Presentation of the Past Hilda Kean

In 2002, in Lancaster, in the north west of England, the Slave Trade Arts Memorial Project (STAMP) was established to commemorate a particular past of this Georgian town. STAMP was inaugurated by ‘several individuals representing various local organizations who feel it is important that Lancaster remembers its involvement in the Transatlantic Slave Trade’ (STAMP, 2003). Ostensibly this was a local project, drawing on the personal interest and enthusiasm of a variety of individuals, artists, educators, and university-based historians seeking to create a diﬀerent public persona for the town. It also involved local schoolchildren and their teachers and succeeded in obtaining funding from both the Millennium Commission and the local council. Kevin Dalton-Johnson, a Manchester-based artist, was commissioned to provide a site of commemoration for the victims of Britain’s involvement in slavery. Thus, through the endeavours of individuals and with state support, an aspect of the town’s past was located explicitly in a national and international history. Rather than presenting the town in a positive light – approaches conventionally favoured by antiquarian historians – STAMP sought speciﬁcally to give a particular analysis to the wealth that created the Georgian buildings of the town by acknowledging its past history as the fourth-largest slave port in England (Rice, 2003, 15). Drawing on current personal interests and enthusiasms, and resulting in a public representation of the past, this was a campaign which might well be deﬁned as public history. In this initiative the boundaries between ‘personal’ and ‘public’, ‘oﬃcial’ and ‘unoﬃcial’ were blurred, allowing diﬀerent questions to be posed about the past. Some writers have created a sharp, and I think false, distinction between public and personal histories, seeing, for example, the work of some family and local historians as merely ‘private’ history, and thus less worthy of consideration by those interested in public history (Liddington, 2002, 90). However, other historians have valued the contribution of local and family historians to the writing of new histories for a wide audience. As long ago as 1976, in an important article on local and oral history, Raphael Samuel recognized the

T A R C

H I value of local historians using diﬀerent materials, including memory, to draw up ‘fresh maps, in which people are as prominent as places’ (Samuel, 1976, 199).

Personal and Public in the Representation of Slavery in Lancaster To start to take discussion of the personal and the public further, I ﬁrst want to consider earlier local forms of memory of slavery in the Lancaster area. At nearby Sunderland Point, at the mouth of the River Lune which leads to the sea from Lancaster, the life of an individual slave, Sambo (sic), was commemorated over 200 years ago. In the early eighteenth century, this had been the port for Lancaster, serving ships too large to sail up to the town (Briggs, 1822, 189; Jones, 1978, 1). With the opening of another dock (in Glasson) in 1787, the trade deserted the place – sailors apparently calling it Cape Famine – and it became a sea bathing place and holiday venue (Farrer and Brownbill, 1914, 61). From this later period comes a story and event recorded in local literary and antiquarian publications which has been popularly reinvented in diﬀerent ways in subsequent centuries (Farrer and Brownbill, 1914, 61; Wilkinson, 1982, 6). Sambo, a slave kept by an unnamed local owner in the 1730s, died shortly aer the ship landed from the Caribbean, ostensibly, as an early 1822 account puts it, when incorrectly thinking ‘he has been deserted by his master’, he fell ‘into a complete state of stupefaction … refused all kinds of sustenance’ and within a few days died. He was then buried ‘without either coﬃn or bier’ in unconsecrated ground away from the village’ (Briggs, 1822, 189). Some 60 years aer his death, a gravestone and an engraved plate were added, referring to him as ‘Sambo, a faithful Negro’. This was the initiative of Reverend James Watson, chaplain to Lancaster Castle, and Figure 3.1 Sambo’s grave, Sunderland Point, brother of William Watson, Lancashire 56

P

P H who has been described as, ‘one of the most commied investors in Lancaster slavers [whose] tenacity was no doubt instrumental in keeping the slave trade alive at Lancaster’ (Elder, 1992, 144). Encouraged by Reverend Watson, summer visitors rather than local inhabitants contributed to the fund for the memorial. Although praising Sambo’s ‘ﬁdelity’ towards his ‘master’, Reverend Watson’s verses made it explicit that Sambo was a reluctant immigrant: ‘From faithful wife and weeping children torn,/ Aﬄiction almost rent thy heart in twain’ (Briggs, 1822, 190–91). This ‘unoﬃcial’ memorial of nearly two centuries ago used a Christian form of commemoration, a graFigure 3.2 Forms of commemoration on Sambo’s vestone inscription, to note grave, July 2005 Sambo’s passing. A personal story of an international trade was created, and as a personal story it has been developed in diﬀerent ways. In recent years the grave of Sambo (Figure 3.1) has been reconﬁgured within the heritage industry of the Lancaster area. Notice-boards and oﬃcial signposts on Sunderland Point deﬁne both the locality and the grave as a tourist araction for visitors (<www.Lancashire.gov.uk> 24 February 2005). Schoolchildren, presumably under the direction of their teachers, make commemorative visits, placing painted and decorated stones with their own messages and names, or aach small teddy-bears in a mode usually reserved for the graves of children (Figure 3.2).1 Arguably, in this mode of visiting the grave we see ‘modern’ acts of empathy directed sentimentally towards a dead individual. Alan Rice, a leading protagonist in STAMP, has, however, argued that the landscaping of the grave is not static, since visitors leave diﬀerent tokens, making it an extremely dynamic

1

This might be seen to be similar to the sentiments of a Lancaster museum monograph of 1982 which suggested both that Sambo was a personal servant – and not a slave – and that he would have been either a grown man or ‘one of the charming children, exotically dressed and treated as pets’ (Wilkinson, 1982, 6). 57

T A R C

H I example among lieu de mémoire, which takes on a life of its own sustained by commemorative vigilance (Rice, 2003, 215–16). Indeed he suggests the location of this site of memory gives Lancastrians an opportunity to remember without being guided by museum curators (Rice, 2003, 216). It is thus both a site of public history and one which has been created through the personal, and unoﬃcial, acts of people operating outside the constructs of academic history. The STAMP project, however, has gone beyond these unoﬃcial acts of commemoration enacted some miles away from the town of Lancaster. Rather, the project has campaigned to have the past slavery of Lancaster physically acknowledged within the town itself. It has succeeded in erecting a monument, not in a site of mourning such as Sambo’s isolated grave, but in an early site of exploitaFigure 3.3 ‘Captured Africans’ tion – outside the former customs house on St George’s Quay in Lancaster. Potentially a diﬀerent sort of commemoration of the past has been created which does not concentrate on a form of mourning of an individual but which addresses the slavery past in diﬀerent ways. Images of slaves as victims were consciously rejected as stereotypical or conforming to Eurocentric depictions in favour of a non-ﬁgurative work. The artist Kevin DaltonJohnson has described his sculpture, which represents cargo levels in the hold of the ship, numbers of African captured and the geography of the slave triangle, as both designed to inform and to memorialize the people who were enslaved (<www.lancaster.gov.uk> ‘STAMP unveils memorial “Captured Africans”’, 23 September 2005) (Figure 3.3). The sculpture is in a public place, funded by public money, but took its impetus from the personal actions – and sentiments – of concerned local individuals. To some, especially those of Afro-Caribbean descent, this was indeed a personal history; and so too, to those living in a physical landscape created through the trade itself. As Jeremy Black has noted, both the state and popular history can come together in the development of a ‘public usage of history’ (Black, 2005, 8). 58

P

P H Different Approaches to Public History The Lancaster example might take us further in unpacking the nuances of the term ‘public history’, a relatively recent arrival on the shores of British historiographical and heritage practice. Some practitioners, oen drawing upon mainstream US practice, have seen public history as exclusively the presentation of history to the public by professional historians mainly employed outside universities in the museum and heritage sector or media. Thus David Vanderstel, the executive director of the National Council on Public History, has recently deﬁned public history as: the means of making what historians do understandable and relevant for a larger public. It is taking historical scholarship and adapting it to historic sites, exhibitions, documentaries, public policy and issues of the day, thus extending historical learning beyond the traditional classroom (Vanderstel, 2005, 32). In similar vein, Bronwyn Dalley and Jock Phillips have suggested in their edited collection, Going Public: The Changing Face of New Zealand History, that public history is: historical work undertaken according to the research priorities, agendas or funding capacities of another party other than being self-directed by the historian. Seen in this way, public history occurs in museums, in government, sometimes in universities, and in the independent freelance community (Dalley and Phillips, 2001, 9). Others, however, have emphasized public history practice as a way of developing links between so-called ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’ practitioners. Rather than dismissing the work of local or family historians or re-enactors as misguided introspective obsessives, historians such as the late Raphael Samuel urged us to explore the historical processes involved in such work (Kean, 2004a). In his important exploration of heritage, he suggested that: ‘If history was thought of as an activity rather than a profession, then the number of practitioners would be legion’ (Samuel, 1994, 17). Self-educated amateurs, such as John Aubrey, the notator of places such as the World Heritage Site of Avebury, were included within Samuel’s tradition of history-making (Edwards, 2000; Samuel, 1994). That is, he argued that personal and local practice were key factors in the construction of the past. Within his deﬁnitions of history Samuel included the important role of memory, valuing a ‘diﬀerent order of evidence and a diﬀerent kind of inquiry’ (Samuel, 1994, 8). Status was given to autobiography, stories, legends and songs which a child might learn at a grandparent’s knee (Samuel, 1994, 11). This inclusion of personal, and collective, memory within deﬁnitions of history has inevitably opened up new dimensions to the subject. Indeed in their collections on memory and history, Katherine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone situate their work as a development of Samuel’s ideas contained in Theatres of Memory, while arguing that work on social and cultural memory ‘has come to be known as “public history”’(Hodgkin and Radstone, 2003, 3). 59

T A R C

H I The idea that ‘the past is essentially open-ended, and accounts of it are public property, available for numerous uses’ (Jordanova, 2000, 155) has been developed by many practitioners keen to provide more ﬂuid deﬁnitions of historical inquiry. Thus, it was argued in an earlier collection that public history implied: the embracing of new materials; the breaking down of clearly deﬁned boundaries between diﬀerent subject areas; and the blurring of the personal and public (Kean, Martin and Morgan, 2000, 13–17). As Jo Stanley’s contribution to that collection, on the absence in maritime museums of women’s experience, argued, ‘I assume that a public site of knowledge should show what I know from personal experience to be the case’ (Stanley, 2000, 94). In seeking to explore the personal and public divide, we suggested that what is experienced in our everyday lives is as likely to be as signiﬁcant in our understanding and creation of history as the reading of books or archives (Kean, Martin and Morgan, 2000, 15). This willingness to see the possibilities for historical work through a refusal to insist on rigid categories has been deﬁned by Paul Ashton as follows: Public history is an elastic term that is still evolving. It means diﬀerent things to diﬀerent people locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. Public history also cuts across many ﬁelds in which most academically-trained historians have limited involvement ... Public history concerns representation of the past in the present in diﬀerent forms ... (Ashton, 2005, 37). Rather than simply counter-posing a form of popular history in which amateurs develop their own personal historical interests, or public history as the presentation by professionally trained historians of the past to the public, some historians have looked in less rigid ways at the relationship between professional history and the work of so-called amateurs making sense of their own and their family’s and community’s past. Publications in diﬀerent continents have both valued this crossover form of history and have initiated debate on the way in which new forms of accessible history for, and by, diﬀerent groups and individuals might be created. Prominent within such exploration is both an acknowledgement of the value of oral history and the role of memory. Radical American historian Howard Green has, for example, discussed the way in which some local, or amateur, historians have been upset by what they see as a condescending approach from professional historians. Noting that people carry with them a world view, a fundamentally historical one which explains the past, present and future, he has argued for a public history in which people make their own history (Green, 1992, 125). For Green, the central task of public historians should be ‘to bring to explicit awareness this embedded sense of history, to help people ﬁnd their own histories, and to aid them in understanding their role both in shaping and interpreting events’ (Green, 1992, 125). The examples he cites include a local-history project which used oral history and conducted a door-to-door search for materials, and a community-history project bridging social divisions of race and ethnicity, while sharpening others such as class. This emphasis on valuing the ways in which people understand their own past has been famously developed by 60

P

P H American public historians Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen. In an important work, Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life, they presented their ﬁndings from a national survey which ascertained how American people both made the past part of their everyday routines and turned to the past ‘as a way of grappling with profound questions about how to live’. People used their pasts, their ﬁndings suggested, to address questions about ‘relationships, identity, immortality, and agency’ (Rosenzweig and Thelen, 1998, 18). The past was not a distant or abstract insigniﬁcant entity but a key feature of their present lives. They noted the diﬀerent ways in which their interviewees engaged with the past, including watching historical ﬁlms, doing family history, reading history and visiting historic sites. That is, there was a crossover between what might be called personal and public histories. Rosenzweig and Thelen discovered that people valued museums and historic sites, believing that here an unmediated past was presented; unsurprisingly this stance was controversial. Writing in his capacity as president of the National Council of Public History, James Gardner (2004, 13) argued that such a position challenged the viability of the work of museum staﬀ. It presented an ‘intimate and personal’ use of the past, commemoration, nostalgia and life-coping skills – a fundamentally diﬀerent sense of the past, he argued, to that held by public historians working in the museum and heritage sector. The problem of what Rosenzweig and Thelen have called ‘shared authority’ between ‘professionals’ and ‘the public’ has led to controversy over several exhibitions, most famously that of the ‘Enola Gay’2 in which the oral testimony and memory of World War II veterans was ultimately privileged over a more critical presentation of the bombing of Hiroshima which the museum staﬀ had wished to oﬀer (Jordanova, 2000, 156–9; Rosenzweig and Thelen, 1998, 190). Rosenzweig and Thelen’s work has been an impetus for a national study by Paul Ashton and Paula Hamilton on contemporary historical consciousness in Australia. They noted the importance of place, locality, material culture and the site of the family in exploring and teaching about the past (Ashton and Hamilton, 2003, 27). This fudging of boundaries between history and memory/public and personal has also been broached by Graeme Davison who has argued that public history had existed in Australia before the actual phrase was coined. He noted the work of the journalist Charles Bean, an ‘untrained historian’ who became the oﬃcial Australian historian of World War I and instigated the ANZAC myth and national legend of the ‘digger’ (White, 1981, 125–39).3 For Davison, the term ‘public history’ can be interpreted in several ways, including the idea of history being created by ‘a disinterested expert at the service of the public’, as well as an emphasis on popular history with an historian acting as ‘advocate for history’s losers’, and the application of the past to the present in the creation of public policy (Davison, 1998; 2000). This recognition of the erosion of rigid boundaries, of the elision between the personal

2 3

The ‘Enola Gay’ was the B-29 ‘Superfortress’ used to drop the ﬁrst atomic bomb on Hiroshima in August 1945. ANZAC – Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. 61

T A R C

H I and the public, has also been carefully expressed by David Glassberg in his own work which discusses the importance of place in the construction of pasts. For him the relationship between historians and the public will not be bridged by historians reaching out to the public but by ‘reaching in to discover the humanity they share’. The recognition of the historian’s – as much as the public’s – personal need for the past is the key to diﬀerent understandings of the past (Glassberg, 2001, 210).

Eliding the Personal and Public in Museum Practice In reﬂecting upon his work as a public historian working with orality and memory, Michael Frisch has deﬁned memory at the heart of the past’s place in the present, exploring the ways in which it can: be tapped, unleashed and mobilized through oral and public history to stand as an alternative to imposed orthodoxy and oﬃcially sanctioned versions of historical reality; it is a route to a broadly distributed authority for making new sense of the past in the present (Frisch, 1990, xxiii). This notion of fudging the concept of authority embodied in conventional museum practice has been explored by various practitioners. The Museum of London, for example, has a tradition of employing oral testimony in its exhibitions. It has also positioned itself as a facilitator in contemporary debates and issues aﬀecting the lives of Londoners, including running small temporary exhibitions to invite debate on contentious issues such as drug-taking in the metropolis. In contrast to some museums, it has a policy – and long practice – of encouraging depositions from members of the public. This led, for example, to the museum being oﬀered the wonderful collection of the Suﬀragee Fellowship. As I have discussed elsewhere, women campaigners for the vote for women had seen their political actions as historic moments which needed to be recorded contemporaneously (Kean, 1990; 2005). The transitory act of advertising a meeting by chalking on a wall, or making chalk pavement drawings as part of a self-denial week, became preserved as potentially historically important through being photographed – and the photographs kept. The uses of professionally made banners, distinctive colours, badges and ephemera were employed to publicize the cause. Aer the vote was partially achieved in 1918, the Suﬀragee Fellowship was established to ‘perpetuate the memory of the pioneers – connected with women’s emancipation and especially with the suﬀrage campaign’ (Cazalet Keir, nd). Particularly interested in promoting the work of the militant suﬀrage organizations, the Women’s Social and Political Union and the Women’s Freedom League, the Suﬀragee Fellowship took upon itself the role of public historian of the militant suﬀrage movement. It campaigned for diﬀerent forms of public commemoration, maintaining and developing the collective memory of suﬀrage through a newsleer, Calling all Women, and through its own small ‘museum’ (Figure 3.4).

62

P

P H

Figure 3.4

Calling all Women, newsleer of the Suﬀragee Fellowship

The Suﬀragee Fellowship oﬀered its collection in 1947 to the Museum of London to ensure that it would ‘appeal to a wider public than which it now obtains in its present home’ (Mayo, 1947). Encouraged by the museum curators, the Suﬀragee Fellowship members themselves carried out the initial cataloguing of the exhibits to ensure accuracy (Kean, 2005). Although the Museum of London curator responsible for the collection in the early 1950s did not have speciﬁc expertise in this ﬁeld (being a medievalist by background), he was enthusiastic about the collection, deﬁning it as a: … collection of literature, propagandist material and relics of militancy and prison-life, diligently collected and cherished by these ladies, [which] represents in a very complete fashion, every aspect, period and personality

63

T A R C

H I of the movement. … From a ‘business’ point of view, the material has that sort of date and slightly sensational character that together provoke a lively interest amongst visitors ...4 These suﬀrage public historians (and the press) were positive about the initial displays when the museum reopened in London’s Kensington Palace in 1951. Stella Newsome, the honorary secretary, went so far as to declare that the relics had been ‘admirably displayed’ and shown to beer advantage than in their previous location (Kean, 2005). The suﬀrage collection and deposition are not only an example of the popular collecting of amateurs such as that analysed by Susan Pearce or Paul Martin (Martin, 1999; Pearce, 1997), but also of an active collection policy embraced by the ‘oﬃcial’ curatorial staﬀ in the late 1940s and 50s (Sassoon, 2003). This collaboration between the collecting practices and categorization of both popular practitioners and oﬃcial museum curators has resulted in a display of nationally and internationally signiﬁcant artefacts for a wide audience. This was not a form of public history-making in the sense of ‘professional historians’ presenting material to the public, but of protagonists themselves seeking to deﬁne their own history – and ensuring that their own role in changing women’s position was publicly recognized. In doing this, the Suﬀragee Fellowship considered oﬃcial forms of historical representation as appropriate vehicles for the incorporation of their personal pasts within the history of the nation. Similar examples of aempts to recognize both the knowledge of nonprofessionals and to work outside the boundaries of mere ‘access’ might also be seen in an innovative exhibition at the Museum of London in 2000 when collectors were invited to display their own artefacts within the museum space. In the last few years the Museum has also actively intervened in the creation of contemporary commemoration. In particular it hosted an anniversary ceremony for the relatives of those killed in the London bombings of July 2005, and also publicly displayed the personal wrien testimonies by bereaved relatives of their deceased family and friends. Its latest temporary exhibition, ‘Belonging: voices of London’s refugees’, is an ambitious project designed to privilege personal experiences of being a refugee in London and to oﬀer diﬀerent perspectives ‘on what it means to belong’. Its intention is to change visitors’ perceptions of refugees by listening to taped and printed extracts of diﬀerent life stories, as the commentary on the walls of the exhibition from the curator, Annee Day, explains: ‘We can only move forward if we take the time to listen’ (Day, 2006). Some 150 life story interviews were collected with the involvement of various ethnic minority groups, specialist refugee organizations and trained representatives of diﬀerent communities. Objects outside the museum’s collection that have personal meaning for individual refugees, such as a toy brought from Argentina, are displayed as memory objects rather than intrinsically

4

Leer from Mr Spencer to Mr Jogden, Corporation Museum, Keighley, oﬀering, with the agreement of the Suﬀragee Fellowship, duplicates from the collection, which related to the movement in Yorkshire. Leer dated 11 February 1954 (Museum of London: Correspondence in Objects relating to Suﬀragee Movement ﬁle Acc 50.82/1 – 154). 64

P

P H

Figure 3.5

Advert for ‘Hello Sailor!’ outside Merseyside Maritime Museum, November 2006

valuable artefacts (Kavanagh, 2000). Challenging the expected public authority of museum practice, the exhibition starts with the statement that it is ‘not a history of refugees in London’. It suggests, if not unmediated material, at least negotiated space in the sharing of voices and memories. While noting that certain experiences and concerns are held in common, ‘each person’s story is unique’. However, while seeking to validate personal experience within the public space of the museum, it juxtaposes this to a conventional history of dates and legislation spelt out along the exhibition’s wall. Thus, on one level, the stories do remain at the personal level. 65

T A R C

H I Rather than becoming a framework for developing a sort of history which sees the personal as a starting point for a diﬀerent type of public history, ‘history’ and ‘personal story’ are counterposed. The oen moving stories thus seem to be just that – stories – rather than material for creating new histories which challenge stereotyped ways of seeing refugees, and suggest alternative understandings. Personal voices are also the starting point for a 2006–07 Merseyside Maritime Museum touring exhibition co-curated by Jo Stanley and Charloe Stead (Figure 3.5). ‘Hello sailor! Gay life on the ocean wave’ aims to ‘tell the story of how gay men created an environment where they could express themselves without discrimination’. Here oral testimony from seafarers on merchant ships, especially passenger ships, from the 1950s to the 1980s, together with their personal artefacts, such as props or adverts for crew shows, is displayed. Period newspaper cuings of homosexual discrimination on land contrast with the apparently separate world of life on board. Given the unoﬃcial nature of the subject maer – male homosexuality at sea was illegal until 1999 – personal stories and material have, inevitably, substituted for an oﬃcial story. The very subject maer invites the use of oral history as the key source and certainly an exhibition on gay life at sea could not have been mounted without this. Here oﬃcial maritime history, as conveyed in the main body of the museum, is implicitly challenged by the hidden and personal experiences of gay seafarers.

Orality, Memory and New Directions for Public History The challenge of exploring the relationship between personal stories and the construction of broader, public, histories has been at the forefront of the work of Alessandro Portelli in his studies of Italian post-war politics. He combines his professorship at La Sapienza University in Rome with the role of the Mayor of Rome’s representative for historical memory. Portelli has gone beyond early notions of oral history as an ‘authentic’ recording of people’s lives to an exploration of the relationship between the interviewer, conventionally the historian, and interviewee, conventionally the subject. For Portelli, both participants are subjects. There is no oral history before the encounter of these two diﬀerent subjects, ‘one with a story to tell and the other with a history to reconstruct’ (Portelli, 1997, 9). His subject maer is neither personal memory per se, nor the validity of personal narratives, but the way in which collective memory is fashioned from the personal. Thus Portelli explores personal and public histories, seeking to bring misunderstandings and misrememberings by groups and communities into the central stage of understanding the way in which the Italian central and local state have aempted to re-write the past for the present. The impetus for his 2003 work, The Order Has Been Carried Out: History, Memory, and Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome, was the election in 1994 of Silvio Berlusconi at the head of a right-wing coalition which, Portelli (2003, 12) argued, ‘challenged the meaning of the Resistance as the foundation of the Italian state’. In 2002, the government had wished to purge history textbooks of anti-Fascist ‘bias’ (ibid.), leading Portelli to revisit the way in which memory of Italy’s Partisan 66

P

P H history was being re-worked. Major historical events, such as the Nazi massacre at Fosse Ardeatine, have been re-appraised in the light of the oral testimony and collective memory of hundreds of Roman citizens. Here the personal and the public are elided, rather than counterposed. One initiative is a series of Sunday morning public lectures, ‘Lessons of history’, held under the aegis of the Rome local government, on nine important dates in the city’s history, including that of the Nazi massacres at Fosse Ardeatine on 24 March 1944. As Portelli has commented, ‘le Fosse Ardeatine restano una ferita aperta nella memoria e nei sentimenti della cia’ (<www.auditorium.com> 2006). Here the past is being ‘presented’ to the public through open and free lectures and a website outlining the importance of particular dates. But this public history has also been created through the current memory of the very inhabitants of the city itself, the massacre being seen as an ‘open wound in the memory and emotions’ of the city itself. Increasingly, personal stories, memory, artefacts and oral testimony have been recognized as potentially contributing to a collective narrative of the past which goes beyond the idea of simply presenting the past to the public. Personal lives can also provide the subject maer of public histories, created outside academic institutions, which engage with the making of history now (Kean, 2004b, 14). A greater acknowledgment of the importance of personal experience and the possibilities for using this both to interrogate previous histories and to create new insights into the past can help instigate new forms of historical writing and presentation. In turn, such an approach may help provide new insights into the relationship between the past and the present.

References Ashton, P. (2005), ‘Vox Pop’, Oral History Journal 33: Spring, 37. Ashton, P. and Hamilton, P. (2003), ‘At Home with the Past’, Australian Cultural History 22, 5–30. Black, J. (2005), Using History (London: Hodder Arnold). Briggs, J. (ed.) (1822), The Lonsdale Magazine and Kendal Repository III: XXIX, 31 May (Kendal: J. Briggs). Cazalet Keir, T. (nd), I Knew Mrs Pankhurst (London: Suﬀragee Fellowship). Dalley, B. and Phillips, J. (2001), Going Public: The Changing Face of New Zealand History (Auckland: Auckland University Press). Davison, G. (1998), ‘Public History’, in G. Davison, J. Hirst and S. Macintyre (eds), The Oxford Companion to Australian History (Melbourne: Oxford University Press), 532–3. Davison, G. (2000), The Use and Abuse of Australian History (St Leonards, New South Wales: Allen and Unwin). Edwards, B. (2000), ‘Avebury and Not-so-ancient-places: The Making of the English Heritage Landscape’, in H. Kean, P. Martin and S. Morgan, Seeing History: Public History in Britain Now (London: Francis Boutle), 65–80.

67

T A R C

H I Elder, M. (1992), The Slave Trade and the Economic Development of Eighteenth- century Lancaster (Krumlin: Ryburn). Farrer, W. and Brownbill, J. (1914), The Victoria History of the County of Lancaster vol. VIII (London: Constable). Frisch, M. (1990), A Shared Authority: Essays on the Cra and Meaning of Oral History (Albany: State University of New York Press). Gardner, J.B. (2004), ‘Contested Terrain: History, Museums, and the Public’, The Public Historian 2:4, 11–21. Glassberg, D. (2001), Sense of History: The Place of the Past in American Life (Amherst: University of Massachuses Press). Green, H. (1992), ‘A Critique of the Professional Public History Movement’, in P.K. Leﬄer and J. Brent (eds), Public History Readings (Malabar, Florida: Krieger Publishing Company), 121–6 (originally published in 1981: Radical History Review 25, 164–71). Hodgkin, K. and Radstone, S. (2003), Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory (London: Routledge). Jones, D.C. (revised Price, J.) (1978), Industrial Lancaster. A Survey (Lancaster: Lancaster Museum). Jordanova, L. (2000), History in Practice (London: Arnold). Kavanagh, G. (2000), Dream Spaces: Memory and the Museum (London: Leicester University Press). Kean, H. (1990), Deeds not Words (London: Pluto Press). Kean, H. (2004a), ‘Public History and Raphael Samuel: A Forgoen Radical Pedagogy?’ Public History Review 11, 51–62. Kean, H. (2004b), London Stories: Personal Lives, Public Histories (London: Rivers Oram Press). Kean, H. (2005), ‘Public History and Popular Memory. Issues in the Commemoration of the British Militant Suﬀrage Movement’, Women’s History Review 14:3/4, 581–602. Kean, H., Martin P. and Morgan, S. (eds) (2000), Seeing History: Public History in Britain Now (London: Francis Boutle). Liddington, J. (2002), ‘What is Public History? Publics and Their Pasts, Meanings and Practices’, Oral History Journal 30:1, 83–93. Martin, P. (1999), Popular Collecting and the Everyday Self: The Reinvention of Museums (London, Leicester University Press). Mayo, W. (1947), Leer from Winifred Mayo, acting chairman of Suﬀragee Fellowship, to Director of the London Museum, 22 November 1947 (Museum of London archive: Objects relating to suﬀragee movement Acc 50.82/1 – 154). Pearce, S. (1997), Collecting in Contemporary Practice (London: Sage). Portelli, A. (1997), The Bale of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press). Portelli, A. (2003), The Order Has Been Carried Out: History, Memory, and Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Rice, A. (2003), Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic (London: Continuum). Rosenzweig, R. and Thelen, D. (1998), Presence of the Past. Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press). 68

P

P H Samuel, R. (1976), ‘Local History and Oral History’, History Workshop Journal 1, 191–208. Samuel, R. (1994), Theatres of Memory (London: Verso). Sassoon, J. (2003), ‘Phantoms of Remembrance: Libraries and Archives as “the Collective Memory”’, Public History Review 10, 40–60. Slave Trade Arts Memorial Project Lancaster (2003), STAMP ﬂier (Lancaster: Lancaster City Museum). Stanley, J. (2000), ‘Puing Gender into Seafaring: Representing Women in Public Maritime History’, in H. Kean, P. Martin and S. Morgan (eds), Seeing History: Public History in Britain Now (London: Francis Boutle), 81–104. Vanderstel, D. (2005), ‘Vox Pop’, Oral History Journal 33: Spring, 32. White, R. (1981), Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688–1980 (St Leonards, New South Wales: Allen and Unwin). Wilkinson, E. (1982), The Port of Lancaster (ed. E. Tyson) (Lancaster: Lancaster Museum).

Websites <www.auditorium.com> accessed 30 November 2006. <www.Lancashire.gov.uk> 24 February 2005, ‘News: pedal back through History’, accessed 30 November 2006. <www.lancaster.gov.uk>, ‘STAMP unveils memorial “Captured Africans” 23 September 2005’, accessed 30 November 2006.

69

This page intentionally left blank

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

PART II MARKERS OF HERITAGE AND IDENTITY

This page intentionally left blank

4

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

‘Natural’ Landscapes in the Representation of National Identity Kenneth R. Olwig

‘Natural’ landscapes are central themes in representations of national identity. Their power lies in the idea that nature, commonly understood as the opposite of culture, can nevertheless provide a source of human identity. National identity can thereby be seen to be a heritage of nature, rather than culture, and this, in turn, lends legitimacy to national identity by suggesting that it is natural, rather than artiﬁcial or unnatural. Because modern nation-states are largely made up of an amalgam of ethnicities and cultures living within a large territorial entity, they constitute an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 1991) in which it is not bonds of family, ethnicity or spatial propinquity that tie people together, but the notion of a shared national identity rooted in abstractions such as ‘nature’. If, however, people can be convinced that the fact of having lived one’s life within the borders of a given nation-state means that one’s identity has been shaped by the nature within those bounds, it is possible to create a uniﬁed national identity as part of an imagined national community that, simultaneously, can be opposed to the identities of other nations. The idea that ‘natural’ landscapes can shape national identity is enhanced by the underlying link between ideas of the national, the native and the natural, in which the preﬁx nat refers to a notion of birthing (as in natal). The nation is thus, by implication, made up of the natives who have been born, as a community, of the nature of a particular place, and it is this heritage of nature that gives the nation its common identity (Olwig, 1993). The link between nature and nativity is problematic, however, in situations where the present territory of the nationstate has been appropriated at some point in time through the colonization of areas belonging to a previous native population. This has occurred, as shall be seen, in places as widely dispersed in location and time as ancient Rome, medieval Sweden, Renaissance Britain and modern America. In this chapter, I will ﬁrst explore the ways in which the link between national identity and nature has been constructed and then consider the ways in which

T A R C

H I the problem of colonization has been dealt with. My task is to focus upon ‘representations’ of nature by examining artistic representations (literary and visual) as well as related forms of representation such as the map. I will concentrate upon the forms of nature that ﬁgure prominently both in the formal and popular educational arena, where national identity building oen takes place, and in the area of the arts and leers, including landscape gardening.

‘Constructing’ a National Identity – a Sleight of Hand? A great number of national songs sing the praises of a nation’s natural landscape, as in the case of America the Beautiful which celebrates the country’s ‘purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain’ stretching from ‘sea to shining sea’ (Bates, 1974 [orig. 1895]). The number of public buildings, including national museums and theatres that are decorated with landscape images of natural scenes, is similarly large. There is, therefore, also a considerable body of academic literature illuminating the role of diﬀering forms of artistic representation in shaping a link between national identity and nature (Novak, 1980). Very few scholars, however, have considered the ‘sleight of hand’ necessary to make people imagine and feel that enormously diverse physical landscapes, composed of generic natural forms, are the source of a unique and uniﬁed heritage and national identity (Cosgrove, 1984; Olwig, 2002a). This may be because it is somewhat oﬀ-puing to entertain the idea that national identities, for which countless numbers of people have died in countless national wars, are, in fact, the outcome of a ‘sleight of hand’ by which these identities have been ‘constructed’. The whole notion of ‘construction’ suggests calculated Machiavellian design and invention that is hard to accept, in part because it is diﬃcult to believe that something that seems so natural, and compelling, as the close identiﬁcation between nation and nature, has been constructed, as by an architect or engineer on a drawing board. It should be recognized, however, that governments have oen had explicit educational policies regarding the propagation of national identity, and that spindoctoring and propaganda have long existed in one form or another. I nevertheless put ‘constructed’ in quotes because I would like to think the sleight of hand of artistic representation is ultimately closer to Pygmalion than to Frankenstein. In the Greek myth, Pygmalion was a sculptor who sculpted a beautiful woman in ivory. Aer the artist falls in love with the statue, it is then miraculously made to come alive by Aphrodite as the ‘my fair lady’ of the artist’s imagination. Thus, even an artwork may be constructed using highly conscious methods for creating shape, form and illusion. A successful artwork, however, ultimately comes alive, and takes on a life of its own that is not constructed but nourished by the experience of art. In this sense the national identiﬁcation with nature can be seen as a creature of art that has come alive and is expressive of beauty within a national community. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that nationalism also has qualities more representative of Dr Frankenstein’s monster than of Pygmalion’s ivory ideal of beauty come alive. 74

‘N’ L R

N

I The line of argument taken here will be, ﬁrst, to elucidate the character of the sleight of hand by which nature comes to be seen as a foundation of national identity and community. Since it is diﬃcult to convey the way this linkage is constructed, and the reason why it is eﬀective, I will ﬁrst look at a particularly ‘pedagogical’ example from Sweden. I will then, going backward in time, examine the broader background for the Swedish case, drawing on examples from America, Britain and ancient Rome.

The Swedish Example How, one might ask, is it possible for living, mobile, thinking human beings to identify with natural physical landscapes consisting largely of inanimate material locked in place? And how can an assemblage of mountains, plains and other more or less generic forms of nature come to be seen as being expressive of the unique character of a particular people? The answer lies largely in the use of two related tools, both of which were developed into their modern form in conjunction with the rise of the modern nation-state in the Renaissance. They are the map and the pictorial representation of landscape as scenery. The role of the map and landscape scenery are ﬁrst illustrated with a modern example from Sweden, and then traced back in time and to diﬀerent places. Torsten Hägerstrand, the well-known Swedish geographer, has evocatively described the scene of his early twentieth-century childhood schoolroom, which he believed signiﬁcantly aﬀected his perception of the world (Hägerstrand, 1983; 1995 [orig. 1984]). Two things featured prominently as icons on the wall of the schoolroom – landscape images of Sweden and maps of Sweden. The two worked together to create an identity in his mind between the appearance of Sweden as perceived horizontally, as in daily life, and the outline of Sweden as seen when looking straight down from on high. The landscape images in the schoolroom were probably images of diﬀering places at diﬀerent stages of economic development which, when seen together, illustrated the changing stages of development of Sweden from a poor agricultural country to the rich industrial nation it hoped to (and did) become. Hägerstrand’s observations are of interest not just because his ideas have aﬀected the thinking of geographers and sociologists, but also because the schoolroom of his childhood so much resembles schoolrooms the world over. The sleight of hand occurs when the children synthesize the particular landscape scenes and the national map in the schoolroom into a uniﬁed whole. This sleight of hand is close, in form, to the illusion that we experience in a cinema, where a series of framed pictures are moved so rapidly in front of our eyes that we seem to experience a ﬂow of continuous movement in time within a contiguous space. The illusion is enormously eﬀective, but it is an illusion. The ability to create an illusion that is as convincing as that in a modern cinema is something that took centuries to develop. It was not just a question of technique but also one of developing the public’s ability to comprehend and want such an illusion. Even today, a ﬁlm, the watching of which can seem natural to an adult, can be confusing to a child who has not learned the conventions of ﬁlm-making, and has trouble linking together

75

T A R C

H I the diﬀerent ‘cuts’ made by the director. The Swedish case provides a particularly good example of how children have been taught to make such connections between the perspective of the map and the landscape scene because a Swedish author, of international importance, has wrien a book that perfectly exempliﬁes how these perspectives are woven together through literary narrative and images, and through the illustrations those images inspired. In 1902, the Swedish teachers’ association commissioned Selma Lagerlöf, a former teacher, who was to win the Nobel Prize in literature in 1909, to write a geography book for use in schools. In 1906 and 1907 she published the result in two instalments as Nils Holgerssons Underbara Resa Genom Sverige, which directly translates as ‘Nils Holgersson’s Wonderful Journey through Sweden’ (Lagerlöf, 1995). On the cover of a classic illustrated edition of the book, we see a tiny boy riding on the back of a goose ﬂying over and through a landscape scene of mountains in the north of Sweden (for an English translation with these illustrations, see Lagerlöf, 1992). The cover by Lars Klinting for Lagerlöf’s book draws the imagination into the landscape scene and out into the distance. It represents the northern end of a story that begins at the southern tip of Sweden where a naughty farm boy, Nils Holgersson, who is fond of teasing the animals, makes the mistake of teasing an elf, and is himself turned into an elf. In this way he aains the power to communicate with animals and thereby learns to identify with them. A ﬂock of wild geese, which forage to this day in great numbers in southern Sweden, ﬂy over Nils’s family’s farm on their way north to their summer nesting place. The sight of the ﬂock tempts the farm’s tame goose to join them, and soon Nils is oﬀ to join the ﬂock on the back of the goose. The story then follows the path of the ﬂock to its nesting home amongst the northern mountains at Kebnekajse, Sweden’s highest mountain, and back again through each of Sweden’s ancient provinces, called landskap (landscape) in Swedish, to the low-lying plains of southern Sweden. (The word landscape is spelled diﬀerently in the diﬀerent Germanic languages, for example, landscha in German, landskab in Danish. For a discussion of the meaning of landscape in the Germanic languages, including English, see Olwig, 2002a.) These landskap provinces were founded upon independent bodies of law based on local custom, and even though they were supplanted by regional bodies controlled by the central state in the Renaissance, they continue to retain importance as loci of local regional identities to this day. Nils is from the landskap province of Scania and during the early twentieth century he, like most people, would have had only nominal knowledge of the other provinces encompassed by the Swedish state. His journey with the geese, however, takes him (and the children who imagine that they are with him) to virtually all these provinces, and when he returns to Scania, and is transformed back into a full-sized boy, he has learnt to see his province as part of the larger whole that is encompassed by the territory and nature of Sweden. The geographer Yi-Fu Tuan has argued that the concept of landscape is ‘diaphonic’ because it combines ‘two dissimilar appearances or ideas’, thereby generating a ‘tensive meaning’. This tension derives from the diﬀering meanings of landscape as being, on the one hand, a regional ‘domain’ and, on the other, visual ‘scenery’ (Tuan, 1978, 363–72, 366, 370). The diﬀerence between the two senses is 76

‘N’ L R

N

I well expressed in Dr Johnson’s classic dictionary, where he distinguishes between landscape as: 1) ‘a region’; and 2) ‘a picture, representing an extent of space, with the various objects in it’ (Johnson, 1755 [1968]: ‘landscape’). A Swedish landskap is a region or a place; however, a map or a scene of landscape represented in perspective is ‘an extent of space, with the various objects in it’. The story of Nils Holgersson, together with its illustrations, shows how an artwork can accomplish the trick of linking the two diﬀerent senses of landscape as represented, in this case, by the landskap domains of Sweden, on the one hand, and the landscape scenes seen from the back of the geese, on the other. Lagerlöf does this by using nature, in the shape of these native-born geese, to provide alternating perspectives on Sweden ranging from the lowest and ﬂaest plains to the highest mountains. In the landscape image, the eye is drawn out to the horizon and beyond. It is thus, in principle, inﬁnite in depth and this means that it does not clearly indicate where the space of a given nation begins or ends. This inﬁnite space of the landscape scene, however, is complemented by the image of the map, which typically represents the world in terms of bounded organic shapes, so that school pupils, who see the map of their nation on the wall of the schoolroom, soon form a mental image of the shape of that nation, and the territories it encloses within it. This shape can even take on a certain personal meaning, or personality, since people have an ability to see shapes as recognizable wholes (as in the case of constellations in the night sky or the shape of clouds). This is illustrated by a poem called The Map of Sweden by the Swedish poet Carl Snoilsky, which prefaces the story of Nils Holgersson. Here he tells that the map on his childhood schoolroom wall resembled a stretched-out lion to his childhood eyes (it looks more like a bear to me) (Snoilsky, 1995). The tendency to see the shape of a nation as a body-like organic whole is enhanced by the fact that many national maps simply leave out adjacent states, or represent them as empty space. A typical map of contemporary Sweden will leave out Norway, with which it shares the Scandinavian Peninsula, just as a typical map of Norway will leave out Sweden. This looks absurd in the eyes of a foreigner, but looks natural in the eyes of the native who sees this ﬂoating shape daily in various media such as newspaper weather maps.

The Map in the Landscape Scene The techniques for making perspective drawing grew out of the techniques of surveying and map-making (Cosgrove, 1984; Edgerton, 1975; 1987). Many Renaissance and Enlightenment atlases, in fact, include both maps and landscape scenes, and in these atlases one can see that the diﬀerence between the top down projection of the map and the landscape scene is basically a question of the angle of projection. The more horizontal a projection becomes the more the map starts to look like a landscape scene. The landscape scene, however, not only projects into inﬁnite space, it also encompasses an inﬁnity of scales. Thus, whereas a given map is normally only drawn to one scale, the landscape scene draws the eye out from 77

T A R C

H I

Figure 4.1

The Swedish twenty-crown note

large-scale foreground objects to progressively smaller-scale objects in the distance. In this way the viewer gains a perspective on the scene that uniﬁes many scales of experience into a single whole. Children viewing the cover of Nils Holgersson can thus easily imagine themselves in the place of the large-scale ﬁgure of Nils ﬂying in the foreground, while simultaneously envisioning the possibility of occupying the spaces that stretch out before him. A comparison of the scene on the cover of Nils Holgersson with a similar scene from the story that now decorates the Swedish 20-crown note (Figure 4.1) illustrates how the book works to synthesize diﬀering forms of visual representation to create an image of Sweden as a uniﬁed national entity, that is one with nature encompassed by the space of its territory. The picture on the 20-crown note looks at ﬁrst glance like a map, but upon closer examination it gradates into a landscape scene that extends to the distance. The scene on the note thus manages to synthesize the bounded spaces of the shapes on the map with the open horizon of the landscape scene. Looking down at this scene of Scania, the eye is thus drawn into the contiguous space of Sweden. As Snoilsky puts it in the prefatory poem: ‘At the map we young ones stared, and our thoughts were egged on to walk the long way from Ystad to Torneå.’ Sweden is thus transformed into a uniﬁed whole in the imagination, both through the illustrations in the book and by the narrative following the seasonal ﬂight of the birds. The linking of nature and nation in the tale of Nils Holgersson seems to be a rather unproblematic way of geing children to identify with their home country. The situation, however, becomes somewhat more complex if one takes a closer look at what is actually being uniﬁed.

78

‘N’ L R

N

I Mapping the Imperial Landscape The Nils Holgersson book, though highly eﬀective, nevertheless represents something of a sleight of hand, because the Sweden that is uniﬁed as a natural whole by the story and its illustrations is actually somewhat fragmented. Thus, the fertile plains of southern Sweden, where the story begins, are part of the ancient Danish landskab (Danish spelling) province of Scania (Skåne), which was appropriated by Sweden in 1658 aer defeating Denmark in war. Scania, as a landskab province, had its own body of laws based on custom, which meant that it had a speciﬁc cultural identity. Though it had, and retains, its own regional identity, it also had much in common with other Danish landskab provinces, such as Zealand, where the Danish capital lies, which is visible from Scania across a narrow straight. Stockholm, by contrast, is many hundred kilometres away. It remains diﬃcult for many Scanians to identify entirely with the wilder nature of northern Sweden, as opposed to the cultivated nature of southern Sweden which is similar to that of Denmark (Germundsson, 2005; see also Sundin, 2005). Likewise, not all would agree that the north of Sweden is a ‘natural’ part of the Swedish nation-state either. The Sámi people (known as the Laps in Lagerlöf’s day), who live in much of the north, thus see themselves as the indigenous population of the area they call ‘Sámi land’ and regard the Swedes as later intruders. The tale of Nils Holgersson illustrates the complexity of the problems that arise in situations where the present territory of a nation-state has been appropriated at some point in time from a native population. One solution to this problem is to have a national boundary that can be perceived as being natural, so that it predates any population group living within its boundary. As has been seen, the map in tandem with the landscape scene provides a means of linking together places, with disparate cultures, histories and physical environments, into what appears to be a uniﬁed organic whole. The power of the map and landscape scene, however, is signiﬁcantly strengthened if the border of the nation is not just a line on paper, but is also marked by a clear, ‘natural’, elemental divide, particularly that between land and water.

The Water Monster in the Map The map represents territories as enclosed organic wholes with which people can imaginatively identify. The line of the map itself can, in some instances, be enough to demarcate the natural space of the nation. In nineteenth-century America, there was thus a political slogan, ‘54, 40 or ﬁght’, which referred to the US demand that the western portion of the northern border with Canada be set at that latitude. If, however, the line on the map also follows a ‘natural’ border, especially a border marked by water, then the shape of the nation seems to be preordained by nature, and hence natural. This is why ‘America’ (meaning the United States) is described as stretching from ‘sea to shining sea’ in the national song. It would be hard to imagine a song describing the nation as stretching from the 30th parallel to the glorious 48th!

79

T A R C

H I Sweden is bounded largely by mountainous terrain to the west, and prior to 1658 it was bordered largely by an extent of forest to the south. In neither case is there a clear-cut elemental boundary. By 1658 the Swedish state had become a pioneer in the mapping of its territory, and the cartographic imagination this stimulated would have made it seem natural for the borderline of the national map to become congruent with the clearly demarcated natural border between land and sea. Looking at the map of Scandinavia, this would mean that Sweden ought to encompass the Danish provinces in the south of the peninsula and all of Norway. For a period Stockholm actually seemed destined to be the capital of a Nordic empire that ﬁrst swallowed Scania and adjacent Danish provinces in the south in 1658, and then incorporated Norway in 1814. It is, of course, a maer of perspective whether or not one views this kind of imperial expansion as being ‘natural’ or ‘monstrous’, but the Norwegians, who celebrated the centenary of their independence from Sweden in 2005, certainly do not see their century-long union with Sweden as being ordained by nature. It is also interesting to note that one of the motivations for commissioning the book that became Nils Holgersson was to provide children with an image of the Swedish nation that could replace that of the lost Swedish Nordic Empire. Even without a water boundary, Sweden could still be seen to be naturally bounded because it stretched ‘between mountain and sea, on the Scandinavian peninsula’, as Snoilsky puts it in his poem. And even if this more limited image of Sweden was not as aggressive as the imperial one, it nevertheless could inspire the desire to defend the homeland. Snoilsky thus ends the prefatory poem with the wish that the map on the schoolroom wall might ‘impress upon the child’s breast’ a ‘living and warm picture of Sweden’ that the child could carry into adulthood ‘and die to protect’! One might speak of a monster in the map when it helps inspire nations to engage in wars in order to conquer what is imagined to be a natural space, as when leaders of the United States described the country’s westward expansion to the Paciﬁc as a ‘manifest destiny’, ordained by Nature and God. Like the Norwegians, the Scanians and the Sámi, neither the Native Americans nor the Mexicans saw their incorporation into an expanding US nation-state as being ‘natural’. The opposite side of the coin, however, is the question of the identity of the nation that takes over the territory of an earlier native population. How could, for example, the European selers of America come to feel that they had a natural legitimate right to think of themselves as natives of America, when they well knew that the continent was populated by another people prior to their arrival? One solution that we have seen is to claim that there is a ‘manifest destiny’ for a given naturally deﬁned geographical area to be seled by a single given nation. But this alone does not lead to identiﬁcation with the nature of an area. The map and the landscape scene are clearly eﬀective, but in the end they only encompass the space of the nation. In order to understand how a nation can identify with the nature of areas it has appropriated, it is also necessary to incorporate time.

80

‘N’ L R

N

I Time, Nature and Nation At the outset I noted that the word nature, like that of nation, originates from a Latin root meaning birth, as in natal. The notion of identity, which derives from the Latin idem, meaning ‘the same’, is oen applied to people in the sense of ‘unity and persistence of personality’ (Merriam-Webster, 2000). ‘Nature’ and ‘identity’ are thus almost synonymous in the primordial sense that a person’s nature, or identity, can be seen to be something that remains constant from birth, even though the person ages and changes through the stages of human development from childhood to adulthood to old age. In this way a person’s identity and nature in the sense of ‘the fundamental character, disposition, or temperament of a living being usually innate and unchangeable’ (Merriam-Webster, 2000) is virtually identical. As we have seen, the idea of nature suggests that one’s natural identity springs from birth. The same idea applies to the identiﬁcation of the nation with the nature of its territory. The natural identity of the nation is established at its birth, when people are living in a natural state, as in: ‘a simpliﬁed mode of life especially as lived out of doors apart from communities and other civilizing and restraining inﬂuences’ (MerriamWebster, 2000). It would be ‘unnatural’, however, for a society, like a child, not to develop through stages of growth. It is this process of natural growth that is followed by Nils Holgersson and the geese when they ﬂy south from the wilds of the north to the cultivated plains of Scania, the epitome of modern agricultural Sweden. Holgersson also grows as a person through this process. Since the selement of Nordic peoples in the central parts of Sweden belongs to pre-history, and there is no clear presence of prior selers, the Swedes are probably justiﬁed in seeing the core of their nation as something that has grown out of its ‘foetal earth’, as Snoilsky calls it in the prefatory poem. This is clearly not the case, however, when the Swedes incorporate the northern territories that were seled by the Sámi well before the coming of the Nordic peoples. In order to de-emphasize the problem of seeing the Swedes as colonizers of the north, Lagerlöf emphasizes the wild character of the northlands, with their high mountains, and gives the ‘Laps’ only a brief presence as a natural part, together with their wild reindeer, of a wild landscape. In this way the northern regions, including the Sámi, represent the wild original natural state of a nation that the Swedes subsequently changed, through natural stages of development, into a modern nation-state. Today, large stretches of this area are preserved for their natural characteristics in Swedish national parks (Mels, 1999), even though much of the area might be regarded as a Sámi cultural landscape. For the Sámi there would thus be nothing ‘natural’ about the area, deﬁned as wilderness, because for them the nature of the place is deﬁned through dwelling (Ingold, 2000). Due to the genius of Selma Lagerlöf, the Swedish case presented here exempliﬁes, particularly clearly, the way an identiﬁcation between nature and nation has developed in many parts of the world through the combined eﬀect of the use of maps, landscape scenery and narrative to construct an image of a nation’s land. In the following, the examples of America, Rome and Britain are used to show these same basic forms of representation being employed in diﬀering contexts to help generate an identiﬁcation between nature and nation. 81

T A R C

H I America: a ‘Natural’ Born Nation An important predecessor for the Swedish approach to the problem of generating a national identity grounded in the nature of the national territory can be found in the United States of America. At the time Selma Lagerlöf was writing her story, Sweden was being emptied of its population through a massive emigration to America, and the concerned Swedes who encouraged her to write the story wished for a book that would help counter that emigration. One reason for that emigration was perceived to be the contrast between the rigidly class-deﬁned society of Sweden and the more open society of America, where a sense that all equally belonged to the land and nature of the continent countered the class allegiances characteristic of Europe. Lagerlöf’s use of map and landscape scenery to generate a sense of identity between the Swedish nation and nature thus bears a resemblance to their similar use in the USA, where the nation broke with all ties to monarchy and nobility, and took its identity from its continent. (To this day, anyone born on the soil of the United States is a citizen – an ‘American’ rather than a ‘United Statesian’.) This similarity, however, was quite ‘natural’ given the parallels between the Nordic peoples, living on the edge of a forested wilderness populated by primitive nomads, and the situation in America – a parallel that was not lost on the artists and writers of nineteenth-century northern Europe (Novak, 1980). The inspiration for the Swedish national parks may thus have come directly from America, but they were accepted in Sweden because they were developed in a context in which many saw a certain kinship between the American and the Swedish situation. The ‘wild north’ in Sweden, the colonization of which became a national cause in the nineteenth century, is the Swedish equivalent of the American ‘Wild West’. The Wild West, of course, is the area originally seled by Native Americans, then called ‘Indians’, that was colonized largely by selers from Europe in the course of the nineteenth century. By casting the west as wilderness, populated by wild beasts and beastly Indians, the American selers, with roots in many diﬀerent European nations, were enabled to see themselves as a new nation in which the diﬀerent nationalities were reborn as one nation in the wild nature of the continent. The importance of the idea that Americans received their identity from being born out of the continent’s wild nature meant that the United States needed to preserve examples of that wilderness in order to conserve the memory of that birth. This need provided the ideological basis for the nation’s pioneering preservation of large areas of wild nature as national parks beginning in the 1880s, when the wilderness frontier was closing (Olwig, 2002a, Chapter 8). The problem with ‘natural’ national parks, however, is that they are invariably carved from another people’s cultural landscape. The grassy meadows of the US Yellowstone and Yosemite National Parks were thus not the heritage from Nature and God that their promoters claimed, but the result of the native population’s burning and hunting practices. The Native Americans, in turn, were not happy with the loss of their good hunting grounds, and thus the ﬁrst tourists to these ﬁrst national parks needed to be protected from the native population by troops – but this made the ‘Indians’ only seem more savage and wild. The solution to the 82

‘N’ L R

N

I problem of legitimizing the selement of another people’s land by making it seem ‘natural’ has a long history that well preceded the selement of America.

Cyclical Nature It may seem odd that the Americans chose areas characterized by grassy meadowlands to make their ﬁrst national parks rather than, for example, wild mountains. The choice can ultimately be linked to the idea that the birthing process of nature is cyclical not lineal. Nature is thus re-born every spring aer much of it dies in the winter, much as the nation must be continually reborn as its older citizens die of old age. The same idea was applied to civilizations, so that the death of classical Greek civilization was seen to be followed by the birth of Roman civilization, and the death of classical Roman civilization was followed by its rebirth in the Renaissance. America was thus perceived to be a new nation, born of the ‘virgin’ nature of a new continent. This new nation was made up of the people from the ‘aging’ European nations who were born as Americans through the experience of the wild western frontier.

Natural Stages of Development At the time of the selement of America it was an accepted ‘scientiﬁc’ fact, bolstered by works of classical literature and even the Bible, that human society began when people ceased to act like wild savages and learned to domesticate grazing animals (both classical mythology and the Bible saw society as developing from an original Edenic golden age in a pastoral paradise). The next natural stage in this development was seen to be the development of agriculture and ﬁnally the stage of urbanism. These ideas were propagated through the art of landscape painters, whose work is prominently displayed in the Capitol in Washington, as well as by maps and countless narratives of the nation’s progressive frontier selement in fulﬁlment of its ‘manifest destiny’ to sele a continent stretching from sea to shining sea. Today, the more sophisticated technology of the ‘Western’ movie endlessly repeats the central mythic elements of the birth of the American nation: the struggle with the wild Indians; the selement by pastoralist cowboys; the supplanting of the cowboys by farmers; and the growth of great cities. The idea that America was reborn as a nation destined to ﬁll the natural space of the continent, and to grow in natural stages from the wild to the civilized urban, was reinforced by the requisite reading of the Greek and Roman classics in the schools, where Virgil, in particular, described a similar cyclical process of development from a pastoral stage to the urban for Roman society (Olwig, 1984, Chapter 8). Virgil played an important role in the iconography of the new American nation. He is thus cited in the national seal that appears on every dollar bill with the words Novus Ordo Seclorum, ‘A new order of the ages’, referring to the new natural cycle of eras that was believed to begin with the birth of the new American nation.

83

T A R C

H I British Natives The founders of the American nation were inspired by the Greek and Roman classics, but they also learned from their own British heritage and the way Renaissance Britain drew inspiration from the classics in constructing a ‘British’ identity linked to the landscape and nature of their home island. Here the problem was the question of uniting Scotland and Wales within a state ruled from London, England. This became an issue when James VI of Scotland became James I of England (and Wales) in 1603. Now the entire island of Britain had one king, but Scotland and England/Wales were still separate states. How were these diﬀering peoples to see themselves as a single nation? One solution was to argue, with King James, that Britain naturally formed what ought to be a uniﬁed political body because it was a uniﬁed geographical body, demarcated by its coast. Or as he put it: Yea, hath Hee [God] not made vs all in one Island, compassed with one Sea, and of it selfe by nature so indivisible … These two Countries [England and Scotland] being separated neither by Sea, nor great Riuer, Mountaine, nor other strength of nature. ... And now in the end and fullness of time united, the right and title of both in my Person, alike lineally descended of both the Crowns, whereby it is now become like a lile World within it self, being entrenched and fortiﬁed round about with a natural, and yet admirable strong pond or ditch (James, 1918 [orig. 1616]: 271–3). The idea of Britain as a unity of the natural landscape and the people of Britain was also promoted through landscape images, especially in the court theatre. Here the master architect, surveyor and designer Inigo Jones created landscape scenes that reinforced the idea that Britain had naturally developed through stages to its present stage of unity and civilization under the commanding vision of the monarch (Olwig, 2002a). The idea of ‘stages’ of development, in fact, grew out of its use in the theatre (Olwig, 2002b).

Roman Britain Britain was the name given to the island shared by England, Wales and Scotland by the Romans, and the name Britain was revived in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as a way of invoking the aura of ancient Rome when promoting the idea of Britain as a single nation encompassed by the shores of the island. It was the Roman selement of Britain that gave the island its uniﬁed identity, bound to the nature of this natural body, and superseding the identities of its native peoples. The place now called Rome was the native homeland of the Etruscans, who were pushed out by the Romans. How could the Romans then claim to be the natives of Rome and one with the Italian peninsula? The solution for Virgil was to compose a Roman creation narrative, The Aeneid, in which the Romans are described as originating as Greeks from Troy who ﬂee their city aer its conquest (as recounted 84

‘N’ L R

N

I in Homer’s Odyssey) under the leadership of Æneas. Aer an odyssey comparable to that in The Odyssey, Æneas and his men ﬁnally end up colonizing Rome. Many of the warrior heroes in Æneas’ band are killed in bale, but when they die they descend to the Elysian Fields (a kind of underworld pastoral ‘heaven’ for heroic soldiers) where they drink waters that cause them to forget their past. They are then reborn as native Romans with no memory of their prior Greek identity and a great love for the land into which they are reborn – voila another sleight of hand!

Elysian Britain The supporters of the idea of a British nation were able to draw on the same Elysian sleight of hand as Virgil by promoting the idea that the British nation actually stemmed from the same origins as that of Rome. According to an old myth, Britain had been seled by a relative of Æneas named ‘Brute’, who hereby founded a classical parallel to Rome in Britain (Olwig, 2002a, Chapter 3). This would appear to explain the prominence of the Elysian theme in the ‘natural’ style landscape garden parks of Britain. The monarchs of the early seventeenth century did not succeed in uniting Britain, but a century later the Parliament did just that. At this time many of the great estate owners, many of whom belonged to a new moneyed class and were thus distinct from the old landed nobility, surrounded their classically inspired mansions with grassy Elysian parks. A prominent feature of one of the greatest parks, Stowe, is thus a grassy area called the ‘Elysian ﬁelds’, and it is adjacent to an ersatz temple to ‘British worthies’ which includes a bust of Inigo Jones, who was a great inspiration to two of Stowe’s architects, Lord Burlington and William Kent. Lord Cobham, who owned Stowe, and whose statue, in Roman costume, can be seen at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, had a circle of friends who were ardent British patriots, and which included the gardening enthusiast William Pi, and James Thomson, author of Rule Britannia (Olwig, 2002a, Chapter 5). Whereas the old nobility legitimized their right to the land through ancient inheritance, the new landed class naturalized their rights in property by surrounding their land with a pastoral/Elysian style of park and garden that was seen to be ‘natural’. A classic example of this was at Stourhead where a London-based family that had made its money in the gold and slave trades, and in banking, bought an estate from the old nobility, tore down its ancient buildings, and replaced them with a mansion in the classical style, complete with a bust of Inigo Jones. The ‘Elysian’ park, which is believed to have been inspired by Virgil’s Aeneid, looks as if it could be straight out of one of Jones’ classically inspired theatre pieces (Coﬃn, 1986; Woodbridge, 1970).

Conclusion I have placed the word ‘natural’ in quotation marks in the title of this essay because, as has been seen, what is perceived to be ‘nature’ is related to the way ‘nature’ is represented (for example, in a map or landscape scene) and what is perceived to 85

T A R C

H I be ‘natural’, and hence normal, by a given nation. Signs of Sámi, Celtic or Native American culture might thus be minimized if these cultures are not deemed to express the natural (that is, normal) nature of the predominant nation. The map of a given state encompasses the areas of nature that belong to that nation and thereby deﬁne a particular combination of natural elements as forming a natural whole. In this way diverse generic landforms, mountains, plains, rivers, are linked together in an area that is seen to have a natural ‘identity’. Identity, however, means ‘the same’, and there is nothing necessarily similar about the landforms of an area that happens to have become the domain of a particular state – as was seen with regard to the plains of Scania versus the mountains of Sámi land. The map thus deﬁnes what is conceived to be nature. The representation of the areas in the form of perspective scenery likewise provides a means of linking the areas within the map into what appears to be a spatial whole. When these scenes are linked together into temporal sequences, as in the scenic stages of a play, or in the frames of ﬁlm, a sense is also created of temporal unity and identity. In a sense the linking of national identity and nature is accomplished using illusions like that of perspective, which is literally constructed using mathematical principles. All artistic genres, be they painting, poetry or music, involve the use of techniques and practices that are the consequence of conscious construction. At the same time, however, they can take on a life of their own, like the statue by Pygmalion, and become things of beauty leading people to care about their natural environment and the people within their national community. The story of the adventures of Nils Holgersson is a recognized work of art, and it basically ﬁts this characterization (though the Sámi might not think so). It represents a pioneering call to environmental awareness, and it has become an international classic, translated into every imaginable language, with an appeal to people everywhere. The identiﬁcation between nation and nature can also, however, take on the characteristics of Dr Frankenstein’s monster when it provides, for example, a ‘natural’ justiﬁcation for appropriating the dwelling places of a neighbouring people. The relationship between national identity and nature is complex and contradictory, which is why, as Lagerlöf’s story illustrates, it inevitably involves a wild goose chase into the realms of fantasy and ﬁction.

References Anderson, B. (1991), Imagined Communities: Reﬂections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso). Bates, K.L. (1974 [orig. 1895]), ‘America, the Beautiful’, in J. Leisy (ed.), The Good Times Songbook (Nashville: Abingdon Press), 24–6. Bender, B. (ed.) (1993), Landscape: Politics and Perspectives (Oxford: Berg). Buimer, A. (ed.) (1983), The Practice of Geography (London: Longmans). Coﬃn, D.R. (1986), ‘The Elysian Fields of Rousham’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 130:4, 406–23.

86

‘N’ L R

N

I Cosgrove, D. (1984), Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (London: Croom Helm). Edgerton, S. (1975), The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective (New York: Basic Books). Edgerton, S. (1987), ‘From Mental Matrix to Mappa mundi to Christian Empire: The Heritage of Ptolemaic Cartography in the Renaissance’, in D. Woodward (ed.), Art and Cartography: Six Historical Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 10–50. Germundsson, T. (2005), ‘Regional Cultural Heritage Versus National Heritage in Scania’s Disputed National Landscape’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 11:1, 21–37. Hägerstrand, T. (1983), ‘In the Search for Sources of Concepts’, in A. Buimer (ed.), The Practice of Geography (London: Longmans), 238–56. Hägerstrand, T. (1995 [orig. 1984]), ‘Landscape as Overlapping Neighbourhoods’, in U. Strohmayer and G.B. Benko (eds), Geography, History and Social Sciences (Dordrecht: Kluwer), 83–96. Ingold, T. (2000), ‘The Temporality of Landscape’, in T. Ingold (ed.), The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood Dwelling and Skill (London: Routledge), 189–218. Ingold, T. (ed.) (2000), The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood Dwelling and Skill (London: Routledge). James I (1918 [orig. 1616]), ‘A Speach, As It Was Delivered In The Vpper Hovse Of The Parliament To The Lords Spiritvall And Temporall, And To The Knights, Citizens And Burgesses There Assembled, On Mvnday The XIX. Day of March 1603. Being The First Day of The First Parliament’, in C.H. McIlwain (ed.), The Political Works of James I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 269–80. Johnson, S. (1755 [1968]), A Dictionary of the English Language (London: W. Strahan). Lagerlöf, S. (1992), The Wonderful Adventures of Nils (with illustrations by Lars Klinting) (Edinburgh: Floris Books). Lagerlöf, S. (1995), Nils Holgerssons Underbara Resa Genom Sverige, Project Runeberg, accessed 8 February 2007. Mels, T. (1999), Wild Landscapes: The Cultural Nature of Swedish Natural Parks (Lund: Lund University Press). Merriam-Webster (2000), Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged Electronic Edition (Springﬁeld, MA: Merriam-Webster). Novak, B. (1980), Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting: 1825–1875 (New York: Oxford University Press). Olwig, K.R. (1984), Nature’s Ideological Landscape: A Literary and Geographic Perspective on its Development and Preservation on Denmark’s Jutland Heath (London: George Allen & Unwin). Olwig, K.R. (1993), ‘Sexual Cosmology: Nation and Landscape at the Conceptual Interstices of Nature and Culture, or: What does Landscape Really Mean?’ in B. Bender (ed.), Landscape: Politics and Perspectives (Oxford: Berg), 307–43.

87

T A R C

H I Olwig, K.R. (2002a), Landscape, Nature and the Body Politic: From Britain’s Renaissance to America’s New World (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press). Olwig, K.R. (2002b), ‘Landscape, Place and the State of Progress’, in R.D. Sack (ed.), Progress: Geographical Essays (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), 22–60. Sack, R.D. (2002), Progress: Geographical Essays (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). Snoilsky, C. (1995), ‘Sveriges karta’, Nils Holgerssons Underbara Resa Genom Sverige, Prefatory poem to Selma Lagerlöf, Nils Holgerssons Underbara Resa Genom Sverige, Lund, Project Runeberg, , accessed 8 February 2007. Strohmayer, U. and Benko, G.B. (eds) (1995 [orig. 1984]), Geography, History and Social Sciences (Dordrecht: Kluwer). Sundin, B. (2005), ‘Nature as Heritage: The Swedish Case’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 11:1, 9–20. Tuan, Yi-Fu (1978), ‘Sign and Metaphor’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 68:3, 363–72. Woodbridge, K. (1970), Landscape and Antiquity: Aspects of English Culture at Stourhead 1718–1838 (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Woodward, D. (ed.) (1987), Art and Cartography: Six Historical Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

88

5

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

Heritage and ‘Race’ Jo Liler

‘Race’ appears in the title and body of this chapter in quotation marks, sometimes called ‘sneer quotes’, for a reason – to foreground the status of the term as a historical ﬁction which has had, and continues to have, very real and damaging eﬀects. The concept of ‘race’ is widely discredited as a category, yet its remnants and legacies continue to shape our contemporary heritage, just as they continue to shape the landscape of contemporary culture more broadly. This chapter considers some of the key issues, contexts and debates that have, both explicitly and implicitly, structured the relationship between ‘race’ and heritage. It does so by providing a summary of diﬀerent ways in which this relationship has historically been problematic, by outlining contemporary work in the ﬁeld, and closes by aempting to point towards some possible future directions for research.

‘Race’ and Ethnicity As Osborne and Sandford put it, ‘“[r]ace” is a concept with a disreputable past and an uncertain future, yet it continues to trouble the present, both politically and intellectually’, even whilst, today, there is a ‘widespread acknowledgement of its lack of objective validity as a principle for the classiﬁcation of human diﬀerences’ (Osborne and Sandford, 2002, 1). In other words, there is no objective reason why people should be compartmentalized by their skin colour any more than by the colour of their hair, their height or the number of teeth or moles they might happen to have. Consequently, today, critics such as Paul Gilroy argue against using the term ‘race’ at all, given its status as invented essentializing ﬁction that was primarily used as an instrument of social domination (Gilroy, 2000). Nevertheless, the sheer weight of the historical processes of what Gilroy calls ‘racialization’ also means that we obviously have to take the eﬀects of such historical classiﬁcations seriously. ‘Racialization’ has been used as a means of regulating power through the control of peoples’ bodies – through, for example, slavery, genocide, asylum and social stratiﬁcation. There are various ways to interpret how ‘race’ gained its importance and signiﬁcance. Processes of racialization are oen understood by (and are themselves

T A R C

H I a good illustration of) Foucault’s theory of ‘biopolitics’ – a theoretical frame that allows us to understand how ‘biological’ discourses intersect with those of power and control (Foucault, 1990; Gilroy, 2000). On a historical level, there is now a large body of work tracing how racialization came into being, by analysing the genealogies of ‘race’ (see, for example, Bernasconi, 2001; Hall, 1997a; Hannaford, 1996). The early emergence of racial classiﬁcation in European colonialism, its development through ‘scientiﬁc’ Enlightenment rationalities, its dissemination through nineteenth-century processes of governmentality, and its twentiethcentury resurgences through both racist and anti-racist discourse, have been the subject of much discussion over the past few decades (see Hall, 1992; Osborne and Sandford, 2002). By contrast, the emphasis of ‘ethnicity’ on social and cultural construction has meant that it became for many a preferable alternative term, as the title of Stuart Hall’s classic 1992 essay, ‘New Ethnicities’, indicates. Ethnicity is usually taken to indicate accumulated bonds of identiﬁcation that exist between certain groups – whether cultural, social, behavioural, linguistic or religious – that are in some way connected to an idea of ancestry or to connections with particular geographical areas. However, ethnicity can also become a means of cultural racism when it is reiﬁed or used in a naturalizing or ‘essentialized’ way. One notorious recent example is Samuel Huntington’s book, The Clash of Civilizations, which has been roundly criticized for its presentation of ethnicity as a largely ‘natural’, solid and historically immutable category, rather than porous, malleable and open to change (Huntington, 1996; McGuigan, 2005). As Edward Said puts it, such essentialized versions of ethnicity are ‘beer for reinforcing defensive self-pride than for critical understanding of the bewildering interdependence of our time’ (Said, 2001, no page reference).

The Heritage of Heritage and ‘Race’ The evolution of ‘race’ as a category has worked to inform heritage in a variety of ways, both consciously and unconsciously. Like ‘race’, heritage (as this book makes clear) is itself a term with a complex and multiple history, and what is meant by the term is culturally speciﬁc and philosophically debatable. However, there are some particular aspects of the history of heritage that have made it only too available to be interwoven with processes of racialization. Both terms were used to shore up the power of the people who deﬁned their meaning, and were mutually valorized and naturalized through discourses of lineage and stock. This was already indicated by how, in medieval times, ‘heritage’ was used in religious discourse to mark the elect, the ‘people chosen by God’ (Samuel, 1994, 231). Later, through the birth of modern industrial capitalism, imperialism and the formation of the nation-state, the particular set of associations of heritage with blood, land, property and old, ‘high’ culture was formed (Boswell and Evans, 1999). What Stuart Hall has termed ‘The Heritage’ thereby came to proclaim the lineage of particular groups, and their social and cultural worth, at the expense of others. Leing 90

H ‘R ’ what was deemed important about the past stand there, as self-evident, obvious, singular, ‘natural’ and not subject to question was one of the key means through which it accumulated its power. As Hall puts it: ‘The Heritage inevitably reﬂects the governing assumptions of its time and context. It is always inﬂected by the power and authority of those who have colonised the past, whose versions of history maer’ (Hall, 2005, 26). The groups who got to deﬁne ‘The Heritage’ – and in a related sense, who possessed heritage – were mainly upper or upper middle-class white people, particularly men. Their whiteness was naturalized through its predominantly unspoken nature, its ‘invisibility’ simultaneously functioning to present an image of its ‘neutrality’ and to lever power (Dyer, 1997; Ware and Back, 2002). In European and American societies throughout industrial modernity, then, heritage became one of a range of cultural sites and narratives through which such discourses of superiority and power could be naturalized and sustained. Whether through public museums (their large pillars at their entrances referencing ‘white’ Greco-Roman empires and their interiors ﬂaunting imperial booty), openaccess stately homes (enabling the visitor or viewer humbly to appreciate the rural residence of the white aristocracy), or the statues of the white military hero in the city centre (to oﬀer visible evidence of imperial victories), what Hall calls ‘The Heritage’ worked to show just who was in charge (Duncan, 1995). It was highly selective, yet achieved much of its power through a cultural grammar of universality; ‘other’ heritage simply did not count. The perpetual popularity of the notion that Europe ‘has an older heritage’ than the Americas also illustrates this point; the Native American Indian’s culture, in this schema, fails to count as heritage. In such ways, the linkages between heritage, race and nation were used to prop each other up. The past few decades in particular have involved a range of challenges to such singular conﬁgurations of heritage, in which its associations with the blessed, ‘natural rights’ of men of certain racialized stock and lineage have been rudely disrupted. The smug certainties of a bounded heritage belonging to a white upper and upper-middle class have been punctured, their claims to be able to speak for other cultures challenged, and the constructed singularity of ‘The Heritage’ has multiplied. Stuart Hall terms this shi in heritage culture as a ‘deep slow-motion revolution’ which is still in progress, one which has taken place in the broader context of the dismantling of the Enlightenment ideal of ‘universal knowledge’ (Hall, 2005, 28). Such a slow yet monumental shi in the meaning of heritage has taken a variety of forms. For example, the expansion of the ‘heritage industry’ in Europe and America in the 1980s (see Boswell and Evans, 1999; Hewison, 1987) involved a broadening-out of what counted in heritage in class terms, with heritage aractions, for instance, providing an arena in which domestic and ‘everyday’ heritage could be experienced. Such forms of ‘history from below’ were contentious as to the extent of their democratization – being viewed by many as oﬀering a thoroughly marketized populism (and in Britain, for example, as a form of Thatcherism in period dress) – but still undeniably marked another signiﬁcant shi away from the idea of heritage as the exclusive province of the great and the good. However, 91

T A R C

H I whilst foregrounding their class dynamics, such populist forms of heritage, as with ‘the heritage debates’ in the humanities which analysed them, had relatively lile to say about the racialized dynamics of the new heritage populism, and so were oen marked by their continued dependence on relatively uncritical pre-existing narratives of whiteness and empire (Liler and Naidoo, 2004). However, from another perspective, the insights of post-colonial critique were being busily pursued across a number of institutional, academic and artistic heritage contexts with varying eﬀects and degrees of success. In particular, the question of the Euro-American museum’s claim to be able to speak on behalf of ‘other’ peoples has, over the last few decades, become roundly questioned and its legacies as a showcase for imperial bounty interrogated and problematized (Simpson, 1996, see Chapter 21). What became known as the ‘new museology’ sought to educate a new generation of curators into thinking through these issues as problems-inprocess (Vergo, 1989). More public-owned museum and gallery spaces turned their aention to featuring ‘other’ cultures. For instance, debates around high-proﬁle exhibitions such as Magiciens de la Terre at the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the Te Maori exhibition at the New York Metropolitan Museum argued over to what extent the Eurocentric grand narratives were being shaken up or perpetuated (Hall, 2005, 28). What Naseem Khan termed The Arts Britain Ignores in her groundbreaking 1976 report became slightly less ignored, as public spaces such as Walsall Museum and Art Gallery produced events oriented toward ‘diversity’, such as exhibitions of Sikh art (Cox and Singh, 1997; Khan, 1976). However, such examples were not without precedent, as a range of grassroots initiatives had, for a very long time, worked on collating archives which told stories about migration, art and cultural production. As Hall (2005, 32) puts it, ‘Like the rainbow, this work comes and goes’, because, occluded from mainstream heritage institutions, and their work rarely funded, the ability of such grassroots initiatives to keep going was, and oen remains, haphazard. In addition, the increasing invocation of heritage as an issue for governmental and policy aention helped consolidate the area now regularly deﬁned as ‘the heritage sector’, which has increasingly been urged to adopt pivotal new roles in terms of governmental and transnational strategies for social inclusion and to redress racialized inequalities. As Sandell puts it, heritage institutions such as museums from the 1980s were increasingly working ‘to explore their contribution towards the combating of social as well as cultural inequality’ (Sandell, 2002, xvii). They were encouraged to do so in part through policy initiatives such as Not for the Likes of You, People and Places and Building on PAT 10 (Liler and Naidoo, 2005, 11; McGuigan, 2004, 92–112). Taken collectively, this surge in the variety of aempts and initiatives to address the history of heritage and ‘race’, and to reconﬁgure their problematic relationship, has resulted in a range of approaches and discourses – the good, the bad and the downright ugly. One means of considering how heritage and ‘race’ have recently been conﬁgured across a range of realms is by sketching broad paradigms and problems that have been noticed, or commented on in this area, and sketching how they have (or might be) overcome. What follows, then, is an outline of a 92

H ‘R ’ series of problematic ‘tendencies’ in how contemporary heritage (as a broadly conceived domain) negotiates with the legacies of the idea of ‘race’. To point out such tendencies is not to suggest that these are consistently or neatly demarcated areas. Instead, following on from Wright’s useful schema of heritage discourses or ‘alignments’ in 1980s Britain (Liler and Naidoo, 2004; Wright, 1985), it is a means to discuss how diﬀerent discourses are in circulation at the present time – whether these are ﬂuctuating, overlapping, residual or emergent.

Problematic Positions Uncritical Imperialism There is a sizeable body of opinion that does not see any serious problem with the legacies of imperialism and race in heritage, and acts to validate it; a formation we might crudely label as ‘uncritical imperialism’. This can take various forms. For example, it can appear through simply ignoring, or airbrushing, imperialism from the heritage narrative in question. Cadbury World in Birmingham, for example, conveniently bypasses any mention of the systems of slavery upon which the chocolate company was founded (Ransom, 2001, 116). Uncritical imperialism can also take the form of being outraged at any aempt even to raise diﬃcult issues over heritage and ‘race’. For a particularly graphic recent example, we have only to look at the moral media panic which was unleashed by the British press over the 2000 publication of the Parekh Report, initially commissioned by the new Labour government, on The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain (Runnymede Trust, 2000). The Parekh Report’s mild conclusion that the idea of Britishness oen has ‘unspoken racial connotations’ induced, as Bill Schwarz puts it in his cogent analysis of the event, a ‘staggering’ level of controversy (Schwarz, 2005, 224). The totalizing, panicked denunciations of the report (initially surfacing in the right-wing press, and swily followed by a slew of back-tracking statements by government ministers) were invariably accompanied by assertions that the commentator was – by contrast with the Parekh Report – ‘proud to be British’. As Schwarz argues, ‘[s]urely, a thoughtful, responsible pride must also co-exist with recognition of the moments of barbarism, with an understanding of the ills which have arisen from conduct perpetrated in the name of one’s country?’ This moral panic was an example of uncritical imperialism, a kind of fanatical moment in which imperialist legacies were overwhelmingly denied, repeated and acted out, rather than worked through (Schwarz, 2005, 224–5).

White Past, Multicultural Present Sometimes heritage can take the form of celebrating contemporary multiculturalism whilst simultaneously presenting it as a solely recent phenomenon and suggesting (implicitly or otherwise) that the past was a time when nationality was a more simple aﬀair (usually white). There is now a huge body of work discussing how 93

T A R C

H I nations’ histories are constituted through waves of immigration and diaspora – histories that were eﬀectively whitewashed and streamlined by the rise of nationalism and its cultural solidiﬁcation through what Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) inﬂuentially termed ‘the invention of tradition’. In Britain, heritage as a space constituted by ﬂows of, for example, Angles, Saxons, Normans, Huguenots, Indians, Africans, West Indians has been well documented by historians (see, for example, Brocklehurst and Phillips, 2004; Fryer, 1984; Visram, 1986). Yet, despite this work, multicultural society can still sometimes be ﬁgured as a ‘new’ development, rather than as a phenomenon which has always been with us, as a phenomenon formatively constitutive of our past as well as present. Such limited imaginings of the past are in themselves the legacy of the rise of nationalism, or the process through which the imagined community of the nation was divested of its complexities in order to provide a securely bonded form of ethnic belonging (Anderson, 1998). Perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, contemporary forms of heritage which imagine the past as white and the present as multicultural oen circulate around the re-branding or image management of the nation. For instance, in the 1990s, both the infamous report published by le-liberal think tank DEMOS, Britain TM, and Creative Britain (the book wrien by the Labour Minister for Culture, Chris Smith) emphasized contemporary Britain as an excitingly mixed multicultural place to be, foregrounding the achievement of young black musicians and artists in particular (Leonard, 1997; Smith, 1998). The key point here is that the emphasis on contemporary multiculturalism as hip, happening and ultramodern was not necessarily carried through to any signiﬁcant extent to the imaginings of the past. Such signs of cultural amnesia were compounded through other aspects of New Labour discourse such as the Cantle Report and then Home Secretary David Blunke’s introduction of a ‘citizenship test’, both of which stipulated that new immigrants learn ‘British values’ which became predominantly framed as a white British heritage in relation to which certain groups of people were positioned ‘outside’ (Younge, 2002). This example shows how it is possible for cultural landscapes to be conﬁgured as excitingly diverse, whilst the image of their past remains more hermetic in its imaginings and its racialized legacies ignored. The problem with this discourse is that it means that those implicitly positioned as ‘new’ and ‘other’ have continually to justify their presence, becoming alienated from a more long-standing or deeply historically rooted sense of belonging. It also impoverishes our collective understanding of the past, of the rich and complex mix of the multiple travels and ﬂows of people that have worked in a multitude of ways to shape us all. The opposite of this discourse, then, can be seen in heritage practices which demonstrate how heritage spaces are always constituted by ﬂows of migration and diaspora, such as the ‘Peopling of London’ project at the Museum of London (Merriman, 1997).

Multicultural Tokenism The ‘white past, multicultural present’ approach to heritage and ‘race’ might itself be considered a variant on another problematic position – multicultural tokenism.

94

H ‘R ’ This is where heritage practices aempt to engage with the legacies of ‘race’, but end up doing so in a gestural fashion rather than integrating them with any thoroughness or longevity. Naseem Khan, for example, gives a vivid example of how Glyndebourne Opera House once fulﬁlled the 4 per cent ‘ethnic minority’ quota demanded of it by the Arts Council by staging a one-oﬀ production of Porgy and Bess with an all-black cast, a classic case of paying lip-service to diversity without it being mainstreamed through the organization. As Khan remarks dryly, ‘[n]o-one who has been to Glyndebourne recently would be able to see the continuing eﬀects of that brush with diversity’ (Khan, 2005, 137). Multicultural tokenism, or the making of inclusive, but superﬁcial (oen unintentionally exoticizing) gestures towards diversity has for a long time been a staple critique within academia, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, and is sometimes termed the ‘saris, samosas and steel-bands syndrome’ (Donald and Raansi, 1992, 2). Such gestures towards ‘multiculturalism’ are problematic because they imply a heritage centre which is of course unchanged and ethnically ‘neutral’ and so work by reinforcing positions of ‘otherness’ which are perpetually ‘outside’ the centre. As Roshi Naidoo puts it, critiquing solely cursory gestures towards multiculturalism such as producing language-sensitive leaﬂets to aract ‘other’ audiences, ‘it would be more radical to imagine us all as “multicultural” rather than bringing “others” into the public sphere as an act of benevolence’ (Naidoo, 2005, 45). However, in some realms the problem of multicultural tokenism is now being more widely recognized. In 2007, for instance, the 3 S’s – ‘saris, samosas and steelbands syndrome’ – was referred to by the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, as a ‘1970s style multiculturalism’ which the ﬁght against racism needed to move beyond. Sentamu was arguing that ‘there was a need to develop programmes that value ethnic diversity beyond merely identifying cultural diﬀerences’ (Daily Mail, 2007). Multicultural tokenism is, therefore, an increasingly widely recognized phenomenon, but it simultaneously remains the subject of discussion because, in a variety of diﬀerent ways, shapes and areas, it very clearly exists. Moreover, whilst multicultural tokenism may be easy to criticize, the kinds of ‘institutional racisms’ which work to produce such tokenism oen need to be grappled with or tackled on a variety of diﬀerent levels. In other words, multicultural tokenism exists not merely in terms of representation but also in terms of institutional process and practice, which are issues with less of a history of being aired and discussed in mainstream discourse. Work that does tackle these issues of process, by bringing together an analysis of the niy-griy complexities of practice and sophisticated theorization, such as the writing of the curatoracademics Poovaya Smith and Tulloch, therefore tends to stand out much more boldly (Poovaya Smith, 1997; Tulloch, 2005).

The Liberal Myth of Seamless Progress Given this talk of progress, however, it is important that we do not fall headlong into another problematic trap, and that is the liberal myth of heritage as the slow,

95

T A R C

H I gradual, yet more or less seamless and inevitable progress into an enlightened multicultural future. This idea, perversely (and appropriately) enough, can be traced back to the same moment in which racialization itself was solidiﬁed and consolidated as a project – the Enlightenment. A crucial and formative aspect of the Enlightenment was the idea that we were progressing, slowly but surely, into a beer world (McLennan, 1992). Such narratives can still be seen to structure many aspects of popular discourse today, including discourses of heritage and ‘race’. Whilst they are tempting in their overwhelming optimism (and whilst it is important not to underplay the extent to which a healthy dose of optimism is crucial in sustaining any activity), we need to be aware (just as with Enlightenment narratives) of what is being elided or ignored in such narratives of pure progress. This is because history invariably teaches us that progressive cultural change is usually not a seamless saunter into the sunset. To say this is not to say, however, that nothing changes, or that heritage is invariably cyclical. Rather, it is to point out that progress is a multi-faceted business, is not inevitable, is not guaranteed, and is shaped by a variety of contexts. The liberal narratives of seamless progress obscure this complexity and with it the understanding needed to create more far-reaching change. The liberal myth of gradual yet seamless progress becomes problematized when we investigate the more precise paerns and journeys such forms of ‘progress’ have actually made in practice. For example, Szekeres has discussed how Australian heritage institutions, moved during the 1980s to create accounts of the country’s past which integrated rather than airbrushed out Aboriginal history, suﬀered a series of setbacks in the late 1990s when the political climate shied towards the right. The advent of the conservative government and the rise of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party (which campaigned on a xenophobic platform against immigration) meant that ‘multicultural’ policies suddenly became denounced as ‘politically correct’. As Szekeres writes, the work of curators became increasingly viliﬁed for simply including details of ‘wrongs’ (that is, the massacres and appropriation of land) done to Aborigines by white Europeans. Curators were accused ‘[…] of peddling a “black armband history”. This phrase has become that which is used to refer to any analysis of colonization that is not celebratory and is a concept that is having a huge and detrimental impact on the process of Aboriginal Reconciliation’ (Szekeres, 2002, 151). Similarly, in 2002, in response to the British government’s shi in race relations policy, speciﬁcally the Home Secretary David Blunke’s ‘racialization’ of citizenship, Gary Younge argued that: We are returning to the crude and ﬂawed mythology of a mono-racial, culturally uniform British identity in which non-white people’s presence is tolerated – and even then only conditionally. […] Three years ago racism was regarded as the problem. Now, once again, the very existence of Britain’s ethnic minorities is becoming the problem (Younge, 2002).

96

H ‘R ’ In other words, Britain was stepping back, rather than forward, in terms of progress. The implication of such examples is that the idea that we are just moving forward to a happier multicultural place is an Enlightenment-derived liberal myth that patronizes the past and does not do analytical justice to the present. There were clearly some spaces and places in mid-twentieth century London, for example, such as dance halls (see Nava and O’Shea, 1995) that were more integrated and cosmopolitan than those existing in the 2000s (such as the BNP-friendly enclave of Barking). We might say, then, that some aspects of the relationship between heritage and ‘race’ are moving forward, some back and some are in ﬂux. But even to say that, on its own, is fairly banal. To be able to say anything really very interesting or signiﬁcant about the relationship between heritage and ‘race’ is therefore usually going to involve both an ability to theorize longer-term historical strands (or discursive genealogies) and speciﬁc cultural, political and social contexts (or the contemporary conjuncture) at one and the same time.

Corporate Multiculturalism and Heritage The use of discursive genealogies and a contextual comprehension of the present are, therefore, useful in arriving at a beer understanding of histories of the relationship between heritage and ‘race’ than liberal narratives of seamless progress can provide. Such tools are also useful for understanding another problematic strand of the relationship between heritage and ‘race’, and this is corporate multiculturalism, or the phenomenon where multicultural diversity is brought together through one particular commonality – the selling of commodities for private proﬁt. Corporate multiculturalism simultaneously acts as a means to popularize, or disseminate, ideas about multiculturalism whilst perpetuating structural inequalities – inequalities that are diﬀerently conﬁgured from and yet intimately connected to the racialized inequalities of the past. As Fanon outlined and predicted, there are numerous correspondences between earlier ages of colonialism and what Hardt and Negri today term the contemporary ‘empire’ of transnational capital, with its globally dispersed pockets of poverty (or ‘fourth worlds’) (Castells, 1998; Fanon, 1965; Hardt and Negri, 2000). As Hesse has eloquently wrien, ‘refusing to eﬀace through forgetfulness’ the implications of colonialism and slavery necessarily involves remembering its legacies, acknowledging, ‘[h]ow the slavery plantation complex’s formative relations of exploitation, exoticism, racism, and violence produced the consumerist contours of Western culture, principally through customizing the transitional cultural production and consumption of mundane staples of the Western lifestyle, such as coﬀee, sugar, coon and tobacco’ (Hesse, 2002, 160). The racialized imperialism of the past and the neo-imperialism of the present, in other words, are connected, and not bothering to trace the connections between them means that we end with an impoverished understanding of both. Slavery’s legacies, therefore, can be seen not only in forms of contemporary slavery, such as

97

T A R C

H I the traﬃcking of women, but also in the forms of economic dis/advantage particular groups of people continue to have in global terms. Corporate multiculturalism is a discourse which can, therefore, be seen to be exhibited in corporate behaviour (such as Cadbury World’s elision of its slave heritage), governmental actions (New Labour’s evocation of creative British multiculturalism as a resource to generate economic proﬁt) or popular sentiment (arguing for free global ﬂows of goods and against free ﬂows of people). If corporate multicultural heritage acts to erase connections between past and present economic racializations, other areas of heritage work to foreground them, providing a more analytical and critical approach. The New York Lower East Side Tenement Museum, for example, runs a ‘Sweatshop Project’, which enables visitors to ‘use the history of this subject as a basis for considering the present situation’ and to ask what has and what has not changed. The museum works with the garment workers’ union, UNITE!, to create a dialogue between a wide range of groups including general visitors, factory workers, managers and buyers (Abram, 2002, 138).

The ‘Plaster Effect’ of Cultural Diversity Whilst corporate multicultural heritage acts to erase the connections between racialized inequalities in the past and in the present, another area swings to a diﬀerent extreme. The phenomenon that we might term ‘the plaster eﬀect’ of cultural diversity uses heritage to paper over the cracks of social inequality. Heritage initiatives, in other words, are in this formation expected to do ‘too much work’ on their own to right the world’s wrongs. For instance, cultural policy in Britain has increasingly been given the hard and lonely task of combating cultural and social exclusion at the same time as the Blair government has pursed an agenda carved out by Thatcherism by eroding the public sector and giving corporate businesses a greater role in running schools, hospitals and public services, all political moves that directly contradict the impulses gestured towards in cultural policy (see Monbiot, 2000; Whitﬁeld, 2001). McGuigan has astutely described this as a cultural policy landscape generating lots of feel-good sentiment that is strangely devoid of speciﬁcity, in which the solutions to the problems are not clear, in which ‘buzzwords without referents’ abound (McGuigan, 2004, 101; see also Naidoo, 2005). What is at stake here, then, is not that heritage is being ‘given a job to do’ in redressing racialization’s wrongs, but rather that its work is not linked to the wider social context with any speciﬁcity or thoroughness. It is given a task beyond its bounds, which also serves to marginalize other areas that need addressing. This can happen through technocratic tinkering (in which policy objectives are thought capable of solving a whole ra of problems, without any critique of the broader context – see Grossberg and Miller, 2003; Osborne, 2005) or through policy making assuming such large and amorphous gestures about changing the world without enough speciﬁcity that, in the process, it simply becomes vapid. Kurin (2004) has suggested that such issues are at risk of occurring in the UNESCO-designated category, ‘intangible cultural heritage’. Whilst manifesting

98

H ‘R ’ the expanded social understanding of culture brought about by the ‘cultural turn’ (Hall, 1997b), this category is also in many ways a rebranding of ‘folklore’, and so carries with it a ra of problematic issues around ethnicity even whilst it aempts to address them (Hafstein, 2004: Kirschenbla-Gimble, 2004) The speciﬁc way that intangible cultural heritage is expected to do ‘too much work’ is through the way it is deﬁned; for, as Kurin puts it: […] to be recognized, intangible cultural heritage has to be consistent with human rights, exhibit the need for mutual respect between communities, and be sustainable. This is a very high and one might say unrealistic and imposing standard. [The UNESCO conventions] … see culture as generally hopeful and positive, born not of historical struggle and conﬂict but of a varied ﬂowering of diverse cultural ways (Kurin, 2004, 70). As Kurin puts it, the implicit model of culture in use is one that bypasses issues of struggle in favour of asserting ‘good’ examples of heritage. This upbeat, conﬂictfree model of intangible cultural heritage, therefore, also overlaps to some extent with the discourses of multicultural tokenism and the liberal myth of seamless progress. The criteria Kurin identiﬁes have parallels to earlier debates around ‘multiculturalism’, and in particular the use of ‘positive role models’ for black communities which were roundly critiqued for failing to recognize, account for and, therefore, tackle the reasons why such role models were needed in the ﬁrst place (Naidoo, 2005). Heritage as ‘plaster eﬀect’, then, is either heritage as technocratic tinkering or vacuously broad gesture. It indicates the impoverished ways through which heritage is aempted to be used to solve social problems, through, at one end of the spectrum, the instrumentalist failure to link heritage strategies to the ‘bigger picture’ and, at the other, the aempt to overload heritage with the task of solving a wide range of problems that are not delineated with any speciﬁcity. The alternative is policy with a critical understanding of broader social and cultural contexts, and with speciﬁcally achievable suggestions and objectives.

Futures of the Racialized Past Much of this chapter has emphasized what is wrong with heritage’s relationship to ‘race’. However, as Szekeres’s anecdote about denunciations in Australia of ‘black armband history’ makes only too clear, glibly glossing over the problems is a means of not recognizing and dealing with them, working as both a wish that racism did not happen and a disavowal of its consequences. There is obviously a crucial need for heritage to represent, and to keep interrogating, the complexities of injustice and gross exploitation, and to keep interrogating the ways in which it does so, whilst simultaneously drawing optimism from imaginative examples of change. What we might call ‘progressive practice’ usually involves imaginatively addressing and surpassing such problems through producing interrogative, hybrid 99

T A R C

H I forms of heritage that are open to discussing the ﬂows of power that constitute them. Future directions for research and practice in this area will need to expand existing debates. It has become increasingly clear, for example, that current dominant paradigms of post-colonial studies are too limited, having in particular marginalized Latin America and Southeast Asia in their frames of analysis (Osborne and Sandford, 2002, 7–8). One key challenge is, therefore, to throw open this debate to engage with the complexities of wider areas of the world, to open the discussion to reﬂect on their particular genealogies of ‘heritage’ and ‘race’, and to interrogate how they intersect. A related route, therefore, involves dealing with the heritage that more recent paerns of racialization and ethnicity are currently throwing into relief. Because, as new paerns of migration, ethnic nationalisms, asylum and ‘long-distance nationalisms’ come into being, paerns of racialization and ethnic stabilization become reconﬁgured; and so the need for heritage to engage with the background of these new, and yet old, stories emerges.

References Abram, R.J. (2002), ‘Harnessing the Power of History’, in R. Sandell (ed.) Museums, Society, Inequality (London: Routledge), 125–41. Anderson, B. (1998), Imagined Communities: Reﬂections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso). Bernasconi, R. (ed.) (2001), Race (Oxford: Blackwell). Boswell, D. and Evans, J. (1999), Representing the Nation: A Reader: Histories, Heritage and Museums (London: Routledge). Bratich, J.Z., Packer, J. and McCarthy, C. (eds) (2003), Foucault, Cultural Studies and Governmentality (New York: SUNY). Brocklehurst, H. and Phillips, R. (eds) (2004), History, Nationhood and the Question of Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave). Castells, M. (1998), End of the Millennium (Oxford: Blackwell). Cox, A. and Singh, A. (1997), ‘Walsall Museum and Art Gallery and the Sikh Community: A Case Study’, in E. Hooper-Greenhill (ed.), Cultural Diversity: Developing Museum Audiences in Britain (Leicester: Leicester University Press), 159–67. Daily Mail (2007), ‘Archbishop aacks 1970s integration’, 31 January, , accessed March 2007. Donald, J. and Raansi, A. (eds) (1992), ‘Race’, Culture and Diﬀerence (London: Sage). Duncan, C. (1995), Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London and New York: Routledge). Dyer, R. (1997), White (London: Routledge). Fanon, F. (1965/2001), The Wretched of the Earth (London: Penguin).

100

H ‘R ’ Foucault, M. (1990), The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume I (New York: Vintage). Fryer, P. (1984), Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto Press). Gilroy, P. (2000), Between Camps: Nations, Culture and the Allure of Race (London: Allen Lane). Goldberg, D.T. and Quayson, A. (eds) (2002), Relocating Postcolonialism (Oxford: Blackwell). Grossberg, L. and Miller, T. (2003), ‘Interview with Lawrence Grossberg and Toby Miller’, in J.Z. Bratich, J. Packer and C. McCarthy (eds), Foucault, Cultural Studies and Governmentality (New York: SUNY), 23–46. Hafstein, V. (2004), The Making of Intangible Cultural Heritage: Tradition and Authenticity, Community and Humanity (PhD Dissertation, Berkeley: University of California). Hall, S. (1992), ‘New Ethnicities’, in J. Donald and A. Raansi (eds), ‘Race’, Culture and Diﬀerence (London: Sage), 252–9. Hall, S. (1997a), ‘The Spectacle of the Other’, in S. Hall (ed.), Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London and New York: Sage), 13–74. Hall, S. (1997b), ‘The Centrality of Culture’, in K. Thompson (ed.), Media and Cultural Regulation (London and New York: Sage), 207–38. Hall, S. (ed.) (1997), Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London and New York: Sage). Hall, S. (2005), ‘Whose Heritage? Un-seling “The Heritage”, Re-imagining the Post-nation’, in J. Liler and R. Naidoo (eds) (2005), The Politics of Heritage: The Legacies of ‘Race’ (London: Routledge), 23–35. Hall, S., Held, D. and McGrew, T. (eds) (1992), Modernity and Its Futures (London: Polity). Hannaford, I. (1996), Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press). Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2000), Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). Hesse, B. (2002), ‘Forgoen Like a Bad Dream: Atlantic Slavery and the Ethics of Postcolonial Memory’, in D.T. Goldberg and A. Quayson (eds), Relocating Postcolonialism (Oxford: Blackwell), 143–72. Hewison, R. (1987), The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline (London: Methuen). Hobsbawm, E. and Ranger, T. (eds) (1983), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Hooper-Greenhill, E. (ed.) (1997), Cultural Diversity: Developing Museum Audiences in Britain (Leicester: Leicester University Press). Huntington, S. (1996), The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster). Khan, N. (1976), The Arts Britain Ignores: The Arts of Ethnic Minorities in Britain (London: Community Relations Commission).

101

T A R C

H I Khan, N. (2005), ‘Taking Root in Britain: The Process of Shaping Heritage’, in J. Liler and R. Naidoo (eds), The Politics of Heritage: The Legacies of ‘Race’ (London: Routledge), 133–43. Kirschenbla-Gimble, B. (2004), ‘Intangible Heritage as Metacultural Production’, Museum International 221:2, May, 52–65. Kurin, R. (2004), ‘Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage in the 2003 UNESCO Convention: A Critical Appraisal’, Museum International 221:2, May, 66–77. Leonard, M. (1997), Britain TM: Renewing Our Identity (London: DEMOS). Liler, J. and Naidoo, R. (2004), ‘White Past, Multicultural Present’, in H. Brocklehurst and R. Phillips (eds), History, Nationhood and the Question of Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave), 330–41. Liler, J. and Naidoo, R. (eds) (2005), The Politics of Heritage: The Legacies of ‘Race’ (London: Routledge). McGuigan, J. (2004), Rethinking Cultural Policy (Maidenhead: Open University Press). McGuigan, J. (2005), ‘A Community of Communities’, in J. Liler and R. Naidoo (eds), The Politics of Heritage: The Legacies of ‘Race’ (London: Routledge), 183–95. McLennan, G. (1992), ‘The Enlightenment Project Revisited’, in S. Hall, D. Held and T. McGrew (eds), Modernity and Its Futures (London: Polity), 327–78. Merriman, N. (1997), ‘The Peopling of London Project’, in E. Hooper-Greenhill (ed.), Cultural Diversity: Developing Museum Audiences in Britain (Leicester: Leicester University Press), 119–48. Monbiot, G. (2000), The Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain (London: Macmillan). Naidoo, R. (2005), ‘Never Mind the Buzzwords: “Race”, Heritage and the Liberal Agenda’, in J. Liler and R. Naidoo (eds), The Politics of Heritage: The Legacies of ‘Race’ (London: Routledge), 36–48. Nava, M. and O’Shea, A. (eds) (1995), Modern Times: Reﬂections on a Century of English Modernity (London: Routledge). Osborne, P. (2005), ‘Whoever Speaks of Culture Speaks of Administration As Well’, Cultural Studies 20:1, 33–47. Osborne, P. and Sandford, S. (2002), ‘Introduction: Philosophies of Race and Ethnicity’, in P. Osborne and S. Sandford (eds), Philosophies of Race and Ethnicity (London: Continuum), 1–18. Osborne, P. and Sandford, S. (eds) (2002), Philosophies of Race and Ethnicity (London: Continuum). Poovaya Smith, N. (1997), ‘Academic and Public Domains: When is a Dagger a Sword?’, in E. Hooper-Greenhill (ed.), Cultural Diversity: Developing Museum Audiences in Britain (Leicester: Leicester University Press), 149–58. Ransom, D. (2001), The No-Nonsense Guide to Fair Trade (London: Verso). Runnymede Trust (2000), The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain: The Parekh Report (London: Runnymede Trust/Proﬁle Books). Said, E. (2001), ‘The Clash of Ignorance’, The Nation, 22 October, , accessed March 2007.

102

H ‘R ’ Samuel, R. (1994), Theatres of Memory Vol 1: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London: Verso). Sandell, R. (ed.) (2002), Museums, Society, Inequality (London: Routledge). Schwarz, B. (2005), ‘Aerword: “Strolling Spectators” and “Practical Londoners”: Remembering the Imperial Past’, in J. Liler and R. Naidoo (eds), The Politics of Heritage: The Legacies of ‘Race’ (London: Routledge), 216–36. Simpson, M. (1996), Making Representations: Museums in the Post-Colonial Era (London: Routledge). Smith, C. (1998), Creative Britain (London: Faber). Szekeres, V. (2002), ‘Representing Diversity and Challenging Racism: The Migration Museum’, in R. Sandell (ed.), Museums, Society, Inequality (London: Routledge), 142–52. Thompson, K. (ed.) (1997), Media and Cultural Regulation (London and New York: Sage). Tulloch, C. (2005), ‘Picture This: The Black Curator’, in J. Liler and R. Naidoo (eds), The Politics of Heritage: The Legacies of ‘Race’ (London: Routledge), 169–82. Vergo, P. (ed.) (1989), The New Museology (London: Reaktion). Visram, R. (1986), Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: Indians in Britain 1700–1947 (London: Pluto Press). Ware, V. and Back, L. (2002), Out of Whiteness: Color, Politics and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Whitﬁeld, D. (2001), Public Service or Corporate Welfare? (London: Pluto Press). Wright, P. (1985), On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain (London: Verso). Younge, G. (2002), ‘Britain is Again White’, The Guardian, 18 February, , accessed March 2007.

103

This page intentionally left blank

6

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

‘We Are Here, Yet We Are Not Here’: The Heritage of Excluded Groups Keld Buciek and Kristine Juul

Displacement, movement and separation of people seem to be among the most prominent features of human existence. The dispersal of populations and cultures across many regions and societies requires that previously solid and grounded notions be reconsidered from an angle of transnationalism and globalization. This is not the less true for questions of heritage, of ownership of discourses of past and present that are important elements in present-day struggles over identity and belonging. Despite the fact that immigrants form a relatively large share of the population of most Western European countries, and hence contribute in a substantial manner to their economic and cultural development, these groups leave only very limited imprints on the oﬃcial branding of heritage sites of these countries. The aim of the chapter, therefore, is to discuss the notion of heritage, and its ability to capture and incorporate the multiple and oen contradictory cultural practices of diﬀerent groups of actors. It seeks also to point towards new paths that might transcend the rather static and conﬁned view of local history that is oen implicit in the heritage perspective. In order to illustrate some of the diﬃculties and potentials encountered when trying to ‘unveil’ the heritage of excluded or marginal groups, we draw on a number of examples from Sweden, Germany, Denmark and elsewhere and discuss how diﬀerent actors are represented in the narratives of the places they inhabit. Furthermore, the chapter assesses how immigrants themselves perceive their position in speciﬁc places. Finally, we trace the formation of diﬀerent migrant belongings and scrutinize the identity narratives through which they are stabilized.

Setting a Monument of One’s Life The Holy Book, sacred bread and a monument – how do such artefacts relate to issues of exclusion, memory, heritage and belonging? Alexandra Ålund (1996a) discusses the stories of three Swedish immigrant girls and shows how each of

T A R C

H I them makes use of certain artefacts to connect past and present. In each of the stories an artefact has particular value to the girls as it serves as a means to create a sense of being rooted and to handle the feelings of having an outsider identity. One of the stories is about Jelena, a girl of Serbian descent living in Sweden. In Jelena’s case, conﬂicts of loyalty between the Serbian community and the Albanian community of her boyfriend put her in a particularly diﬃcult role. As Ålund (1996a, 18) writes: ‘Against the background of the disintegrating Yugoslavia, the majority of the Serbs in Jelena’s suburb have adopted the Serbian motherland’s view of Kosovo Albanians as a threat.’ But despite all the personal experiences of persecuted relatives expelled from other parts of Yugoslavia, Jelena still connects to Yugoslavia as her country and perceives it as multi-ethnic and indivisible. In her despair over the present situation, in which the equal values and common life on which the former Yugoslavia was built are fading, she relates to a number of heroic images and, in particular, to a certain monument (a stone) from her grandfather’s village which commemorates the heroes of World War II. What is important to her is that these heroes were of mixed ethnic origin. Just as Jelena’s own ancestors, these people came from diﬀerent parts of the Balkans but had seled in this particular village and, when it became necessary, they fought to be able to belong there. By recalling the content of this monument, Jelena is able to come to grips with the present unseling situation of a homeland which increasingly is being based on myths of ethnic exclusivity and diﬀerence. Jelena does not feel that she belongs to a speciﬁc ethnic group and hence for her the memorial stone conveys and underscores this feeling of a mixed descent, which to her is the very essence of being Yugoslav. But as her Yugoslavia no longer exists and her relationship with her boyfriend, a Swedish boy of Albanian descent, is rendered so diﬃcult, her Swedishness assumes increasing importance. In this situation she wonders if Sweden really is her country now, and whether she or her children will ever be seen on a monument for those who have built Sweden (Ålund, 1996b, 20). The story of Jelena epitomizes one of the central themes of this chapter: how do immigrants deal with memories and heritage, and how is the past used in the present by groups who have limited possibilities of leing their past leave imprints in the places they inhabit? In Jelena’s case, the monument she uses to reconcile herself with the collapse of Yugoslavia is located far away from her present life, while the monument commemorating the contribution of immigrants to the building of Sweden may never come into existence. Within the iconography and monuments representing minority groups, it is oen diﬃcult to ﬁnd place narratives which take into consideration the heritage of excluded groups.

Do Immigrants Leave Imprints? Although a critique has been raised of the homogenizing hegemony of heritage construction over the past few years, relatively few aempts have been made to study how immigrants ﬁgure in local heritage representations (see Buciek, Bærenholdt and Juul, 2006). Among the more lasting examples of heritage, one ﬁnds 106

‘W A H, Y W A N H’ for example the Jewish churchyards in Copenhagen, Fredericia or Nakskov which, together with the Russian and German sections of the public cemeteries, witness to a multicultural presence in the past. Cemeteries as markers of the presence of minority groups do not play the same role as before, as many immigrants now have the means to have the bodies of their dead family members ﬂown back to the ‘homeland’ where they can be given a ‘proper’ burial. Apart from burial grounds, very few monuments can be found in the Danish landscape that document the contribution of immigrants to the nation-building process. Two exceptions concern Kongenshus Memorialpark in Jutland and the town of Frederiksværk in Sjælland.

Kongenshus Memorialpark This memorial complex is located in a large nature/heath reserve and consists of a number of tall, upright stones with inscriptions. The ﬁrst part of the site comprises a long path of stones leading down to a valley boom, where a number of other stones form a large circle or arena. This site commemorates those people who ‘conquered the heath’ and transformed it into agricultural land. The stones around the arena are inscribed with the names of the ‘pioneers’, mainly those who planned and conceived the project, while the stones along the pathway are decorated with the names and symbols of the districts and parishes which were involved in this gigantic project. The names of those farmers who actively struggled to cultivate and transform the heath into ﬁelds and forests are also commemorated here. Kongenshus Memorialpark is a celebration of one of the most prominent Danish eﬀorts to transform nature into culture. This eﬀort was particularly nurtured following Denmark’s defeat to Prussia in 1864, when one ﬁh of the national territory (including Schleswig-Holstein) was lost. Under the slogan: ‘Hvad udad tabes skal indad vindes’,1 the diminished kingdom implemented a number of public works to regain territory through cultivation of ‘pristine’ nature within its territory. The central narrative of strength and endurance also made it an appropriate issue to commemorate in the rebuilding process aer World War II. At the inauguration in 1953, King Frederik IX opened the park with the following words: The stones here bear witness to the fact that tenacity and tough willpower can overcome all obstacles. May these noble qualities never disappear from our nation and our people, and let us – the descendants – continue along this path and through solidarity show our commitment to make Denmark bigger and richer. Long live Denmark (our translation, cited in Sørensen, 2003, 101). While the heritage site connects ﬁrst and foremost to Danishness and national pride (see Graham, Ashworth and Tunbridge, 2000, for a discussion of the relations between nationalism and heritage), perhaps its most interesting feature is a small stone located in a rather marginal position. Marked 1759, this is inscribed with a 1

‘Recovering external losses through internal gains.’ 107

T A R C

H I number of German names. In contrast to the adjacent celebration of Danishness, it commemorates the story of a group of landless German immigrants who were persuaded to move into this area in the mid-eighteenth century by the Danish crown. The plan had been to establish a colony with hard-working German peasants who could show their Danish equals how to cultivate the diﬃcult and sandy heathlands. The colonization of the heath turned out to be a disaster and those migrants who survived the experiment had to return to Germany as poor as when they had ﬁrst come. Nonetheless, the project was an important milestone in Danish agricultural history as it contributed to the introduction of new crops and to new ways of using dra animals. In spite of these important achievements, it requires careful scrutiny of the Kongenshus Memorialpark to notice these traces of foreign impact. The presence of this particular stone, nonetheless, adds an important qualiﬁcation to the otherwise glamorous picture of the national struggle to ‘combat the heath’. Obviously, the transformation of the heath started more than a century before the defeat of 1864, which conventionally marks the ‘turning point’ in Denmark’s selfidentiﬁcation from an expansive kingdom to a small, but hard-working nation. Furthermore, this process was initiated by foreign farmers, a picture which does not ﬁt into the later celebration of Danishness. As a result, these cultivators remain almost invisible, overlaid by the master narrative at play here, that of Danishness.

Frederiksværk A similar example, related to industrial expansion and the creation of the Danish welfare state, is provided by the development of Frederiksværk which provides an excellent illustration of the invisibility of the undeniable contribution by migrant workers in its oﬃcial branding as Denmark’s oldest industrial town. The tourist construction of the town goes like this: Once upon a time long ago, in 1717 to be precise, the king decided that a canal should be dug to drain water from Arresø. The work was carried out by Danish soldiers and Swedish POWs. Today the canal ﬂows peacefully, enhancing the town’s special charm. Along its banks the many well-preserved buildings blend happily with the new, a modern testimony of the past. In reality, the creation, growth and wealth of Frederiksværk were closely associated with the availability of foreign labourers who were brought to the town in great numbers from very diﬀerent parts of the world. First, in the early 1700s, Swedish prisoners-of-war contributed to the creation of the town by digging the canals which connected the Arresø Lake with Roskilde Fjord. When the opportunities of waterpower were seized to develop a large and successful production of gunpowder and cannons on the banks of the canals, French, German and British workers and engineers were brought to the town to provide the expertise and skilled manpower needed. Armaments production was later expanded with foundries, rolling mills, stove production and other types of iron and steel production, all of 108

‘W A H, Y W A N H’ which demanded a continuous provision of skilled labour. Finally, the industrial boom from the 1960s onwards required organized recruitment of many workers, initially from other parts of Denmark, but subsequently from Pakistan, Ireland and Yugoslavia. In the common narratives, Frederiksværk’s remarkably global dimension tends to be downplayed and forgoen. The town still contains many traces of its history of industrial development, some of which are still in use while others have been reconstructed as heritage sites. Obviously the laer do not in themselves communicate any meanings, doing so only through the establishment of place narratives. Such place narratives may be produced by inhabitants, visitors, or by the trade unions. It is through their visions, as well as those of central agents such as museums or the tourist industry, that a particular selection of heritage achieves a more lasting imprint on the visual and material representations of the town. Obviously, all social groups create and reproduce relationships between their members by actively engaging memory-work of some kind, and many groups strive to gain recognition by celebrating their perceived heritage. In Frederiksværk a great deal of work has been done by the trade unions in documenting the role of manual workers in the town’s industrial growth. But the experiences of the immigrant workers are partial (Buciek, Bærenholdt and Juul, 2006). In the publications of the museum and the trade unions, the emphasis is mostly on the stability of the hard-working Yugoslavs and their acceptance of whatever working condition and payment they were oﬀered: The ﬁrst migrant workers to come to Frederiksværk were the Yugoslavs. They arrived more or less in the mid-sixties. There is no doubt that they undercut the wages. But we were happy to have them here, since the dirtiest work was passed on to them. Later, when we found out that they had support contracts and could send money home tax-free, we really started envying them. I also remember when shortage of employment began and people said that they should be sent home (interview with Danish steel worker, in the publication celebrating the centenary of the trade union of un-skilled labour (Federspiel, 1998, 124)). This narrative is also shared by the Yugoslav workers themselves: ‘In fact, they [the Yugoslavs] would take on any kind of jobs, that the Danes wouldn’t do themselves. I don’t know if they [the Danes] felt superior or they simply didn’t want to do it because the work was so hard’ (Serb immigrant, interviewed by Buciek, 2005). Asked about the imprints le by themselves and their fellow immigrant labourers on the town (Buciek, Bærenholdt and Juul, 2006), the Serbs who constitute the bulk of the foreign labour force of Frederiksværk tend to highlight their invisibility. This is not done in a negative way. Rather they take a certain pride in stressing the high level of integration found among this group: We do not form a glaring contrast to Danish people, we do not have dark skin, and our culture and habits are not very diﬀerent from the Danish habits (interview with Serbian immigrant, June 2005). 109

T A R C

H I We’ve taken on any kind of work here, and have taken part during all these years … In Frederiksværk, you know, we are so many Yugoslavs who live here. But, when I think about it, we aren’t very visible. It’s because we are so integrated. We are very much accepted here. You won’t sense any unrest here. Compared to many other places, there is no trouble here. In Frederiksværk we are here, yet we are not here (Serbian man, January 2005). The lack of immigrant imprints on the town is perhaps also an explanation as to why some of the interviewees described it in rather unexciting terms: ‘There isn’t much to see in Frederiksværk. You can visit the woods, and stroll by the canal. You can walk the pedestrian street from the shopping mall to the church. You can go to a café or you can go home and watch TV’ (Serbian man, February 2005). There are, however, a number of places or way-points which bear strong evidence of Frederiksværk’s global labour force. One such way-mark is the Serbian club, the Salpetre Barn, located in the old gunpowder mill area, which hosts a number of the cultural associations sponsored by the Frederiksværk municipality. Another is the shopping mall, the Nord Centre, which has become a favourite spot for many of the older ﬁrst-generation workers, among whom a large number are now retired. During the day, the main indoor passage of the mall is the agora for the ‘ethnic’ diversities of everyday life. Some people meet on the benches, others at the local café to have a cup of coﬀee or a beer and discuss colloquial maers. Yugoslav friends (men and women, but mostly elderly men) come and go, some sit, others just engage in a lile small talk with the various groups in passing. Deals are made, things are traded, information is exchanged both about the former Yugoslavia and life in Denmark. The most important, and, at the same time, the least visible, marker of Yugoslav presence in the town is the private house. For many Yugoslavs in Frederiksværk, the home stands out as the most important marker of integration and partaking, the most obvious expression of their integration into Danish society: To buy a house is also a way of involving yourself. It costs a lot to get a house and if you take a look around among the Yugoslavs here, you’ll realize that it was my father who was the ﬁrst to acquire a house – he was the pioneer. Today many Yugoslavs in Frederiksværk have houses. There are really many, at least 100 households, that have built houses. People have realized [that it is safe to do so …]. Earlier there was always a fear of being expelled from the country, so at that time the strategy was to have as lile material possessions as possible here, so as not to have great losses, if we were thrown out. It isn’t like that any more. People no longer think that way (interview with Serbian male, Frederiksværk, January 2005). Indeed the house has become a marker of membership in the consumer society – a marker of selement and of having acquired a longer time perspective:

110

‘W A H, Y W A N H’ We have our children and grandchildren here. That has changed people’s mentality. When they ﬁrst arrived here, they were only thinking about earning money, and were living in small rooms in order to spend as lile money as possible. Today people live in luxury, as I think I do. We have bought houses and cars and all these odd things [points at a large TV and stereo set]. We no longer think that we should save money to build down there. Now life is here. This is where we belong (interview, Frederiksværk, January 2005).

Memory-work: Inside and Outside As the villas of Serbian immigrants in Frederiksværk serve as symbols of integration, they usually resemble other houses. Indeed the owners take great pride in not having any signs of diﬀerence or otherness displayed on the façade. In reality much of the memory-work among foreigners tends, as will be shown below, to take place, not in the public sphere, but at home. This accords with much of the literature on diasporas and identity, such as, for example, the studies by Divya Tolia-Kelly (2004a; 2004b) of South Asian immigrants in Britain. According to her, it is mainly through what she terms visual cultures, the photographs, pictures, shrines and artefacts, displayed in the homes of immigrants, that identity work takes place. Through such display of material artefacts, immigrants carry out the memory-work which enables them to secure a sense of being and belonging within England. Tolia-Kelly’s point is that through the displaying of such ‘visual cultures’, a ‘sensory engagement with other places, landscapes and natures is refracted’ (2004a, 319). As material signiﬁers of identiﬁcation with land, territory and environments, artefacts contribute to create a formal and informal connectedness with national cultures and citizenship as part of an embodied practice of ‘making homes’ among the immigrants. Apparently trivial artefacts may become sacred shrines and function as important points of engagement with being, living and developing a history in England. But how does memory-work relate to heritage? Obviously all social groups carry out diﬀerent forms of memory-work. This also goes for those groups who are perceived as being on the margins or outside mainstream culture. Many of the groups discussed here have experienced some kind of displacement, voluntary or not, and employ diﬀerent types of markers of memory. According to Hall (1999) memory-work is a signifying practice, a way of producing meaning by the use of the past. In that respect memory-work can be regarded as analogous with the way Graham, Ashworth and Tunbridge (2000) use the concept of heritage. Just like heritage, memory-work fulﬁls many opposing uses and contains conﬂicting meanings. Just like heritage, the practice of memory-work takes place somewhere. In other words memory-work exists as a practice which involves both spatial and identity-related discussions. While relatively lile work has been done speciﬁcally on heritage and memorywork among minority or diaspora groups, the ﬁeld of heritage and memory-work is wider when it comes to understanding how both remembering and forgeing 111

T A R C

H I function as inherently social processes in majority cultures. Many of these discussions may be traced back to the works of Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945). Not least in Social Frameworks (1992), he takes a stand against the then dominant notion of memory as an individual phenomenon. Instead he analyses its collective character in relation to family, religious groups, classes and so on. Furthermore he highlights how the collective memory is bound to a physical space. Especially in On Collective Memory (1992), a theoretical understanding of the relations between collective memory, time, space and symbol is developed. According to Halbwachs, it is only through group relations that localization and reproduction of memory are possible. This is because memory is a social construct, being created, reproduced and transmied through the institutions and practices of the social group. To Halbwachs, it makes no sense to discuss individual memory as something separate from social memory. We are never alone, he says, meaning that memory only exists as a social gestalt, where each member of a social group needs others to decide what to remember, what to forget and, not least, to decide how to interpret speciﬁc events. In this social process inclusions and exclusions are inevitable. According to Halbwachs, the past is constantly (re-)created in accordance with the needs of the present. Every time we memorize the original experience, it is reduced to a stereotypic image, forming the collective memory. The function and meaning of memory is therefore deﬁned by present purposes. Or one could also say, the past is used as a resource for the present. The past, however, is not used similarly by all social groups and, evidently, identity work is carried out very diﬀerently among dissimilar types of immigrants. This multi-vocality of the heritage of excluded or marginalized groups is demonstrated by Maja Povrzanovic Frykman’s work (2002) on diﬀerent Croatian diaspora groups in Sweden. She shows the diﬀerence in narrative strategies about the homeland and the past between, on the one hand, the well-established Croatian diaspora and, on the other, those refugees who arrived in Sweden as a result of the collapse of Yugoslavia during the 1990s. Due to the diﬀerent symbolic spaces through which the ethnic and national identities have been produced, diﬀerent narrative strategies are employed regarding the new homeland. Obviously, identity-shaping experiences such as the disintegration of Yugoslavia diﬀer widely between those whose understandings may be ranked as non-experience (seeing the war only on television) and those who had ﬁrst-hand experiences of being exposed to military aack. Consequently many diasporic Croatians, for whom Croatian independence was part of a necessary transition to a beer future in ﬁnally acquiring their own homeland, decorate their houses with national Croatian symbols. This is not the case of the refugees, for whom the transition was a personal tragedy, encapsulating loss, rupture and displacement. Instead of adorning their homes with national symbols which to them have no positive connotations, they struggle to create agreeable surroundings in ﬂats that they seldom might choose themselves. All social groups do heritage-work, through strategically selecting events or ideas from the past to be used in everyday life. But there are as many collective memories as there are social groups. Some of these groups have more power than others, some are dominant in puing their heritage on display. This obviously challenges many 112

‘W A H, Y W A N H’ diﬀerent identity projects with potentially conﬂicting (or competing) values. In fact, identity and otherness are closely related, and according to Graham, Ashworth and Tunbridge (2000, 24) both concepts are necessary to understand how ‘the creation of any heritage actively or potentially disinherits or excludes those who do not subscribe to, or are embraced within, the terms of meaning deﬁning that heritage’. An obvious consequence of this is that we must deal with a multiplicity of alternative visions of places and complex understandings of hybrid cultures. Of particular relevance for the present discussion is the use of souvenirs as transmiers and touchstones of memory. Much in the same vein as Tolia-Kelly looks at the role of artefacts, Morgan and Pritchard (2005) stress the ways in which souvenirs can be regarded as objects mediating experiences in time and space. The accumulation of the physical artefacts of displacement materializes identity and mediates the sense and memory of place for many excluded groups. Many families use souvenirs as a means of preserving narratives about place and memory and through that evolve into narratives of heritage. As in Frederiksværk, an important means for gaining visibility as a member of contemporary post-industrial societies is the acquisition of material objects and possessions. The objects on display in the homes oen acquire a sacred character, not least for those social groups who are experiencing profound cultural change due to displacement and marginalization. The artefacts become important elements in the way these groups (as well as others) deal with self-identity. At one and the same time souvenirs and artefacts serve to emphasize individuality and symbolically display the owner’s social and cultural integration. Hence, the home is a moral place, a reminder of undisrupted religious and social relationships. As such the home is the source of an authentic ‘pre-Diaspora’ self (Povrzanovic Frykman, 2002) and in this way it represents the ‘real’ or ‘genuine’ heritage.

Heimat Among the Yugoslav immigrants in Denmark, a popular saying is: ‘Wherever a man goes he has to build a house.’ Hence, it is the houses as such which constitute the most important markers of immigrant presence, a display of successful integration and of the intentions of the builder of ‘seing roots’ in the new homeland. Discussions of heritage inevitably also become discussions about seeking roots. The excluded groups we are dealing with here have come through diﬀerent routes. Remembering the well known idea of the dialectic of ‘roots’ and ‘routes’ – what Cliﬀord (1997) terms ‘dwelling-in-travel’ (see also Urry, 2000, 132–3), we explore here a heritage project that highlights root-seeking and route-taking for excluded groups. In October 2005, the journal GEO (a German parallel to National Geographic) published a large special issue entitled: Heimat – Warum der Mensch sie wieder braucht. The editorial introduction expressed a lingering German ambivalence, together with a need for re-opening a discussion of the concept with direct reference to the existence of new marginal, ethnic-oriented Heimat projects in a modern German context. It was acknowledged that it has been diﬃcult for many years to discuss 113

T A R C

H I the notion of Heimat (homeland/hometown/native soil/root) in Germany, due to the clear connotations of this concept to Nazism.2 This seems now under change. Today around 10 per cent of the German population do not have a German passport and Germany has become a country of immigration (at the time of the re-uniﬁcation in 1990, one-third of all West Germans were regarded as ‘immigrants’). Thus there is a strong need among many ‘new Germans’ for roots, for having a Heimat. The ambivalence of this memory project clearly stands out in the volume. The front-page features the picture of an old oak tree with two people siing on a bench beneath it. The oak is most likely chosen with direct reference to ancient German iconography and the idea of a distinct German Volk. In the construction of the supposed authenticity of that Volk, elements of landscapes were actively used. In contrast to Italian olive trees, and in contrast to urbanity, enormous oak trees began to ﬁgure as the emblem of ‘Germania’ (Schama, 1995, 103). Well aware of the problematic status of the concept of Heimat, the journal is trying to manoeuvre between considering the legitimate need of its readers to some kind of place-identity (for example, through a photo contest: ‘Schicken Sie uns Ihr schönsten Heimat-foto – dann schicken wir Sie nach Venedig!’3), and a critical stance towards the Heimat projects of a number of minority groups (among others, neo-nationalsocialist groups). As the editor puts it: ‘Heimat ist schwierig. Mehr denn je. Die Suche nach ihr. Und das Finden.’4 (GEO, 2005, 3). First and foremost, the search for Heimat is seen in a perspective of loss: ‘es bleibt im Kern eine defensive, eine Bewahrungsund Angstkategorie. Es handelt von Verlust’5 (ibid). This is in fact the main reason for dealing with the concept: In a time of great social unrest and change, the concept is oﬀering itself as a way for many human beings to help them understand their own ‘glocal’ history and as a help to regain their own position in the world (ibid, 103). So, what kinds of projects are highlighted through the re-introduction of Heimat? To a large degree, the cases are identity-related heritage projects of excluded groups: Turkish homes in Germany; the border activities of Chinese immigrants between Hungary and Germany; forced relocation of Germans from Poland; minority cultures of Frisian-speaking Germans; Jews in Germany today; Russian artists in Berlin; and the use of Denkmahler (memory sites) among neo-Nazi groupings. The main article relates to the heritage of immigrant workers in Germany and to their ways of mediating between house/home and home/home (where you live – where you belong). The pictures illustrating this last theme are signiﬁcant. A number of families of diﬀerent ethnic origins living in the same building in inner-city Hamburg are portrayed in their living rooms surrounded by what one might expect are their most important artefacts – family photographs, souvenirs, chinaware, paintings, statuees and other types of icons from the homeland (alongside stereos, televisions, and so on). With reference to Tolia-Kelly (2004a ;

2 3 4 5

Although the German ﬁlm director Edgar Reitz fuelled discussion with Heimat from 1984, few have taken the opportunity to re-explore the concept. ‘Send us the ﬁnest photo from your native soil and we will send you to Venice.’ ‘Heimat is a diﬃcult thing. More than ever. Searching it. And ﬁnding it.’ ‘Basically it is a defensive category of conservation and anxiety. It is all about fear.’ 114

‘W A H, Y W A N H’ 2004b), there seems to be a number of common elements in living diasporic lives, be that in Germany, Britain or elsewhere. The families in the building come from Afghanistan, Turkey, Cape Verde, Russia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and from other parts of Germany. For GEO, this represents modern German society: ‘One house, many nations’ (‘es gibt vermutlich schon eine ganze Menge solcher Häuser bei uns’6). While the ethnic German occupants express their longing towards a Heimat with reference to a childhood by the ocean, or the food of their childhood, this longing is not dominant as their homes are in Hamburg. For the ‘new Germans’ the case is diﬀerent, of course. Oen Heimat/home is connected with loss, grief, escape, while Germany conveys security: ‘Jedes Mal, wenn ich Bilder aus der Heimat sehe, denke ich: Go sei Dank sind wir jetzt in Deutschland … Heimat … bedeutet … keine Angst haben’7 (Djamala, from Afghanistan). On the other hand, all the new Germans express positive memories by relating to notions of lost landscapes, the climate of home, or food-culture/café-culture. Many express a wish to be buried ‘back home’. All these families express their status as marginal or excluded in one way or the other. They directly address relations to the majority culture, not the least in connection to language: ‘Fremd fühle ich mich nur manchmal, wenn ich nicht das richtige deutsche Wort ﬁnde’8 (Zineta, from Bosnia). Although obviously no common picture of the heritage of these groups materializes, some features can nevertheless be outlined; to forget is, as we saw above, an integral part of memory. If memory is to make any sense, humans must also be able to forget. Only by forgeing can we give sense and meaning to memory. The memory of any given event or experience exists as a narrative, but is oen contextualized in our memory by artefacts. What is le of the original experience is strongly reduced and collective memory is therefore the result of an enormous process of selecting and excluding. In this process both minority and majority cultures take part. What in fact manifests itself physically to bind this memory process for the groups discussed here are ‘monuments’ that have to do with overcoming geographical distance. For these groups, the home becomes a memory site through the artefacts symbolizing the relation between home/home and house/home, the old home and the new home. On the basis of that, one could propose the concept of ‘monuments of distance’ as an expression of the heritage of excluded groups. Where the majority culture expresses heritage through what we may call ‘monuments of events’ (baleﬁelds, national heroes, buildings, memorial sites, stones, and so on), the heritage of excluded groups manifests itself in artefacts that remember the journey, both the traumatic journey and the repeated visits to the homeland. In other words, this is where routes and roots come together.

6 7 8

‘There are probably already a whole lot of such houses among us.’ ‘Every time when I see pictures from the homeland, I think: Thank God that we are now in Germany. Being at home is … not to feel anxiety.’ ‘Foreign is a feeling that I only have sometimes, when I cannot remember the right German word.’ 115

T A R C

H I Heritage as a Means of Stabilizing Identities The need for stabilizing identities through the establishment of symbolic spaces and other types of memory-work has become at the same time more pertinent and more diﬃcult for speciﬁc immigrant groups since the mid-1990s (Ålund, 1996a; Fortier, 2000; Povrzanovic Frykman, 2002; Stefansson, 2000). This applies not least to those who arrived in Denmark from the former Yugoslavia more than 30 years ago. During their absence from Yugoslavia, they experienced how their homeland disintegrated and collapsed, while they personally were forced to transform from being Yugoslavs to becoming Serbs, Croats, Albanians, Bosnians or Montenegrins or, even more painful, a mix of several of these categories. For many of the Serbs interviewed in our research, this was a maer of deep frustration, as it implied a loss of some of the political markers which had enabled them to feel politically connected to the Danish labour movement, the trade unions and the socialist and Social Democratic Parties. Furthermore the picture of Serbia as the villain of the Balkan wars has become commonplace, both in the news media and popular culture, where the drug dealer or king-pin of female traﬃcking tends to be either an evil Serb or a ruthless Albanian. The ordinary Serb of Frederiksværk or Hillerød has limited means to contest the increasingly stereotyped backdrop of the Balkan countries as a perpetual powderkeg and the site of ancient ethnic division and hatred. Neither the war memorials that convey the story of Serbia’s long and bloody struggle against Fascism during World War II, the monuments commemorating brotherhood and unity so common all over the former Yugoslavia, or the types of monuments employed by Jelena in her memory that underscore and recollect Yugoslavia’s more tolerant and multiethnic past are available to the Danish public. Hence, the opportunity of using the past in the present becomes severely restrained. Because of their ‘integration to the point of invisibility’, as discussed above, Lowenthal’s (1998) notion of heritage as something which clariﬁes pasts so as to infuse them with present purposes is hardly an available option for Danish Serbs. What remains is the possibility employed by many of the Serbian associations in Denmark, to become visible through football, folkdance and traditional food available at town festivals. Meanwhile other types of memory-work, either on the personal level or in the more public sphere, (increasingly) take place ‘down there’ in the hometown in Serbia. Here one can celebrate the deceased family members or organize one’s own burial place in a decent and respectful manner which expresses one’s achievements in life. Here one can erect a board commemorating those who died in traﬃc accidents, and here one can build houses which adequately display the increase in status and economy acquired through the long years of austerity in the foreign country.

Multi-place and Mobile Heritage Practices What do these increasing transnational relations imply for the notion of heritage? As has been shown in the booming literature on transnationalism, improved 116

‘W A H, Y W A N H’ conditions for mobility and for maintaining and expanding relations with the homeland implies that many diaspora groups maintain close relations with the hometown or place (Portes, 1999) and that ‘they live dual lives, speaking two languages and having homes in two countries and making a living through continuous regular contact across national borders’ (Ní Laoire, 2003, 277). Among the Serbs in Denmark, for example, one ﬁnds a large group of retired persons who divide their lives equally between their two homes, staying six months in Denmark and six months in Serbia, where they are supported by their Danish pensions. In much of the literature, however, the new challenges in terms of heritage and memory-work brought about through this straddling over two home countries are discussed primarily as a question of how diasporic groups struggle to create new homes and identities outside their home countries. An interesting example of this perspective is provided by a recent volume of Contemporary South Asia (Brown and Talbot, 2006). This special issue focuses on the large communities of various groups of South Asian origin in Britain. Particular aention is paid to the work of creating sacred and domestic spaces, emphasizing the development of sacred spaces from makeshi premises to ostentatious ‘cathedrals’, reﬂecting not only the changing role of places of worship but also their importance for community visibility and their growing importance in community development. In this way, such sacred places are elevated to visible heritage sites. Nevertheless, the focus tends to remain on domestic practices when looking at the ways in which diaspora groups maintain links to homeland. While the cultural, social and economic linkages that exist across the boundaries of nations are emphasized, the focal point oen remains spatially conﬁned or ﬁxed on the ways in which the national spaces are sustained and reworked through the everyday activities of people and communities (Lowe and Lloyd, 1997; Olson and Silvey, 2006) rather than on the relations of movement and displacement (as proposed by, for example, Cliﬀord, 1997; Mitchell, 1997). Increasingly, however, scholars recognize that transnationalism deals with relations between things and movements across things. As Mitchell (2003) stresses, an emphasis on border crossing, movements and connections forces a reconceptualization of core beliefs in migration and geopolitical literature. Obviously, such a conceptualization of transnationalism should also challenge our notion of heritage. Maybe heritage is not only polyvocal but also polyspatial. Maybe the really important thing about immigrant heritage/heritage of the excluded lies in the ability to transgress the spatially conﬁned notions of heritage. In the case of the Serbian diaspora in Denmark, many eﬀorts are, as shown above, invested in demonstrating integration into Danish society, to such an extent that immigrant culture tends to become invisible. Nonetheless, these eﬀorts are part of an ambivalent project, since an obvious interest exists to keep contact with the village of origin. That oen remains the place, even for the younger generations, where marriage partners are to be found (although most probably from one’s own or one of the other diaspora communities). This is where important celebrations such as baptisms, weddings and funerals take place, just as it remains the principal site for displaying wealth and social status through conspicuous status demonstrations (see Schierup, 1973; Schierup and Ålund, 1987). 117

T A R C

H I As described by Buciek, Bærenholdt and Juul (2006), part of the life of the Serb diaspora is spent travelling between Serbia and Denmark. Several members of the diaspora have been employed as chauﬀeurs or travel hostesses by the bus companies operating between Denmark and the Serbian hometowns. Driving buses provides extra income opportunities and enables frequent visits between family members. The bus connects the places but is itself a mobile place, a material expression and speciﬁcity of the diaspora experience. There are, however, no ‘oﬃcial’ narratives about this. Neither the important connections knied through these travel activities in terms of capital remiances from the migrants to kin (and state) in the homeland, nor the important contributions of the diaspora communities in terms of preserving contact between Serbia and the rest of Europe, are included in any oﬃcial narrative about the workers in, for example, Frederiksværk. Nevertheless, these narratives of transnational activities are perhaps among the most important, not least at a time when many of those staying in Serbia feel increasingly abandoned and discarded as a second-class nation. Indeed, many of the crucial experiences which form the memories and heritage of diaspora or excluded groups are not conﬁned to a single and limited space, but rather to the connections between places. They involve multiple allegiances and belongings negotiated in a kind of intermediate space between nations and cultures.

From Identity to Belonging: Invisible Immigrant? In her discussion of the struggles of many migrants to gain recognition and become visible in the societies in which they have seled and begun a new life, Alexandra Ålund (1996b) invokes the ﬁgure of Gregor Samsa. In Ka a’s short story Metamorphosis, the clerk, Gregor Samsa, wakes up one morning and ﬁnds that he has mutated into a giant bug. When he speculates about his new fate, Samsa realizes that he is in fact a non-person and that his life has been characterized by continual denunciation, being only the ‘boss’ creature, without intelligence and backbone. Samsa knows that he has been changed, but does the rest of the world know, see or feel it? Samsa doubts it. Will they even notice his metamorphosis, and will they be frightened? If that is the case, there is no major trouble as he had no responsibility for his own mutation. And if they do not notice and they are not upset, then he has no reason to be upset either. In fact, he can, if he hurries, be at the station by eight and make it to work on time (Ka a, 1964, from Ålund, 1996b). As Ålund observes, Ka a brings to light the classic connection between systemic violation and deformation of personal identity. A central issue here is that of visibility – if Samsa’s mutation into a bug is perceived by himself and by others as normal, the act of violation is made invisible and he alone becomes responsible for his misery. But recognition of fellow beings represents not simply politeness but a vital human need. In that sense the character of Samsa, whose extreme transformation into a giant bug seems likely to pass unnoticed by his neighbours and colleagues, is central for understanding the way in which non-recognition contributes to make Samsa a non-person, an ‘invisible’. In many ways it may be 118

‘W A H, Y W A N H’ paralleled to the situation of many immigrants, whose feelings of outsider identity and search for socio-cultural belonging give way to identity work and eﬀorts being put into recreating and sustaining a continuity between past and present through the use of various symbols. Here, places of memory act as a means to give them visibility as persons and citizens in the countries of reception. The issue of invisibility has long been discussed within, for example, feminist literature, but it is less apparent how it is being approached within literature on identity and heritage (Ålund, 1996b, 7). One scholar who has touched explicitly upon the notions of home, origins, continuity and tradition is Anne-Marie Fortier (2000), who discusses the formation of Italian migrant belongings and the ways in which identity narratives are stabilized. According to Fortier, migrant identity is one for which the experience of geographical movement has been formative. She regards identity as a threshold, a location that by deﬁnition frames the passage from one space to another. Hence it is a transition, always producing itself through the combined process of being and becoming. To circumvent common explanations according to which the idea of having an identity circulates as a feasible idea and an evident fact, Fortier’s work instead highlights the hard and strenuous work which is invested by Italian immigrants in Britain in the creation of communal spaces of belonging, as part of a continuous identity project. These communal spaces are based on a perceived reproduction of traditions, and the cultural and historical meanings produced in a wide array of institutional practices, which serve to connect the fragmented and dispersed Italian population. Through her work, Fortier stresses the idea of belonging as a notion referring to both possessions and inclusion. Hence, ‘practices about group identity are about manufacturing cultural and historical belongings that mark out the terrains of commonality, through which the social dynamics and politics of “ﬁing in” are delineated’ (Fortier, 2000, 1). By using the terminology of ‘belonging’ instead of that of ‘identity’, Fortier (and, before her, Probyn, 1996) is able to ‘capture more accurately the desires for some sort of aachment, be it to other people, places or modes of aachment and the ways in which individuals and groups are caught within wanting to belong and wanting to become, a process that is fuelled by yearning rather than positing identity as a stable state’ (Probyn, 1996, in Fortier, 2000, 2). Obviously, some of these terrains are physical spaces that are appropriated as Italian cultural belongings, and reiﬁed as Italian possessions. Fortier’s work thus emphasizes the issue of visibility. Much like the Serbs encountered in Frederiksværk, the Italian communities in London that she has studied tend to cast themselves as ‘white ethnics’, as invisible immigrants in British society. As with many other (European) immigrants, they ﬁnd themselves at a threshold of distinctness and sameness in relation to the national majority culture. According to Fortier, Italian immigrants represent themselves as ‘invisible immigrants’ to emphasize the political indiﬀerence they come up against in their country of selement and to describe the quiet, non-disruptive nature of their insertion within British social fabric (Fortier, 2000, 23). What is important in Fortier’s work, however, is that she shows how invisibility may be a desirable strategy both for Italians in Britain and for Serbs in Denmark.

119

T A R C

H I But the issue of invisibility also conveys a fear of losing one’s own ethnic and national identity among a group whose invisibility is the product of its integration and acceptance into British society (rather than a result of conditions of marginality and imposed silence which conﬁgure the ‘invisibility’ of blacks in Britain) (Fortier, 2000, 23). Many Italians, therefore, seek to move out of this invisibility by carrying out diﬀerent collective forms of remembrance, oen through rituals and commemorations carried out at the Italian churches in London or the Italian cultural centres. These acts are deeply performative. Fortier’s project is therefore to explore the relationship between the construction of identity of places and the construction of terrains of belonging. What becomes interesting is to understand the ways in which memorywork may be localized and how this localization may take place.

Why Do Immigrants Leave So Little Imprint: Deliberate Strategy of Exclusion or Invisibility? To conclude, how is the ‘here’ inhabited and invested by a ‘foreign’ presence? How does the immigrant presence manifest itself in cities like London, Frederiksværk or Hamburg, and what is expressed in these displays? All heritage projects potentially disinherit or exclude those who do not subscribe to, or are not embraced within, the terms of meaning deﬁning that heritage. The cases discussed above raise the question of how marginal groups are represented in heritage narratives and why their own heritage so oen seems invisible. In the chapter, we have mainly been looking at exclusion in relation to diﬀerent diaspora experiences. The establishment of symbolic spaces and other types of memory-work fulﬁlling a growing need for speciﬁc immigrant groups has been our main focus. Memory-work as a signifying practice, a way of producing meaning through the use of the past, fulﬁls many opposing purposes and contains conﬂicting meanings. Just like heritage, the practice of memory-work involves both spatial and identity-related discussions. Memory exists only as a social gestalt, and each member of a social group needs others to decide what to remember, what to forget and, not least, to decide how certain events should be interpreted. In this social process, inclusions and exclusions are made and the past is constantly (re)created in accordance with the needs of the present. The point of departure for this chapter was that the new challenges in terms of heritage and memory-work, brought about through the straddling over two home countries, have been discussed primarily as a question of how diaspora groups struggle to create new homes and identities outside their home countries. We argue that the focus tends to remain on domestic practices when looking at the ways in which diaspora groups maintain links to homeland. While the cultural, social and economic linkages that exist across the boundaries of nations are seen as a necessary backdrop, it is oen presumed that the focus remains spatially conﬁned or ﬁxed. Oen the focal point remains on the ways in which national spaces are sustained and reworked through the everyday activities of people and communities rather than on the relations of movement and displacement. 120

‘W A H, Y W A N H’ Looking at the iconography and monuments representing minority groups, it may be diﬃcult to ﬁnd place narratives which take into consideration the heritage of excluded groups; in fact, very few monuments can be found which document the contribution of immigrants to the nation-building process. We saw how immigrant cultivators, workers, ethnic groups remain almost invisible, overlaid by the master narrative at play in the speciﬁc situations, being the national narratives of Danishness or the like. Many diﬀerent narratives are connected to the same spatial reality, but the oen very global aspect of the heritage of speciﬁc places is downplayed in the narratives being told. In fact this is done to such a degree that the legacy of ‘the stranger’ is more or less invisible. Much of the memory-work among foreigners thus tends to take place, not in the public sphere, but at ‘home’. For many of the Yugoslavs in Frederiksværk, the homestead stands out as the most important marker of integration and partaking, the most obvious expression of their integration into Danish society. Indeed the house has become a marker of membership in the consumer society – a sign of selement and of having acquired a longer time perspective. As material signiﬁers of identiﬁcation with land, territory and environments, artefacts help create a formal and informal connectedness with national cultures and citizenship as part of an embodied practice of ‘making homes’ among the immigrants. While the interior decoration of the homes of the diaspora bear speciﬁc imprints of the immigrants’ national identity, it is the houses as such which constitute the most important markers of immigrant presence among the Serbian immigrants in Denmark. Despite extensive literature on material culture, empirical studies of the meanings marginal groups ascribe to the objects they possess, why they value them and how much importance they aach to them, are surprisingly scarce. In a future research project, it could be insightful to examine the ‘meanings’ of ‘displacement artefacts’, employing novel forms of expressing lived ‘bordercrossing’ experience (including visual representations, autobiographical methods). What in fact manifests itself physically to bind the memory process seems for the groups we are dealing with here to be ‘monuments’ that have to do with crossing geographical distance. For these groups, the home becomes a memory site, its artefacts symbolizing the relation between home/home and house/home, the old home and the new home. On this basis we suggest the concept of ‘monuments of distances’ as an expression of the heritage of excluded groups. Where the majority culture expresses heritage through, what we could call, ‘monuments of events’, the heritage of excluded groups is manifested in artefacts that remember the journey, both the traumatic journey of exile and the repeated visits to the homeland. In other words this is where routes and roots come together. We identify a need for approaches that can recognize the speciﬁcity of the diaspora experiences and the contingency of historical and material processes that can give rise to diﬀerent diaspora spaces. Many of the important experiences which form the memories and heritage of diaspora or excluded groups are not conﬁned to a single and limited space, but rather to the connections between places involving multiple allegiances and belongings – as a kind of intermediate space between nations and cultures.

121

T A R C

H I References Ålund, A. (1996a), Vitas Metamorphosis to ‘Immigrant Woman’ (Esbjerg: South Jutland University Press). Ålund, A. (1996b), Book, Bread and Monument: Continuity and Change Through Ethnic Memory and Beyond (Esbjerg: South Jutland University Press). Anderson, K., Domosh, M., Pile, S. and Thri, N. (eds) (2003), Handbook of Cultural Geography (Sage: London). Brown, J. and Talbot, I. (eds) (2006), ‘Making Home in the Diaspora: Opportunities and Dilemmas in the British South Asian Experience’, Contemporary South Asia 15 (June), 125–31. Buciek, K., Bærenholdt, J.O. and Juul, K. (2006), ‘Whose Heritage? Immigration and Place Narratives in Denmark’, Geograﬁska Annaler 88B:2, 185–97. Cliﬀord, J. (1997), Routes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). Coser, Lewis A. (1992), Maurice Halbwachs: On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Fanon, F. (1967), Black Skin, White Mask (New York: Grove Press). Federspiel, S. (1998), Arbejdsmænd – i Danmarks ældste industriby. SID Frederiksværk 1898–1998 (Copenhagen: Knuths Forlag). Fortier, A-M. (2000), Migrant Belongings, Memory, Space, Identity (Oxford: Berg). GEO 10, Heimat – Warum der Mench sie wieder braucht, October 2005 (Hamburg: Gruner and Jahr). Graham, B., Ashworth, G.J. and Tunbridge, J.E. (2000), A Geography of Heritage: Power, Culture and Economy (London: Arnold). Halbwachs, M. (1992), On Collective Memory (including: ‘The Social Frameworks of Memory’ [1925] and ‘The Legendary Topography of the Gospels in the Holy Land’ [1941]). Hall, S. (1999), ‘Whose Heritage? Un-seling “The Heritage”, Re-imagining the Post-nation’, Third Text 49, Winter, 3–13. Ka a, F. (1961), Metamorphosis and Other Stories (London: Penguin). Lowe, L. and Lloyd, D. (1997), ‘Introduction’, in L. Lowe and D. Lloyd (eds), The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 1–32. Lowe, L. and Lloyd, D. (eds) (1997), The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Lowenthal, D. (1998), The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Mitchell, K. (1997), ‘Transnational Discourse: Bringing Geography Back In’, Antipode 29:2, 101–14. Mitchell, K. (2003), ‘Cultural Geographies of Transnationality’, in K. Anderson, M. Domosh, S. Pile and N. Thri (eds), Handbook of Cultural Geography (Sage: London), 74–87. Morgan, N. and Pritchard, A. (2005), ‘On Souvenirs and Metonymy – Narratives of Memory, Metaphor and Materiality’, Tourist Studies 5:1, 29–53. Ní Laoire, C. (2003), ‘Editorial Introduction: Locating Geographies of Diaspora’, International Journal of Population Geography 9, 275–80. 122

‘W A H, Y W A N H’ Olson, E. and Silvey, R. (2006), ‘Transnational Geographies: Rescaling Development, Migration and Religion’, Guest Editorial, Environment and Planning A 38:5, 805–8. Portes, P. (1999), ‘Social and Psychological Factors in the Academic Achievement of Children of Immigrants: A Cultural History Puzzle’, American Education Research Journal 36, 489–505. Povrzanovic Frykman, M. (2002), ‘Homeland Lost and Gained; Croatian Diaspora and Refugees in Sweden’, in N. Ali-Ali and K. Koser (eds), New Approaches to Migration? Transnational Communities and the Transformation of Home (London: Routledge), 118–37. Probyn, E. (1996), Outside Belongings (London: Routledge). Schama, S. (1995), Landscape and Memory (London: Harper Collins). Schierup, C-U. (1973), ‘Houses, Tractors, Golden Ducats, Prestige Game and Migration. A Study of Migrants to Denmark from a Yugoslav Village’, Field Report, Institute for Ethnography and Social Anthropology, Moesgård, Århus. Schierup, C-U. and Ålund, A. (1987), Will They Still be Dancing? Integration and Ethnic Transformation Among Yugoslav Immigrants in Scandinavia (Stockholm: Almqvist och Wiksell). Sørensen, G.L. (2003), Det Begyndte på Kongenshus – en Fortælling om Hedens Natur, Kultur og Opdyrkning (Copenhagen: Nyt Nordisk Forlag Arnold Busk). Stefansson, A.H. (2000), ‘Det Fremmede Hjem, Bosniske Flygtninges Illusioner om Hjemlandet’, Tidsskriet Antropologi 41, 47–60. Tolia-Kelly, D. (2004a), ‘Locating Processes of Identiﬁcation: Studying the Precipitates of Re-memory Through Artefacts in the British Asian Home’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 29, 314–29. Tolia-Kelly, D. (2004b), ‘Materializing Post-colonial Geographies: Examining the Textural Landscapes of Migration in the British Asian Home’, Geoforum 35, 675– 88. Urry, J. (2000), Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-ﬁrst Century (London: Routledge).

123

This page intentionally left blank

7

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

The Contestation of Heritage: The Enduring Importance of Religion Rana P.B. Singh

The Context of Religion in Heritage Globalization, democratization, international and local cultural preservation initiatives, the penetration of the market economy, the commodiﬁcation of culture, and the politics of religious and ethnic identity impinge upon and shape many of the monumental religious sites in the world today: Lumbini; Borobudur; Angkor Wat; Stonehenge; the great pyramids of Giza; the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya; the Buddhist images at Bamiyan; the mosques and churches in Bosnia; these are only some of the examples (Owens, 2002). The concern of cultural heritage, especially religious built forms, played an active role in the past, but aention to value, use and conservation are said to have emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from the rubrics of ‘modernity’ (Graham, Ashworth and Tunbridge, 2000). With the ‘cultural turn’ in geography and the parallel ‘turn to place’ in sociology during the 1990s, writers began mapping social relations and heritage constructs, including some issues of contestation. Religious beliefs and practices have shaped local geographies through built forms and associated rituals and performances. In course of time, such symbolic forms were considered as symbols of political control, identity, hegemony and social security (see Harvey, 1979). Bevan (2006, 7–8) notes that, ‘the levelling of buildings and cities has always been an inevitable part of conducting hostilities and has worsened as weaponry has become heavier and more destructive, from the slings and arrows of the past to the daisy-cuers of today’. Religion and political conﬂicts go side-by-side in the maintenance and destruction of those heritagescapes that played a symbolic role in identity. The ancient monuments and built structures of the past have literally been invented and reinvented by many people over successive generations, each with their own ideas and many times with religious connotations (Harvey, 2005). This results in a multiplicity of readings, which oen compete for legitimacy and dominance

T A R C

H I (Harvey, 2003). A particular site perceived as possessing inherent power of healing becomes a sacred place (see Brace, Bailey and Harvey, 2006). Considering space as a point of cultural and religious contact, exchange, and sometimes conﬂict, has aracted scholars to understand the reﬂections and reproductions of religious and social desires and anxieties (De Rogatis, 2003). These structures are, symbolically, the repositories of knowledge about former understandings of our planet and our relationships with it. In a broad sense, the heritage of religion refers to the places where the spirit of nature and culture meet, and are additionally symbolized and maintained by people’s aachment to rituals performed there (Singh, 1997). Sacrosanct built forms possess at least four aributes: external (for example, architecture); internal (for example, images); eternal (for example, universal message); and manifest (for example, adherents’ beliefs). But the transferability from one to another always seems to be a painful contestation. There are elements, however, composed of signs, words and symbols associated with built heritage and related inherent values that may diﬀer to those of non-believers or tourists (Vukonić, 2006). The four basic issues for understanding representations and the discursive construction of heritage are: understanding cultural signiﬁcance; information on the value of heritage; conservation in response to the spiritual; and cultural responsibility (Waterton, Smith and Campbell, 2006). In pursuing such points, the chapter ﬁrst addresses the contestation of heritage and religion which is then discussed through a series of case studies. I then move to examine issues of conservation and preservation as they apply to religious heritage.

Contesting Heritage and Religion The subject of contesting heritage and the related enduring role of religion can be visualized at various scales, global, national, regional, local and bodily, and at various degrees of a shared sense of religious belonging (Kong, 2001). Lowenthal (1998, 226) argues that ‘heritage, far from being fatally predetermined or God-given, is in large measure our own marvellously malleable creation’. Of course, heritage is not an innate or primordial phenomenon; people created or converted it into symbolic form, and in many cases associated it with religion. The understanding of national heritage as an expression of culture is largely a local understanding. This promotes conﬂicts and contestation, due mainly to the clash betwen various groups claiming the same control or the same ancestry (Olwig, 2005). Contestation between regional and national also emerges with reference to the values perceived regionally and projected nationally. It is also sometimes the case that regional or provincial landscape challenges the national. This condition is more prevalent in the case of the built religious heritage landscape in South Asia, which is historically old, and culturally and visually rich, especially in its architecture and associated symbols and legends. In Asia, it is an issue of open debate as to whether the elements of cultural traditions to be reinforced should include heritage environments. Some would say that the maintenance of the intangible elements of heritage (religion, language, 126

T C

H literature, dance, music) is suﬃcient. Others, however, insist that a people’s history is wrien on the ground, that cultural traditions are reﬂected in the built environments people have created for themselves, and that, because of this, heritage areas and buildings merit protection (Howe and Logan, 2002). Religious traditions and customs have become common as heritage through the people being habituated to them which is, in fact, a quite informal process (Eiter, 2004). Statutory law, in contrast, applies to a community consisting of any members who may have the same interests but do not necessarily have common roots or heritage. In many areas of heritagescape, conﬂicts occur due to divergent practices in recording individuals’ claims. Tunbridge and Ashworth (1996) have suggested that heritage is inherently ‘dissonant’. It is open to multiple interpretations and functions as people seek to fulﬁl competing interests. Although all heritages are contestable, the interpretation and representation of human suﬀering and past injustices can create signiﬁcant dissonance or disagreement, as is evident at many sacred places all over the world, especially with reference to contested religious identities. This dissonance derives, ﬁrst, from remembering uncomfortable historical truths within a process of making religious identity, and then determining how the meaning of the religious identity will be represented and communicated to the public. Increasing numbers of studies have addressed heritage sites as nodes where the competing histories – or the dissonant heritages – of diﬀerent social groups collide. Accommodating dissonance means recognizing the complicated histories of communities and their places, while simultaneously accepting parallel and competing accounts of the past. The contradiction between symbolic systems and economic values, especially for religious buildings, creates a problem when, under comprehensive development plans, such built forms require demolition or change of location. In Singapore, for example, the issues about shiing buildings are solved by pragmatic planning principles and active public participation, meaning that the vested sacred meanings and values therein are re-established (Kong, 2000). The values that are central to religious individuals suggest the importance of self-identities rooted in more symbolic and spiritual dimensions. To realize these self-identities requires that certain built forms, namely religious buildings, exist, following particular symbolic principles of existence. These tensions are constantly negotiated through the cultural landscape, as the state and people renegotiate the centrality of urban forms in their spiritual identities (see Kong, 2000). The use of heritage also becomes controversial in the context of the commercialization of spirituality (Timothy and Conover, 2006). In some areas of the world, there are examples of government policies inﬂuencing visitors and interpretation at religious sites. A classic example concerns the Buddhist shrines in Myanmar, now taken over by the reigning government which, in turn, reinterprets the shrines for tourists in a sanitized manner, focusing more on reinforcing political and economic claims than on presenting the Buddhist views of site sacrality (Philip and Mercer, 1999). The conﬂicts between natural and cultural landscapes become noticeable in other places; in fact, in many cases, association with a particular sect or religious group results in contestation. Under the ethical and rational senses of 127

T A R C

H I sustainable planning, the issue of contestation can be transformed into harmonious integrity (see Slaiby and Mitchell, 2003). Long-standing conﬂicts of interest between cities or local sites and state or central authority, and between districts themselves, were exacerbated by the competitive and motivated concerns of development policy in South Asia. Even though all religious sites are part of a heritage environment, not all heritage sites are religious sites. Nevertheless, in the Oriental world religious sites dominate the heritage scene. The built heritage gives the visual appearance of a value in its own right and has the eﬀect that the necessary interdependence of its very existence with other processes (economic, political or social) can be complex (Duncan and Duncan, 2001). At a site or place, the religious (cultural) symbolic value is manifested in a variety of ways.

Religion and the Contestation of Heritage: the Scenario Developing on these general points, in this section of the chapter, several case studies are used to explore the role of religion in the contestation of heritage.

The Holy Land Of all the Earth’s sacred places, in the city of Jerusalem, all the world’s three major monotheistic faiths – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – claim inextricable sacred ties. There is much that these three religions of Abraham have in common, but shared belief has not translated easily into shared space. Over the past 2,000 years, these religions have struggled for control of the city and the holy places within it, leading to, at best, uneasy co-existence, at worst, periods of outright war. The conﬂict continues even today. At various times adherents of each religion have suﬀered persecution and the destruction of their places of worship. In 1071, Jerusalem came under Turkish control, and the destruction of the city and persecution of Christians prompted the Pope to call for a holy war for control of the city. Less than 30 years later, Christian Crusaders had taken control of Jerusalem and slaughtered the city’s Muslims and Jews, but their hegemony was short-lived, and Muslims retook the city in 1187. In 1517, the Turks conquered Jerusalem, which remained a part of the Ooman Empire for 400 years, during which period there were mixed periods of friendly and hostile relations among the three religions. Sectarian strife increased, however, most especially during the nineteenth century. Aer World War I, the British gained control of Palestine, including Jerusalem, and endorsed the idea of a national home for the Jews. Aer World War II, the catastrophe of the Holocaust increased international sympathy for the Jewish cause. In 1947, the United Nations resolved to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, with Jerusalem designated as an international city. Bordering Arab nations resisted the establishment of Israel as an independent state and a war for Israel’s independence broke out in 1948. In 1967, Israel seized the remainder of Jerusalem but restored access to sacred sites for all religions. In the decades that followed, Palestinian Arabs, most of whom are Muslim, have struggled to achieve their own statehood, which some 128

T C

H feel should include all or part of Jerusalem, especially the sacred sites that crown the Temple Mount, the Dome of the Rock and Al Aqsa mosque. The three religions (Christianity, Judaism and Islam) contest territorial control of the sacred sites in Jerusalem. There were periods in history when control by one religion meant that it was prohibited to another religious community (Kliot and Collins-Kreiner, 2003). Since 1967, when East Jerusalem and the holy shrines were transferred to Israeli rule, the policy of the Israeli government has been to preserve and defend the conditions of the sacred sites, to respect the Church’s autonomy and status quo among them, avoiding friction or conﬂicts with the various denominations. For the Muslims, who took over Jerusalem from the Christian Byzantines in 638 AD, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem is regarded as a holy Muslim site, third only to the mosques of Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia. Muslims exerted full control over the Temple Mount for 1300 years, except for a short period between 1099 and 1187 when the Christian Crusades established their kingdom in the Holy Land and turned the Temple Mount into a church site. The British received a mandate over Palestine in 1920, and in 1967 Israel assumed control over Jerusalem. Since then, the Arab reaction to Israeli control over the Temple Mount has become extremely defensive (Gonen, 2003). This represents an ongoing apprehension that Jewish national–religious circles will eventually have their way and the Jews may destroy Islamic holy shrines on the Temple Mount, Haram a-Sharif (see Gonen, 2003). Since 1982, at least 20 religious zealots and fanatics of all kinds have been caught in preparations of atrocities of one kind or another, including planning to bomb the Temple Mount mosques. Such a situation tends to promote the ‘Jerusalem Syndrome’, a mental disturbance of people whose encounter with Jerusalem is emotional, stormy and may cause temporary or permanent mental illness (Kliot and Collins-Kreiner, 2003). Bethlehem constitutes, together with Jerusalem and Nazareth, one of the three most sacred cities for Christianity. The Basilica and Groo of the Nativity is sacred for Catholics, Orthodox and Armenians, and all have ownership rights in the church. Bethlehem is the only important pilgrimage site in the Holy Land wholly under the control of the Palestinian Authority and, similarly to Nazareth, is a city with tensions between the Muslim majority and the dwindling Christian community. Pilgrimage to Bethlehem means a transition from Israeli-controlled territory to Palestinian Authority areas, and Israel and the Palestinians have to coordinate that transition, but occasional outbreaks of violence have discouraged pilgrims and tourists from visiting (Kliot and Collins-Kreiner, 2003). The Shihab-a-Din area of Nazareth is a site of constant dispute between Christians and Muslims (see Emme, 1995). Within the framework of the Nazareth 2000 Plan, a large square, adjacent to the Basilica of the Annunciation, was planned as an open space where pilgrims and tourists could rest before and aer visiting the sacred sites. In one corner of this designated square, an old and dilapidated structure was declared as unﬁt and destroyed. Some Muslims claimed that this structure had been used as a place for prayer and that, because of its proximity to a grave related to Shihab-a-Din (a Muslim hero according to Islamic tradition), a 129

T A R C

H I mosque should be built on the site instead of a square which would beneﬁt only tourists and Christians. To emphasize their demands, Muslim religious youth erected a prayer-tent on the Shihab-a-Din site and called on believers to come and pray in the temporary mosque (Kliot and Collins-Kreiner, 2003). This resulted in contestation and disrupted the serenity of the place. The tension between the two communities exploded in April 1999, just before Easter, when there were riots and violent aacks by Muslim mobs on Christians, priests and nuns and on Christian shops. Over the course of time, the construction of the mosque without permission, and the inability of the Israeli government to take action against this illegal construction, has resulted in continuing conﬂict. Thus, the Palestinian-Israeli conﬂict, and tensions within Israel among Muslims, Christians and Jews, are major forces threatening the serenity and harmonious environment at heritage sites. This has a direct impact on checking the numbers of pilgrims and visitors to those sites of living heritage and thus on the economy of the region.

Southern Asia The stupa of Borobudur in Java, Indonesia, which was built c.1200BP, is the largest Buddhist monument that represents existential space, culturally deﬁned and dating back to the tradition of Mahayana Buddhism and the control of central Java by the Sailendra dynasty. Undoubtedly, the strong, common religion was a major force informing the building and meaning of Borobudur in relation to its landscape seing. There were also international connections with India and Sri Lanka (Taylor, 2003). This massive complex has recently undergone various transformations that have been prompted by its designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and by Indonesians reconceptualizing their nation-state aer the transition from Sukarno to Suharto. Obviously, the Indonesian government’s deliberate eﬀorts at modernization have provided new frames and lives for Borobudur, while eliding others, including religious aﬃnity. It is now a monument to the heritage of the nation and a tourist destination at which Buddhists are prohibited from performing collective rituals (Owens, 2002). The ‘totalizing’ eﬀect of governmental ‘framing’ of Borobudur’s meanings has resulted in ‘eliminating other “frames”, other “lives”, other stories about it’ (Errington, 1993, 56). Swayambhu (Kathmandu Valley, Nepal), the central point of a World Heritage Monument Preservation Zone and Nepal’s largest and arguably most important ancient site of Buddhist devotion, is a place being shaped by people who have diﬀering visions of what it is and should be. Inspired by devotion or a desire to acquire merit (among many other motivations), South Asians have also long restored, improved, decorated, remodelled and rebuilt temples, including ancient ones. The hill that more or less deﬁnes the Swayambhu Monument is a site of four Buddhisms (broadly deﬁned): Theravada, from Sri Lanka, Burma, and Thailand; Tibetan, from Tibet and Bhutan; and local variations of Vajrayana and Mahayana. The most conspicuous, elaborate and honoured feature of this site is the Swayambhu stupa itself, which is the most revered place for the Kathmandu Valley’s Newar Buddhists (Owens, 2002). This is also a site of contestation from many perspectives,

130

T C

H ranging from debates about religious meaning, to architectural symbolism, to struggles over land. It is also, however, ‘a product of collaborative construction that brings diﬀerences among collaborators to light’ (Owens, 2002, 283). The many diﬀerent parties interested in Swayambhu’s fate, both within and outside Nepal, have diﬀerences of opinion about what is to be preserved and for whom. Some favour the traditional practice of religious activities (now possible on a new scale and accessible to many), and others privilege the monuments themselves to be used as a heritagescape for tourism. The bombing of the international resort area of Kuta Beach and Hindu temples in Bali (Indonesia) in October 2002, that killed more than 200 people and ruined the Balinese tourist industry, was a threat to cultural–religious heritage and religious expressions of healing. Of course, it is not the high visibility of Bali as another locale vulnerable to terrorism, but the question of the relationship between a host culture and the aspiration of guests for a religious experience which indicates that ‘religious tourism’ may be a distinctive type of travel in the twenty-ﬁrst century (Fischer, 2003). Without rehearsing the historical context of the expansion of Javanese Hinduism, it is important to note that the oﬃcial designation of Balinese religious identity is ‘Hinduism’. Unfortunately, only ﬁve religions are recognized according to Indonesian law, and Balinese Hinduism is not one of them. The Hindu community in Bali was unsuccessful in preventing the building of a large hotel adjacent to the world-famed temple of Tanah Lot, but its resistance did accomplish two long-term results. First, restrictions were placed on the height and proximity of hotels to religious sites, while, secondly, many Balinese were awakened to the fragility of their environment and the need to use opportunities to act with a sense of empowerment over their land and culture. The Balinese Hindu community also opposed designation as a World Heritage Site, refusing to relinquish their authority over this symbolic centre, fearing that inscription might impugn their jurisdiction over the practices and care of Bali’s greatest pilgrimage site (Fischer, 2003). An order (fatwa) of the Taliban leader, Mulla Omar, on 26 February 2001 led to the destruction of the mammoth mountain carvings of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan. The prolonged civil war and unrest in the country since the fall of the communist government led to the systematic looting of ancient sites such as Ali Khanum, Begram and Hadda. As a consequence of religious vandalism, all traces of a glorious past have disappeared for ever (Bopearachchi, 2004). The Bamiyan destruction demonstrates four important points. First, unlike traditional war damage to cultural heritage, which aﬀects the enemy’s property, the demolition of the Buddhas of Bamiyan concerns heritage that belonged to the pre-Islamic past of the Afghan nation itself. Secondly, the destruction was not motivated by a military objective, but by the deliberate eradication of cultural heritage of religious or spiritual creativity that did not correspond to the Taliban view of religion and culture. Thirdly, the methods of execution diﬀered considerably from similar carefully planned destruction that occurred in the course of recent armed conﬂicts, such as the Balkan War of the 1990s and the Iraq–Iran war in the 1980s. Finally, this was the ﬁrst example of a planned, deliberate destruction of cultural heritage

131

T A R C

H I of great importance as an act of deﬁance toward the United Nations (UN) and the international community (Francioni and Lenzerini, 2006).

Holy Cities in India On 6 December 1992, a mob led by right-wing activist Hindu fundamentalists from the World Hindu Congress (VHP) succeeded, aer several aempts, in razing the sixteenth-century Babri mosque (built by Mughal king Babur) in Ayodhya, which was believed to be an important temple site of lord Rama in the early twelh century, but converted into a mosque aer its demolition (Bevan, 2006). However, there was not suﬃcient evidence to prove the existence of a Hindu temple on this site. During the previous four centuries, there had been several aempts to remove the mosque, either by legal means or through planned aacks. Aer India’s independence in 1947, the diﬀerent religions and their monuments had largely coexisted side by side, as in Bosnia. The Ayodhya crisis must also be seen within the climate of increased tensions between India and Pakistan over the last few decades, and between fundamentalist Hindu and Muslim groups within India itself (see Elst, 2002; 2003). The VHP has extended its agenda to get several disputed mosques under its control, as in the example of the important mosques in the holy cities of Mathura and Banaras (Varanasi). Eaton (2000) clearly shows that cases of destruction of places of worship were not restricted to Muslim rulers alone. He recounts numerous instances of Hindu kings having torn down Hindu temples, in addition to Jain and Buddhist shrines. He argues that these must be seen as, above all, politically powerful symbolic acts. Bevan (2006, 137) observes that: The demolition of sacral buildings has become a key proxy through which post-Partition inter-communal strife is now expressed. Ayodhya is India’s Twin Towers – a ground zero from which the waves of violence are spreading to engulf thousands and potentially millions of people. The Buddhist monastery and temple at Bodh Gaya was built by the king Ashoka c.2300BP and remained an active site until 1192 when Muslim invaders destroyed it. During the rule of Mughal king Akbar, from 1590, the temple was under the control of a Shaiva Hindu priest who managed to set Shiva Linga in the inner sanctum, which, aer the passage of time, resulted in religious conﬂicts. Under the patronage of the Burmese king, the temple was renovated and re-built in 1872. Aer independence, an Act of 1949 led to both Hindus and Buddhists geing authority for worship and joint control. But Buddhists have not accepted this arrangement, leading to a continuous movement to liberate the temple from the interference of Hindus, including the peaceful march of around half a million Buddhists from all parts of the world in October 1992 and November 1995. This contestation still continues. In Varanasi, the existence of an important mosque which followed the demolition of the famous temple of Vishvanatha in 1669 by the order of Mughal king Aurangzeb, is a subject of continuing conﬂict between Hindus and Muslims. Aurangzeb did not just build an ‘isolated’ mosque on ‘a’ destroyed temple. He 132

T C

H ordered all temples to be destroyed, among them the Kashi Vishvanatha, one of the most sacred places of Hinduism, and had mosques built on a number of cleared temple sites. Until today, the old Kashi Vishvanatha temple wall is visible as a part of the walls of the Gyanvapi mosque which Aurangzeb had built at the site. Aer demolishing the temple, Aurangzeb had a mosque built there. However, part of the temple was le as a warning and an insult to Hindu feelings (Singh, 1994). The Riverfront Heritage of Varanasi is in process of being enlisted as a World Heritage Site but is a source of contestation rather than consensus among Hindus and Muslims (see Singh, 1993). All other Hindu sacred places within Aurangzeb’s reach equally suﬀered destruction, with mosques being built on their sites. Among them were Krishna’s birth temple in Mathura and the rebuilt Somnath temple on the coast of Gujarat. The neo-Hindu revival and the awakening of Hindu identity inspired by the VHP is leading to demands to destroy, in turn, those Muslim monuments built on the razed sites of Hindu temples. Champaner-Pavagarh (a World Heritage Site), like other heritage sites in India, is both an historic and also an ethnographic landscape. It exhibits both the palimpsest of landscape layers inscribed over time and the juxtaposition of Hindu and Islamic traditions in architecture and city planning (see Sinha, 2004). Both Hindu and Islamic cultures exploited the visual potential of the topography. The sense of an harmonic relationship between Hindu (such as the Kalika goddess) and Muslim (such as the Jami and Shehri mosques) co-exists in the maintenance of this heritagescape; they exist facing each other, but it is questionable that this will continue in the future. The concept of cultural landscape as a heritage resource is a recent development from the old idea of historic conservation and certainly does not guide monument-centric colonial eﬀorts at restoration (Sinha and Harkness, 2006). Again, the Yamuna riverfront around the Taj Mahal (also a World Heritage Site) is suggested as a ‘cultural heritage landscape’. This also raises the issue of the suspicion of tensions between Hindus and Muslims at some places. Deﬁning heritage territory under the strict control of heritage law will help avoid conﬂicts and contestation, together with active public participation.

Other Areas Numerous other examples exist of the contestation of religious heritage. For example, religious objects are commonly and intentionally stolen from Catholic churches in Guatemala, just as there are thes of artefacts from ancient Maya and Xinca civilisations. It is estimated that over 5,000 archaeological sites are on the verge of destruction and loss in Guatemala (Valdés, 2006). Islamic religious heritage sites in Bosnia-Herzegovina, including mosques, shrines, martyrs’ tombs, theological schools and Islamic libraries and religious archives, all appear to have been singled out for destruction during the 1992–96 war. Out of 277 mosques, 68 were destroyed. Additionally 13 Roman Catholic religious monuments in the Canton of Sarajevo were razed (see Riedlmayer, 2002). From the spring of 1998 until the summer of 1999, Kosovo was the scene of armed conﬂict and savage ‘ethnic cleansing’. Thousands of the region’s Kosovar Albanian inhabitants

133

T A R C

H I were killed and nearly a million were driven from their homes. Less well known than the human tragedy is the damage to Kosovo’s rich cultural heritage, including its churches, mosques, monasteries and other religious monuments. A study of Guizhou villages in China reports that culture remains the most signiﬁcant development resource, but it needs to be viewed by the local state and other institutions as more than a product. We should remember that culture is a human process through which we create meaningful worlds in which to live (Negus, 1997). Treating culture in these broader terms, rather than only as an instrument for development, has helped to resolve the kinds of conﬂicts that have developed in places like Azure Dragon and Ox Market Fort in China (Oakes, 2006; Oakes and Schein, 2006).

Heritage Conservation, Preservation and Religion In warfare, historical and religious monuments are oen aacked to dispirit the enemy. As in Afghanistan under the Taliban regime, it is oen diﬃcult to prevent great losses (Krieken-Pieters, 2004). It is obvious that powerful groups oen promote ‘sectarian claims upon the past’ for their own ends and for keeping their upward identity (Landzelius, 2003, 208). Many heritage movements and plans are designed by local authorities to suit place-promotion strategies and marketing for tourism, pilgrimages and investment. Perhaps inevitably, they oen sanitize local histories, rarely focusing on their controversial, uncomfortable or mundane aspects, but celebrating their notable, distinctive elements instead. The cultural heritage, like other forms of landscape, is a subject of instability and transformation with respect to historical and cultural representations. Representation is a subject of people’s engagement to it, re-working for it, maintaining it, continuing it and also contesting to appropriate it, commonly using religion as a tool. Oral history is one of the commonly used approaches for maintaining continuity (Riley and Harvey, 2005). Public interest anthropology oﬀers a valuable approach, promising to provide the ground necessary for constructive dialogue between the varied stakeholders and for ameliorating social inequalities at heritage sites. A situation in which outsiders have pre-eminence in heritage productions and imagery also sometimes turns into contestation (Adams, 2005a). For example, the politics of power dynamics embedded in the genesis of the tourism imagery in the eastern Indonesian island of Alor derives mostly from competing images of Alorese people sculpted by both insiders and outsiders. The process encourages conﬂicts, especially in making images at diﬀerent levels and degrees. In fact, tourist images emerge and evolve as hybrid forms through the fusion of historical, local and visitor imagery (Adams, 2004a; 2004b). The contradiction between local perceptions and the involvement of outsiders, superseding the local, leads to further conﬂicts, as in the case of the Toraja village of Kété Késu on the island of Sulawesi, Indonesia, which is now inscribed on the World Heritage List as a living cultural landscape/heritagescape (Adams, 2003; 2005b; 2005c). Of course the country, Indonesia, is dominated by Islam; Toraja 134

T C

H village is mostly a Christian community that maintains its ethnic identity by the continuance and maintenance of its ancestral houses (tongkonan). One of the major objectives in visiting religious heritage sites is the development of identity through spiritual enlightenment. As many of the tourist industry’s resources are based on natural and built heritage, religious heritage is an important object for retrospection (Olsen and Timothy, 2002). Conversely, tourism aracts international visitors as a means of economic development and exchange. The Tarajans (Indonesia) are bound to re-examine and re-model their rituals and history to please outsider tourists and make the place more aractive, at the cost of sometimes destroying the meaning, exposure and emotive power of culture (Adams, 1999). With the growing sense of tourism and the wish to see culture as the mirror of history and tradition, heritage resource management becomes a focal issue for both the protection and maintenance of sacred sites and also the survival and continuity of pilgrimage ceremonies. The conservation and preservation of such holy sites would be a signiﬁcant move in the direction of fostering the rediscovery of forgoen or near-forgoen common cultural heritage and practices at sacred places, that oen centre on reverence to, and harmony with, the Earth as a source and sustainer of life (Singh, 2006). There are examples of such grand Hindu pilgrimages at regional level, like Sabarimalai in Kerala (South India), in which Christians and even Muslims participate (Sekar, 1992). Such places provide a nexus of cultural integrity. The Old Swan Brewery Precinct, in Perth, Western Australia, is considered as a place of cultural heritage signiﬁcance because of its aesthetics, scientiﬁc and social values, but this is also an object of dispute between indigenous and European heritage. The demolition of a brewery may be taken as a symbolic victory of Aboriginal rights; but ‘symbols are vulnerable entities upon which to build one’s hopes’ (Jones, 1997, 154). The case of the Bahá’í Gardens in Haifa, Israel, provides a successful example of the contentious politics of religion through the strategic social construction of the Gardens as a pseudo-secular site. Haifa’s adoption of the Gardens as a city icon and primary tool for the religious tourism industry has been accomplished in this process (Collins-Kreiner and Gatrell, 2006). Australia’s ICOMOS Burra Charter, 1999 (Article 13) emphasizes that the coexistence of cultural values should be recognized, respected and encouraged, especially in cases where they conﬂict. In this Article, the term ‘cultural values’ refers to those beliefs which are important to a cultural group, including but not limited to political, religious, spiritual and moral beliefs. In an Asian context, the ﬁve categories of the Burra Charter – aesthetic, historic, scientiﬁc, social and spiritual – are reduced into fewer categories; for example, in China social and spiritual values are neglected under the country’s political agenda (Logan, 2004; Waterton, Smith and Campbell, 2006). Certainly we need a very comprehensive vision of cultural landscape that integrates the harmony of ethical–religious values and intangible cultural heritage. Under the provisions of the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conﬂict of 14 May 1954, and of other relevant 135

T A R C

H I international instruments, it is prohibited: to commit any acts of hostility directed against the historic monuments, works of art or places of worship which constitute the cultural or spiritual heritage of peoples; to use such objects in support of the military eﬀort; to make such objects the object of reprisals (Francioni and Lenzerini, 2006). The deliberate and systematic destruction of cultural properties of preIslamic Afghanistan and, more particularly, of the Bamiyan Buddhas, in so far as this heritage constituted a representation of both a religious belief and the cultural identity of a people, could ﬁnally be envisaged as a violation of certain human rights to practise and obtain respect of one’s own religion (Francioni and Lenzerini, 2006). Years of civil war, bombardment, looting, neglect and, most recently, iconoclastic hysteria have reduced the once-proud National Museum at Kabul to a nearly empty shell. And now, reportedly, above its front door, frayed and ﬂapping in the wind, hangs a banner that reads: ‘A nation stays alive when its culture stays alive’ (Cuno, 2006, 41). Reconstruction on the rubble of destruction at Bamiyan is an option, and subsequent listing as a World Heritage Site would then become a possibility if, and only if, the World Heritage Commiee would make an exception to its criterion of authenticity, as it did in 1980 by listing the historic city of Warsaw. In this event the enormous increase in name recognition, caused by the publicity, could then even result in an increase in tourism, and some palpable if unintended beneﬁts might result from the destruction (Ashworth and Aa, 2002, 455). Unfortunately, there is no way to guarantee that tragedies like Bamiyan will not happen in the future. Rogue governments that refuse to heed the voice of human reason and restraint will no doubt be part of our future, just as they have been of the past. But there are some things that could be done to lessen the likelihood of such events in the future, including: an active UN-sponsored inter-religious dialogue and aention to spirituality; promoting education for universal values; giving more prominence to the UNESCO Convention; and increasing funding to preserve and maintain these sites for the sake of future generations (Bryant, 2002/03). The conservation of heritage in India is regulated by the constitution, referring to the fundamental rights to freedom of religion and culture. The presence of historic buildings in the modern world is fraught with danger. They are symbols of national pride, but are also sites of contestation, especially religious, that can also turn to inter-community violence. Much of the recent public debate associated with heritage has accompanied the escalation of both nationalist and regionalist movements, although claims on the past in the domains of museum representation, consumption and cultural performance are also related to the liberalization of the political economy (Hancock, 2002). Violence and suﬀering may reﬂect humanity’s sad history of continuous conﬂict, oppression and general unpleasantness, but they are also aractive characteristics of tourism products and heritage (Ashworth and Hartmann, 2005). In India, there has been criticism of the roles that urban development and mass media have played in erasing the material relics of the past, as well as in diminishing residents’ knowledge of and aachments to those relics. At the same time, the greater value accorded tourism as an avenue for development reﬂects a perception that the marketing of heritage oﬀers a means of preserving and 136

T C

H enhancing the value and visibility of the endangered residues of the past (Hancock, 2002). But religious consciousness has not led to an awakening of understanding of cultural heritage and heritage buildings. Religious buildings may form a large part of the cultural heritage in South Asia, but there is lile consciousness of their historical value (Feilden, 1993). In South Asia, the conservation movement has not yet integrated the religious ethos of Hindus, Jains, Buddhists, Sikhs as well as Muslims, and this is a critical area that needs study from the perspective of the ethics and practice of conservation and the projection of universal values (Feilden, 1993). Cultural heritage in Asian cities is shaped by philosophies and religious systems that emphasize the intangible rather than the tangible, and the built environment is oen not integral to memories of the past. Asian cities are treasure houses of intangible heritages with an abundance of myths, legends, festivities and rituals associated with sacred places. Without taking these and religious rites into account together, even the best-preserved temple will be merely an empty shell and of lile signiﬁcance to local people (Howe and Logan, 2002).

References Adams, K.M. (1999), ‘Taming Traditions. Torajan Ethnicity in the Age of Tourism’, in J. Forshee and C. Fink (eds) , Converging Interest: Traders, Travelers and Tourists in Southeast Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press), 249–63. Adams, K.M. (2003), ‘The Politics of Heritage in Southeast Asia: Interplaying the Local and the Global’, Indonesia and the Malay World 31:89, 91–107. Adams, K.M. (2004a), ‘The Genesis of Touristic Imagery: Politics and Poetics in the Creation of a Remote Indonesian Island Destination’, Tourist Studies 4:2, 115–35 Adams, K.M. (2004b), ‘Commentary: Locating Global Legacies in Tana Toraja, Indonesia’, Current Issues in Tourism 7:4 and 5, 433–5. Adams, K.M. (2005a), ‘Public Interest Anthropology in Heritage Sites: Writing Culture and Righting Wrongs’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 11:5, 433–9. Adams, K.M. (2005b), Art as Politics: Re-Craing Identities, Tourism, and Power in Tana Toraja, Indonesia (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press). Adams, K.M. (2005c), ‘Generating Theory, Tourism and “World Heritage” in Indonesia: Ethical Quandaries for Practicing Anthropologists. For Anthropological Contributions to Travel and Tourism: Linking Theory with Practice’, National Association for the Practice of Anthropology Bulletin 23, 45–59. Ashworth, G.J. and Aa, B.J.M. van der (2002), ‘Bamyan: Whose Heritage Was It and What Should We Do About It?’, Current Issues in Tourism 5:5, 447–57. Ashworth, G.J. and Hartmann, R. (eds) (2005), Horror and Human Tragedy Revisited: The Management of Sites of Atrocities for Tourism (New York: Cognizant). Bevan, R. (2006), The Destruction of Memory. Architecture at War (London: Reaktion Books). Bopearachchi, O. (2004), ‘Recent Archaeological Discoveries from Afghanistan: Destruction of Cultural Heritage’, in K. Warikoo (ed.), Bamiyan: Challenge to World Heritage (New Delhi: Third Eye Bhavana Books & Prints), 40–54. 137

T A R C

H I Brace, C., Bailey, A. and Harvey, D.C. (2006), ‘Religion, Place and Space: A Framework for Investigating Historical Geographies of Religious Identities and Communities’, Progress in Human Geography 30:1, 28–43. Bryant, M.D. (2002/03), ‘The Tragedy of Bamiyan: Necessity and Limits of the Dialogue of Religions and Cultures’, Dialogue & Alliance 16:2 (Fall/Winter), 51–62. Collins-Kreiner, N. and Gatrell, J.D. (2006), ‘Tourism, Heritage and Pilgrimage: The Case of Haifa’s Bahá’í Gardens’, Journal of Heritage Tourism 1:1, 32–50. Cuno, J. (2006), ‘Beyond Bamiyan: Will the World be Ready Next Time?’, in B.T. Hoﬀman (ed.), Art and Cultural Heritage: Law, Policy and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 41–6. De Rogatis, A. (2003), Moral Geography: Maps, Missionaries and the American Frontier (Ithaca, NY: Columbia University Press). Duncan, J.S. and Duncan, N.G. (2001), ‘The Authenticization of the Politics of Landscape Preservation’, Annals, Association of American Geographers 91:2, 387–409. Eaton, R. (2000), Essays on Islam and Indian History (Delhi: Oxford University Press). Eiter, S. (2004), ‘Protected Areas in the Norwegian Mountains: Cultural Landscape Conservation – Whose Landscape?’, Norsk Geograﬁsk Tidsskrif – Norwegian Journal of Geography 58:4, 171–82. Elst, K. (2002), Ayodhya: The Case Against the Temple (New Delhi: Voice of India). Elst, K. (2003), Ayodhya, the Finale: Science Versus Secularism: The Excavations Debate (New Delhi: Voice of India). Emme, C.F. (1995), Beyond the Basilica: Christians and Muslims in Nazareth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Errington, S. (1993), ‘Making Progress on Borobudur: An Old Monument in New Order’, Visual Anthropology Review 2, 32–59. Feilden, B.M. (1993), ‘Is Conservation of Cultural Heritage Relevant to South Asia’, South Asian Studies 9:2, 1–10. Fischer, C.B. (2003), ‘Monument or Mall? Pilgrimage and Tourism in Indonesia’, paper delivered in the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religions in Atlanta, November. Francioni, F. and Lenzerini, F. (2006), ‘Obligation to Prevent and Avoid Destruction of Cultural Heritage: From Bamiyan to Iraq’, in B.T. Hoﬀman (ed.), Art and Cultural Heritage: Law, Policy and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 28–40. Gonen, R. (2003), Contested Holiness: Jewish, Muslim and Christian Perspectives on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem (Jersey City: KTAV Publ. House). Graham, B., Ashworth, G.J. and Tunbridge, J.E. (2000), A Geography of Heritage: Power, Culture, Economy (London: Arnold). Hancock, M. (2002), ‘Subjects of Heritage in Urban Southern India’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20, 693–717. Harvey, D. (1979), ‘Monument and Myth’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 69:3, 362–81. Harvey, D.C. (2001), ‘Heritage Pasts and Heritage Presents: Temporality, Meaning and the Scope of Heritage Studies’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 7:4, 319–38. 138

T C

H Harvey, D.C. (2003), ‘“National” Identities and the Politics of Ancient Heritage: Continuity and Change at Ancient Monuments in Britain and Ireland, c. 1675– 1850’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 28:4, 473–87. Harvey, D.C. (2005), ‘Newgrange, Heritage and the Irish Nation: Two Moments of Transformation’, in M. McCarthy (ed.), Ireland’s Heritages: Critical Perspectives on Memory and Identity (Aldershot and London: Ashgate), 123–37. Harvey, D.C., Jones, R.A., McInroy, N. and Milligan, C. (2002), ‘Timing and Spacing Celtic Geographies’, in D.C. Harvey, R.A. Jones, N. McInroy and C. Milligan (eds), Celtic Geographies: Old Cultures, New Times (London: Routledge), 1–17. Howe, R. and Logan, W.S. (2002), ‘Conclusion. Protecting Asia’s Urban Heritage: The Way Forward’, in R. Howe and W. Logan (eds), The Disappearing ‘Asian’ City – Protecting Asia’s Urban Heritage in a Globalizing World (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, China), 245–56, notes 279. Jones, R. (1997), ‘Sacred Sites or Profane Buildings? Reﬂections on the Old Swan Brewery Conﬂicts in Perth, Western Australia’, in B. Shaw and R. Jones (eds), Contested Urban Heritage. Voices from the Periphery (Aldershot and London: Ashgate), 132–55. Kliot, N. and Collins-Kreiner, N. (2003), ‘Wait For Us – We’re Not Ready Yet: Holy Land Preparations for the New Millennium – The Year 2000’, Current Issues in Tourism 6:2, 119–49. Kong, L. (2000), ‘Value Conﬂicts, Identity Construction and Urban Change’, in G. Bridge and S. Watson (eds), A Companion to the City (Oxford: Blackwell), 354–65. Kong, L. (2001), ‘Mapping “New” Geographies of Religion: Politics and Poetics in Modernity’, Progress in Human Geography 25, 211–33. Krieken-Pieters, J. van (2004), ‘The Buddhas of Bamiyan and Beyond: The Quest for an Eﬀective Protection of Cultural Property’, in K. Warikoo (ed.), Bamiyan: Challenge to World Heritage (New Delhi: Third Eye Bhavana Books & Prints), 134–57. Landzelius, M. (2003), ‘Commemorative Dis(re)membering: Erasing Heritage, Spatializing Disinheritance’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 21, 195–221. Logan, W.S. (2004), ‘Introduction: Voices from the Periphery: The Burra Charter in Context’, Historic Environment (Council for the Historic Environment, Australia), 18:1, 2–8. Lowenthal, D. (1998), The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Negus, K. (1997), ‘The Production of Culture’, in P. du Gay (ed.), Production of Culture/Cultures of Production (London: Sage), 67–118. Oakes, T. (2006), ‘Cultural Strategies of Development: Implications for Village Governance in China’, The Paciﬁc Review 19:1, 13–37. Oakes, T. and Schein, L. (2006), Translocal China: Linkages, Identities and the Reimagining of Space (London and New York: Routledge). Olsen, D.H. and Timothy, D.J. (2002), ‘Contested Religious Heritage: Diﬀering Views of Mormon Heritage’, Tourism Recreation Research 27:2, 7–15.

139

T A R C

H I Olwig, K. (2005), ‘Introduction: The Nature of Cultural Heritage, and the Culture of Natural Heritage – Northern Perspectives on a Contested Patrimony’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 11:1, 3–7. Owens, B.M. (2002), ‘Monumentality, Identity, and the State: Local Practice, World Heritage, and Heterotopia at Swayambhu, Nepal’, Anthropological Quarterly 75:2, 269–316. Philip, J. and Mercer, D. (1999), ‘Commodiﬁcation of Buddhism in Contemporary Burma’, Annals of Tourism Research 26, 31–54. Riedlmayer, A. (2002), ‘From the Ashes: The Past and Future of Bosnia’s Cultural Heritage’, in M. Shatzmiller (ed.), Islam and Bosnia: Conﬂict Resolution and Foreign Policy in Multi-Ethnic States (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press), 98–135. Riley, M. and Harvey, D.C. (2005), ‘Landscape Archaeology, Heritage and the Community in Devon: An Oral History Approach’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 11:4, 269–88. Sekar, R. (1992), The Sabarimalai Pilgrimage and Ayyappan Cultus (New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas Publishers). Singh, R.P.B. (1993), ‘Varanasi: A World Heritage City: The Frame, Historical Accounts on UNESCO Scale’, in R.P.B. Singh (ed.), Banaras (Varanasi): Cosmic Order, Sacred City, Hindu Traditions (Varanasi: Tara Book Agency), 297–316. Singh, R.P.B. (1994), ‘Sacred Geometry of India’s Holy City, Varanasi: Kashi as Cosmogram’, in R.P.B. Singh (ed.), The Spirit and Power of Place. Human Environment and Sacrality (Varanasi: National Geographical Society India, Pub. 41), 189–216. Singh, R.P.B. (1997), ‘Sacredscape and Urban Heritage in India: Contestation and Perspective’, in B. Shaw and R. Jones (eds), Contested Urban Heritage. Voices from the Periphery (Aldershot and London: Ashgate), 101–31. Singh, R.P.B. (2004), ‘The Ganga Riverfront in Varanasi, a Heritage Zone in Contestation’, Context: Built, Living and Natural (DRONAH, Gurgaon, HR, India) 1:1, 25–30. Singh, R.P.B. (2006), ‘Pilgrimage in Hinduism, Historical Context and Modern Perspectives’, in Dallen J.T. and Olsen D.H (eds), Tourism, Religion, and Spiritual Journeys (London and New York: Routledge), 220–36. Singh, R.P.B., Dar, V. and Rana, P.S. (2001), ‘Rationales for Including Varanasi as Heritage City in the UNESCO World Heritage List’, National Geographical Journal of India 47, 177–200. Singh, R.P.B. and Rana, P.S. (2001), ‘The Future of Heritage Tourism in Varanasi: Scenario, Prospects and Perspectives’, National Geographical Journal of India 47, 201–18. Sinha, A. (2004), ‘Chapmaner-Pavagarh Archaeological Park: A Design Approach’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 10:2, 117–28. Sinha, A. (2005), ‘Reconstructing the Taj Mahal Heritage Landscape: Deconstructing the Tourist Gaze’, Landscape Design 5:1, 14–20. Sinha, A. and Harkness, T. (2006), ‘Heritage, the Eye Visit: The Taj Mahal in Agra, India’, Indian Architect & Builder July, 95–8.

140

T C

H Slaiby, B.E. and Mitchell N.J. (2003), A Handbook for Managers of Cultural Landscapes with Natural Resource Values (Woodstock, Vermont: Conservation Study Institute). Taylor, K. (2003), ‘Cultural Landscape as Open Air Museum: Borobodur World Heritage Site and its Seing’, Humanities Research 10:2, 51–62. Timothy, D.J. and Conover, P.J. (2006), ‘Nature Religion, Self-spirituality and New Age Tourism’, in D.J. Timothy and D.H. Olsen (eds), Tourism, Religion, and Spiritual Journeys (London and New York: Routledge), 139–55. Tunbridge, J.E. and Ashworth, G.J. (1996), Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conﬂict (Chichester: John Wiley). Valdés, J.A. (2006), ‘Management and Conservation of Guatemala’s Cultural Heritage: A Challenge to Keep History Alive’, in B.T. Hoﬀman (ed.), Art and Cultural Heritage: Law, Policy and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 94–9. Vukonić, B. (2006), ‘Sacred Places and Tourism in Roman Catholic Tradition’, in D.J. Timothy and D.H. Olsen (eds), Tourism, Religion, and Spiritual Journeys (London and New York: Routledge), 237–53. Waterton, E., Smith, L. and Campbell, G. (2006), ‘The Utility of Discourse Analysis to Heritage Studies: The Burra Charter and Social Inclusion’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 12:4, 339–55.

141

This page intentionally left blank

8

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

Heritage from Below: Class, Social Protest and Resistance Iain J.M. Robertson

The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgeing (Kundera, 1996, 5). This chapter explores the idea and possibilities of the notion of heritage from below. Drawing on the widely accepted view that heritage is a social and cultural construct ﬁrmly embedded in the power relationships that structure society, this perspective relies on the recognition of the possibility of the expression of alternative forms of heritage that ‘work’ from below and within, conceived for, from and by local communities with minimal professional help from without. Such heritages, it is also suggested, interact more readily with identity at a local rather than national scale. Examples of these are comparatively rare. Nevertheless, it is argued here that the recently constructed memorial cairns on the island of Lewis, oﬀ the northwest coast of Scotland, are one such example. And yet, this chapter will show that, even at these very localized levels, such can be the ineﬀectual nature of heritage as a medium of communication that heritage from below may be incapable either of wholly circumventing the boundaries created by identity-making and maintaining, or of avoiding the dissonance wrien into any heritage landscape. There are two strong sets of views centring on the heritage discourse, the one considerably more pessimistic than the other. One set of views, typiﬁed by the work of Hewison (1987), Lowenthal (1985) and Wright (1985), sees heritage as an essentially conservative and nostalgic project. It encompasses a romanticized and idealized view of the past which, in Britain at least, is deployed to reinforce old certainties at times of signiﬁcant change. Tropes of identity which utilize a sense of inheritance from the past are, according to this view, predominantly rural and evoke a ‘lost golden age’. The countervailing view is considerably more optimistic and, drawing predominantly on binary oppositions such as amateur/professional; insider/outsider; history/heritage, recognizes a more democratic form of heritage. Here, heritage is seen to emphasize the ‘lile platoons’ rather than ‘great society’ (Samuel, 1994, 158). The ‘spirit of local places’ gains prominence in this construction, as do urban places. And it is not memorialization that is celebrated but ‘memorialism’

T A R C

H I (Dicks, 2000) – aempts by local communities to make and maintain their own heritage. Nevertheless, this present chapter is predicated on the belief that, whilst these more optimistic readings carry considerable merit, both fail to be suﬃciently broad or deep fully to accommodate the making and maintaining of an inheritance from the past here recognized as heritage from below. The view taken is that heritage from below is most oen found in, or drawing on, expressions of resistance or memory of resistance amongst the dominated. The chapter will draw on case studies from Australia and England, although the central focus will be on the recent memorialization of acts of social protest in the Highlands of Scotland. Triangulating between in-depth interviews with members of the organizing commiee, and theoretically informed work on heritage dissonance, memory and identity, it is argued that, although these memorials are manifestly expressions of heritage from below, the assertion of local identity via heritage and through social memory is even more complex and at odds to other dominant registers of identity than recent re-workings suggest.

Heritage and Local Identity: an Under-explored Relationship Made Meaningful via Heritage from Below? The heritage discourse is centred around a number of critical (in both meanings of the word) dualisms: between those who take a pessimistic view of the turn to heritage in the last quarter of the twentieth century and those who take a more optimistic view; between the professional practitioners of the heritage industry and the professional academics; between the past deployed in the service of identitymaking and maintaining at a national level and at other spatial scales. Whatever the scale, whether it is a single monument or ‘framing stretches of scenery’, landscapes, through their seeming ability to exemplify ‘moral order and aesthetic harmony’, come to ﬁgure and ‘picture the nation’ and thereby ‘achieve the status of national icons’ (Daniels, 1993, 5). It is, as Short (1991) has shown, only a short step from icon to ‘national landscape ideology’ in which the supposed values, meanings, beliefs and character of ‘the nation’ are enshrined in these iconic ’scapes’. Fully imbricated into and playing a constitutive role in this ideology is a sense of inheritance from the past in the form of national heritage (Edensor, 2002, 41). The key to understanding this link between national identity and ideology as made manifest in iconic national landscapes lies, Osborne believes, in the fact that nations occupy both ‘material and psychic terrains … oen rendered in terms of symbolically charged … space’. Drawing on Halbwachs’s conceptualization of ‘landmarks’, Osborne argues that these, through the conﬂation of history and geography, ‘serve to punctuate time, focus space and ﬁgure the landscape, converting it into a psychic terrain’ (see Halbwachs, 1992; Osborne, 1996, 24–5) that is at the core of identity at all spatial scales, but particularly the national. This seeming power of national identities as they relate to heritage is challenged both by other spatial and non-spatial manifestations of belonging and expressions of this relationship. Indeed, according to Graham, Ashworth and 144

H B : C, S P R Tunbridge, nationalism appears to exist ‘largely to structure such heterogeneity into … synecdoches of sameness’. Moreover, and most importantly for the current chapter, the role of heritage in identity-making and maintaining ‘ensures that it also becomes the focus of resistance at many scales and in many places’ (Graham, Ashworth and Tunbridge, 2000, 84 and 93). Notwithstanding this assertion, consideration of the relationship of heritage to spatial registers of identity other than the national has been somewhat uneven. Indicative of this is the fact that, whilst there is a considerable body of literature investigating this relationship at the supra-national scale, discussion of the manifestation of heritage at the local scale has been, on occasion, somewhat superﬁcial. Graham, Ashworth and Tunbridge (2000), for instance, devote comparatively lile space to exploring the relationship between heritage and local identity, notwithstanding the fact that, as Samuel (1994) demonstrates, it is with the local register that the relationship between heritage and identity-making and maintaining is the more meaningful. Nevertheless, some key interventions have been made. Working on the politics and practice of representation underpinning the commemoration of the war dead in France aer World War I, Sherman postulates a sharp distinction between national and local discourses of collective memory. He argues that, whilst ‘larger structures … and ideological formulations like the national-local dichotomy … mediate both the experience and the representation of memory’, local artefacts of commemoration enjoy ‘considerable autonomy’ (Sherman, 1994, 186–7) from these wider structures, processes and ideologies. Indeed, heritage as an expression of local autonomy is a belief explicitly underpinning the notion of local distinctiveness as formulated by the group Common Ground (in England) and implicitly underlying the notion of heritage from below. Critical to the main thrust of this chapter is the existence of a fundamental dichotomy within the ways in which heritage can be understood. For Howard, this dichotomy can be captured in the phrase ‘conspiracy theory’ (2003, 36), although this only implicitly includes the more optimistic readings of the implications of the UK’s turn to heritage in the 1970s. More balanced is Smith’s aempt to capture this dichotomy through ‘the authorized heritage discourse’ (AHD), which she contrasts with ‘subaltern and dissenting heritage discourses’ (2006, 29–42). Consisting largely of professionals speaking to professionals and within national and international institutions and codes of practice, the AHD lays claim to cultural capital via elite notions of ‘inheritance’ and ‘value’. This is therefore, according to Smith, a ‘professional discourse’ (2006, 4) which speaks to and assists in naturalizing dominant practices of identity and belonging. Smith contrasts this with ‘a range of popular discourses and practices’ which challenge the hegemonic. In particular, she identiﬁes ‘subaltern discourses of community participation’ (2006, 35) to which this chapter will add alternative expressions of identity-making and maintaining at the local scale. Much of the basis of these more optimistic perspectives can be found in the work of Raphael Samuel, whose position begins from a condemnation of academic history, albeit without taking into account many of the debates around postmodern historical constructions. For Samuel (1994), academic history is predicated on the belief that knowledge ‘ﬁlters downwards’ (1994, 4) in a strict hierarchy of 145

T A R C

H I practitioner acceptability. This he vividly contrasts with what he terms ‘unoﬃcial knowledge’ – a vast panoply of ‘other’ forms of history that receive at best grudging acknowledgement from the practitioners of ‘real history’. These forms range from the oral tradition through ‘children’s theatricals’ to the ‘set-piece historical debate’ and reveal history to be a ‘social form of knowledge’ grounded in an ‘ensemble of activities and practices’ (1994, 5–11), out of which, alongside and indivisible from events in the past, emerges a sense of the past in the present. For Samuel, close consideration should be given to ‘the perceptions of the past which ﬁnd expression in the discriminations of everyday life’ (1994, 17). From this he derives his more optimistic reading of the rise of heritage, itself consequent upon the historicist turn (identiﬁed by Samuel as ‘retroﬁing’ and ‘retrochic’) in the UK of the 1970s onwards. One consequence was a signiﬁcant broadening of what had hitherto been understood as heritage. Moreover, Samuel believes that the past encapsulated by this broadened heritage is culturally more pluralist and radically diﬀerent from previously hegemonic versions. Thus ‘it is the lile platoons … which command aention’ (1994, 158) in the late-twentieth-century version of the national past: urban, feminine and domestic. But most critically, and the point of departure for the idea of heritage from below here delineated, Samuel views the heritage currently enacted as an ‘inconceivably more democratic’ version of Englishness than any previously enacted and which the ‘heritage baiters allow’ (Samuel, 1994, 160–63 and 259–71). The phrase ‘heritage from below’ is a deliberate echo of the history from below impulse that was a product of the refashioning and revitalizing of social history in the 1960s. Clearly generating an echo also in Samuel’s optimistic conceptualizing of heritage and in the Public History movement of which Samuel was a pioneer, the intention was to challenge elitist conceptions of who history is about, who should ‘do history’ and who history is for. The intention was to uncover the lives and thoughts of common people and to rescue them from the ‘enormous condescension of posterity’ (Hobsbawm, 1998, 285). Encompassing a number of forms foregrounded by this movement, not least oral histories and popular memory, heritage from below draws in part on this project, in part also on Gramsci’s notion of ‘counter hegemony’ and on ‘unoﬃcial knowledge’. Gramsci’s notion of ideological hegemony has had a signiﬁcant impact on intellectual thought generally and across the humanities and social sciences more speciﬁcally. Unfortunately, the impact on heritage studies has been limited and oen negative. Ashworth, for instance, argues that this approach is of limited worth because ‘places rarely … convey a simple master narrative of the imposition of a single coherent dominant ideology for the establishment of legitimacy by a hegemonic authority or social group’ (1998, 113). This negative impact is a maer of some regret as the thesis has much to oﬀer studies of manifestations of social phenomena from below and in opposition to class domination. Equally regretfully, space does not here permit a full discussion of this thesis, thus the following brief outline is oﬀered by way of contextualization for the idea of heritage from below. The notion of hegemony is closely tied to the cultural means by which one group achieves and maintains dominance over others. Critically, from the perspective of 146

H B : C, S P R trying to understand the ‘work’ heritage does, hegemony allows entry into the important ways in which ‘culture itself’ shapes ‘social ideals and social relations’ (Billinge, 1984, 34). Gramsci characterized hegemony as the capacity of ‘dominant’ or ‘leading’ groups to generate consent among ‘the great masses’ due to the prestige (or authority or persuasion) and structural position of the dominant groups (Gramsci, 1971, 12). According to Williams, hegemony, as expressed by Gramsci, refers to ‘a complex interlocking of political, social and cultural forces’ that is also always dynamic, contested and modiﬁed (Williams, 1977, 108–12). It is, perhaps, always in a state of becoming. Apparent in ‘the whole substance of lived identities and relationships’, hegemony is, therefore, ‘a … body of practices and expectations’ from which the ‘lived social process [is] practically organized by speciﬁc and dominant meanings and values’ (Rudé, 1980; Williams, 1977, 108– 10). For Thompson (1978), such dominance can only be sustained by the constant exercise of skill, theatre and concession. Hegemonic control cannot impose an allembracing domination upon the ruled and there are always possibilities (latent or realized) for the expression of oppositional cultures. For the ideas here outlined, this last is critical. In discussing opposition to the hegemony of a dominant culture, we may distinguish between alternative and counter-hegemony. The former is associated with the rise to power of a new class but is only visible in an unrealized state. Once established, it becomes a new hegemonic culture. Counter-hegemony is any opposition to dominant hegemony. It need not be underpinned by an articulated class consciousness and can take both informal and organized forms. Thus food riot or land seizure (see below) can be recognized as counter-hegemonic forms (see Withers, 1988). Furthermore, if ‘landmarks’ or lieux de mémoire can be wrien into the landscape in support of national landscape ideologies, national identity and the meanings and values of the dominant within society, then counter-hegemonic landmarks can equally be wrien into the landscape in support and expression of local identity. As heritage from below, such landmarks can celebrate, perpetuate and make material oppositional meanings and practices. Something of the possibilities in this concept can be discerned in the preface by Studs Terkel to Brecher’s History From Below: ‘Ours, the richest country in the world, is the poorest in memory’ (Stonesoup, n.d.). In exactly the same way that history from below sought to prioritize the story of the defeated and nonprivileged, the idea of heritage from below recognizes the possibilities of heritages other than those of the dominant in society. One such possibility, and one of the key tasks of heritage from below, is that this expression of heritage, tangible or (oen) intangible, can oﬀer an alternative construction of the past to that of the hegemonic and, thereby, both galvanize and cohere local communities around alternative constructions of identity and narratives of place. This, then, provides the opportunity (seldom taken) to celebrate and memorialize from within the lives and thoughts of those otherwise hidden from history. Furthermore, recognition of manifestations of this concept takes us further away from the hegemonizing impulse of history than even Samuel would allow. Out of this, heritage from below can be recognized as both an opportunity for the expression of other heritages 147

T A R C

H I and identities, and a possibility for the assertion of a structure of feeling that runs counter to the hegemonic. Much of this derives from the widely recognized assertion (see, for instance, Ashworth, 1994 and Johnson, 1999) that the past, as heritage and a form of cultural capital, assists in the making and maintaining of elite narratives of place and identity. Heritage from below, therefore, draws also on the realization that this inevitably leaves a gap for the possibility of alternative and conﬂicting expressions of place and identity. Particularly evident in the multi-layered power of landscapes as memory places, heritage from below is grounded in common experience and popular memory and, it will be argued, is self-evidently a product of the local structures of feeling surrounding the creation of the memorial cairns on the Hebridean island of Lewis.

Heritage from Below in Place and Landscape? Common Ground and the Local Heritage Initiative In the UK, but regretfully actually English-centric, something of the nature of heritage from below is apparent in the campaigning group Common Ground and the Heritage Loery Fund’s funding stream ‘Local Heritage Initiative’ (LHI). Indeed, the two are explicitly linked through Common Ground’s notion of ‘Local Distinctiveness’. Common Ground intervenes to facilitate and stimulate local projects of placemaking and maintenance. Working with a philosophy borrowing recognizably from the phenomenology of Heidegger and Ingold amongst others, the group seeks to work with a conceptualizing of the relationship between people, place and identity which it terms ‘Local Distinctiveness’ (see Cliﬀord and King, 1993). This it sees as ‘a starting point for action to improve the quality of … everyday places’ (Common Ground, n.d.) based on a symbiotic and time-deep relationship between human and natural histories made manifest in the landscape and through everyday artefacts. Mirroring debates within heritage, both around authenticity and the need for a ‘lost golden age’ (inescapably rural), Common Ground seeks to be a catalyst of processes of heterogeneity. This it does with ‘provocations, examples and questions’ but not models or a lead role in local community actions as this would ‘deny the basic philosophy that we are expressing’. ‘Locality needs to be deﬁned from the inside, with a cultural and natural base, less abstraction, more detail’ (Cliﬀord and King, 1993, 7–18). Notwithstanding these aspirations, professionals from outside oen take a central role in Common Ground’s interventions. The New Milestones project may well be ‘a powerful exposition of cultural intimacy with the land’ but the most signiﬁcant claim made about the project is that it required equal input from the artist and local people (Morland, 1988).1 On one level this 1

hp://www.commonground.org.uk/sculpture/s-essay.html, accessed 12 February 2007. 148

H B : C, S P R reveals an interesting interactive process being played out, on another it reveals that even projects that aspire to ‘particularity’, ‘patina’ and ‘authenticity’ and to enabling the voice from within to be heard, cannot do this without the intervention of professional practitioners from outwith the community. Common Ground’s basic philosophy of ‘Local Distinctiveness’, in combination with a UK government drive to encourage citizens to take action ‘to care for their local environment’ (Local Heritage Initiative, 2006, 9), became central to a local heritage funding programme of the late 1990s – the LHI. ‘Local Distinctiveness’ was one of the four key aims of the LHI as it sought to ‘create a holistic programme that could add a new dimension to the understanding and appreciation of heritage at a local level’ (Local Heritage Initiative, 2006, 8). This programme would seem to be designed to encourage and foster expressions of heritage from below. Indeed, the founding principles of the LHI encapsulate the belief that ‘local people’ through ‘participatory heritage management … are well qualiﬁed to identify the heritage of their local area and determine what is of value to them’ (Local Heritage Initiative, 2006, 7). Nevertheless the LHI foresaw a role for professionals within that process and established a network of expert advisers and project support workers. There was also a Grant Assessment Panel and a number of centrally commissioned reports and assessments of value (Local Heritage Initiative, 2006, 10–12). In short, this resembles all the paraphernalia of the AHD. As Dicks (2000) has shown, such local/professional dualisms appear inevitably to involve the generation of tensions and conﬂicts and, indeed, dissonance from within the project that works to the detriment of local conceptualization of, and participation in, the scheme. Aempts to delineate and identify expressions of heritage from below are not, therefore, unproblematic. This chapter, however, has not as yet engaged with the processes where such expressions might be most readily located – expressions of resistance or memory of resistance amongst the dominated. Two case studies will be oﬀered here. The ﬁrst captures in brief the work of Roy Jones and questions of contested urban heritage. The second, more detailed, case study focuses on processes of memorialization in the Scoish Highlands in the 1990s. It is here suggested that these two case studies demonstrate far less problematically the working out of the ideal of heritage from below in the landscape and as an expression of local identity. It must be admied, nevertheless, that even at this most localized of levels, identity is always contested, heritage is always problematic and dissonance is always present.

The Old Swan Brewery Conflict – Perth, Western Australia This conﬂict (see Jones, 1997, 132–55) was about the site and the brewery, and it began with the designation of the brewery complex as oﬃcial heritage. As with many other landscapes, the history of the ’scape is a contested and polysemic one, only exacerbated by the fact that one aspect of this contestation lies between Aboriginal and white peoples. For the former, this was a sacred site associated with teaching and ceremony; whilst for the laer this was a site of signiﬁcant industrial heritage. Contestation over whose past was going to be represented centred on the demolition or preservation of the redundant brewery complex. Aempts by

149

T A R C

H I the Western Australian state government to reach a compromise only heightened the dispute, resulting in direct action by some Aboriginal groups supported by the construction workers union and Christian groups. Notwithstanding this, the site was eventually placed on the State Register of Historic Places (Jones, 1997, 140–41). According to Jones (1997, 152), the cause of the protracted nature of the dispute (it had lasted six years and was still ongoing whilst he was writing) was the fact that this was not ‘a simple Aboriginal–developer confrontation’ but was multi-layered and multi-vocal. For instance, support both against and for the demolition of the complex was evident amongst the white middle class and Aboriginal opinion. On one level, Jones’s summation of this dispute – of the symbolic signiﬁcance of an Aboriginal victory in ‘the establishment heartland of the inner city’ – closely accords to the idea of heritage from below as here expressed. However, as Jones argued, the fate of the brewery actually lay ‘in white hands’ and a more pessimistic reading would recognize this as a ‘developers versus NIMBYs bale, with Aboriginals … as the pawns of both sides’. Clearly, and despite the fact that the brewery’s demolition would be ‘a signiﬁcant and symbolic victory for Aboriginal rights’ (Jones, 1997, 154), evidence of non-dissonant expressions of heritage from below must be sought elsewhere.

The Lewis Memorial Cairns to the ‘Land Heroes’ From the early eighteenth century, the Scoish Highlands and Islands experienced a signiﬁcant and prolonged period of social and cultural change that had huge repercussions for ordinary highlanders. These changes took the form of the replacement of small-scale subsistence agriculture with large-scale sheep farming. It also involved the transformation of part feudal, part tribal social relations into purely capitalist relations. Finally, in the period from about 1820 to 1850, it involved the forced migration and emigration of the bulk of the population in the process that has become known as the Highland Clearances. Highland communities did not accept change wholly passively, although a spirit of resistance took some time to emerge from the highlanders’ deferential mentalité. Nevertheless, by the 1880s a strong protest ideology had emerged and generated extensive and extended episodes of class conﬂict that have become known as the Highland Land Wars. These declined in the ﬁrst decade of the twentieth century, only to revive again in the period following the end of World War I. Both the Clearances and the Land Wars have been memorialized in recent years; ﬁrstly in Tiree and Skye and then in Lewis (Figure 8.1). Here the memorial form is traditional and vernacular. The majority of the Lewis memorials, however, are public-art representational (see Figure 8.2, for example). All memorials, of whatever form, look inward to the croing community and aempt to create emblematic landscapes of resistance. The particular signiﬁcance of the Lewis representational monuments comes from the fact that although they were the vision of a professional artist, these were not overly mediated from outwith but were created for, by and from within the local community. What here transgresses the disjuncture created by the deployment of a professional artist is the fact that in this instance the artist

150

H B : C, S P R

Figure 8.1

Lewis: Location of memorials

concerned had family connections that link him back to the island and directly to the Clearances. As one of the key members expressed it, whilst at ﬁrst his colleagues on the local commiee were opposed to ‘some modern artist [being] parachuted in’ from outside, the close connections of the artist to the island somewhat allayed these fears.2 The Lewis project was for four monuments. According to Angus Macleod, the key ﬁgure behind the scheme, inspiration came aer he was invited to Tiree to the opening of a memorial there, and by his awareness of memorial cairns on Skye:

2

Interview with Roddie Murray, Lewis, 7 April 1998. 151

T A R C

H I

Figure 8.2

The memorial located in Gress to the land agitation in Coll and Gress

I said to one or two of my friends: ‘we are a shamed people, we’re forgeing our history. Other people are looking aer their history and shouldn’t we not? There are at least four episodes here in Lewis which are well worth commemorating. So everyone was agreed and up and formed a commiee and sailed oﬀ from then.3 This was Cuimhneanchain nan Gaisgeach, a commiee and group with the aim of commemorating (literally) ‘our land heroes’. The individual events chosen to be commemorated4 were: the riots at Bernera and Aignish; the Pairc Deer Raid; and the meeting between Lord Leverhulme and the croers from Back, Coll and Gress, consequent upon the land raids in the area in the 1920s. All these events were of great signiﬁcance in the campaign for land on Lewis (see Buchanan, 1996) and aracted considerable publicity in the (UK) national press and public interest. For Macleod, therefore, these events virtually chose themselves. The nature of the way in which Cuimhneanchain nan Gaisgeach was constituted is of particular interest here. Angus Macleod importantly believed that as the memorials were to be ‘about our history’, then they had to be ‘from and by and

3 4

Interview with Angus Macleod, Lewis, 6 April 1998. This continues to be an ongoing process. The decision has recently been made to build a ﬁh monument at Uig. 152

H B : C, S P R for the locality’.5 To ensure this, the commiee had a diﬀerent chairman (they were always men) in place for each of the diﬀerent projects. Furthermore, the chairman was always from the part of the island in which (and for which) the particular monument was to be erected. There is a history of place-speciﬁc conﬂict on the island and this policy was an aempt to circumvent this. According to one of the permanent members of the commiee, Macleod based this policy on personal experience. When talking about a public meeting to consider the design and location of the cairn for the Coll and Gress land raiders, ‘he says [to me] “there is no point someone outwith the area going down there”’, as he (Macleod) had been told at a meeting shortly aer the end of World War II that he had no right to advise them as he did not come from the area.6 What underlay this disjuncture, then, was a sense of (very) local identity. For Roddie Murray, Balallan, the ﬁrst monument to be completed, ‘was ﬁne because Balallan was Angus’s own home patch and … John M. Macleod was also on the commiee from there’.7 In addition to replacing the chairman, each commiee could co-opt local people and a series of public meetings could be arranged to ensure full consultation. In this way, with the emphasis and weight given to opinion from within and from the non-professional, the process of monument-making here described emerges as a manifestation of heritage from below. Key to this is the fact that these are monuments to illegality. They are monuments created by those for whose future protesters were ﬁghting in the Land Wars of the 1880s and 1920s. Events of these periods, class and cultural conﬂicts, were ideologically driven and expressive of counter-hegemony. And whilst there is no doubt that the cairns were not explicitly constructed as sites of resistance, they do celebrate a culture of resistance and of counter-hegemony. Moreover, those ideas that underlay protest and counterhegemonic social formations remain evident in the contemporary croing community. In celebrating and commemorating illegality and in creating landmarks to the memory of an alternative culture, Cuimhneanchain nan Gaisgeach was making heritage from below. These memorials are aempts to ﬁx and record authentically what has transpired and oﬀer that past to future generations of insiders. They are, in short, aempts to create distinct landscapes of belonging that are themselves expressive of an alternative hegemony. Heritage and landscapes of belonging are, however, never unproblematic. As already noted, the original intention was to build four monuments. Ultimately, however, ﬁve monuments were built, although only three of these were built by Cuimhneanchain nan Gaisgeach. The others were built by independent groups formed speciﬁcally to build just the monument in their locality. In one instance, moreover, there is a Cuimhneanchain nan Gaisgeach monument and an independent monument, diﬀerently located but celebrating the same key event. This was the meeting between Lord Leverhulme and the croers from Back, Coll and Gress, to which Cuimhneanchain nan Gaisgeach intended to build a monument at Back. The

5 6 7

Interview with Angus Macleod, Lewis, 6 April 1998. Interview with Roddie Murray, Lewis, 7 April 1998. Ibid. 153

T A R C

H I

Figure 8.3

The memorial to the Bernera riot

land disturbances celebrated by this memorial involved people from at least three separate townships but were coordinated as (virtually) one event. Notwithstanding this, members of the individual townships felt that these events should have been memorialized individually. In addition, people from Upper Coll felt disenfranchised by their lack of representation on Cuimhneanchain nan Gaisgeach and further

154

H B : C, S P R alienated by the public art form of the proposed monument. Their response was to erect an alternative traditional and vernacular monument in Upper Coll. At Bernera, also, there was tension over both the perceived inappropriate nature of the memorial to be built and Cuimhneanchain nan Gaisgeach’s role in any memorialization. People from Bernera had been observing Cuimhneanchain nan Gaisgeach’s proposal for at least two years and had become increasingly uncomfortable with the commiee’s (to them) ever-more elaborate plans. The result was that the memorial was rejected at a series of public meetings. A Bernera-based group was formed; they raised funds within the area and erected a traditional cairn and dedication plaque.8 As with Angus Macleod’s concerns over chairing a public meeting in a district to which he did not belong, for Roddy Murray the root cause of this is to be found in Bernera’s ‘own very territorial reasons’. For members of the group charged with creating their own memorial, aempts by Angus Macleod and other members of the Cuimhneanchain nan Gaisgeach commiee to persuade them to change their minds only pushed the locality in the opposite direction. As Noreen McIver says, ‘it became quite political’.9 Tension involving the Bernera and Back/Upper Coll cairns is a manifestation of aempts to maintain a distinctive and very local identity for which the ‘other’ comprises juxtaposed local communities on Lewis. In both cases, moreover, the failure to accord with the Cuimhneanchain nan Gaisgeach project, an explicit aempt to take the mnemonic beyond the purely local, meant that the two cairns became, perhaps unintentionally and unconsciously, inward looking; for Bernera and Upper Coll separately and only. It is with no lile sense of irony, then, that it should be noted that such actions may well identify the Bernera and Upper Coll cairns as purer expressions of heritage from below than those created by Cuimhneanchain nan Gaisgeach. They were wholly local, without any professional design or other help, and were wholly funded by the areas to which they belong. In contrast, the fact that the Cuimhneanchain nan Gaisgeach project was part-funded by the Gulbenkian Foundation, and that it was awarded – and the organization accepted – a Civic Trust award for design, must raise some doubt over the autonomous nature of the project. At the same time, the conﬂicts around the vernacular cairns demonstrate the dissonance and tensions that emerge when monuments are deployed as mnemonics. The Bernera riot had signiﬁcance outwith both Bernera and Lewis and for the land protest movement as a whole. An outward-looking public-art memorial would have been representational of this. But by creating an inwardlooking monument, the cairn sets up a dissonance between the event and its memorialization, and celebrates only the local district and its identity. This serves, moreover, as a reminder that dissonance and contestation are intrinsic to any aempt to write heritage into the landscape in the form of memorialization. Both heritage and identity are susceptible to contestation from within as much as they

8 9

Interview with Noreen McIver, Bernera, 4 February 2005. Interview with Roddie Murray, Lewis, 7 April 1998; interview with Noreen McIver, Bernera, 4 February 2005. 155

T A R C

H I are from without. It would seem that the contestations around memorial-making on the island of Lewis arise from traditional local rivalries and from a fear that the strong voices on Cuimhneanchain nan Gaisgeach were aempting to disinherit areas from which they did not originate. Undoubtedly these memorials mediate the landscape and comprise a sense of identity at a very local scale. Nevertheless, this aempt to build heritage as commemoration has proved incapable of being able to transgress the boundaries created by these self-same identities.

Conclusion Unquestionably, the examples utilized in this chapter serve to reinforce the widely held conviction that because heritage is multi-perceived, multi-sold and multiconsumed, then dissonance is intrinsic to heritage landscapes even in this very localized context. Furthermore, heritage from below as here expressed replicates something of the polysemic nature of the heritage discourse. One aspect of the concept is purely academic and is essentially about the recognition of a category of heritage hitherto not given full worth in the academic literature. At the same time, however, the term is expressive of the recognition of the possibility and opportunity of the deployment of the past in service of a present that runs counter to that of the hegemonic and which, operating at the local level, is constitutive of constructions of identity that are at odds with the dominant. Drawing on the widely accepted argument that heritage is a social and cultural product, it is here argued that heritage from below, as an expression of local identity, is evident in expressions of resistance to dominant discourses such as the conﬂict surrounding the Old Swan Brewery. The deployment of what we might recognize as a sense of heritage from below is evident also in the campaigns undertaken by Common Ground and in its conceptualization of ‘Local Distinctiveness’. This, in turn, was of fundamental inﬂuence on the Local Heritage Initiative that of itself may be said to have been an aempt to harness heritage from below to a community regeneration initiative. But perhaps where the concept is here most readily seen ‘at work’ is with the memorial cairns to land disturbances on the island of Lewis. And yet, even here, at this most localized scale, a sense of a radical inheritance from the past has proved incapable of transgressing the boundaries inherent in identitymaking and maintaining. Any aempt, it would seem, to utilize a sense of the past in identity-making and maintaining generates disinheritance, if not dissonance, conﬂict and contestation.

References Ashworth, G.J. (1994), ‘From History to Heritage – From Heritage to History: In Search of Concepts and Models’, in G.J. Ashworth and P.J. Larkham (eds), Building a New Heritage: Tourism, Culture and Identity (London: Routledge), 13–30. 156

H B : C, S P R Ashworth, G.J. (1998), ‘Heritage, Identity and Interpreting a European Sense of Place’, in D. Uzzell and R. Ballantyne (eds), Contemporary Issues in Heritage and Environmental Interpretation (London: The Stationery Oﬃce), 112–32. Ashworth, G.J. and Larkham, P.J. (1994) (eds), Building a New Heritage: Tourism, Culture and Identity (London: Routledge). Baker, A.R.H. and Gregory, D. (eds) (1984), Explorations in Historical Geography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Billinge, M.D. (1984), ‘Hegemony, Class and Power in Later Georgian and Victorian England: Towards a Cultural Geography’, in A.R.H. Baker and D. Gregory (eds), Explorations in Historical Geography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 28–67. Buchanan, J. (1996), The Lewis Land Struggle (Stornoway: Acair). Cliﬀord, S. (1994), ‘New Milestones: Sculpture, Community and the Land’ . Cliﬀord, S. and King, A. (1993), Local Distinctiveness: Place, Particularity and Identity (London: Common Ground). Common Ground (no date), ‘Common Ground’, , accessed 12 February 2007. Daniels, S. (1993), Fields Of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States (Cambridge: Polity Press). Dicks, B. (2000), Heritage, Place and Community (Cardiﬀ: University of Wales Press). Edensor, T. (2002), National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life (Oxford: Berg). Gillis, J.R. (ed.) (1994), Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (New Jersey: Princeton University Press). Graham, B., Ashworth G.J. and Tunbridge, J.E. (2000), A Geography of Heritage: Power, Culture and Economy (London: Arnold). Gramsci, A. (1971), Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers). Halbwachs, M. (1992), On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Hewison, R. (1987), The Heritage Industry (London: Methuen). Hobsbawm, E. (1998), On History (London: Abacus). Howard, P. (2003), Heritage: Management, Interpretation, Identity (London: Continuum). Johnson, N.C. (1999), ‘Framing the Past: Time, Space and the Politics of Heritage Tourism in Ireland’, Political Geography 18:2, 187–207. Jones, R. (1997), ‘Sacred Sites or Profane Buildings? Reﬂections on the Old Swan Brewery Conﬂict in Perth, Western Australia’, in R. Jones and B. Shaw (eds), Contested Urban Heritage (Aldershot: Ashgate), 132–55. Jones, R. and Shaw, B. (eds) (1997), Contested Urban Heritage (Aldershot: Ashgate). Kundera, M. (1996), The Book of Laughter and Forgeing (London: Faber and Faber). Local Heritage Initiative (2006), Lessons Learnt: A Review of the Local Heritage Initiative (London: The Countryside Agency). Lowenthal, D. (1985), The Past Is A Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

157

T A R C

H I Morland, J. (1988), New Milestones: Sculpture, Community and the Land (London: Common Ground). Osborne, B.S. (1996), ‘Figuring Space, Marking Time: Contested Identities in Canada’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 2:1/2, 24–7. Rudé, G. (1980), Ideology and Popular Protest (London: Lawrence & Wishart). Samuel, R. (1994), Theatres of Memory (London: Verso). Sherman, D.J. (1994), ‘Art, Commerce and the Production of Memory in France Aer World War One’, in J.R. Gillis (ed.), Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (New Jersey: Princeton University Press), 186–214. Short, J.R. (1991), Imagined Countries (London: Routledge). Smith, L. (2006), Uses of Heritage (London: Routledge). Stonesoup Cooperative (no date), ‘History from Below’ , accessed 12 February 2007. Thompson, E.P. (1978), ‘Eighteenth Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class’, Social History 3:3, 133–65. Uzzell, D. and Ballantyne, R. (eds) (1998), Contemporary Issues in Heritage and Environmental Interpretation (London: The Stationery Oﬃce). Williams, R. (1977), Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Withers, C.W.J. (1988), Gaelic Scotland: The Transformation of a Culture Region (London: Routledge). Wright, P. (1985), On Living In An Old Country (London: Verso).

158

9

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

Heritage, Gender and Identity Laurajane Smith

Gender tends to be overlooked in discussions of ‘heritage’. When it is addressed, it is oen related to women’s issues. Just as many people tend to believe that ideology is what other people believe, and ethnicity is what people unlike ourselves possess, ‘gender’ all too oen gets treated as what women have – a women’s problem – as if men have no gender. In this chapter, I am going to address a more rounded sense of what gender is, and discuss how diﬀering and changing ideas about masculinity and femininity – diﬀerent ways of being a ‘man’ or a ‘woman’ – interact with ‘heritage’. I argue that heritage is gendered, in that it is too oen ‘masculine’, and tells a predominantly male-centred story, promoting a masculine, and in particular an elite-Anglo-masculine, vision of the past and present. This chapter examines the gendered nature of heritage, and explores the ways in which gender identities are constructed and naturalized through ‘heritage’, but also ultimately contested and negotiated within the heritage process. One of the key assumptions in the heritage literature is that heritage is about the construction and expression of ‘identity’. The links between heritage and identity are oen taken for granted – we protect, manage, interpret for visitors, and visit heritage sites because they are, in some way, symbolic of our identities. Material heritage and intangible heritage performances oﬀer corporeal reinforcements of a sense of belonging and sense of place, but whose identities are being represented and reinforced? How are identities constructed by, or in association with, heritage places and events? What are the contemporary consequences of those constructions – particularly for gender roles and identities? Although the heritage literature assumes an inherent and indelible link between the things and places we call heritage and the representation and constructions of identity, not enough is understood about the nature of these links and processes, and how they are (re)created. A lot is assumed, but lile is actually known, about the dynamics of the social and cultural work that heritage ‘does’ in Western societies. Another key assumption is the monolithic and ﬁxed nature of identity that is expressed and constructed through heritage. The aim of this chapter is to acknowledge and unpack some of these assumptions – particularly as they relate to issues of gender.

T A R C

H I Gender and Identity It needs to be acknowledged at the outset that identity is ﬂuid, subjective and multi-dimensional, our sense of place and belonging in the world centres not only on the ways we may (or may not) express our national or cultural identities and aﬃliations, but is also concerned with expressing and working out a range of other cultural, social and political experiences. These experiences may be structured and understood by relations deﬁned, for instance, by ethnicity, by class, by our religious beliefs (or non-beliefs), by age, and/or by sexuality. An individual’s perception of family and kinship may also help inform their sense of identity, as may associations with local or regional communities; and the political and moral values we uphold as individuals and collectives will equally inﬂuence a sense of self and belonging. Gender is another signiﬁcant element in the construction and expression of identity. It is, however, a concept that is itself taken for granted, and oen naturalized as a biologically determined category. However, gender is a socially and culturally constructed concept that helps structure and understand our behaviour and experiences as ‘women’ and ‘men’; it is interlinked with, but is not determined by, our biological reproductive functions as ‘females’ and ‘males’. Rather, people are ‘gendered’, socially deﬁned through masculine, feminine or indeed other culturally determined gender categories. However, the binary gender categories of woman/ man that tend to dominate in Western cultures are oen inescapably linked and divided along lines of sex, and this culturally determined linkage helps to reinforce ‘common sense’ assumptions about the biological inevitability of gender identities (see Bleier, 1991; Buchbinder, 1994; Connell, 1987; 2002; Hardy, 1986; Keller, 1989, amongst others, for an extended discussion of these points). Increasing public aention has been focused on gender issues following the rise of feminist scholarship. The visibility of women’s issues as part of feminist arguments and agendas on the one hand, and naturalized assumptions that make masculinity unproblematic on the other hand, have oen resulted in a popular tendency to assume gender issues are only about women – that women are gendered, but men just ‘are’ (see Brod and Kaufman, 1994; Chapman and Rutherford, 1988; Connell, 1995; 2000, for discussions on masculinity). Gender, alongside concepts of ethnicity and class, is perhaps one of the most un-problematized and naturalized aspects of identity within heritage discourses. The categories of identity constructed by the identiﬁers ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are rarely questioned in authorized accounts of heritage, and as such are continually recreated and reinforced. As is argued below, the heritage discourse itself acts to construct and validate identity, and the social and cultural values that underpin it. How heritage is deﬁned and understood is itself an act of ‘heritage’ – as the construction of the heritage discourse is itself both a construction of, and a negotiation of, a range of identity categories. The idea of discourse used here, which underpins my previous work on heritage issues (Smith, 2004; 2006; Waterton, Smith and Campbell, 2006), is based on the idea that the way people think and talk about, and understand, things and social practices, such as heritage, both reﬂects and helps to constitute those practices. Discourse has a material consequence that maers, it is a social action and ‘a speciﬁc 160

H, G I ensemble of ideas, concepts, and categorizations that are produced, reproduced, and transformed in a particular set of practices and through which meaning is given to physical and social realities’ (Hajer, 1996, 44). Discourses not only frame the way people think about social realities, they also help to validate them, and it is vital to note that diﬀerent and competing discourses not only exist, but will both understand and validate realities in sometimes conﬂicting and contradictory ways (Fairclough, 2001). This is an important point for understanding issues of gender and heritage. Competing or alternative discourses about both ‘gender’ and ‘heritage’ will construct diﬀerent ways of understanding the realities of social practices structured by gender relations, and will give diﬀerent and competing values and meanings to the historical and contemporary validity of gender identities. As Stuart Hall (1997, 4) observes, ‘identities are constructed within, not outside, discourse’ and as such are produced in speciﬁc historical, institutional and cultural contexts and have speciﬁc material and social consequences. The positive consequences of identity formation and practices – the sense of belonging oen considered to be fostered by the links between heritage and identity – are emphasized, if not eulogized, in the heritage literature. However, it is also important to acknowledge the political and social problematics of this as well, for, as Hall (1997, 4) goes on to observe, identities: emerge within the play of speciﬁc modalities of power, and thus are more the product of the marking of diﬀerence and exclusion, than they are the sign of identical, naturally-constituted unity – an ‘identity’ in its traditional meaning (that is, an all-inclusive sameness, seamless, without internal diﬀerentiation). The construction and expression of any identity (be it national, regional, gender and so forth) inevitably relies on the identiﬁcation and diﬀerentiation of the ‘other’ and leads to the fostering and maintenance of boundaries of behaviour and relationships within and between diﬀerent social and cultural identities (Bre, 1996; Graham, Ashworth and Tunbridge, 2000). In this context the construction, commemoration and expression of gender identities in heritage can never be understood to be politically or culturally neutral, as what is constructed has a range of implications for how women and men and their social roles are perceived, valued and socially and historically justiﬁed. The rest of this chapter examines the ways in which discourses of heritage construct both masculine and feminine identities and the implications this has for understanding the nature of heritage.

The Masculinity of Heritage Heritage is gendered. It is gendered in the way that heritage is deﬁned, understood and talked about and, in turn, in the way it reproduces and legitimizes gender identities and the social values that underpin them. A range of assumptions about the experiences of men and women are embedded in the deﬁnitions and discourses 161

T A R C

H I of heritage. The authorized heritage discourse – or AHD – is, as I have argued elsewhere (Smith, 2006; 2007a), a professional discourse that tends to dominate national and international Western debates about the nature, value and meaning of heritage. Although this discourse varies across national and other cultural contexts, it nonetheless shares a range of basic assumptions that frame the way heritage practitioners, policy-makers, governments and amenity societies think, talk, write and act upon heritage. The AHD emphasizes the materiality and the assumed innate universal value of heritage, draws on and reproduces a consensual view of nationhood and national history, and aﬃrms that it is heritage experts that must act as stewards of the past to protect and maintain heritage places and heritage values, so that they may be passed on to ‘future generations’. This discourse, which has its origins in the nineteenth century, developed out of the debates about the desirability of conservation versus restoration led in England by John Ruskin and William Morris (Smith, 2006, 19–20). It is a discourse that developed not only within a particular temporal and historical context, but also within a particular social one. The social and cultural experiences of the European educated upper middle and ruling classes, who dominated the professional groups that championed and concerned themselves with the preservation of historical monuments, also underwrote this discourse. Subsequently, the discourse was built not only on professional values and concerns, but also on certain class and gender experiences and social and aesthetic values. As Lowenthal points out, the social and historical origins of the heritage debate ensure that ‘the historic fabric belongs to the Great and the Good; heritage is the pastoral care of gentlemen’ (1992, 159, original emphasis). One of the many consequences of this discourse is that it has been masculine values and perceptions, particularly masculine values from the elite social classes, that have tended to dominate how heritage has been deﬁned, identiﬁed, valued and preserved. More simply, the types of artefacts, sites, places and monuments that are identiﬁed as heritage, and are subsequently conserved or preserved, are those that ‘make sense’ within the AHD, which, in turn, is inﬂuenced by certain social experiences and values. As Hayden points out, it is rarely the urban landscapes of working men and women that are identiﬁed or preserved as heritage, but rather the few architectural monuments that become associated with male elites as ‘city fathers’ (Hayden, 2003, 199). The links between nationalism and masculine values, whereby great men become patriotic symbols for nationhood, is well documented (Aitchison, 1999), a process facilitated by the stress on the universal values of heritage enshrined within the AHD which ensures that patriarchal heritage becomes symbolic for all. Where gender issues are identiﬁed in the heritage literature, two issues tend to stand out. The ﬁrst concerns the degree to which sites and places of signiﬁcance to women’s history and experience are neglected in registers of conserved or preserved heritage and, secondly, the degree to which the stories told at heritage places and museums tends to convey and legitimize gender stereotypes of men and women. The heritage literature, and the heritage studies ﬁeld more generally, is very much at the ‘remedial stage’ of feminist and/or gender awareness identiﬁed by Wylie (1992). This is an early stage of awareness of gender issues oen characterized as the 162

H, G I ‘add women and stir’ phase – where it is hoped that the stirring will awaken new ways of not only acknowledging and including women’s values and experiences, but perhaps also facilitating new ways of understanding and seeing gender as structuring the behaviour and experiences of both men and women. Much of the literature associated with this issue not only points out the masculinity of heritage preservation practices and the subsequent absence of women’s sites and places, but also draws aention to the degree to which this absence validates elite male history, and recreates history generally as ‘great men and their deeds’ (see, for instance, Bertelsen, Lillehammer and Naess, 1987; Conkey and Spector, 1984; du Cros and Smith, 1993; Dubrow and Goodman, 2003; Gero and Conkey, 1991; Porter, 1990). This literature also makes the important point that wider social perceptions of women and men, together with the gender make-up of the heritage workplace, have a direct link to how certain heritage sites and places are identiﬁed and valued. The degree to which the disciplines, professions, and work practices associated with heritage are dominated by masculine work practices and workplace cultures is signiﬁcant in perpetuating the masculinity of the AHD and the conservation practices it fosters. In the archaeological and historical literature in particular, two of the disciplines alongside architecture that have had the most impact on heritage policy and practice, feminists have argued that the disproportionately high numbers of men to women that work in postgraduate research, the academy and, in some countries, as heritage professionals,1 is directly linked to the reinforcement of masculine understandings of heritage (see, for instance, Downs, 2005; Hope, 1993; Nelson, Nelson and Wylie, 1994; Sinclair, 1997; Smith, 1995; Smith and Burke, 2006; Wylie, 1993). Subsequently, the perpetuation of gender inequality in heritage conservation practices is both a function of, and reinforces, contemporary gender inequalities and stereotypes in and outside of the heritage workplace. This is not a trivial observation, as heritage as tangible representations of history and the past are powerful symbols in the representation of cultural and social values and messages. As Olwig (1999) points out, dominant forms of heritage convey social and political power to those recognized, while those who are made invisible within the dominant heritage discourse may be marginalized in wider political and social arenas. Heritage can, and oen does, become a powerful resource in the politics of recognition – how certain groups are recognized or misrecognized can have important consequences in wider struggles over resources and equity (Fraser, 2000; Smith, 2004; 2007b). Subsequently the contemporary heritage values given to certain gender identities sends powerful messages – if women are invisible and devalued in the way they are portrayed through a nation’s heritage, this will reinforce the contemporary values and inequities given to women’s identities, social roles and experiences. 1

In Australia, women have tended to dominate, numerically, paid positions in heritage professions, unlike in many other Western countries. However, the value of work that heritage professionals do in Australia is subsequently marginalized by the idea that heritage is ‘women’s’ work and not as ‘real’ as academic or other related professional positions (see Clarke, 1993; Smith, 1995; and chapters in du Cros and Smith, 1993 and Nelson, Nelson and Wylie, 1994 for further discussion). 163

T A R C

H I Not only is the absence of women’s sites important in maintaining gender stereotypes, so too is the way that heritage sites and museum exhibits are displayed and interpreted. The majority of literature on gender issues and heritage has been concerned with examining the androcentrism of heritage and museum interpretation. These studies have analysed and identiﬁed the gendered assumptions underlying interpretive texts, visual representations, and the content of guided talks (see, for instance, Bickford, 1981; 1985; Dubrow and Goodman, 2003; Holcomb, 1998; Katriel, 1997; Moser, 1993; 2001; Russell, 1999; Smiles and Moser, 2005; R. Smith, 2006). A focus of this literature has been visual representations, and a number of commentators have endeavoured to identify the androcentric, and indeed Eurocentric, assumptions underlying the ways in which women and men are portrayed. This is less because these assumptions are not equally embedded in textual sources – they are – than because it is the ‘secondary messages and incidental learning’ (Katriel, 1997, 68) that visual material provides and that can and does have subtle and unacknowledged consequences for a viewer’s sense of self. This material also tends to reveal the extent of the taken-for-granted nature of those androcentric assumptions so oen guarded against in wrien interpretive texts. The gendered assumptions about the primary role of men as the active agents in human history and development have been publicly challenged by feminist historians, and wrien heritage interpretive texts will oen actively aempt to avoid the use of sexist or gender-stereotyped language. To what degree of success is, of course, debatable, but most museum and heritage mongers in the West will follow guidelines on the use of non-sexist language. However, these aempts are oen compromised when the visual interpretive aids are considered. For instance, an easily identiﬁable stereotype is the symbolic representation of human physical evolution, represented by a line of male ﬁgures in ascending order of stature and descending order of hirsuteness. This embodiment of the development and emergence of humans only visually reinforces the idea that human history is about men – or, as Holcomb reminds us, ‘history is his story’ (1998, 38, emphasis in original). Feminist commentators have also revealed the tendency to portray males in active and even aggressive stances, females in passive ones, oen behind or below males, all of which occur within a wide range of visual and spatial clues that are used to help reinforce and legitimize the social roles and the values given to the roles and identities of men and women (Holcomb, 1998; Moser, 1998; 2003; Porter, 1996; Russell, 1999). In response to the observations outlined above in the heritage literature, a range of oppositional practices within the heritage sector internationally have been aempted, or put in place, to raise gender issues and to engage critically with traditional gender identities. Programmes have been initiated to help with the identiﬁcation and conservation of women’s sites (for instance, Morris, 1997; Parks Canada, 2004), and women’s networks have been formed such as the British WHAM (Women, Heritage and Museums) in 1984 (Holcomb, 1998, 48), and the Australian Women in Archaeology group in 1991 (du Cros and Smith, 1993; Smith and du Cros, 1994) to facilitate gender initiatives and awareness in the heritage area. Together with other equity dimensions, gender guidelines also exist for museums, 164

H, G I galleries, government agencies and amenity societies dealing with heritage issues, and industrial legislation requiring equal opportunities in the workplace also applies to these institutions in many Western countries. Although a range of networks, guidelines, projects and even legal texts exist to encourage debates over gender issues, the criticism of much of the feminist literature on the inequality of female representation in the heritage sector remains all too relevant. The move in the United Kingdom to apply the social inclusion policies of the Labour government within the cultural, and in particular the heritage, sector is an initiative to raise the diversity of heritage interpretation and other practices to acknowledge and commemorate social and cultural diversity (Butcher, 2006; Newman, 2005; Newman and McLean, 1998; 2004). However, ‘gender’ as a particular issue remains entirely invisible within the social inclusion policies and practices of English Heritage, the government agency responsible for heritage and conservation issues in England – a perusal of its social inclusion policies failed to identify ‘gender’ as a signiﬁcant issue or concern. Having said that, however, examples of social inclusion and outreach programmes do exist that explore and acknowledge gender issues. The Apna Ghar project between English Heritage and South Asian women in Sandwell, West Midlands, is one such project where oral histories were collected and used to develop a community performance piece of relevance to a particular gender (English Heritage, 2006). Nonetheless, it is of concern, and rather revealing, that gender does not seem to be actively or publicly debated in English social inclusion polices. While the social inclusion debate in England has tended appropriately to champion the inclusion and recognition of ethnic and class diversity, it needs to be asked: why does gender appear to be absent in this debate? Despite this lack of explicit public debate on gender in much of, not only the English-language, but also the international heritage sector, exhibitions and projects dealing with gender issues, particularly women’s issues, have increased signiﬁcantly in recent years both in museums and heritage centres and sites, not only in England, but internationally as well. However, many of these tend to take the form of special or temporary exhibitions. An interesting example of this was the ‘Maids and Mistresses’ exhibition held jointly at four country houses in Yorkshire in England in 2004 (Larsen, 2004). Country houses are perhaps one of the most visually striking sites redolent of the English AHD and heritage industry. They are one of the main, if not the key, genre of ﬂagship sites of England’s authorized heritage and indisputably elite-masculine in the symbolic power and prestige they represent. Curiously, these most masculine of sites are oen represented in the heritage literature as being of particular interest to women visitors and tourists (see, for instance, Mandler, 1997, 386). While there is some evidence that women visit these sites at a slightly higher frequency than men (Smith, 2006, 130), there does appear to be an assumption in the literature that it is only appropriate that women should gaze at their magniﬁcence. As West (2003, 83) notes, these house museums have a long history of memorializing the economic, social and political power of elite white men, and present a particular problem for those interested in interpreting women’s history. However, the ‘Maids and Mistresses’ initiative of the 165

T A R C

H I Yorkshire Country House Partnership aempted to challenge this stereotype. As a temporary exhibition, however, any challenges it oﬀered were only ﬂeeting. It is not enough, as Hayden (1997, 8) warns, to tack on a few women’s or ethnic projects and assume that equity and inclusivity have been achieved in heritage interpretation. Before this is achieved, the entire framework of assumptions – the AHD – needs to be challenged and overturned, and, to do this, consciously and critically gendered interpretation must become part of accepted heritage discourse and practices, and not be conﬁned to special, temporary or token events. The inclusion of gender issues into mainstream heritage debates and practices is not an easy or short-term process, and as Holcomb (1998, 40) observes, it is a process that not only requires knowledge and understanding, it also requires energy and commitment. The English ‘Maids and Mistresses’ exhibit also oﬀers another useful lesson, as in this exhibition, servants – the ‘maids’ of the title – were themselves rendered historically marginal. While the mistresses tended to be interpreted individually, highlighted by drawing visitors’ aentions to their portraits, possessions within the house, and diary entries, the maids were depersonalized and tended to be interpreted generally as an anonymous group. For instance, in one of the houses, they were presented as faceless silhouees doed around the house. While these silhouees aempted to convey the ways in which servants were ignored or made invisible within the working house, the lack of individuality of interpretation of the maids, when juxtaposed to the degree of personal detail provided for the mistresses, provides an unintended message about the historical value and legitimacy of both the ‘mistresses’ and the ‘maids’. The issue here is that gender as an interpretive issue in heritage is not one that can be considered in isolation. In this case, class was also a signiﬁcant factor in inﬂuencing the identities of those portrayed. Early feminists have correctly been criticized for universalizing women’s experiences, and for neglecting the issues of class, ethnicity, age and sexuality, amongst others, that structure and inﬂuence women’s and men’s experiences (see Connell, 2002; hooks, 1984; 2000; Spelman, 1988). To consider gender in isolation when researching, interpreting or conserving heritage will only perpetuate its own mythologies and facilitate the misrecognition of gender identities. Underlying much of the literature on gender and heritage is the recognition that the ‘built environment is experienced diﬀerently by men and women and that space is gendered’ (Holcomb, 1998, 37). What is, however, oen not adequately considered in the heritage literature is what that experience is. What do people do at heritage sites? Do they simply soak up the interpretive material, or social and cultural messages conveyed at and by the site or exhibition, or are there other more active processes at work? A key assumption in the AHD, and much of the heritage literature, is that heritage and museum audiences are passive in their engagement, and will simply accept or take in the interpretive message uncritically (MacDonald, 2005a; Mason, 2004; 2005; Moscardo, 1996). One of the emerging research issues in heritage is the identiﬁcation and examination of motivations for visiting sites, and identifying the nature and consequences of experiences people have at museums and heritage places (see, for instance, Bagnall, 2003; Falk and Dierking, 2000; Longhurst, Bagnall and Savage, 2004; MacDonald, 2005b; McIntosh and Prentice, 1999; Poria, Butler and 166

H, G I Airey, 2003). A concern that underlies much of the gender literature in heritage has also been the fear that people will uncritically absorb the androcentric assumptions and messages that tend to be created at heritage places and museums. It may be the case that many people do, but then again, these questions have not been adequately or widely asked of people who visit heritage sites and museums, so perhaps there is a more active and critical process going on. Before we can understand the consequences of androcentric or gynocentric treatments of heritage places, we do need to have a beer understanding of how people interact, engage and experience heritage sites – and how this experience is gendered. Although research on this issue is embryonic, the next section starts to look at how some visitors and community groups have dealt with gender issues in heritage.

Performing Gender Identities If we allow that heritage is more than simply a site, artefact or other ‘thing’, then the conceptual framework of heritage discourses can be expanded to incorporate a sense of activity or engagement. The AHD, in deﬁning and emphasizing heritage as monument, and other material things, removes critical aention away from what actually happens at, in or around heritage places. If we consider heritage as a cultural process, and that what happens at heritage places is part and parcel of heritage, then notions of heritage not only become more complex, but they allow the possibility of active public or visitor engagement with heritage sites. Heritage is as much what happens at sites, places, exhibitions and so forth as the places themselves. It is a moment or a social and cultural performance, in which cultural and social values and meanings are recognized and negotiated, and then either accepted, rejected and/or contested. This (re)negotiation may occur at, or around, certain signiﬁcant heritage places – places that become both ‘signiﬁcant’ and ‘heritage’ because of the roles they play as arenas or ‘theatres’, to borrow from Samuel (1994), in which performances of identity, remembering and commemoration are played out. Therefore, an integral part of heritage is a performance of meaningmaking in which the various social, political or other needs of the present are used to remember or interpret the past and create meaning in and for the present (see Smith, 2006 for fuller discussion). This deﬁnition of heritage is used below to examine the identity and memory-work that people undertook at labour history museums and at country houses in England, and is based on interviews with visitors to these sites undertaken in 2004. In these examples, gender was used in a range of active ways, in remembering family stories and using these to reﬂect on their sense of belonging, while others recreated stereotyped gender and class roles for themselves, while yet others explored the possibilities of what it meant to belong to another gender. Still others used the gendered past critically to reﬂect on gender roles in both the past and present. In the ﬁrst example, a woman was simply remembering family stories told to her by her mother. This woman had come speciﬁcally to see the ‘Maids and Mistresses’ exhibition at a country house, and noted that she had come because 167

T A R C

H I both the house and its exhibition ‘connect with my childhood. My mother was a maid in an old house, and told me stories that I related to today’ (respondent CH346). Her visit to the house with its associated special exhibition had provided her with an opportunity to ‘relate’ to stories her mother had told her about her working life. She went on to observe: [The house is] Interesting, you can imagine all the stories my mum told me. Most of the houses she worked in have been turned in to something else … It is nice that all the original things, furniture and stuﬀ, are here, and it gives you an idea of what they had here and what they used … [I have] A connection [to country houses] through my mother who was a lady’s maid – running baths and laying out clothes. She had one uniform in the morning and one in the aernoon (CH346). What is evocative in this example is the opportunity that a special exhibition gave to this woman to undertake some memory-work about her mother. While she found a connection to country houses through her mother’s former position as a maid, it was the opportunity provided outside of the usual interpretive programmes of country houses that facilitated a deeper engagement with her mother’s experiences and reminiscences. The absence of women in heritage representations can not only help to ensure that national narratives remain masculine and elite, but that, at much smaller scales, it can also have consequences for individual and family identities. At the National Coal Mining Museum, West Yorkshire, many visitors who had been miners or were from mining communities or families used the museum to remember and reconnect to what it meant to be part of a particular masculine workplace, to remember the comradeship, sense of belonging and gender identity that they drew from that. Although gender, and their identity as men, were never explicitly raised or touched on by respondents at this museum, the sense of identity expressed by men who were or had been miners was very strong, and the museum became a place to remember and commemorate that identity. One man who visited the museum exempliﬁed this, as being at the museum: brings memories back and it’s nice to share them with the family … remembering when I was a miner 30 years ago. I miss the community spirit, it’s not like that in the factory I work in now (NCMM14). In contrast to the above two examples, and in relation to the ‘Maids and Mistresses’ country house exhibition, gender identities can be remembered and given meaning in this process in such a way as to actively reinforce gender and class stereotypes. One woman identiﬁed that her reason for coming to the country house that day was again to view the special exhibit and to see: the women who worked and lived here [as] being a woman is part of the past and present history. Women of a diﬀerent social standing here in the special ‘Maids and Mistresses’ exhibition (CH331). 168

H, G I She noted that she liked being at or visiting country houses as she enjoyed ‘trying to imagine what it would have been like to live here in its heyday’, although she noted that she felt ‘slightly sad that it is not used – sad that the family could not maintain the home as they were’ and that it ‘is just a museum now’ (CH331). Her emotional engagement with the museum, and her empathy with a lost lifestyle, helped her to construct messages about the social and cultural signiﬁcance and meaning of the place for the present. She observed that the house was ‘a reminder to us all of how things used to be, and how hard life was for ordinary people’ (CH331). While she acknowledged the class diﬀerences in the amount of labour and leisure engaged in by ‘ordinary people’ and the family who owned the house, she also felt that the house represented and conveyed certain worthy social values, and she went on to observe: ‘What a beautiful place it must have been, and I hope that the people who worked here were able to appreciate the seing and house’ (CH331). A sense emerges here that she hoped that the staﬀ at the house had understood the aesthetics of the house and gardens and that they thus appreciated the social values they represented, as she went on to note that: ‘I had a great-great grandmother who was a lady’s maid in a hall less grand. She had a big inﬂuence within the family. The values she brought from service were passed on’ (CH331). Here the respondent, in remembering her ancestor and the social values she ‘brought from service’ to her family, was not only reaﬃrming those values as important for her today, but also legitimizing them in the context of the physical symbolism and grandeur of the country house. The exhibition on women she was also engaging with further reinforced her own sense of not only gender, but also class identity. This is a socially conservative and deferential reading of both the house and the exhibit – but it is nonetheless an active and engendered engagement and experience of heritage. Another example of the reaﬃrmation of received identities comes from the National Coal Mining Museum in West Yorkshire. Here again a woman was remembering her past through her visit to the museum, and noted that the museum ‘takes me back to when I was lile, I can remember a lot of these things, when men were men and did men’s jobs not oﬃce jobs’, and that the experience of being at the museum also ‘makes me think how men worked hard’ (NCMM21). There was a sustained lament, echoed by many others interviewed at this museum (see Smith, 2006), at the loss of the coal mining industry and the impact this loss and the 1984–85 Miners’ Strike had on the social, economic and political prosperity of mining communities. However, here there is an added dimension in that she was also lamenting the loss of a masculine and class-based identity – of a time when men being ‘men’ equalled hard physical work. Other individuals, in response to the same sites and exhibitions, used the experience of their visit to reﬂect on what it was like to be a ‘man’ or a ‘woman’ in the past and present. Some visitors used these reﬂections also critically to reﬂect on the present: I’m trying to see what it was like for the men in my family for the sake of a wage. … I have a son who is 18 and I am glad he does not have to do the work that his father and uncles did (NCMM20, woman). 169

T A R C

H I Seeing what men used to do down the mines and how young they were (NCMM11, woman). Seeing the life styles of the men who worked – the women’s lives in the homes – family life … How the men worked (NCMM56, woman). In these examples, women were reﬂecting on the experiences of husbands, brothers and fathers and what it was like for them. This is not insigniﬁcant, as such reﬂections may be used to consider how, in the case of NCMM20, the lives of their families have changed and what that may mean for a range of contemporary issues. It also provides the possibilities of facilitating empathy and subsequently respect for the other gender. This sense of respect underlies the following example, where a man in his 60s recounted his experiences at the National Coal Mining Museum: Seeing how they lived – I was never a part of this class of people. If you are a miner you are a miner and come from that sort of family … particularly everything [at this museum] has changed my view on how hard life was back then. It’s hard to imagine how women actually provided for their families. Interviewer: who is this place important to? Everybody – it shouldn’t be lost, everybody should know. I didn’t know about this place until we were told (NCMM73, man). Here the strength of the empathy gained by his reﬂections on the hard lives of the mining community, and women’s lives in particular, is reﬂected in his assertion that the museum is or should be important to everyone; the implication here is that other people should come and learn what he had learnt. This sense of critical reﬂection is also manifested in the messages people took away from the colliery exhibit at the North of England Open Air Museum, Beamish. The colliery exhibit tells the story of a mining community, where both the lives of men and women are told. Costumed interpreters who engage or are engaged by the public in discussions over the exhibitions and their meanings represent the primary interpretive vehicle at this museum – within these discussions the general lives of both men and women may be raised. Although the gender content of the interpretive material encountered by visitors was not recorded, several women took away gendered messages from the site. Whether these messages were constructed through their own reading of the site or through discussions with the interpreters is not known. One woman at Beamish remarked that she was ‘exploring the past’, and remembering her childhood, nominating the following memory: ‘the outside toilets bring back memories, we had outside toilets with cut up newspapers when I was a child’. However, the message she took away from the site was that although ‘women stayed in the house then – the role of women has changed so much’, while going on to note that ‘we are so lucky now as women’ (OAM81). Two other women also commented positively on changes to ‘women’s positions [and] children’s rights’ (OAM105) and other

170

H, G I changes in ‘gender segregation’ (OAM119). It is interesting, however, that with the sole exception of NCMM73, it was only women who reﬂected explicitly on gender issues. What this perhaps tells us is the degree to which the masculine nature of these heritage sites, particularly country houses, and the embedded messages they convey about gender identities and roles, are so naturalized and invisible that they were not remarked upon. However, it should be noted that the sense of masculine identity that was being remembered and commemorated at the National Coal Mining Museum was oen very personal and painful – particularly as 2004, the time of the interviews, was the 20-year anniversary of the Miners’ Strike. The lack of explicit discussion of gender should not be taken for absence of the real and deep engagement that many men at the museum had with their gendered identities. Rather that at the museum there was no or lile sense of dissonance about the gender identities represented there, and that the museum and heritage experiences it facilitated evoked powerful memories and expressions of identity that did not need commentary. This does not mean, however, that individuals are not able to renegotiate masculine messages and stories. Visitors were also interviewed at the Tolpuddle Martyrs Museum, in Dorset, that tells of events signiﬁcant in the early history of organized labour in England. The available interpretive material is concerned primarily with the lives of the Tolpuddle Martyrs – all men – and lile interpretive space is given over in this museum to the women aﬀected by the Martyrs’ persecution. Despite the predominantly masculine story of the museum, one woman used her own gender experiences to make sense, during her second visit to the museum, of the messages it conveyed and the meaning the Martyrs’ story had in her own life. She discussed her reading of the museum: I think it is very important because you realize the struggles that people go through are still the same, perhaps not as bad, but that things are still the same. There is still a need to support ordinary people and the courts and magistrates are still against workers and unions. … I draw a parallel with feminism, it’s easy for young women to not understand this, but if you can see yourself as part of a historical movement then you can understand how you ﬁt into on-going struggles … Being involved in the trade union movement. Between my ﬁrst visit and this I have done more things within my union and understand more about trade unionism, so it [the museum exhibition] spoke to me and inspired me, especially my ﬁrst visit (TP55). Here the woman, through drawing parallels with her own gender experiences and identities, was able to connect with and be inspired by the museum’s story and messages. What the above examples all illustrate is the variety of ways that people engage with and experience heritage, and the way gender can be an active part of that experience. Further, people will also undertake gendered readings of sites and exhibitions that may not be intended by the exhibition or site manager and interpretive staﬀ. Heritage and museum visitors will use sites and exhibitions to remember, commemorate and construct their own sense of gendered self, not only 171

T A R C

H I in varied ways, but also in ways that may be counter-intuitive or unexpected within the interpretive frameworks that draw on the AHD. Conversely, readings may also occur within the frameworks oﬀered by the AHD, as the examples provided by respondents CH331 and NCMM21 suggest. Although people engaged diﬀerently with the sites and exhibitions, depending on their sense of gender and what that may mean to them, it is worth stressing that, whether people were constructing conservative or radical messages from the sites they visited, they were actively engaged. This sense of agency undermines the dominant assumption within heritage literature and practice of the passivity of heritage and museum visitors. Although the examples above provide only the barest of glimpses into the ways visitors engage with heritage, the sense of agency argues that much further research into visitor interactions with heritage places is not only needed, but is likely to produce rich and instructive results. Although I have emphasized the existence and power of the AHD, it is also important to note that the AHD is contested. This contestation may take subtle and gentle forms as is illustrated in some of the examples above, but what this contestation does is suggest that there are other ways of seeing and understanding the nature and consequences of heritage. Widening academic and policy understandings of heritage and the roles and consequences it has in everyday lives is vital in developing socially inclusive cultural policies that consider and celebrate not only the diversity of people’s gendered experiences and identities, but other social and political experiences and identities centred on class, age, race and so forth. Challenges oﬀered to the AHD and the gendered values it represents can also be much more explicit than the examples above, particularly those that have come from outside the heritage sector. An example of challenges to the authorized gendering of heritage is documented by Hayden (1997), who recounts the work of a community project to commemorate the life of Biddy Mason, an African-American midwife and former slave who lived in Los Angeles between 1856 and 1891. The house that this woman had once built had been demolished, and received heritage wisdom would tend to assume that the material opportunity to commemorate this woman and her life and times had thus gone. Nonetheless, a commemorative space and artwork celebrating this woman’s life, and subsequently the lives more generally of African-American women in Los Angeles, was created and included in a walking tour of the city (Hayden, 1997; 2003). The art included a range of events, not least of which was the construction of a permanent poured-concrete wall some 25 metres long with interpretive panels, artworks, photographs of her homestead deeds and her ‘freedom papers’, and material culture (including midwife’s bag, scissors and other objects) bonded to the wall (Hayden, 2003). This project not only challenges in both its nature and the fact of its permanence and visibility the androcentric nature of heritage, but also the way in which commemorative space can be made and used, as despite the absence of surviving built heritage, new commemorative and heritage space was made. The Waanyi Women’s History Project is another example where a women’s community group challenged not only assumptions about women’s place in the past, but also the nature of heritage. This project, initiated by Aboriginal women from the Waanyi community of Northern Queensland, 172

H, G I Australia, aimed not only to recognize heritage of relevance to Aboriginal women in the region, but also to assert their rights to control the management of those sites. In the course of the project, ‘management’ not only meant physically identifying and protecting sites, but also passing on knowledge and the stories associated with the sites and places to their kinswomen (see O’Keefe et al., 2001; Smith, Morgan and van der Meer, 2003a; 2003b). Here again, basic assumptions about the physicality of heritage and its management were challenged, as the passing on of stories and cultural knowledge about site and places to the appropriate people was identiﬁed as heritage ‘management’ – a process of conserving the meaning and value of heritage places.

Conclusion The lack of extended discussion of gender issues in the heritage ﬁeld helps to reinforce the continued legitimacy of authorized and consensual accounts of history and the meaning and value the past has in the present. Failure to explore and engage with gender issues also facilitates the uncritical maintenance of received gender identities and the values that maintain the hierarchical relationship between those identities. The AHD works not only to frame heritage debate and practices, but is also itself a discourse that creates and legitimizes a range of identities and social and cultural values – not least of which are gendered identities. Feminists and other commentators on gender in the heritage sector have identiﬁed the gender assumptions, workplace and exhibition practices and power relations that maintain the authority of the AHD, and the masculine sense of history and the past it constructs. The assumed passivity of women, and heritage visitors more generally, has tended to restrict the degree to which the experiences of visitors have been considered a productive area of heritage research. However, visitors, community groups, and the ways they interact, engage with and experience heritage may not only challenge the AHD and the assumptions underlying it, but may provide researchers with new ways of understanding and engaging with heritage. If we understand heritage as more than a ‘thing’ or physical place to possess, list on registers and manage, then the conceptual framework of what heritage is and does can be extended. This extension is necessary to create the conceptual space to allow a shi away from a sense in which knowledge and values possessed by the heritage expert ﬂow down to communities and heritage visitors, to facilitate more equitable engagement between heritage professionals and their audiences. A reconsideration of heritage as a cultural process in which ideas of gender are created, challenged and negotiated, and are interlinked with, inﬂuence and are inﬂuenced by a range of other social and cultural identities such as class, ethnicity, nationhood and community is a useful starting point. Conceptual frameworks that can acknowledge and reﬂect upon not only the diversity of identity and social experiences of communities and individuals, but also understanding the social and political consequences of heritage and its relationship with identity are necessary to map the interlocking networks of identity creation and expression. Research into 173

T A R C

H I gender and heritage issues provides a useful, but neglected, focus for revealing the complex relationships between a person’s sense of heritage, place and identity and the social and political networks within which they sit.

References Aitchison, C. (1999), ‘Heritage and Nationalism: Gender and the Performance of Power’, in D. Crouch (ed.), Leisure/Tourism Geographies: Practices and Geographical Knowledge (London: Routledge), 59–73. Bagnall, G. (2003), ‘Performance and Performativity at Heritage Sites’, Museum and Society 1:2, 87–103. Bertelsen, R., Lillehammer, A. and Naess, J. (eds) (1987), Were They All Men? An Examination of Sex Roles in Prehistoric Society (Stavanger: Arkeologisk Museum i Stavanger). Bickford, A. (1981), ‘The Patina of Nostalgia’, Australian Archaeology 13, 7–13. Bickford, A. (1985), ‘Disquiet in the Warm Parlour of the Past: Material History and Historical Studies, Calthorpes House Museum, Canberra’, History and Cultural Resources Project: Part 2, Seminar Papers (Canberra: Commiee to Review Australian Studies in Tertiary Education). Bleier, R. (1991), ‘Science and Gender: A Critique of Biology and its Theories on Women’, in S. Gunew (ed.), A Reader in Feminist Knowledge (London: Routledge), 249–56. Bre, D. (1996), The Construction of Heritage (Cork: Cork University Press). Brod, H. and Kaufman, M. (eds) (1994), Theorizing Masculinities (London: Sage). Buchbinder, D. (1994), Masculinities and Identities (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press). Butcher, J. (2006), ‘Cultural Politics, Cultural Policy and Cultural Tourism’, in M.K. Smith and M. Robinson (eds), Cultural Tourism in a Changing World: Politics, Participation and (Re)presentation (Clevedon: Channel View Publications), 21–35. Chapman, R. and Rutherford, J. (eds) (1988), Male Order: Unwrapping Masculinity (London: Lawrence and Wishart). Clarke, A. (1993), ‘Cultural Resource Management (CRM) as Archaeological Housework: Conﬁning Women to the Gheo of Management’, in H. du Cros and L. Smith (eds), Women in Archaeology: A Feminist Critique (Canberra: Australian National University), 191–4. Conkey, M. and Spector, J. (1984), ‘Archaeology and the Study of Gender’, Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory 7, 1–38. Connell, R.W. (1987), Gender and Power (Cambridge: Polity Press). Connell, R.W. (1995), Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity Press). Connell, R.W. (2000), The Men and the Boys (Cambridge: Polity Press). Connell, R.W. (2002), Gender (Cambridge: Polity Press). Corsane, G. (ed.) (2005), Heritage, Museums and Galleries: An Introductory Reader (London: Routledge). Crouch, D. (ed.) (1999), Leisure/Tourism Geographies: Practices and Geographical Knowledge (London: Routledge). 174

H, G I Derry, L. and Malloy, M. (eds) (2003), Archaeologists and Local Communities: Partners in Exploring the Past (Washington: Society for American Archaeology). Downs, L.L. (2005), Writing Gender History (London: Hodder Arnold). Dubrow, G. and Goodman, J. (eds) (2003), Restoring Women’s History Through Historic Preservation (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press). du Cros, H. and Smith, L. (eds) (1993), Women in Archaeology: A Feminist Critique (Canberra: Australian National University). English Heritage (2006), ‘West Midlands: Apna Ghar (Our Home)’, , accessed 5 February 2007. Fairclough, N. (2001), ‘The Discourse of New Labour: Critical Discourse Analysis’, in M. Wetherell, S. Taylor and S.J. Yates (eds), Discourse as Data: A Guide for Analysis (London: Sage), 229–66. Falk, J.H. and Dierking, L.D. (2000), Learning from Museums: Visitor Experiences and the Making of Meaning (Walnut Creek: AltaMira). Fischer, F. and Forester, J. (eds) (1996), The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and Planning (Durham: Duke University Press). Fraser, N. (2000), ‘Rethinking Recognition’, New Le Review, , accessed 12 November 2003. Gero, J.M. and Conkey, M. (eds) (1991), Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory (Oxford: Blackwell). Graham, B., Ashworth, G.J. and Tunbridge, J.E. (2000), A Geography of Heritage: Power, Culture and Economy (London: Arnold). Gunew, S. (ed.) (1991), A Reader in Feminist Knowledge (London: Routledge). Hajer, M. (1996), ‘Discourse Coalitions and the Institutionalization of Practice: The Case of Acid Rain in Britain’, in F. Fischer and J. Forester (eds), The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and Planning (Durham: Duke University Press), 43–76. Hall, S. (1997), ‘Introduction: Who Needs “Identity”?’, in S. Hall and P. du Gay (eds), Questions of Cultural Identity (London: Sage), 1–17. Hall, S. and du Gay, P. (eds) (1997), Questions of Cultural Identity (London: Sage). Hardy, K. (1986), The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). Hayden, D. (1997), The Power of Place (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press). Hayden, D. (2003), ‘The Power of Place Project: Claiming Women’s History in the Urban Landscape’, in G. Dubrow and J. Goodman (eds), Restoring Women’s History Through Historic Preservation (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press), 199–213. Hodder, I. (ed.) (2001), Archaeological Theory Today (Cambridge: Polity). Holcomb, B. (1998), ‘Gender and Heritage Interpretation’, in D. Uzzell and R. Ballantyne (eds), Contemporary Issues in Heritage and Environmental Interpretation (London: The Stationery Oﬃce), 37–55. hooks, b. (1984), Feminist Theory From Margin to Centre (Boston: South End Press). hooks, b. (2000), Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (London: Pluto Press). Hope, J. (1993), ‘Double Bind: Women in the Cultural Heritage Business in NSW’, in H. du Cros and L. Smith (eds), Women in Archaeology: A Feminist Critique (Canberra: Australian National University), 175–90. 175

T A R C

H I Katriel, T. (1997), Performing the Past: A Study of Israeli Selement Museums (London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates). Keller, E.F. (1989), ‘The Gender/Science System: Or, Is Sex to Gender as Nature Is to Science?’, in N. Tuana (ed.), Feminism and Science (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 33–44. Larsen, R.M. (ed.) (2004), Maids and Mistresses: Celebrating 300 Years of Women and the Yorkshire Country House (Castle Howard: Yorkshire Country House Partnership). Lee, A. (ed.) (1992), Past Meets Future: Saving America’s Historic Environment (Washington: The Preservation Press). Longhurst, B., Bagnall, G. and Savage, M. (2004), ‘Audiences, Museums and the English Middle Class’, Museum and Society 2:2, 104–24. Lowenthal, D. (1992), ‘A Global Perspective on American Heritage’, in A. Lee (ed.), Past Meets Future: Saving America’s Historic Environment (Washington: The Preservation Press), 157–66. MacDonald, S. (2005a), ‘Accessing Audiences: Visiting Visitor Books’, Museum and Society 3:3, 119–36. MacDonald, S. (2005b), ‘A People’s Story: Heritage, Identity and Authenticity’, in G. Corsane (ed.), Heritage, Museums and Galleries: An Introductory Reader (London: Routledge), 272–90. MacDonald, S. and Fyfe, G. (eds) (1996), Theorizing Museums (Oxford: Blackwell). McIntosh, A. and Prentice, R. (1999), ‘Aﬃrming Authenticity: Consuming Cultural Heritage’, Annals of Tourism Research 26:3, 589–612. Mandler, P. (1997), The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (New Haven: Yale University Press). Mason, R. (2004), ‘Conﬂict and Complement: An Exploration of the Discourses Informing the Concept of the Socially Inclusive Museum in Contemporary Britain’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 10:1, 49–73. Mason, R. (2005), ‘Museums, Galleries and Heritage: Sites of Meaning-making and Communication’, in G. Corsane (ed.), Heritage, Museums and Galleries: An Introductory Reader (London: Routledge), 200–14. Morris, M. (1997), A Methodology for the Identiﬁcation, Interpretation and Promotion of the Heritage of Women in Tasmania (Hobart: State Government of Tasmania). Moscardo, G. (1996), ‘Mindful Visitors: Heritage and Tourism’, Annals of Tourism Research 23:2, 376–97. Moser, S. (1993), ‘Gender Stereotyping in Pictorial Reconstructions of Human Origins’, in H. du Cros and L. Smith (eds), Women in Archaeology: A Feminist Critique (Canberra: Australian National University), 75–92. Moser, S. (1998), Ancestral Images: The Iconography of Human Origin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell). Moser, S. (2001), ‘Archaeological Representation: The Visual Conventions for Constructing Knowledge about the Past’, in I. Hodder (ed.), Archaeological Theory Today (Cambridge: Polity), 262–83. Moser, S. (2003), ‘Representing Human Origins: Constructing Knowledge in Museums and Dismantling the Display Canon’, Public Archaeology 3, 1–17. 176

H, G I Nelson, M.C., Nelson, S.M. and Wylie, A. (eds) (1994), Equity Issues for Women in Archaeology (Washington: Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association, Number 5). Newman, A. (2005), ‘Social Exclusion Zone’ and ‘The Feelgood Factor’, in G. Corsane (ed.), Heritage, Museums and Galleries: An Introductory Reader (London: Routledge), 325–32. Newman, A. and McLean, F. (1998), ‘Heritage Builds Communities: The Application of Heritage Resources to the Problems of Social Exclusion’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 4:3/4, 143–53. Newman, A. and McLean, F. (2004), ‘Presumption, Policy and Practice: The Use of Museums and Galleries as Agents of Social Inclusion in Great Britain’, International Journal of Cultural Policy 10:2, 167–81. O’Keefe, E., Burgan, D., Morgan, A., Smith, L. and van der Meer, A. (2001), ‘Waanyi Women’s History Project and Re-engendering the Riversleigh and Lawn Hill Landscapes’, unpublished conference paper, given at the 6th Women in Archaeology Conference, Queensland, Australia. Olwig, K.F. (1999), ‘The Burden of Heritage: Claiming a Place for a West Indian Culture’, American Ethnologist 26:2, 370–88. Parks Canada (2004), ‘National Historic Sites of Canada System Plan: Commemoration of Women’s History’, , accessed 7 February 2007. Poria, Y., Butler, R. and Airey, D. (2003), ‘The Core of Heritage Tourism’, Annals of Tourism Research 30:1, 238–54. Porter, G. (1990), ‘Gender Bias: Representations of Work in History Museums’, The Australian Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 3:1, , accessed 4 July 2006. Porter, G. (1996), ‘Seeing Through Solidity: A Feminist Perspective on Museums’, in S. MacDonald and G. Fyfe (eds), Theorizing Museums (Oxford: Blackwell), 105–26. Russell, L. (1999), ‘“Well Nigh Impossible to Describe”: Dioramas, Displays and Representations of Australian Aborigines’, Australian Aboriginal Studies 2, 25–34. Samuel, R. (1994), Theatres of Memory. Volume 1: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London: Verso). Silberman, H. and Fairchild, D.R. (eds) (in press, 2007), Cultural Heritage and Human Rights (New York: Springer). Sinclair, M.T. (ed.) (1997), Gender, Work and Tourism (London: Routledge). Smiles, S. and Moser, S. (eds) (2005), Envisioning the Past: Archaeology and the Image (Oxford: Blackwell). Smith, C. and Burke, H. (2006), ‘Glass Ceilings, Glass Parasols and Australian Academic Archaeology’, Australian Archaeology 62, 13–25. Smith, L. (1995), ‘Cultural Resource Management and Feminist Expression in Australian Archaeology’, Norwegian Archaeological Review 28:1, 55–63. Smith, L. (2004), Archaeological Theory and the Politics of Cultural Heritage (London: Routledge). Smith, L. (2006), Uses of Heritage (London: Routledge). 177

T A R C

H I Smith, L. (2007a), ‘Empty Gestures? Heritage and the Politics of Recognition’, in H. Silberman and D.R. Fairchild (eds), Cultural Heritage and Human Rights (New York: Springer), in press. Smith, L. (2007b), ‘General Introduction’, in L. Smith (ed.), Cultural Heritage: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies (London: Routledge), 1–21. Smith, L. (ed.) (2007), Cultural Heritage: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies (London: Routledge). Smith, L. and du Cros, H. (1994), ‘Equity and Gender in Australian Archaeology: A Survey of the “Women in Archaeology” Conference, 1991’, in M.C. Nelson, S.M. Nelson and A. Wylie(eds), Equity Issues for Women in Archaeology (Washington: Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association, Number 5), 115–20. Smith, L., Morgan, A. and van der Meer, A. (2003a), ‘Community-driven Research in Cultural Heritage Management: The Waanyi Women’s History Project’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 9:1, 65–80. Smith, L., Morgan, A. and van der Meer, A. (2003b), ‘The Waanyi Women’s History Project: A Community Partnership Project, Queensland, Australia’, in L. Derry and M. Malloy (eds), Archaeologists and Local Communities: Partners in Exploring the Past (Washington: Society for American Archaeology), 147–65. Smith, M.K. and Robinson, M. (eds) (2006), Cultural Tourism in a Changing World: Politics, Participation and (Re)presentation (Clevedon: Channel View Publications). Smith, R. (2006), ‘A Feminist Critique of the Natural History Galleries at the Manchester Museum’, accessed 4 June 2006. Spelman, E.V. (1988), Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon Press). Tuana, N. (ed.) (1989), Feminism and Science (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). Uzzell, D. and Ballantyne, R. (eds) (1998), Contemporary Issues in Heritage and Environmental Interpretation (London: The Stationery Oﬃce). Waterton, E., Smith, L. and Campbell, G. (2006), ‘The Utility of Discourse Analysis to Heritage Studies: The Burra Charter and Social Inclusion’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 12:4, 339–55. West, P. (2003), ‘Uncovering and Interpreting Women’s History at Historic House Museums’, in G. Dubrow and J. Goodman (eds), Restoring Women’s History Through Historic Preservation (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press), 83–95. Wetherell, M., Taylor, S. and Yates, S.J. (eds) (2001), Discourse as Data: A Guide for Analysis (London: Sage). Wylie, A. (1992), ‘The Interplay of Evidential Constraints and Political Interests: Recent Archaeological Research on Gender’, American Antiquity 57:1, 15–35. Wylie, A. (1993), ‘Workplace Issues for Women in Archaeology: The Chilly Climate’, in H. du Cros and L. Smith (eds), Women in Archaeology: A Feminist Critique (Canberra: Australian National University), 245–58.

178

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

PART III PRACTICES OF HERITAGE AND IDENTITY

This page intentionally left blank

10

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

The Communication of Heritage: Creating Place Identities Peter Groote and Tialda Haartsen

Heritage as Communication Modernity aempted to ﬁx space through the creation of rigidly territorial nation-states, promulgating ideologies which aempted to subsume diﬀerences through representations of homogeneity. But all too oen, the grail of universal conformity has produced atrocity and genocide as those who do not ﬁt have been driven out or eradicated. Heritage is heavily implicated in these processes as a medium of communication of prevailing myths and counter-claims (Graham, Ashworth and Tunbridge, 2000, 55). It takes only a limited number of steps to argue that heritage management and research are in essence about communication. The starting point is one of the simplest and consequently most aractive deﬁnitions of heritage, namely as ‘contemporary uses of the past’ (Graham, Ashworth and Tunbridge, 2000, 2). From this it follows that heritage is used or ‘consumed’. What is consumed, however, is not so much the heritage itself, in the form of, for example, a building or a cultural landscape, but its representation in the form of a historical narrative. Only in this step does the past, or rather history, play a role. If a commodity is to be consumed, it has ﬁrst to be produced. So we may expect agents to spend time, money or other resources on the production or reproduction of such historical narratives, in order to have them consumed as heritage. As the spending of resources is involved, it is logical that participating agents will have a speciﬁc purpose – heritage narratives are not produced for nothing or for fun, but in order to, for example, preserve cultural values, aract tourists and tourist spending, or to reinforce speciﬁc place identities. The narratives convey the meanings of the heritage commodity, and as such take part in the processes of deliberately (or accidentally) creating place identities: [A] major outcome of conserving and interpreting heritage, whether intended or not, is to provide identity … There may be other purposes as well, such

T A R C

H I as legitimation, cultural capital and sheer monetary value, but the common purpose is to make some people feel beer, more rooted and more secure (Howard, 2003, 147). This means that heritage research needs to pay aention to questions of representation and the politics of the communication of meanings, in particular if the role of heritage in the production of place identities is the focus of the research. In the arena where heritage and place meanings are contested, communication is a powerful weapon. The most convincing historical narrative logically is that most widely accepted, or ‘hegemonic’ in Gramsci’s terms (see, for the original, Gramsci, 1947; also Gramsci, 1991). Consequently, communication strategies are important for the producers of heritage. If eﬀectively communicated, heritage can be a prime marker or carrier of place identities (Kavaratzis and Ashworth, 2005). The creation of channels of communication has even been put forward as the main objective in heritage management, in order to achieve stakeholder collaboration (Aas, Ladkin and Fletcher, 2005, 39).

Heritage Representations in Separate Discourses? There are, of course, myriad communicative aspects to heritage. The most inﬂuential contemporary theorist of cultural representations, Stuart Hall, follows up on Gramsci’s ideas (Barker, 2004, 177). As Hall (1995; 1997) focused on the role of language as a system of representation, it is logical to link his ideas to the idea of discourse. Although this concept has acquired many, sometimes conﬂicting, meanings, it suﬃces for this chapter to regard it as the cultural circle or network in which meaningful communication is (or can be) performed (see Gregory, 2000, 180). Discourses may diﬀer in, for example, the agents participating in the process of producing representations and communicating meanings through these, in the power relations between agents and in their objectives, but also in the choice of media and the languages that are used. Stuart Hall’s ideas have been picked up in a wide array of cultural studies, including heritage: ‘Like language, it [heritage] is one of the mechanisms by which meaning is produced and reproduced. Hall proposes a “cultural circuit”, which can be extended to include heritage’ (Ashworth and Graham, 2005, 5). Traditionally, in discourses revolving around the theme of heritage management the focus has always been on experts, or ‘those with knowledge’. The forerunners in heritage conservation were learned people from ﬁelds such as history or architecture. Archetypal examples are Ruskin, Pugin and Viollet-le-Duc (Graham, Ashworth and Tunbridge, 2000, 14). They acted mainly within the academic discourse. This has been aptly deﬁned as ‘the constructs of academics aempting to understand, explain and manipulate the social world’ (Halfacree, 1993, 31). Increasingly their eﬀorts were supported by experts who were professionally engaged with heritage, communicating mainly in the professional discourse (Jones, 1995). In the context of heritage, professionals work for example with the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), English Heritage, the National Trust or the

182

T C

H: C P I German Denkmalschutz, but also on the local level with municipalities or in cultural tourism. Less prominent in the traditional description of heritage management are lay and popular discourses (Jones, 1995). In the former, representations are based upon everyday interpretations and communications within an individual’s personal network (Halfacree, 1993). By deﬁnition lay discourses are contrasted with their expert counterparts. Popular discourses are founded in cultural and societal structures, such as the media and ﬁne arts. In contrast to lay discourses, they extend beyond an individual’s communicative network, ‘to reach a wider public at a variety of scales ranging from local to international’ (Jones, 1995, 38). Oen, popular discourses function as intermediaries between lay and various professional discourses, because they both reproduce and produce the representations residing with the general public. On the one hand, mass media try to pick up and conform to the ideas and taste of the general public, as their ultimate goal is to ‘sell’ their messages in a very competitive market to as large an audience as possible. On the other hand, by doing so, mass media are very inﬂuential in shaping these same ideas and tastes: ‘The media industries have been assigned a leading role in the cultural community of Europe: they are supposed to articulate the “deep solidarity” of our collective consciousness and our common culture’ (Morley and Robins, 1995, 174). Later in the chapter we will focus on two of the most prominent examples of heritage in the media, namely speciﬁc television programmes, such as the BBC’s Restoration, and its continental successors (Ashworth, 2004), and heritage movies (Goode, 2003). There are, of course, other popular discourses, such as literature (Stainer, 2005), that can be used in heritage communication. It is clear from the above that heritage and its communication are in many senses plural concepts. There are diﬀerent agents involved, communicating in diﬀerent discourses, and they use diﬀerent historical narratives linked to diﬀerent place identities to achieve diﬀerent objectives. These pluralities signify the importance of contestation. Heritage meanings are socially, or culturally, constructed and are therefore always contestable. In the body of the chapter, we focus on three dimensions to these general issues. In the ﬁrst instance, the discussion addresses the professional discourse and, in particular, the question of prizes and awards in communicating heritage. We then move on to certain dimensions of the popular discourse, focusing on the role of television and the movies in shaping representations of heritage. Finally, we assess the eﬀectiveness of the heritage policy discourse as a mode of communication in the construction of place identities.

The Professional Discourse: Prizes, Awards Professionals communicate about heritage projects in many ways. Sometimes such communications are meant not just for the professional discourse itself, but also for the outside world. This is the case, for example, with the awarding of prizes. Here we want to focus on the Europa Nostra awards for excellence in heritage conservation. Europa Nostra is a conglomerate of more than 200 non-governmental organizations 183

T A R C

H I active in the ﬁeld of heritage conservation in Europe. These range from wellknown general bodies such as the UK’s National Trust to speciﬁc ones such as the Hungarian Haydn Society or the Butrint Foundation (Albania–UK). Europa Nostra was set up in 1963 with support from the Council of Europe, but initiated by Italia Nostra, hence its peculiar name (Van Jole, 2002). Since 1978, Europa Nostra has been awarding medals and diplomas for remarkable conservation practices within the European realm.1 In 2002, the European Commission launched the EU Prize for Cultural Heritage as part of the implementation of the Culture 2000 Programme. It asked Europa Nostra to run the new scheme, on the basis of its experience in evaluating and rewarding heritage conservation practices. Both schemes were merged into what has since been called the ‘European Union Prize for Cultural Heritage/Europa Nostra Awards’. In this way, both governmental and non-governmental organizations were made responsible for awarding heritage sites within the European context. Apart from the traditional Europa Nostra medals and diplomas, a number of inﬂuential and monetary prizes were introduced, each of €10,000. These were meant for: outstanding conservation projects (category 1); studies (category 2); and dedicated persons or organizations (category 3). Category 1 was further subdivided into: architectural heritage; cultural landscapes; archaeology; and collections of works of art. Interestingly, projects from countries outside the EU (and European Economic Area) may participate, but can win at most a medal or diploma rather than a monetary prize. Since 2002, prizes in the categories of architectural heritage, cultural landscapes, and archaeology have been awarded to projects in Norway (twice), Finland, Denmark, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Germany, Romania, Spain, Greece and Cyprus. Although there was clearly an aempt at diversity in the types of objects, ranging from a Stone Age selement in Finland to a 1936 theatre in Denmark, there was a modest preference for Romantic, rural eighteenth-century objects. Typical were the Larchill Arcadian Gardens in County Kildare, Ireland, which won the cultural landscapes category in 2002. Museum Varusschlacht-Kalkriese is arguably the best example of the use of prizes to communicate the meaning of heritage sites.2 It was the winner of the 2004 prize in the category of archaeological sites, but the messages communicated in the awarding of the Europa Nostra prize, as well as in later marketing campaigns of the museum, have nothing to do with local archaeology. Instead they are entirely rooted in the contemporary German or European situation. The museum is located on the spot where, in 9 AD, Germanic tribesmen, under Arminius or Hermann, beat three Roman legions, under the command of Varus. This was a severe blow to the Romans, and Emperor Augustus is reported to have cried out: ‘Varus, give me back my legions.’ The exact location of the bale, and even its historical validity, was doubtful until some decades ago. It used to be referred to as the bale of the Teutoburgerwald. In the nineteenth century it had been interpreted

1 2

See <www.europanostra.org>. , ‘Europäischer kulturpreis für Kalkriese’, accessed 14 March 2007. 184

T C

H: C P I as an important narrative about the heroic roots of the German nation. The further appropriation of this narrative by the Nazis has meant that the bale was regarded as ‘contaminated’ and positioned as an a-historical myth. This caused a problem for the public authorities involved aer a British archaeologist discovered the correct site of the bale. The problem was solved through two communicative practices (Groote, 2006). In the ﬁrst place, the heroic character of the winners of the bale was downplayed. It is, aer all, very peculiar that the museum is now named aer Varus, the loser of the bale, who also was the foreign intruder, instead of the winner, Arminius, the defender of the territory. Also, in the story as told in the Museum Varusschlacht, it was not so much the strategy or courage of the winners that were decisive, but the abysmal physical characteristics of the site of the bale, a swamp. Secondly, the problem was solved by communicating not the narrative of the bale, but translations and interpretations of it. So it is the history of the communication of a speciﬁc heritage place that is on display. This has been done in a spectacular and artistic manner, in order to be more convincing and to pull the visitor further away from traditional, heroic interpretations of the bale. ‘In contrast to other archaeological open-air museums, the Kalkriese project deliberately chose abstract representation, using metaphors and symbols, thus avoiding detailed and seemingly authentic reconstruction of place and event’ (Europa Nostra, 2004). Even more explicitly, in his word of gratitude to Europa Nostra, the head of government of the Bundesland Niedersachsen, Christian Wulﬀ, pointed towards the central role that Varusschlacht-Kalkriese could play for the ‘cultures of peace on the regional and European scale’. Member of the European Parliament, Hans-Gert Pöering, reinforced this: ‘Wir haben die Aufgabe, den jüngeren Generationen auch die weniger friedlichen Kapitel unserer Vergangenheit nahe zu bringen und damit ihre Wertschätzung für das geschichtlich einmalige Friedenswerk zu stärken, das die Europäische Union heute darstellt.’3

Visible Heritages: the Popular Discourse In the popular discourse, ﬁlms and television can be considered means of communication with a large impact and range. They form dominant sites of contemporary cultural production. Heritage is also produced and communicated through these media.

Heritage Movies An example in the ﬁlm industry is the appearance of so-called heritage ﬁlms. As Richard Dyer noted: ‘The term [heritage ﬁlm] suggests an aﬃnity with what has 3

‘We have the task of bringing the younger generation closer to the less peaceful chapters of our history as well. Through this we can reinforce their valuation of the historically unique work of peace that the European Union is nowadays’ (). 185

T A R C

H I been called the heritage industry … a text set in the past drawing upon a canonical source from the national literature and comprised of period costumes, décor and locations carefully recreated’ (Dyer, 1996, 186). Heritage ﬁlms represent the relationship of the past with the present, and oen communicate an idealization of the past in response to present-day negative developments. The increase in the number of British heritage ﬁlms in the 1980s, for example, is seen as a response to the Thatcher period, with economic decline and high unemployment rates (Goode, 2003). The increasing production of heritage ﬁlms in Poland in the 1990s has been explained by the anxieties and uncertainties Poland experienced aer the transition from communism to the market economy (Mazierska, 2001). Goode (2003, 296) states that ‘the meaning and cultural sources of the “heritage” that constitutes heritage cinema continue to be assumed and taken for granted’. The heritage ﬁlms themselves are characterized by conservatively constructed national identities. In Britain and Poland, heritage ﬁlms are oen based on respectable literary sources, shot on location in a pastoral ambience, focusing on upper-class and respectively Victorian or Sienkiewicz-ian lifestyles (Higson, 1993; Mazierska, 2001). Debates about heritage, Goode argues, could gain in importance by including histories of heritage and the cultural processes that construct it. In the discipline of media studies this has been acknowledged. Under the intriguing title Janespoing and Beyond, the leading German scholar Eckart Voigts-Virchow (2004), for example, analysed such diversities of both the constructions of the past in heritage ﬁlms as well as of their possible readings. Although some versions of heritage may dominate others, representations and communications of heritage are plural, ﬂuid and contested. Three aspects still seem, however, to be relatively absent from these ﬁlm-based debates. These are: the acknowledgement of place identities other than the national; the role of non-experts (professionals or academics) in determining what is to be regarded as heritage and how this relates to place identities; and, ﬁnally, how campaigning or lobbying might inﬂuence political decision-making processes about heritage. These three aspects have, however, been very visible in the recent surge of heritage television programmes.

Heritage Management on Television In 2003, the BBC broadcast the ﬁrst series of the television programme Restoration, produced by the international production company Endemol. The oﬃcial goal of Restoration was to bring a number of neglected buildings under public aention, and to organize a public competition that would result in the election of one winning building that was to be awarded a restoration grant of £3.5 million. The programme was organized geographically – the UK was divided into ten regions, in each of which heritage organizations selected three buildings which were introduced by advocates in a series of regional heats. Although this ﬁrst selection and the campaigns were managed by experts, the general public selected the winner of each round through telephone voting aer the broadcast. In the grand ﬁnal, the regional winners again competed. The overall winner of the ﬁrst series was Victoria Baths in Manchester (2003). Later series were won by the Old Grammar School and

186

T C

H: C P I nearby Saracens Head in Birmingham (2004), and Chedham’s Yard in Wellesbourne, Warwickshire (2006). From a geographical point of view, it is intriguing that in spite of the deliberate UK-wide regional spread of candidate buildings, the winners came from the tourism region, ‘Heart of England’ (Wellesbourne and Birmingham) or relatively close by (Greater Manchester starts just outside the region). Winners were not from London or South-East England, but neither from the periphery, although Cornwall, Northern Ireland, the Orkneys and the Shetland Islands had their nominees. Is it that the general vote tends to a geographical or spatial centre, or is it that this region is still seen as the soul of England (cf. Lowenthal, 1991, 213) ? It is notable, too, that the programme developed in the same manner as heritage policies in general, with the focus widening from individual buildings to ensembles and heritage areas (Ashworth, 1991, 20). Whereas the ﬁrst two series of the programme focused on separate buildings, in the third series heritage villages were central. As Ashworth (2004) predicted, the Restoration idea has been copied to other countries and regions, among which are Belgium (Monumentenstrĳd), the Netherlands (Restauratie), Germany (Ein Schloss wird gewinnen), and the San Francisco Bay Area (American Express-sponsored Partners in Preservation). The Belgian version of Restoration, Monumentenstrĳd (‘Bale of the Monuments’), was broadcast for the ﬁrst time in 2006. It diﬀered from the British version in adopting a regional focus on Flanders instead of a national one on both Flemish and Walloon heritages. The programme is initiated by Vlaamse Radio-en Televiseomroep (VRT) and the Flemish Department for Monuments, Landscapes, Archaeology and Heritage. So it is an initiative from the government as well. Another diﬀerence is that the general public could nominate candidate heritage sites. From almost 400 nominations, an independent commiee pre-selected 30 sites for the programme, six monuments for each of ﬁve provinces. In two selection series, the public could vote for ﬁnalists.4 The winner of the series was the former apple-syrup factory in Borgloon, a small town in Flemish Limburg. It received 6,000 votes in the semiﬁnal and 60,000 in the ﬁnal (total of two voting rounds). Viewing audiences for the series, broadcast on Monday nights, were between 150,000 and 200,000, with a peak of almost half a million on the night of the ﬁnal. The ﬁve ﬁnalists shared a total budget of one million euros, earmarked for restoration and re-use of the sites. One notable contestant in Flanders was the Boekentoren (‘book tower’) in Gent which is a modernist 20-storey concrete building, some 64 metres high and sited at the highest point of the city. It was designed in the 1930s by Henry van der Velde and listed as a monument only in 1992. One would not expect this example of modernist urban architecture to appeal to a lay audience, but it still made it to the grand ﬁnal, only to lose to two of the supposedly more appealing, small-scale and less urban ﬁnalists. This forms an intriguing contrast to a British variant of Restoration that was broadcast in 2005. It was aptly named Demolition, as it followed the format of Restoration, but with the opposite intention, namely demolition of Britain’s ‘worst’ 4

,accessed 14 March 2007. 187

T A R C

H I buildings.5 Again, the general public could nominate buildings considered ﬁt for demolition. More than 10,000 votes were cast to come to the top 12 buildings, labelled the ‘dirty dozen’. These were put under the spotlight in four programmes. Here the format of Restoration could not be followed; there was no ﬁnal contest with the demolition of the ‘winning’ building as the main prize. The Dutch version of Restoration copied not just the format, but also the name of its British counterpart: Restauratie (Oosting and Groote, 2005). It started in November 2006, and was sponsored by a loery.6 A number of Dutch cultural-heritage organizations recommended a large number of buildings. Of these, 15 were selected to join the programme, based on a number of selection criteria. For the individual buildings, these were clear signs of decay, no private ownership, availability of a wrien restoration plan, and a (future) public function. Although the nominated buildings were supposed to be spread across the country, the organizers of the programme did not select buildings in four north-eastern provinces (Friesland, Drenthe, Overĳssel, Flevoland). Broadcasts were not organized geographically – the 15 buildings were presented in ﬁve episodes. The programme was broadcast at prime time on Saturdays. Viewing audiences were slightly less than half a million, which is reasonably high by Dutch standards. An interesting aspect of the Restoration concept is the role of the geographical seing and lobby aspects. In the case of Victoria Baths, the 2003 UK winner, the municipality of Manchester mobilized the Manchester population to vote for Victoria Baths. Of course, the size of the city is important. Buildings that are located in relatively densely populated areas seem to have more chance to win Restoration than others. However, the results in the Dutch Restauratie show a diﬀerent picture, since two out of three selected buildings stem from relatively sparsely populated areas in the northern Netherlands. This might have something to do with the speciﬁc lobby for one of these buildings. The 150 inhabitants of the village of Vierhuizen have been very active in promoting their church. They designed, for example, a website and glued posters of their campaign on election billboards throughout the whole province (see Figure 10.1).7 The website of the Belgian Monumentenstrĳd goes one step further and even stimulates individual lobbying by oﬀering a download page with campaign material for each of the nominated buildings on the programme’s website. Restoration – and probably its Dutch and Belgian counterparts – has led to increased aention to heritage generally but also recognition that choices have to be made in heritage management. The programmes also question traditional roles as to who deﬁnes heritage. Usually, restoration is paid for with public money, but it is the expert who decides which heritage is worth restoring. On what basis do experts claim the right to exclude the public in these decisions? Experts are thought to be able to make well-thought-out considerations about the value of a monument, including contextual and locality aspects. In Restoration, the decisive votes are in

5 6 7

www.channel4.com/life/microsites/D/demolition/index.html, accessed 14 March 2007. See www.restauratie.tv, accessed 14 March 2007. <www.stemvierhuizen.nl>. 188

T C

H: C P I

Figure 10.1 Posters, campaigning for the church at Vierhuizen to win the Dutch version of ‘Restoration’, pasted over those for the national Parliamentary elections, Groningen, November 2006 the hands of lay people. This general public lacks background heritage knowledge and will probably be more led by the appearance of the building, its story and emotional aspects, such as personal or local experiences related to the building. But is the Restoration approach as boom-up as it seems? Aer all, the (pre)selection of the buildings was done by heritage organizations – by people from professional or expert discourses. Some buildings were already listed as monuments.

Policies as Communication In the policy discourse, the relationship between communicating heritage and place identities can be two-fold. The ﬁrst runs from regional policies to heritage production. In this case, the (re)production of heritage is used in order to produce place identities. An intriguing example concerns the creation of the administrative region of Nunavut in 1999, as Inuit territory in North Canada (Van Dam, 2005). The institutionalization of this new region, in Paasi’s (1986) terms, demanded new communications of heritage to initiate the identiﬁcation of individuals with 189

T A R C

H I the region. In Nunavut, as elsewhere, the past is oen used to give meaning to sometimes newly invented symbols of regional identity, including even the territorial shape and the name of the region. In Nunavut the Inukshuk was chosen as a regional symbol. This is a stone marker on the land to guide people while travelling. It was also included on the oﬃcial ﬂag. The second relation between heritage as a communicative practice and regional identity politics is the more general one – heritage policies that inﬂuence place identities. A prime example concerns the so-called Belvedere memorandum on cultural heritage which was published in the Netherlands in 1999 (see Reuselaars, 2003 for a short explanation)). The vantage point is ‘conservation through development’, implying the maintenance of heritage while spatial developments can continue. The policy was introduced by four Dutch government ministries (Education and Culture, Agriculture, Planning, and Environment and Transport) and two heritage organizations (the Netherlands Department for Conservation and the National Service for Archaeological Heritage). It aims at strengthening the cultural identity of places and regions by using ‘space in such a way that an object of cultural and/or historic importance is given a place and will contribute to the quality of its newly created surroundings’.8 The Belvedere strategy can be seen as a policy interpretation of the cultural turn, as ‘the use of cultural heritage adds an extra cultural dimension to the spatial culture’. The implementation of the policy is coordinated by the Belvedere project oﬃce, set up in 2000, which is strongly geared towards inﬂuencing governance and society, professional development and network-building. Belvedere projects have to be paid for with existing ﬁnances, but subsidies are provided for dynamic experiments dealing with cultural history. In total, by 2007 some 300 projects had already been funded by Belvedere. One project of particular interest for this chapter is the preliminary investigation into the desirability, applicability and potential content of an ‘Atlas of Spatial Identity’. The central problem is that spatial planners and policy makers increasingly try to improve spatial qualities and identities in their spatial planning policies, without knowing what spatial identities are, nor how to ﬁt them into spatial plans. An ‘Atlas of Spatial Identity’ was thought to be a potential solution to this problem by providing policy makers with all the information they need on the identities of their place or region. But what information should this Atlas contain? A questionnaire was conducted with 400 potential users, principally planners and policy makers who are dealing or have dealt with spatial planning projects aimed at maintaining and strengthening local or regional identities. One of the questions asked concerned the concrete actions and measures towards maintaining and strengthening identities already undertaken by the respondents. Some 44 per cent identiﬁed measures of conservation of heritage that had fallen into decay or had become less visible, and 29 per cent mentioned the use of identity and heritage as a starting point for spatial plans. Another question sought to ascertain which speciﬁc aspects of spatial identity should be contained in the Atlas.

8

<www.belvedere.nu>, accessed 14 March 2007. 190

T C

H: C P I For practical reasons, the researchers deﬁned spatial identity as a location-speciﬁc combination of: • • •

physical and man-made processes that inﬂuence the formation of places and landscapes; speciﬁc elements and structures in these places and landscapes; the couleur locale, representations of, and meanings and narratives that are ascribed to the places and landscapes.

The respondents were convinced that processes, elements and structures were more important than the couleur locale. Some claimed that ‘narratives are highly coloured and therefore beside the truth’ (Lantschap, 2006, 24). The somewhat naïve assumption seems to be that there is an objective truth in the landscape. It appears, too, that agents in the policy discourse have more problems with dealing with the inherent socially constructed and plural nature of heritage as well as regional identities than do agents in the lay and popular discourses. This conclusion corresponds with the ﬁndings of Reser and Bentrupperbäumer (2005) that managers of World Heritage Sites tend to understand their values predominantly in terms of physical characteristics, whereas visitors and local residents seem more capable of empathizing with and appreciating the corresponding narratives. Ashworth and Kuipers (2001) have severely criticized the Belvedere approach for the same reason; it is not just conceptually diﬃcult to use heritage to ‘strengthen’ a regional identity (in the singular!), but it is also plainly wrong to suggest that this would be an inherently justiﬁed approach. Instead it is a potentially dangerous strategy that can only be of use for the cultural and political elite. Aer all, whose heritage is communicated, and consequently whose identities?

Concluding Remarks Gradually, the cultural turn in society and in the social sciences seems to have an impact on heritage management and research as well. In the ﬁrst place, there is clearly more aention to heritage as a communicative practice. This has obvious consequences, as it brings the socially constructed and contested nature of heritage to the forefront. Although this is theoretically recognized in academic discourse, it seems much harder to have it accepted, let alone implemented in the policy discourse. In the second place, the democratization of heritage seems well accepted. A more prominent role for non-experts in the deﬁnition and selection of heritage seems to be increasingly popular. Museums communicate about ‘peoples’ heritage’, spatial policies are speciﬁcally targeted to cultural–historical place identities, and heritage is deliberately used in these. This is most visible in the popularity of heritage television programmes, based on the BBC’s (or rather Endemol’s) Restoration format. However, this does not necessarily imply a true boom-up strategy in deciding which heritage is heritage. The initial selection of buildings is still performed by experts. Also, conspicuous as the programmes may 191

T A R C

H I be, the majority of budgets are still controlled by professionals and experts, and possibly for the best. Aer all, the ‘heritage crusade’ started thanks to the cultural elite. Finally, one aspect of heritage as a communicative practice seems in need of more discussion, particularly in the academic and popular discourses. It seems necessary to pay aention not just to the producers but also to the receivers of heritage communications. In particular, the role of consumer segmentation in the reception and translation of heritage communications seems problematic.9

References Aas, C., Ladkin, A. and Fletcher, J. (2005), ‘Stakeholder Collaboration and Heritage Management’, Annals of Tourism Research 32:1, 28–48. Ashworth, G.J. (1991), Heritage Planning: Conservation as the Management of Urban Change (Groningen: Geo Pers). Ashworth, G.J. (2004), ‘The BBC’s “Restoration”: Should We Cheer, Laugh or Cry?’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 10:2, 209–12. Ashworth, G.J. and Graham, B. (2005), ‘Senses of Place, Senses of Time and Heritage’, in G.J. Ashworth and B. Graham (eds), Senses of Place: Senses of Time (Aldershot: Ashgate), 3–12. Ashworth, G.J. and Graham, B. (eds) (2005), Senses of Place: Senses of Time (Aldershot: Ashgate). Ashworth, G.J. and Kuipers, M.J. (2001), ‘Conservation and Identity: A New Vision of Pasts and Futures in the Netherlands’, European Spatial Research and Policy 8:2, 55–65. Barker, C. (2004), The Sage Dictionary of Cultural Studies (London: Sage). Caughie, J. and Rocke, K. (eds) (1996), The Companion to British and Irish Cinema (London: British Film Institute). Dicks, B. (2000), ‘Encoding and Decoding the People – Circuits of Communication at a Local Heritage Museum’, European Journal of Communication 15:1, 61–78. Dyer, R. (1996), ‘Heritage Cinema in Europe’, in J. Caughie and K. Rocke (eds), The Companion to British and Irish Cinema (London: British Film Institute), 186–7. Ennen, E. (1999), Heritage in Fragments. The Meaning of Pasts for City Centre Residents (Groningen: FRW/KNAG). Ennen, E. (2000), ‘The Meaning of Heritage According to Connoisseurs, Rejecters and Take-it-or-leavers in Historic City Centres: Two Dutch Cities Experienced’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 6:4, 331–49. Europa Nostra (2004), Jury Report, , accessed 14 March 2007. Friedman, L. (ed.) (1993), British Cinema and Thatcherism (London: UCL Press).

9

Some aention has been paid to this in the literature, but generally in the context of speciﬁc heritage uses, such as museums or urban heritage residential quarters (Dicks, 2000; Ennen, 1999; 2000; Prentice and Cunnell, 1997). 192

T C

H: C P I Goode, I. (2003), ‘A Paern of Inheritances: Alan Benne, Heritage and British Film and Television’, Screen 44:3, 295–313. Graham, B., Ashworth, G.J. and Tunbridge, J.E. (2000), A Geography of Heritage: Power, Culture and Economy (London: Arnold). Gramsci, A. (1947), Leere dal Carcere (Torino: Einaudi). Gramsci, A. (1991), Prison Notebooks (New York: Columbia University Press). Gregory, D. (2000), ‘Discourse’, in R.J. Johnston, D. Gregory, G. Pra and M. Was (eds), Dictionary of Human Geography, 4th edition (Oxford: Blackwell), 180–81. Groote, P. (2006), ‘Museum Varusschlacht, Osnabrück: Een Verrassend Excursiedoel’, Geograﬁe 16:1, 34–7. Halfacree, K.H. (1993), ‘Locality and Social Representation – Space, Discourse and Alternative Deﬁnitions of the Rural’, Journal of Rural Studies 9:1, 23–37. Hall, S. (1995), ‘New Cultures for Old’, in D. Massey and P. Jess (eds), A Place in the World? Places, Cultures and Globalization (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 175–214. Hall, S. (1997), ‘The Work of Representation,’ in S. Hall (ed.), Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Sage), 13–64. Hall. S. (ed.) (1997), Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Sage). Higson, A. (1993), ‘Re-presenting the National Past: Nostalgia and Pastiche in the Heritage Film’, in L. Friedman (ed.), British Cinema and Thatcherism (London: UCL Press), 109–29. Howard, P. (2003), Heritage: Management, Interpretation, Identity (London: Continuum). Johnston, R.J., Gregory, D., Pra, G. and Was, M. (eds) (2000), Dictionary of Human Geography, 4th edition (Oxford: Blackwell). Jones, O. (1995), ‘Lay Discourses of the Rural – Developments and Implications for Rural Studies’, Journal of Rural Studies 11:1, 35–49. Kavaratzis, M. and Ashworth, G.J. (2005), ‘City Branding: An Eﬀective Assertion of Identity or a Transitory Marketing Trick?’, Tĳdschri Voor Economische en Sociale Geograﬁe 96:5, 506–14. Lantschap (2006), Atlas van de Ruimtelĳke Verscheidenheid, Onderzoek Naar de Wenselĳkheid, de Toepassingsmogelĳkheden en de Vorm van een Atlas van de Ruimtelĳke Verscheidenheid (Haaen: Bureau Lantschap). Lowenthal, D. (1991), ‘Heritage and the English Landscape’, History Today 41, 7–10. Massey, D. and Jess, P. (eds) (1995), A Place in the World? Places, Cultures and Globalization (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Mazierska, E. (2001), ‘In the Land of Noble Knights and Mute Princesses: Polish Heritage Cinema’, Historical Journal of Film Radio and Television 21:2, 167–82. Morley, D. and Robins, K. (1995), Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries (London and New York: Routledge). Oosting, M.W. and Groote, P. (2005), ‘Geograﬁsche Idols’, Geograﬁe 14:2, 28–31. Paasi, A. (1986), ‘The Institutionalization of Regions: A Theoretical Framework for Understanding the Emergence of Regions and the Constitution of Regional Identity’, Fennia 164, 105–46. 193

T A R C

H I Prentice, R. and Cunnell, D. (1997), ‘Response to Interpretative Media as a Basis of Multi-variate Market Segmentation for Museums and Heritage Centres: The Case Example of the People’s Story, Edinburgh’, Museum Management and Curatorship 16:3, 233–56. Reser, J.P. and Bentrupperbäumer, J.M. (2005), ‘What and Where are Environmental Values? Assessing the Impacts of Current Diversity of Use of “Environmental” and “World Heritage” Values’, Journal of Environmental Psychology 25:2, 125–46. Reuselaars, I. (2003), ‘Belvedere: Preservation of Cultural Heritage as Part of Town and Country Planning in the Netherlands’, Archaologisches Nachrichtenbla 8:2, 190–202. Stainer, J. (2005), ‘Literature and the Constitution of Place Identity: Three Examples From Belfast’, in G.J. Ashworth and B. Graham (eds), Senses of Place: Senses of Time (Aldershot: Ashgate), 165–76. Van Dam, K.I.M. (2005), ‘A Place Called Nunavut: Building on Inuit Past’, in G.J. Ashworth and B. Graham (eds), Senses of Place: Senses of Time (Aldershot: Ashgate), 105–18. Van Jole, M. (2002), The Power of Example: 40 Years of Europa Nostra, 3rd revised and updated edition (Den Haag: Europa Nostra). Voigts-Virchow, E. (2004), Janespoing and Beyond: British Heritage Retrovisions Since the Mid-1990s (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag).

194

11

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

Place, Naming and the Interpretation of Cultural Landscapes Derek H. Alderman

Naming is a powerful vehicle for promoting identiﬁcation with the past and locating oneself within wider networks of memory. The passing of surnames from one generation to the next is an important symbol of personal heritage in many cultures. Growing interest in genealogical research has spurred many people to trace the origin and meaning of their family names. As Ruane and Cerulo (2000, 70) observe, surnames ‘serve as a roadmap to the past; they guide us through an individual’s lineage and archive one’s traditional group aﬃliation and cultural ties.’ By the same token, giving up a surname, such as many women do on marriage, represents an important power dynamic in deciding whose family history will be recognized and preserved publicly. Lile surprise that nineteenth-century feminists such as Lucy Stone and Elizabeth Cady Stanton saw the retaining of maiden or birth names as a central element in the crusade for women’s rights (Kaplan and Bernays, 1997). Naming is a noteworthy cultural practice not only because of its ability to create a sense of continuity over time but also through its capacity for changing and challenging lines of identity. Renaming represents a way of creating new connections between the past and the present. Perhaps no other social group realizes this fact more than AfricanAmericans, who have actively sought to take control of the power to identify themselves. Consider the historical role that whites played in naming African slaves and how, even aer emancipation, African-Americans oen just assumed the name of their masters. Believing his name to have originated from white slave holders, civil rights leader Malcolm X rejected the moniker of ‘Lile.’ Like many black Muslims at the time, he chose ‘X’ to mark his unknown and stolen tribal name (Malcolm X, 1965). Beginning in the late 1980s, many blacks advocated being called ‘African-American’ in a collective aempt to reclaim a common ancestral history, although the entire minority community has not embraced this new appellation (Baugh, 1991). The practice of naming, like all heritages, is inherently dissonant and open to multiple and sometimes competing interpretations.

T A R C

H I The power and politics of naming is especially evident on the cultural landscape. Place names (or toponyms) use a single word or series of words to distinguish and identify one place from another. In addition to facilitating physical navigation, toponyms evoke powerful images and connotations, contributing to the development of a sense of place. According to Berg and Kearns (1996), place naming plays a key role in the social construction of space and the contested process of aaching meaning to places. Place names are oen used for commemorative purposes and can be studied as ‘symbolic monuments that greatly inﬂuence public memory’ (Grounds, 2001, 289). Place names perhaps lack what Armada (1998) called the ‘rhetorical’ power of monuments, museums, and other memorials. However, they inscribe ideological messages about the past into the many practices and texts of everyday life, making certain versions of history appear as the natural order of things (Azaryahu, 1996). Toponyms permeate our daily vocabulary, both verbal and visual, appearing on road signs, addresses, advertising billboards, and (of course) maps. Place names not only meld history with geography but also conﬂate place and group identity because of the shared context of using and referring to toponyms. Despite the cultural importance of place naming, it has not had a central position within the study of heritage until recently. Much of the new, critical research has focused on the role of place names in nation building and how they are rewrien in times of political and ideological change (Azaryahu, 1992). These studies largely emphasize how government elites in countries such as Israel, Germany, Russia, Romania, and the former Yugoslavia have manipulated place names – particularly commemorative street names – to advance reinvented notions of national identity and history (for example, Azaryahu, 1997; Azaryahu and Golan, 2001; Azaryahu and Kook, 2002; Cohen and Kliot, 1992; Gill, 2005; Katz, 1995; Light, 2004; Robinson, Engelso and Pobric, 2001). Scholars have also explored place naming as part of the colonial process of claiming territory and subordinating indigenous histories as well as the post-colonial process of recovering lost language and memory (Breymaier, 2003; Herman, 1999; Nash, 1999; Yeoh, 1992; 1996). While not negating the importance of studying nationalism, it is worth exploring some of the other social practices and actors that shape place naming. In addition, while heritage scholars have examined place naming in a number of diﬀerent regions, few have conducted critical studies of the United States landscape. The purpose of this chapter is to broaden, theoretically and empirically, how we conceptualize place naming as a platform for the construction of heritage and identity. Drawing inspiration from the American scene, particularly the AfricanAmerican experience, I articulate two conceptual frameworks for advancing future research – naming as symbolic capital and naming as symbolic resistance. These approaches, although grounded in a speciﬁc empirical context, have relevance beyond the study of just one country. Naming as symbolic capital is a theme that recognizes how place names are evoked to bring distinction and status to landscapes and the people associated with them. As part of the commodiﬁcation of heritage in the United States, naming is used by developers to create place identities that promote idyllic yet oen socially 196

P , N I

C L exclusive historical representations. These representations, while evoking feelings of comfort and prestige to some heritage stakeholders, function as a form of symbolic violence or marginalization for other stakeholders who remember the past diﬀerently. Naming as symbolic resistance is a theme that recognizes that place naming is not always controlled by elites and dominant groups. Naming can also be appropriated by marginalized stakeholders who wish to have a greater voice in determining what vision of the past is inscribed into the landscape. In America, racial and ethnic minorities are increasingly turning to place renaming as a strategy for challenging the dominance of white-controlled commemoration and asserting the legitimacy of their historical achievements – although their eﬀorts have been resisted by the dominant white group. Before engaging these themes, it is necessary to trace the evolution of placename research as part of broader changes in how scholars have interpreted the cultural landscape. There has been a shi from studying names as mere artifacts to recognizing the role of naming as an active and contestable process of claiming and constructing the landscape around certain ideological visions about the past.

From Names on the Land to Naming and Claiming the Landscape The study of place names has a long history in the United States (Ashley, 1989; Ganne, 1902 [1971]; Wright, 1929). An important advancement in the analysis of place names occurred with the research of George R. Stewart, long-time professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley and one of the founding members of the American Name Society. Of the three books that Stewart wrote on the study of naming, Names on the Land (1958, originally published in 1945) was his ﬁrst and most favorite (Beeler, 1976). Unlike his European counterparts at the time who tended to focus on the etymology or the speciﬁc linguistic origins of names, Stewart showed greater concern for uncovering the human motivation behind the naming process and the extent to which place names were ‘a reﬂection of folk-tradition’ (Beeler, 1976, 81). Credited with humanizing place-name study, Stewart (1958, 3–4) once wrote: ‘Thus the names lay thickly over the land, and the Americans spoke of them, great and lile, easily and carelessly … not thinking how they came to be. Yet, the names had grown out the life, and the lifeblood, of all those who had gone before.’ The job of the place-name scholar, according to Stewart (1958, 386), was to reconstruct the historical environment within which naming occurred, and thus ‘piece together some record of what we were.’ His work, like much of the traditional scholarship on the subject, treated place names as unproblematic indicators of the culture and history of an area, oen ignoring the role of conﬂict in naming and remembering (Kearns and Berg, 2002). Stewart later developed a ten-category system for classifying place names based on their origin (Stewart, 1954; 1970; 1975). He recognized that Americans pulled directly from their past when naming the

197

T A R C

H I landscape and, consequently, included a commemorative name category within his classiﬁcation system. Stewart’s approach complemented the then prevailing direction of landscape studies articulated by Carl Sauer, whose writings inspired the ‘Berkeley School’ of cultural geography. The Berkeley School, which dominated from the 1930s to the 1970s, focused intently on tracing the origins and diﬀusion of cultural traits as well as describing and classifying the morphology (that is, shape and structure) of the landscape (Sauer, 1925 [1996]). Stewart’s description of how names ‘lay thickly over the land’ correlated with Sauer’s vision of how layers of material artifacts become superimposed onto landscapes over time. In studying place names as artifacts of earlier eras of selement and migration, landscape scholars of the Berkeley School focused almost exclusively on the cataloguing, measuring, and mapping of naming paerns, similar to the way in which they ploed house and barn types (for example, Jordan, 1970; Leighly, 1978). Wilbur Zelinsky, one of Sauer’s students and a reader of George Stewart, became the most proliﬁc proponent of this approach (Zelinsky, 1967; 1980). In one of his most widely cited contributions to the ﬁeld, Zelinsky (1988) documented the eﬀects of nationalism and patriotism on the placename landscape. He found that 25 percent of counties in the United States were named aer national leaders from the past. The most frequent references were to Washington, Jackson, Lincoln, Jeﬀerson, and Franklin. Traditional place-name study has been criticized for its tendency to rely on the collection and description of data over theoretically guided interpretation and explanation. Zelinsky and other members of the Berkeley School advanced a ‘superorganic’ notion of culture, failing to study landscapes in the context of the daily social practices, relations, and struggles of people who create them (Duncan, 1980; Mitchell, 2000). In focusing on naming paerns, the ﬁeld neglected to study the people behind these paerns. As Withers (2000, 533) astutely observed: ‘Aention to the name alone, either on the ground or on an historical map, runs the risk of concerning itself with ends and not with means; of ignoring, or, at best, underplaying the social processes intrinsic to the authoritative act of naming.’ Traditional toponymic studies said lile about how social power and ideology inﬂuence the naming process. Recognizing this fact, Roberts (1993, 159) implored scholars to discover ‘who had the power to leave names to posterity’ and ‘what values these names represent.’ Myers (1996, 238) argued for examining the ‘performance aspects’ of place names, how naming is employed strategically in constructing and contesting identity boundaries. Place-name study underwent a redeﬁnition in the 1990s with the emergence of a new, critical approach to cultural landscape studies. Through its dialogue with social theory, this school re-theorized culture and landscape in signiﬁcant ways. Rather than ignore the inner workings of society, scholars began focusing on the collision of social interests behind the construction of culture and cultural identities (Anderson and Gale, 1992). Landscapes were increasingly recognized as ‘documents of power,’ shaped by the fact that ‘some social groups exert greater or lesser eﬀects on places around them’ (Mahews, 1995, 456). The landscape, rather than merely reﬂecting culture, participated in making certain cultural relations and 198

P , N I

C L identities appear to be normal. In the words of Don Mitchell (2000, 100), landscape is a ‘form of ideology,’ and ‘one of the chief functions of landscapes is precisely to control meaning and to channel it in particular directions.’ From the perspective of critical landscape study, place names are more than passive artifacts. They are symbolic texts embedded in larger systems of meaning and ideology that are read, interpreted, and acted upon socially by people (Duncan, 1990; Pinchevski and Torgovnik, 2002). Emphasis is placed less on the name itself and more on the cultural practice of naming, that is, how people seek to control and contest the naming process as they engage in wider economic, social, and political struggles. Kearns and Berg (2002, 285) have argued that ‘names are a constitutive component of the landscape,’ rather than simply ‘being entities in [and on] the landscape.’ As they also assert, the construction of place identities is carried out through the pronunciation of geographical names as well as their inscription into signs, documents, and maps. Whether wrien or spoken, it is now understood that place naming represents a means of claiming the landscape, materially and symbolically, and using its power to privilege one world view over another. As part of the landscape, toponyms are not simply evidence of history, as suggested by traditional place-name research, but part of the ideologically driven process of visibly grounding the past into the present and framing these historical meanings as legitimate. As mentioned in the chapter’s introduction, current research emphasizes the extent to which place naming is employed in constructing and institutionalizing nationalistic histories. The remainder of this chapter examines two other contexts, symbolic capital and symbolic resistance, in which people use place naming to lay claim to the landscape as a device for communicating heritage and identity.

Naming as Symbolic Capital The term ‘symbolic capital’ is drawn from the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1984; 1991). Bourdieu deﬁned culture as a ‘ﬁeld’ in which social actors compete not only to accumulate economic capital but also symbolic capital, those practices and goods that are deﬁned as socially distinctive, desirable, and superior (Gartman, 2002, 257). Symbolic capital contributes to the reproduction of power and privilege within the social world because it confers status, prestige, and honour upon its holder. Symbolic capital originated from Bourdieu’s concern for understanding how aesthetic issues and notions of taste are used to reinforce the importance of social class beyond the sheer measures of monetary wealth. Place naming can be conceptualized as a form of symbolic capital used to associate places with consumable and exclusive visions of the past. Identiﬁcation with these naming paerns serves as a source of social distinction for some people while bringing social marginalization to others. Symbolic capital can take many forms, but the built environment is a powerful device for creating social distinction. James and Nancy Duncan (2001) have explored how place-based identity can be analyzed as a form of symbolic capital. As they found in Bedford, New York – a suburb of New York City – people go to great pains 199

T A R C

H I to represent their community as distinctive and elite, oen by making comparisons with other places as well as through exclusive zoning laws. According to the Duncans, heritage plays a central role in the construction of distinction in Bedford. Historical societies and preservation commiees manipulate the landscape to maintain a romantic image of Bedford as a traditional rural village reﬂective of an era before urban capitalism, ensuring that ‘landscapes are preserved so that history and community can be consumed as good taste, as symbolic capital’ (Duncan and Duncan, 2001, 44). Events in Bedford are indicative of larger societal trends. As noted by Claire Mitchell and her colleagues (2001, 285), many heritage landscapes are created around the goal of serving ‘the demands of post-modern consumers to purchase symbolic capital in the form of unique products and experiences that reﬂect a bygone era.’ As found in Bedford, many of these products and experiences commodify images of a preserved rural heritage, even though the creation of a saleable past oen leads to the destruction of old landscapes. Bourdieu (1984) recognized that symbolic capital can be exchanged for and converted into economic capital (and vice versa). Yet, he also suggested that the creation of social distinction was important in gaining political power and not necessarily limited to economic gain. According to Forest and Johnson (2002, 524), political elites manipulate monuments and other places of memory as symbolic capital in their ‘aempt to gain prestige, legitimacy, and inﬂuence.’ Although scholars recognize how heritage functions as symbolic capital, few studies (if any) have examined place naming in this context. Naming represents a means of appropriating or taking ownership of places. The word ‘ownership’ captures how the power to name can be exchanged like any commodity. For instance, it is a tradition on many American college campuses to name buildings aer generous donors. ‘Stadiums are especially susceptible to commodiﬁcation – FedEx Field, MCI Center, Fleet Center, and Coors Field are perfect examples’ (De Blĳ, Murphy and Fouberg, 2007, 174). In 2005, the town of Clark, Texas (population: 125) renamed itself ‘DISH’ in exchange for ten years of free satellite-television service for every household. Clark, Texas is just one of a growing number of small towns in America that have oﬀered up their place identities to corporations (Spokane Spokesman-Review, 2005). These agreements may appear to be simply advertising stunts, but it is important to note the potential impact on collective memory. In abandoning the name Clark, residents have lost a historical connection with the family that founded the town. As asserted by Tuan (1991, 688), renaming ‘has the power to wipe out the past and call forth the new.’ Oﬃcials in Clark saw their name change as a way of re-branding the town, a means of drawing aention to the community with the hope of aracting new residents and businesses. The branding of place refers to more than just selling one’s name to corporations. Branding is a larger process of promotion in which places are represented as having distinctive and desirable characteristics and identities. Although the marketing of places has a long history in the United States, it has taken on greater dimensions in the post-industrial era as cities aempt to gain an aesthetic advantage over their competitors (Gold and Ward, 1994; Zukin, 1995). Creating such distinctions is oen focused on promoting places around 200

P , N I

C L selective and marketable historical visions or narratives (Kearns and Philo, 1993). The practice of branding is especially popular within the marketing of tourism destinations (Morgan and Pritchard, 1998). Naming places is an important branding strategy. This is particularly the case within heritage development, which involves not only a direct commodiﬁcation of the past but also, more subtly, the promotion of a ‘heritage ambience’ that can ‘provide a strong regional or community image and hence encourage investment from both internal and external sources’ (Aplin, 2002, 17). Naming participates in the manipulation and management of public images and impressions essential to the social construction of place identity. Place names are oen used to draw distinctions around neighborhoods, leading to an association of certain spaces with social groups or classes (Alderman, 2002a; Berg and Kearns, 1996; Myers, 1996). Developers in the United States are increasingly cognizant of the ‘imagegenerating potential’ of place names as they seek to aract residents, business investment, and tourists (Zelinsky, 1989, 44). This fact is perhaps no more apparent than in Las Vegas, where Raento and Douglass (2001, 14) found that a casino’s name ‘sets the initial tone of a property’s primary identity.’ Casinos associate themselves with a variety of images, but historical themes are some of the most popular. Many casino names reference real or mythical people and places from the nineteenth-century American West, a reﬂection of the casino’s regional context and the cultural popularity of ‘Western’ ﬁlms, television shows, and novels. Like many of these ‘old West’ media images, casino names valorize the exploits of white selers (for example, Gold Rush, 49er, Westward Ho) and misrepresent, if they acknowledge at all, the experiences of Native Americans. Western names also carry connotations of uninhibited adventure and opportunity, complementing the city’s latest promotional mantra of ‘What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas.’ Aaching a well-chosen name to subdivisions, shopping centers, and apartment complexes is seen as essential to giving customers a point of social distinction, a means for them to acquire symbolic capital and a sense of sophistication and superiority. In creating such an atmosphere, developers oen employ names that make connections with European (particularly British) history, even ﬁctional literary ﬁgures. In Winterville, North Carolina, there is a subdivision named ‘Canterbury’ with street names drawn directly from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: Miller Circle, Shire Drive, Tabard Road, Friar Drive, and Merchant Circle (Figure 11.1). My discussions with homeowners in Canterbury show that while they do not connect directly with Canterbury Tales as a historical literary text, they identify with the name as a place signiﬁer of exclusivity, an ironic fact given that Chaucer wrote of a pilgrimage that brings together people from diﬀerent classes and walks of life. In craing a positive, consumable identity for a place, developers frequently choose names that ‘conjure up an image of a misty, rural past’ (Zelinsky, 1989, 45). Americans, like Europeans, idealize rurality and buy into images of the countryside inscribed into heritage products and places (Short, 2006). In evoking rural heritage, names are chosen that glorify traditional styles of community such as hamlet, commons, colony, cluster, square, and village (Zelinsky, 1989). These monikers carry connotations of harmonious rural ways of life in the past, even 201

T A R C

H I

Figure 11.1 The intersection of Shire Drive and Tabard Road in the Canterbury housing subdivision in Winterville, North Carolina (USA) though the rural idyll is actually ‘an exclusionary place’ (Bell, 2006, 151). This fact is quickly apparent when one realizes that many of these named places cater to, and are largely inhabited by, middle- to upper-class white Americans. Katharyne Mitchell (1997, 169) has asserted that symbolic capital is ‘predicated on both exclusivity and the ongoing process of creating outsiders.’ The accumulation of symbolic capital hides ‘the processes by which power relations and material inequalities are reproduced’ (Manza and Sauder, 2006, 559). Indeed, Bourdieu (1991) coined the term ‘symbolic violence’ to capture the way in which cultural meanings and categories (including names) are imposed upon and accepted by subordinate groups as natural. The popularity of toponymic references to ‘plantation’ in the United States illustrates the symbolic violence that can accompany naming when it is used to represent popular yet racially insensitive visions of the past. References to ‘plantation’ are common within American place naming, particularly in the American South with its strong historical connection to the plantation economy and society that 202

P , N I

C L dominated the region before and aer the Civil War (Aiken, 1998) (Figure 11.2). The plantation also occupies a prominent place in the region’s collective memory and identity, made nostalgic in the still popular novel and ﬁlm, Gone with the Wind. For many white southerners, references to the plantation signify prestige and there are proﬁts to be made in evoking this history (Smith, 1982). A search of a national business directory (Reference USA, 2006) reveals that 2,253 businesses in the United States use the word ‘plantation’ in their name. Eighty-ﬁve percent of these businesses are located in the South. There are a host of establishment types that use the word ‘plantation,’ but the most frequent are: restaurants; townhouses and apartment complexes; real estate ﬁrms; hotels; motels; and bed/breakfast inns – all of which are highly dependent on communicating memorable promotional images. References to plantation may be a positive point of identity for many whites, but the word carries diﬀerent historical connotations for African-Americans, whose ancestors’ forced labor ran these agricultural estates. The commemoration of the plantation lifestyle has long been used in reinforcing white supremacy, segregated race relations, and the marginalization of African-Americans (Hoelscher, 2003). Most plantation-tourism-heritage sites in the South do not acknowledge the contributions of slave labor or even mention slavery in their advertising (Butler,

Figure 11.2 The entrance of Colleton River Plantation, an exclusive gated community in Hilton Head, South Carolina (USA) 203

T A R C

H I 2001; Eichstedt and Small, 2002). A symbolic violence is perpetuated upon AfricanAmericans as the historical celebration of the plantation is upheld as a legitimate identity for places. The symbolic violence of plantation naming oen goes unquestioned, such as when black southerners live in subdivisions, condominiums, and apartments named in this manner, but this is not always the case (Towns, 1996). In 1994, when a developer in Fulton County, Georgia sought to rename a public street using the word ‘plantation,’ a black elected oﬃcial successfully derailed the proposal. The oﬃcial was quoted as saying: ‘A large segment of our community does not have happy memories of idyllic plantation days … I would no more vote to name a county road Auschwitz Avenue or Swastika Boulevard’ (Towns, 1996, 4H). Another participant in the debate complained: ‘My great-grandparents died trying to get oﬀ the plantation’ (Towns, 1996, 4H). For some African-Americans, it may feel like they never le the plantation. Journalist Peter Applebome (1994, A18) recognized this irony when he wrote: Once, blacks picked the long-stranded coon and worked the ﬁelds here among the South Carolina Sea Islands. Now, they clean linens, scrape deviled crabs oﬀ dirty plates and trim azaleas on private, gated resorts with names like Shipyard Plantation, Port Royal Plantation, Wexford Plantation, Colleton River Plantation, and Hilton Head Plantation. The fact that many African-Americans can aﬀord only to work, rather than live, in plantation places illustrates how toponyms, through their ability to sell a distinctive place identity, are involved in the reproduction of class and racial inequality.

Naming as Symbolic Resistance Much of the critical place-name research recognizes that naming can be used as a tool of control, a means of inscribing and reifying certain cultural and political ideologies. In the case of heritage, there is recognition that place names can be manipulated by dominant social actors and groups in ways that allow certain historical narratives to be seen and heard while silencing other representations. Ironically, while newer approaches to cultural-landscape study emphasize the social contests oen involved in the creation of place identity, toponymic study has not fully explored the negotiated and struggled-over nature of remembering the past through naming. I suggest that place naming can be studied as a site of symbolic resistance within the politics of public commemoration. In previous work, I have suggested that place naming, speciﬁcally the naming of schools and streets, functions to create ‘arenas,’ public spaces where social groups of varying power debate the contemporary meaning of the past, the extent to which they identify with certain notions of heritage, and how best (and where best) to carry out commemoration through the landscape (Alderman, 2002a; 2002b).

204

P , N I

C L Other scholars have pointed to the need for looking at place naming in these terms. Myers (1996) complained that the limited amount of research that connected place naming to issues of power focused almost exclusively on the imposition of state or elite ideologies. As he argued, place naming – and the boundary-making that accompanies it – ‘are strategies exercised both by those having a great deal of social power and by those [who] comparatively lack it’ (Myers, 1996, 244). Myers advocated the analysis of place naming as a form of resistance rather than simply a mechanism of control. The use of place naming as resistance is oen done subtly, such as when a marginalized group employs a competing, informal system of geographical nomenclature rather than the authorized system of naming (Yeoh, 1992). In addition to creating and using alternative names, resistance can also involve the ‘use of alternative pronunciations for established names’ (Kearns and Berg, 2002, 286). Yet, subordinate groups can and do contest the power of dominant groups through formal, political means as well. In examining street naming in postindependence Singapore, Yeoh (1996) found evidence of diﬀerent racial groups questioning, challenging, and even resisting the form and meaning of place names in oﬃcial policy seings. As she also noted: ‘The inscription of hegemonic [dominant] meanings in landscape text is hence more akin to an uneven, negotiated process of constant mediations rather than a static consensual once-and-for-all translation of a monolithic ideology into material form’ (Yeoh, 1996, 304). Indeed, while theories of hegemony recognize that dominant groups or classes control the production of culture space, they also assert that this dominance is never complete and is challenged by counter-hegemonic ideologies of subordinate groups. Resistance is sometimes confrontational, but oen symbolic. Symbolic resistance involves the ‘appropriation of certain artefacts and signiﬁcations from the dominant culture and their transformation into symbolic forms that take on new meaning and signiﬁcance’ for the subordinate group (Cosgrove and Jackson, 1987, 99). Place naming can be interpreted as a conduit for challenging dominant ideologies about the past as well as a means of introducing new historical meanings and narrations of identity into the landscape. Although place naming is certainly controlled and planned by the state, it can also be appropriated by marginalized groups wishing to have their political and commemorative interests seen and heard publicly. This process of being seen and heard is critical in establishing who has a right to the city and its landscapes (Mitchell, 2003). American racial and ethnic minorities are increasingly turning to place renaming as a strategy for demanding new rights and recognition. These renaming campaigns are part of a direct political movement to challenge and change the commemoration of the past within cultural landscapes (Alderman, 2000). African-Americans have been particularly active in addressing the exclusion and misrepresentation of their achievements within traditional, white-dominated constructions of heritage. In arguing for greater public recognition of their experiences in the past, black activists have carried out a campaign of: 1) removing place names that commemorate white supremacists or purveyors of racial inequality, and 2) renaming places to celebrate black historical ﬁgures, particularly from the American Civil Rights Movement. 205

T A R C

H I These name changes reﬂect an eﬀort to create a heritage place identity that can assist in reconstructing the group identity of African-Americans. By naming landscapes in ways that talk about the historical importance of minorities, African-Americans seek to change the way they are valued in the present. Removing racially insensitive place-name references has proved especially controversial. Florida’s Palm Beach School Board decided to remove the name of Jeﬀerson Davis from a middle school aer several years of resistance from parents and white Civil War heritage groups (Cerabino, 2004a; 2004b). School oﬃcials and black community activists interpreted Davis, the only president of the pro-slavery, southern secessionist government called the Confederacy, as an inappropriate identity for the school and its student population. This controversy joined numerous debates in the South over the public display of Confederate symbols (Leib, Webster and Webster, 2001). Renaming the middle school became an arena for debating whether references to Davis were legitimate expressions of (white) southern heritage or symbols of the perpetration of racism upon blacks (Leib, Webster and Webster, 2001). The fact that the school was named aer Davis in 1961, amid (and perhaps in reaction to) the Civil Rights Movement, did lile to convince African-Americans that the school’s original naming was not an aempt at the time to maintain the dominance of white rule. As illustrated in Florida, schools are key sites in the production of culture, not only in transmiing a dominant culture to students but as places where ‘cultural meanings can be resisted and contested’ (Dwyer, 1993, 143). Events in New Orleans, Louisiana illustrate the importance that some African-Americans see in rewriting the historical identity of schools through renaming. In 1992, the Orleans Parish School Board passed a policy that prohibited school names honoring slave owners and others who did not respect equality. The names of many white historical ﬁgures (including the slave-holding ﬁrst president of the United States, George Washington) were removed from schools and replaced with names commemorating prominent African-Americans, including Martin Luther King Jr. (Dart, 1997). In the wake of rebuilding New Orleans aer Hurricane Katrina, it will be interesting to see if these challenges to white memory will endure, given the displacement of blacks from the city and the changing racial/ethnic composition of the area. Slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. holds a common yet contentious place in African-American aempts to resist the white hegemonic order and redeﬁne the commemorative place-name landscape. By 2003, at least 730 cities and towns in the United States had named a street aer King. Yet, the work of naming streets aer Martin Luther King Jr. oen takes place through highly public debate, exposing basic racial and political tensions within communities (Alderman, 2006). A ‘reputational politics’ oen surrounds the street-naming process as AfricanAmericans engage in discursive struggles to convince the larger white public of the legitimacy and resonance of King’s legacy (Alderman, 2002b). One of the largest obstacles facing African-Americans is the prevailing assumption, particularly among whites, that King’s historical relevance is limited to the black community, and hence renamed streets should not cut across traditional racial boundaries and penetrate the lives and place-based identities of white America. While these 206

P , N I

C L

Figure 11.3 Members of Coalition against Racism march along Martin Luther King Jr Drive in Greenville, North Carolina (USA) debates about where, and where not, to locate King’s memory take place between blacks and whites, they also occur within the African-American community, as activists seek to inspire and mobilize black neighborhoods rather than challenge the historical consciousness of whites (Alderman, 2003). Place identity plays a key role in these struggles to commemorate King (Figure 11.3). Some African-Americans have refused to rename a road aer the civil rights leader when they believe the street does not have a suﬃciently prominent image and status. By the same token, some opposing whites believe that naming a street aer King will stigmatize their street and bring a decline in property values, although there is no evidence to substantiate this (Mitchelson, Alderman and Popke, 2007). As a result, King’s name is frequently (but not always) found on side streets or portions of roads located within poor, black areas of cities. The renaming of these degraded and obscure streets has, in some instances, changed the streets’ symbolic meaning from being a point of African-American pride to yet another reminder of continued racial inequality. The segregation of King’s memory on the landscape would appear, at ﬁrst glance, to substantiate claims that place naming remains a tool of cultural and

207

T A R C

H I political control. Yet, by studying place naming as a form of symbolic resistance, even when that resistance is not successful, we begin to fully understand how public remembrance of the past is ‘a ﬁeld of social conﬂict and tension’ (Graham, Ashworth and Tunbridge, 2000, 5). In addition, the debates over remembering King in America illustrate how the use of place naming as resistance is not limited to marginalized groups seeking greater public recognition. As Kearns and Berg (2002) suggested, resistance should also be thought of in terms of how hegemonic or dominant groups resist or contest counter-hegemonic aempts to claim and rewrite the landscape around alternative historical meanings. Although named streets commemorate the Civil Rights Movement as a completed part of the country’s past, they speak, perhaps more importantly, to the great social struggles that African-Americans still face as they aempt to reverse the control historically exercised by whites over racial and ethnic minorities.

Concluding Remarks Naming is used to ﬁx the identity of places, oen as part of larger renegotiations over the lines of national, regional, and racial identity. In doing so, place names can be scripted to evoke general (and even superﬁcial) associations with the past or to honor speciﬁc historical ﬁgures. Toponyms serve, quite literally, as signposts for directing people to what is historically important. Because of the normative power of naming, place names create a material and symbolic order that allows dominant groups to impose certain meanings into the landscape and hence control the aachment of symbolic identity to people and places (Berg and Kearns, 1996). This is oen done by government elites in the name of nationalism, state formation, and the creation of what Anderson (1983) famously called ‘imagined communities.’ Yet, the place-name landscape is inhabited by a wide array of other heritage stakeholders who use naming in diﬀerent ways and for diﬀerent purposes. Developers and place promoters manipulate heritage-related toponyms as ‘symbolic capital.’ The images of social distinction and elitism created through naming not only work to commodify the past but also assist in reinforcing unequal power relations. As illustrated by the competing meanings that surround the word ‘plantation’ in the American South, what is symbolic capital for many white southerners can exist, simultaneously, as symbolic violence and exclusion for African-Americans. The theme of control is important in studying the interconnections of heritage, identity, and place naming, but it is also necessary to explore the dimensions of resistance and how place naming is open to social negotiation and debate as marginalized groups, such as racial and ethnic minorities, struggle to redeﬁne what is considered worthy of public remembrance. As illustrated through the naming of streets aer Martin Luther King Jr., the politics of commemoration is not simply about convincing people to remember the past in diﬀerent ways. Rather, it also requires ﬁnding suitable locations in which to do this remembering and merging heritage with place identity in progressive and positive ways.

208

P , N I

C L References Adams, P.C., Hoelscher, S. and Till, K.E. (eds) (2001), Textures of Place: Exploring Humanistic Geographies (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press). Agnew, J.A., Livingstone, D.L. and Rodgers, A. (eds) (1996), Human Geography: An Essential Anthology (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell). Aiken, C.S. (1998), The Coon Plantation South since the Civil War (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press). Alderman, D.H. (2000), ‘A Street Fit for a King: Naming Places and Commemoration in the American South’, Professional Geographer 52:4, 672–84. Alderman, D.H. (2002a), ‘School Names as Cultural Arenas: The Naming of U.S. Public Schools aer Martin Luther King, Jr.’, Urban Geography 23:7, 601–26. Alderman, D.H. (2002b), ‘Street Names as Memorial Arenas: The Reputational Politics of Commemorating Martin Luther King, Jr. in a Georgia County’, Historical Geography 30:1, 99–120. Alderman, D.H. (2003), ‘Street Names and the Scaling of Memory: The Politics of Commemorating Martin Luther King, Jr. within the African-American Community’, Area 35:2, 163–73. Alderman, D.H. (2006), ‘Naming Streets aer Martin Luther King, Jr.: No Easy Road’, in R. Schein (ed.), Landscape and Race in the United States (New York, NY: Routledge), 215–38. Anderson, B. (1983), Imagined Communities: Reﬂections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso). Anderson, K. and Gale, F. (eds) (1992), Inventing Places: Studies in Cultural Geography (Melbourne: Longman). Aplin, G. (2002), Heritage: Identiﬁcation, Conservation, and Management (New York, NY: Oxford University Press). Applebome, P. (1994), ‘Tourism Enriches an Island Resort, But Hilton Head Blacks Feel Le Out’, New York Times, 2 September, A18. Armada, B.J. (1998), ‘Memorial Agon: An Interpretive Tour of the National Civil Rights Museum’, The Southern Communication Journal 63:3, 235–43. Ashley, L.R.N. (1989), What’s in a Name? (Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Publishing). Azaryahu, M. (1992), ‘The Purge of Bismarck and Saladin: The Renaming of Streets in East Berlin and Haifa, a Comparative Study in Culture-Planning’, Poetics Today 13:2, 352–67. Azaryahu, M. (1996) ‘The Power of Commemorative Street Names’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 14:3, 311–30. Azaryahu, M. (1997), ‘German Reuniﬁcation and the Politics of Street Names: The Case of East Berlin’, Political Geography 16:6, 479–93. Azaryahu, M. and Golan, A. (2001), ‘(Re)naming the Landscape: The Formation of the Hebrew Map of Israel 1949–1960’, Journal of Historical Geography 27:2, 178–95. Azaryahu, M. and Kook, R. (2002), ‘Mapping the Nation: Street Names and ArabPalestinian Identity: Three Case Studies’, Nations and Nationalism 8:2, 195–213. Baugh, J. (1991), ‘The Politicization of Changing Terms of Self-Reference among American Slave Descendants’, American Speech 66:2, 133–46. 209

T A R C

H I Beeler, M. (1976), ‘George R. Stewart, Toponymist’, Names 24:2, 77–85. Bell, D. (2006), ‘Variations on the Rural Idyll’, in P. Cloke, T. Marsden and P. Mooney (eds), Handbook of Rural Studies (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications), 149–60. Berg, L. and Kearns, R. (1996), ‘Naming as Norming: “Race,” Gender, and the Identity Politics of Naming Places in Aotearoa/New Zealand’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 14:1, 92–122. Bourdieu, P. (1984), Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). (Translated by Richard Nice.) Bourdieu, P. (1991), Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). (Edited and introduced by John B. Thompson, translated by Gino Raymond and Mahew Adamson.) Breymaier, J.R. (2003), India and the (Re)naming of Bombay as Mumbai: A Study in Place Names and Power, unpublished Masters thesis, Department of Geography and Planning, University of Toledo. Butler, D.L. (2001), ‘Whitewashing Plantations: The Commodiﬁcation of a Slave-Free Antebellum South’, International Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Administration 2:3/4, 163–75. Cerabino, F. (2004a), ‘School Names Rise As Davis Goes South’, Palm Beach Post, 25 January: 1C. Cerabino, F. (2004b), ‘School Name Change Brings Out Rebel Yelp’, Palm Beach Post, 1 February: 1B. Cloke, P., Marsden, T. and Mooney, P. (eds) (2006), Handbook of Rural Studies (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications). Cohen, S.B. and Kliot, N. (1992), ‘Place-Names in Israel’s Ideological Struggle over the Administered Territories’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82:4, 653–80. Cosgrove, D. and Jackson, P. (1987), ‘New Directions in Cultural Geography’, Area 19:2, 95–101. Dart, B. (1997), ‘History Lesson in Controversial Name Change’, Atlanta Journal/ Constitution, 27 November: D1. De Blĳ, H., Murphy, A.B. and Fouberg, E.H. (2007), Human Geography: People, Place, and Culture (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley). Duncan, J. (1980), ‘The Superorganic in American Cultural Geography’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 70:2, 181–98. Duncan, J. (1990), The City as Text: The Politics of Landscape Interpretation in the Kandyan Kingdom (New York: Cambridge University Press). Duncan, J. and Duncan, N. (2001), ‘Sense of Place as a Positional Good: Locating Bedford in Space and Time’, in P.C. Adams, S. Hoelscher and K.E. Till (eds), Textures of Place: Exploring Humanistic Geographies (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press), 41–54. Dwyer, C. (1993), ‘Constructions of Muslim Identity and the Contesting of Power: The Debate over Muslim Schools in the United Kingdom’, in P. Jackson and J. Penrose (eds), Constructions of Race, Place, and Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 143–59.

210

P , N I

C L Eichstedt, J. and Small, S. (2002), Representations of Slavery: Race and Ideology in Southern Plantation Museums (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution). Foote, K. (1997), Shadowed Ground: America’s Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press). Forest, B. and Johnson, J. (2002), ‘Unraveling the Threads of History: SovietEra Monuments and Post-Soviet National Identity in Moscow’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 92:3, 524–47. Ganne, H. (1971), The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (Detroit, MI: Gale Research) (originally published in 1902). Gartman, D. (2002), ‘Bourdieu’s Theory of Cultural Change: Explication, Application, Critique’, Sociological Theory 20:2, 255–77. Gill, G. (2005), ‘Changing Symbols: The Renovation of Moscow Place Names’, The Russian Review 64:3, 480–503. Gold, J.R. and Ward, S.V. (eds.) (1994), Place Promotion: The Use of Publicity and Marketing to Sell Towns and Regions (New York: John Wiley). Graham, B., Ashworth, G.J. and Tunbridge, J.E. (2000), A Geography of Heritage (New York: Oxford University Press). Grounds, R.A. (2001), ‘Tallahassee, Osceola, and the Hermeneutics of American Place-Names’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 69:2, 287–322. Herman, R.D.K. (1999), ‘The Aloha State: Place Names and the Anti-Conquest of Hawaii’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 89:1, 76–102. Hoelscher, S. (2003), ‘Making Place, Making Race: Performances of Whiteness in the Jim Crow South’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 93:3, 657–86. Jackson, P. and Penrose, J. (eds) (1993), Constructions of Race, Place, and Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Jordan, T.G. (1970), ‘The Texan Appalachia’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 60:3, 409–27. Kaplan, J. and Bernays, A. (1997), The Language of Names (New York: Simon & Schuster). Katz, Y. (1995), ‘Identity, Nationalism, and Placenames: Zionist Eﬀorts to Preserve the Original Local Hebrew Names in Oﬃcial Publications of the Mandate Government of Palestine’, Names 43:2, 103–18. Kearns, G. and Philo, C. (eds) (1993), Selling Places: The City as Cultural Capital, Past and Present (New York: Pergamon). Kearns, R. and Berg, L.D. (2002), ‘Proclaiming Place: Towards a Geography of Place Name Pronunciation’, Social and Cultural Geography 3:3, 283–302. Leib, J.I., Webster, G.R. and Webster, R.H. (2001), ‘Rebel with a Cause? Iconography and Public Memory in the Southern United States’, GeoJournal 52, 303–10. Leighly, J. (1978), ‘Town Names of Colonial New England in the West’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 68:2, 233–48. Light, D. (2004), ‘Street Names in Bucharest, 1990–1997: Exploring the Modern Historical Geographies of Post-Socialist Change’, Journal of Historical Geography 30:1, 154–72. Malcolm X (1965), The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley (New York: Grove Press). 211

T A R C

H I Manza, J. and Sauder, M. (2006), ‘Social Capital’, in B. Turner (ed.), The Cambridge Dictionary of Sociology (New York: Cambridge University Press), 557–9. Mahews, H. (1995), ‘Living on the Edge: Children as “Outsiders”’, Tĳdschri voor Economische en Sociale Geograﬁe 86:5, 456–66. Mitchell, C., Atkinson, R.G. and Clark, A. (2001), ‘The Creative Destruction of Niagara-on-the-Lake’, The Canadian Geographer 45:2, 285–99. Mitchell, D. (2000), Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell). Mitchell, D. (2003), The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space (New York: Guilford). Mitchell, K. (1997), ‘Conﬂicting Geographies of Democracy and the Public Sphere in Vancouver BC’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 22:2, 162–79. Mitchelson, M., Alderman, D.H. and Popke, J. (2007), ‘Branded: The Economic Geographies of MLK Streets’, Social Science Quarterly 88:1, 120–45. Morgan, N. and Pritchard, A. (1998), Tourism Promotion and Power: Creating Images, Creating Identities (New York: John Wiley). Myers, G.A. (1996), ‘Naming and Placing the Other: Power and the Urban Landscape in Zanzibar’, Tĳdschri voor Economische en Sociale Geograﬁe 87:3, 237–46. Nash, C. (1999), ‘Irish Placenames: Post-Colonial Locations’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 24:4, 457–80. Pinchevski, A. and Torgovnik, E. (2002), ‘Signifying Passages: The Signs of Change in Israeli Street Names’, Media, Culture and Society 24:3, 365–88. Raento, P. and Douglass, W.A. (2001), ‘The Naming of Gaming’, Names 49:1, 1–35. Reference USA (2006), U.S. Businesses Directory (Omaha: InfoUSA). Roberts, J.T. (1993), ‘Power and Placenames: A Case Study from the Contemporary Amazon Frontier’, Names 41:3, 159–81. Robinson, G.M., Engelso, S. and Pobric, A. (2001), ‘Remaking Sarajevo: Bosnian Nationalism aer the Dayton Accord’, Political Geography 20:8, 957–80. Ruane, J.M. and Cerulo, K.A. (2000), Second Thoughts: Seeing Conventional Wisdom through the Sociological Eye (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge). Sauer, C.O. (1996), ‘The Morphology of Landscape’, in J.A. Agnew, D.N. Livingstone and A. Rodgers (eds), Human Geography: An Essential Anthology (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell), 296–315. Short, B. (2006), ‘Idyllic Ruralities’, in P. Cloke, T. Marsden and P. Mooney (eds), Handbook of Rural Studies (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications), 133–48. Smith, S. (1982), ‘The Old South Myth as a Contemporary Southern Commodity’, The Journal of Popular Culture 16:3, 22–9. Spokane Spokesman-Review (Spokane, WA) (2005), ‘Towns Changing Names, Cashing In’, 26 November: 4. Stewart, G.R. (1954), ‘A Classiﬁcation of Place-Names’, Names 2:1, 1–13. Stewart, G.R. (1958), Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-naming in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Riverside). Stewart, G.R. (1970), American Place-Names: A Concise and Selective Dictionary for the Continental United States of America (New York: Oxford University Press). Stewart, G.R. (1975), Names on the Globe (New York: Oxford University Press). 212

P , N I

C L Towns, H.R. (1996), ‘Blacks More Accepting of Communities’ Southern Names’, Atlanta Journal and Constitution, 10 November: 4H. Tuan, Yi-Fu (1991), ‘Language and the Making of Place: A Narrative-Descriptive Approach’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 81:4, 684–96. Turner, B. (2006), The Cambridge Dictionary of Sociology (New York: Cambridge University Press). Withers, C.W.J. (2000), ‘Authorizing Landscape: “Authority”, Naming and the Ordnance Survey’s Mapping of the Scoish Highlands in the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Historical Geography 26:4, 532–54. Wright, J.K. (1929), ‘The Study of Place Names: Recent Work and Some Possibilities’, Geographical Review 19:1, 140–44. Yeoh, B.S.A. (1992), ‘Street Names in Colonial Singapore’, Geographical Review 82:3, 313–22. Yeoh, B.S.A. (1996), ‘Street-Naming and Nation-Building: Toponymic Inscriptions of Nationhood in Singapore’, Area 28:3, 298–307. Zelinsky, W. (1967), ‘Classical Town Names in the United States: the Historical Geography of an American Idea’, Geographical Review 57:4, 463–95. Zelinsky, W. (1980), ‘North America’s Vernacular Regions’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 70:1, 1–16. Zelinsky, W. (1988), Nation into State: The Shiing Symbolic Foundations of American Nationalism (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press). Zelinsky, W. (1989), ‘The Game of the Name’, American Demographics 11:4, 42–5. Zukin, S. (1995), The Cultures of Cities (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell).

213

This page intentionally left blank

12

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

Commemoration of War Paul Gough

‘Plinth and/or Place’ In the four weeks leading to 11 November 1928 the now defunct illustrated newspaper Answers published a ‘magniﬁcent series of plates celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Armistice’. Under the strapline ‘Ten years aer, 1918–1928’, the plates were published as four pairs of pencil drawings by the former soldier-artist Adrian Hill. They depicted the principal buildings on the old Western Front in Belgium and France as they appeared in ruins in late 1918, and under restoration ten years later. Arras Cathedral, the Cloth Hall at Ypres, Albert Basilica and the Menin Road had become icons across the British Empire as the immutable symbols of the trauma of the Great War. Indeed, in the months aer the Armistice, Winston Churchill had strongly advocated ‘freezing’ the remains of Ypres and preserving it forever as an ossiﬁed commemoration of the war. Its pulverized medieval buildings would, he argued, be more articulate than any carved memorial or reverential monument. Churchill’s predilection for bombed ruins surfaced again during the Second World War when he argued that a portion of the blitzed House of Commons ought also to be preserved as a reminder of the bombing of the capital (Hansard, 25 January 1945). As with many grand commemorative schemes, Churchill’s vision was not to be realized. Indeed, aer both wars many of the grander commemorative schemes ﬂoundered: a national war memorial garden in the precincts of St Paul’s Cathedral was abandoned as a project in the late 1940s; ambitious plans to house the national war art collection in an imposing Hall of Remembrance came to nothing 20 years earlier, as did a similar architectural scheme in Canada. Although many ideas were realized, few were achieved without some degree of argument. In this chapter I will examine how the desire to produce a common understanding of the past has resulted in material forms such as the plinth and the pedestal which have become the key visual components of ideological and rhetorical urban topography. I want to contrast them with the concept of ‘reiﬁed place’, in particular preserved or reconstructed baleﬁelds which have become the focus of commemorative rites – the places where ‘one takes personal narratives’. Most of the examples used to illustrate this tension will be drawn from the northern European theatres of war, although reference will be made to certain other conﬂicts, such

T A R C

H I as the Bale of Geysburg, which became the template for historic conservation and the embellishment of military memory. In concentrating on idealized objects on the one hand, and recuperated landscapes on the other, I will have to set aside consideration of other acts of commemoration; in these we might include ritual, song and poetry, but also the material culture of war such as artwork, paintings and sculpture which were commissioned by national governments as both propaganda and as evidence of cultural superiority. When considering how warfare might variously be commemorated, it is clear that every act is highly contested. Even the granting of war trophies could stir dissent and disagreement. In 1919, when the small east Lancashire town of Haslingden was oﬀered a tank as a gi from the government in recognition of its contribution to war savings, the local branch of the Discharged Soldiers and Sailors Association (DSSA) rejected it as an inappropriate emblem of commemoration. ‘This tank,’ wrote its President, ‘will remind us of things we do not want to be reminded of, and one which would be an expense to the town’ (Haslingden Gazee, 1919). He asked instead that the government send an army-hut as a club-room for the veterans, and ensure them a ﬁing place in the coming Peace Day celebrations – the protocols for the laer proving to be as equally contested as the gi of a redundant military vehicle (Turner, 1995, 58). Of course, many of the tensions between ‘plinth’ and ‘place’ had been played out long before the Great War. The construction of monuments and memorials on sites of bale has a history reaching back to the classical periods of Greece and Rome (Borg, 1991; Carman and Carman, 2006). However, the demarcation of baleﬁeld sites so as to accentuate the material remains of the past is a fairly recent phenomenon. In their analysis of 23 north European bale sites, covering nine centuries (from the Bale of Maldon in 991, to the Spanish Bale of Sorauren in 1813) Carman and Carman note (2006, 184–6) that only ﬁve are marked by contemporary memorials, while all but three are furnished with modern memorials, which all take monumental form. Six of these sites also host a museum or have heritage status, usually dating from the twentieth century, thus reﬂecting the idea that such places have only laerly been considered worthy of note and subject to demarcation, textual display and commodiﬁcation. Such spaces are invariably politicized, dynamic and contested. As Bender (1983) notes, they are constantly open to negotiation. They are also complex sites of social construction. As we shall see in our examination of twentieth-century wars in northern Europe, it is best not to view such sites as the location of single events, but as ‘a palimpsest of overlapping, multi-vocal landscapes’ (Saunders, 2001, 37).

Commemoration, Reverential and Utilitarian: a Definition of Terms Any reading of the historiography related to the commemoration of war (Borg, 1991; Hynes, 1990; King, 1998; Mosse, 1990; Winter, 1995) will reveal that the words ‘monument’ and ‘memorial’ are used interchangeably, their deﬁnitions oen paradoxical and weakly articulated. Arthur Danto (1986, 152), reﬂecting on the 216

C

W Vietnam Veterans Memorial in the United States, aempts to distinguish one from the other by arguing that whereas many memorials speak of healing, remembrance and reconciliation, monuments are usually celebratory or triumphalist. Although somewhat simplistic, such deﬁnition oﬀers a starting point. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a monument is ‘a structure, ediﬁce or erection intended to commemorate a person, action or event’. In contrast, deﬁnitions of ‘memorial’ focus on the preservation of speciﬁc memory and on their iconographic role in evoking remembrance. In common understanding a monument should bear the aributes of scale, permanence, longevity and visibility. Memorials, by contrast, are oen more intimate, local and personal, though they are still required to be durable and open to public gaze. While the monument has oen been built to promote speciﬁc ideals and aspirations – from the Statue of Liberty to the Eiﬀel Tower – the memorial is essentially a retrospective form, idealizing a past event, historic ﬁgure or deiﬁed place. The German cultural historian, Alois Riegl (1903), distinguished between monuments that are ‘wanted’ – in the sense of satisfying a commemorative need – and those that are merely remnants, usually in the form of historical or preserved remains that connect us to a revered past. Drawing on Freud’s work on mourning and melancholia, others have argued that monuments become memorials as a result of the successful completion of a mourning process (Rowlands, 1999), when: the object must die twice, ﬁrst at the moment of its own death and secondly through the subject’s unhitching from its own identiﬁcation. It is only then that the object can pass into history and that the stones can be set – for mourning and memorial are a phase apart (Cousins, 1996, 36–41). Clearly, there are several distinct phases in the creation of the public monument. Winter (2000) proposes a tripartite cycle in the aerlife of lieux de mémoire. An initial, creative period – the construction of ‘commemorative form’ – is marked by monument-building and the creation of ceremonies that are periodically centred on the reverential object. During the second phase, the ritual action is grounded in the annual calendar and becomes institutionalized as part of civic routine. There is then a critical, transformative period when the public monument either disappears or is upheld as an active site of memory. This ﬁnal phase, as Winter (2000, 22–5) reminds us, is largely contingent on whether a second generation of mourners inherits the earlier meanings aached to the place or event and adds new meanings. Without frequent re-inscription, the date and place of commemoration simply fade away as memory atrophies. Very soon the monument loses its potency to re-invigorate memory; it becomes ‘invisible’. This complex and delicate process is exempliﬁed in the case of monuments to distant wars. Here, as Inglis suggests, the terminological diﬀerence is signiﬁcant: ‘Where the French speak of monuments aux morts, the English say war memorials.’ Memorial leaves open the form of commemoration which may, or may not, be monumental (Inglis, 1992, 601). Commemoration, essentially anti-entropic, is oen predicated upon the monument being a physical object that arrests the eﬀects 217

T A R C

H I of time. It has a temporal as well as a spatial value, and might be considered a ‘single point [that] continues in the present and into the future’ (Treib, 2001, 82). By comparison, the German word for monument, denkmal – literally ‘a means to thought’ – oﬀers a conceptual vehicle that is more closely auned to the idea that human perceptions shi and adjust, and that monuments – like so much rhetorical topoi – can become irrelevant, invisible, and yet also able to arouse intense debate (Gough and Morgan, 2004). In largely Protestant countries such as Britain, hospitals, libraries and other utilitarian memorials had long been considered to be structures appropriate for the commemoration of war. Victorian and Edwardian Britain is strewn with the evidence of philanthropic and state benefaction. This was perhaps most evident aer the First World War, when small communities, already torn by grief, were further divided by the need to decide between erecting reverential memorials or building functional utilities. In the laer, memorial schemes varied in object from avenues of trees to pragmatic solutions to local issues and took the form of community halls, recreation grounds, convalescent homes and, in one case, a waterpipe to a local school (King, 1998, 68). There were precedents for such decisions. A paper on Monumental Memorials and Town Planning, given in 1917, noted the tale of a ‘small Urban Council who, with an eye to thri and economy, decided to commemorate the Jubilee of Queen Victoria by the construction of a new public sewer’ (Adhead, 1917, 21). A preference for the utilitarian may, in part, have been a reaction to the frenzy of monument building across Europe in the late nineteenth century. As Whelan points out, the busy furnishing of urban centres reﬂected the intense nationalism of the period when plinth-topped statuary became a focus for collective participation in the politics and public life of villages, towns and cities across Europe (Whelan, 2005, 63). Figurative ensembles were readily understood as symbolic devices capable of capturing and imposing the ideals, principles and aspirations of the established regime. ‘Frenzy’ is the appropriate term. Owens calculates (1994, 103) that one statue was erected in central London every four months during the reign of Queen Victoria. In Germany, in a single decade, some 500 memorial towers were raised to Bismarck alone. However, in 1919 the need to ﬁnd a tolerable meaning to the vast losses of the Great War demanded a radical break from august statues crowding the overfurnished urban centres of Europe. Nor could the scale of loss be satisﬁed by shortterm utilitarian solutions. In the absence of bodies to grieve over, the cenotaphs, memorial stones and catafalques erected in thousands across Britain had to perform several interlocking functions. Initially they acted as a focus for personal, public and civic displays of grief. Their iconic form helped to reassure non-combatants and relatives that the dead had died for a greater cause, one linked to abstract values of nationhood, camaraderie or Christian citizenship. The blank-faced slab of the Cenotaph in Whitehall provided a template for hundreds across the Empire honouring the placeless dead. Along with the equally classless Tomb of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey, the Cenotaph became a heterotopic site at which the ‘multiple memories’ of parents, ﬁancées and widows could be located and ﬁxed (Hallam and Hockey, 2001, 90). The very solidity of these monumental 218

C

W forms provided a sense of ‘anchoring’ – spatial, temporal, perhaps even social – in a mobile and disjointed society (Huyssen, 1995, 7). Indeed, stone, brass and metal have become increasingly valued as the material embodiment of memory, largely because they seem to act as a counterpoint to fears of a ‘throw-away consumer culture’ with its emphasis on the immaterial, the transient and the ﬂeeting. Annual rituals such as Armistice services gradually reinforce the permanence of the material through becoming the locus of communal and individual remembrance, and opening up a discourse of healing, regret and reﬂection. Monumental forms, argues Rowlands (1999, 199), ‘should ideally allow the fusion of the living with the dead as an act of remembrance whilst in time providing a way out of melancholia through an act of transcendence’. As such they function as palliative topoi that help resolve the conditions of ‘negativity and impotence’ aroused by violent death, particularly of the young. Of course, not all war memorials act in this way; some are bombastic and celebratory, embellishing the past, promoting pride in distant victories and asserting inﬂated values of nationhood. Although they play a major part in the creation of place identity in the built environment, the role of monuments during social change is rarely predictable and they are subject to random forces. ‘Existing monuments may be removed and replaced; they may be re-designated and their meanings re-interpreted to express new meanings; or they may simply become ignored and rendered all but invisible, their meanings lost through being irrelevant or unreadable’ (Ashworth and Graham, 2005, 11). Unsurprisingly, they are also capable of arousing complex passions. Take for example, the furore over the installation of a statue to Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris in London in 1992 (Johnson, 1995) or the desecration of the Whitehall Cenotaph during May Day protests in 2000 (Winter, 2000). Consider also the recent upsurge in the memorialization of the Second World War, most notably in central London (Gough, 2007) but also at the National Memorial Arboretum in central England. Amidst such contingency we can be certain of two things: monuments are seldom built to commemorate continuing events or to honour those still living. This explains our ‘queasiness when we are commemorated’ (Lowenthal, 1985, 232). Secondly, the erection of memorials is intended to be a terminal act, indicating closure and the completion of a segment of historical past (though this is not always achieved). Monuments, according to Hynes (1990, 14), are crucial icons in the oﬃcial act of closure, the ultimate solidiﬁcation in the ‘discourse of big words’ – ‘heroism’, ‘gallantry’, ‘glory’, ‘victory’, though only occasionally ‘peace’ (Gough, 2007).

Naming and Knowing In his account of building the Menin Gate at Ypres, Sir Reginald Blomﬁeld identiﬁed the single greatest problem in achieving an appropriate design for his war memorial: ‘I had to ﬁnd space for a vast number of names, estimated at ﬁrst at some 40,000 but increased as we went on to about 58,600’ (Blomﬁeld, 1932, 179). Yet despite spreading the names over 1,200 panels across walls, arches, columns and even the stairwells, Blomﬁeld could ﬁt only 54,896 names into the elongated 219

T A R C

H I tunnel-like arch. Expediently, the names of ‘an excess of nearly 6,000’ were transferred to national burial sites nearby (Longworth, 1985, 96). Further south, the design of the gigantic arch at Thiepval was dictated by the need to display the names of 73,367 men with no known resting place who had died during the Bale of the Somme. Designed by Edwin Lutyens, the arch consists of 16 enormous load-bearing columns each faced by stone panels carved to a height of some six metres, the words never quite beyond legibility. It is, as Geoﬀ Dyer (1995, 126) reﬂects, a monument to the ‘untellable’ whilst also being a monument that is ‘unphotographable’; no image can capture its daunting scale, its weight, and the panorama of names. ‘So interminably many,’ Stephen Zweig notes, ‘that as on the columns of the Alhambra, the writing becomes decorative’ (cited in Lacquer, 1994, 154). It is also unnervingly precise in both its grammar and speciﬁcity: individuals who may have served (and died) under assumed or false names are listed; common names – Smith, Jones, Hughes – are further identiﬁed by their roll number; the memorial also features an Addenda and, according to Barnes, a Corrigenda (Barnes, 1995, 98). It is a gargantuan roll of honour created in brick and stone. As Shepheard has convincingly argued, it is this painstaking aention to detail – the assiduous ‘clip and mow and prune’ and the insistence on speciﬁcity at every level – that makes it possible for the Commonwealth War Graves Cemeteries to commemorate the dead without glorifying war (Shepheard, 1997, 227). Naming, and the evocation of names, were central to the cult of commemoration aer the Great War. As a process it mirrored the complex bureaucracies developed by the industrial armies during years of total war; the administration of death echoed the military machine which had become ‘rationalised, routinised, standardised’ (Horne, 1984, 228). However, initial aempts to co-ordinate the burial and recording of the dead were haphazard. In the British army in Flanders, it was the zeal of Fabian Ware and his graves registration unit that laid the foundations of a systematic audit of the dead and their place of burial (Longworth, 1985). Once it had been decided that bodies would not be exhumed and repatriated, Ware began to establish a method for graves registration and a scheme for permanent burial sites. He also arranged that all graves should be photographed so that relatives might have an image and directions to the place of burial. By August 1915 an initial 2,000 negatives, each showing four grave markers, had been taken. Cards were sent in answer to individual requests, enclosing details that gave ‘the best available indication as to the situation of the grave and, when it was in a cemetery, directions as to the nearest railway station which might be useful for those wishing to visit the country aer the war’ (Ware, 1929, vii). Less than nine months later, Ware’s makeshi organization had registered over 50,000 graves, answered 5,000 enquiries, and supplied 2,500 photographs. Lile over a year thereaer, the work to gather, re-inter and individually mark the fallen had become a state responsibility. The dead, as Heﬀernan points out, were no longer allowed ‘to pass unnoticed back into the private world of their families’. They were ‘oﬃcial property’ to be accorded appropriate civic commemoration in ‘solemn monuments of oﬃcial remembrance’ (Heﬀernan, 1995, 302).

220

C

W Lacquer has pointed out the epistemological shi that came out of Ware’s founding work; here, a new era of remembrance began – the era of the common soldiers’ name. This marked a radical break from the customs of the nineteenth century. On monumental structures in France and Prussia, naming dead soldiers of all ranks had been occasionally adopted, but not in Britain. When such a proposal was considered as a way of honouring the dead of Waterloo, it was turned down by Parliament (King, 1998, 184–5). It was le to military units to initiate and raise the money for memorials that listed all ranks. More usually, only oﬃcers were named, rankers simply identiﬁed by the number of dead (Penny, 1987, 794). This was certainly the practice aer the Crimea, but by the end of the Boer War it had become commonplace for local military memorials in Britain to contain lists of those who had died, oen denoting rank – a practice that was avoided aer the Great War, largely to connote ‘equality of sacriﬁce’ irrespective of class, rank or status. Aer the Armistice of 1918, the administration of death and grieving became highly regulated and was marked by ‘a historically unprecedented planting of names on the landscapes of bale’ (Lacquer, 1996, 152–3). Indeed, the very words chosen for the Stone of Remembrance in each of the larger cemeteries underlines this fact: ‘Their name liveth evermore’, a phrasing that caused Lutyens to ask, ‘But what are names?’ For the bereaved, however, they were oen all that was le.

Place and the ‘Anxiety of Erasure’ While names can be recovered, even recuperated, from the past, language strains to depict the calamity and depravity of modern war. As T.S. Eliot wrote, words crack ‘and sometimes break under the burden, under the tension, slip, slide, perish’ (Eliot, 1963, 194). John Maseﬁeld, writer and future poet laureate, had no available vocabulary to describe his ﬁrst sight of the Somme baleﬁeld in 1916. ‘To say that the ground is “ploughed up” with shells is to talk like a child,’ he complained, ‘to call it mud would be misleading’: It was not like any mud I’ve ever seen. It was a kind of stagnant river, too thick to ﬂow, yet too wet to stand, and it had a kind of glisten and shine on it like reddish cheese, but it was not solid at all and you le no tracks in it, they all closed over, and you went in over your boots at every step and sometimes up to your calves. Down below it there was a solid footing, and as you went slopping along the army went slopping along by your side, and splashed you from head to foot (Maseﬁeld, 1916 [1978], 164). Almost every baleﬁeld visitor called it ‘indescribable’. And yet, every baleﬁeld visitor made an aempt to describe it in words; indeed many thousands of pages were ﬁlled trying to deﬁne and describe the trauma that had been visited upon this small tract of northern France. The spectacle of abject ruination drew pilgrims, just as it draws visitors today, to dwell on it in dread fascination.

221

T A R C

H I However, when considering these as commemorative sites, the ‘spectacle’ was oen lile more than a cleared tract of land to which historic signiﬁcance had to be aached; it oen took negative form, it was a spectacle of absence, a potent emptiness of ﬂaened earth, ruined and shaered forms. As sites of memory though, these obscure places loomed huge in the popular imagination. Identifying, conserving and managing these ‘places we want to keep’ because they are deemed to have layers of signiﬁcance is strewn with competing demands. As Freestone argues, the structures and relationships between the many sets of stakeholders who have some authority over a given ‘site of memory’ are ‘complex, incomplete, sometimes unfair, confused, and conﬂicting’ (Freestone, 1995, 79). As locales of embodied potentiality (Forster, 2004), baleﬁelds present very particular opportunities for preservation. It is possible to trace a paern of commemoration that was ﬁrst created aer the Bale of Geysburg in 1863, continues on the barren ash hills around Verdun, through to such Second World War sites as the beaches of Normandy, the ‘martyred village’ of Oradour, and ﬁnally on to the razed city of Hiroshima (Gough, 2000). On each baleground the moral resonance of the site itself is seen as paramount. Ditches, mounds, ruins and apparently barren tracts have been maintained, preserved and sometimes enhanced, because they are seen as historical traces which have an unassailable authority. However, the semiotics of commemorative spatiality are complex because they must be constantly negotiated and redeﬁned. This diﬃculty notwithstanding, a semiotics of place has been clearly articulated by the French sociologist, Maurice Halbwachs, who was compelled by the qualities of particular sites and examined their role in the formation of collective memory. ‘Space,’ he wrote, ‘is a reality that endures’, it has the capacity to unite groups of individuals and believers, concentrating and ‘moulding its character to theirs’ (Halbwachs, 1950). So saturated in potentiality are some sites that pilgrims have been continuously drawn to places that ‘contain’ the memory of overwhelming events. In this sense, the terrain around Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, the ‘raised knoll’ in downtown Dallas, or the ash-hills of Fort Douaumont at Verdun can be considered secular shrines capable of rekindling memories of awesome events. Nowhere, perhaps, are such maers more urgent than in the controversies that surround how we remember and represent the Holocaust. In the absence of convincing memorials, the very sites chosen to remember the Holocaust have become pivotal in the national and popular imagination as it aempts to address the events of the Second World War. This has become especially pressing in those places where ‘unmanaged ecological succession threatens to erase history’ (Charlesworth and Addis, 2002, 240). Koonz, in an analysis of the commemorative hinterland around Nazi concentration camps, suggests that whereas we know that wrien texts are ‘inﬁnitely malleable’ and readily abridged, that ﬁlms can be edited and photographs digitally manipulated, the landscape feels immutable. Only geography, she argues, is capable of conveying the narrative of extermination; ‘At these places of remembering, memory feels monolithic, unambiguous, and terrible’ (Koonz, 1994, 258–80). It is a view earlier suggested by Mayo (1988, 172) in his epic survey of the contested terrain of native North America, when he simply states that ‘the landscape itself is the memorial’. 222

C

W Wandering over the sites of the Bale of Geysburg and musing on the manner in which we create ‘signiﬁcant’ landscapes, Harbison suggests that ‘serious tourists’ help monumentalize the landscapes they pass through, ‘classicizing’ them. We do this by concentrating on certain nodes of signiﬁcance which acquire ‘ceremonial eminence’, whatever their outward condition (Harbison, 1991, 38). The role of the serious tourist, he argues, is essentially reconstructive. Similarly, Ashworth and Graham suggest that the imposition of the designation ‘heritage site’ forever alters the character of an area, which ‘thus becomes monumental and historic with potential consequences for the sense of place held by insiders and outsiders’ (Ashworth and Graham, 2005, 151). The former baleﬁelds perched on the tip of the Dardanelles Peninsula in western Turkey oﬀer a telling example of a heritage site that has been spasmodically contested by ‘insiders and outsiders’ since the Empire troops evacuated its bloody ridges and exposed beaches in early 1916. The defence of Gallipoli was a victory for the Turkish army – their single triumph in ﬁve campaigns – but this might not be the ﬁrst impression gained by the casual visitor. The peninsula is peppered with war memorials, baleﬁeld museums, facsimile trench lines and cemeteries. The main period of cemetery planning and memorial building took place in the 1920s when the Imperial War Graves Commission (IWGC) assumed responsibility for situating and planning 31 cemeteries and ﬁve Allied memorials (Longworth, 1985). They are carved in the restrained neo-classical style that characterizes the work of the IWGC, work that was carried out in the most severe climatic, geological and socio-political conditions. The principal architect, Sir John Burnet, bemoaned the insecure ground, poor drainage and the propensity of the impoverished locals to remove stone and metal intended for the Commission. He had also to work in an emotionally charged context – a clamorous lobby by Australian and New Zealand ex-servicemen to designate the entire area around Anzac Cove as consecrated ground; a lobby that, while unsuccessful at the time, would later lay the foundation for territory disputes that have become spasmodically inﬂamed since the Turkish government agreed the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. As for marking their part in the campaign, there was no comparable response from the Turkish authorities until the 1950s, and then again in the late 1960s when a number of imposing modernist structures were built at Cape Helles, the most southerly point of the peninsula. During the late 1980s a number of traditional Islamic memorial sites were built, and in the last decade several large ﬁgurative statues – some of them strident, even bombastic, in tenor – have been located at Anzac Cove and Helles. Although the war ended here in 1916, a bale for monumental supremacy has been waged ever since. Turkish and Commonwealth memorial sites are located uncomfortably close to each other on the cliﬀs over the oncedisputed beaches, and immense statues of Turkish heroes stand face-to-face with Commonwealth War Graves Commission obelisks, locked in ‘parallel monologues’ (Ayliﬀe, Dubin and Gawthorp, 1991). On the eve of the 80th anniversary of the Allied landings in 1995, the Turkish authorities supplemented the martial statuary with an ambitious – but not uncontroversial – planting regime designed to dress the baleﬁeld with appropriate symbolic ﬂoral designs (Gough, 1996). 223

T A R C

H I Two years later the Turkish government announced a competition for a new 330,000-hectare park dedicated to peace at Gallipoli. Although a winning design was chosen, there has been lile progress in advancing the scheme and the only physical changes on the peninsula have been the unplanned encroachment of villas and an irreversible road-widening programme intended to facilitate the tens of thousands of visitors (many from Australia and New Zealand) who want to visit, but who have become increasingly concerned at the unsightly violation of a place they deem essential to their identities as nations. As hallowed sites of national memory, the identiﬁcation and preservation of a baleﬁeld as a physical and inviolable entity can help maintain a consciousness of the past which, as Lowenthal argues, is ‘essential to maintenance of purpose in life, since without memory we would lack all sense of continuity, all apprehension of causality, all knowledge of our identity’ (Lowenthal, 1985, 103). However, as is evident on the contested ravines and beaches of the Dardanelles, memory, identity and purpose are seldom shared values, especially between geographically far-ﬂung nations. Nevertheless if, as Lowenthal (1979, 109–11) has suggested, landscape is ‘memory’s most serviceable reminder’, then preserved baleﬁeld sites can help to concretize the experience of war and evoke profound reﬂections. Despite the need for occasional artiﬁce, baleﬁelds are especially signiﬁcant as memorial landscapes because they ‘challenge us to recall basic realities of historical experience, especially those of death, suﬀering and sacriﬁce’(Rainey, 1983, 76).

Beyond Space: Counter-memorials Perhaps some of the most radical developments in the evolution of commemorative form emanated from Germany in the 1980s, as a young generation of artists and writers began to face the concealed and repressed recent past of their nation. Building on the maxim of John Latham and the Artist Placement Group which asserted that ‘the context is half the [art]work’, artists and cultural interventionists such as Jochen Gerz worked from the premise that memory is ﬂuid and contingent, and that, consequently, it is neither possible nor desirable to insist on a single, objective and authoritative reading of any place or historic moment (Latham, 1997, 15). The key concepts behind these actions produced ‘negative’ or ‘invisible’ forms. Anti-maer and the ephemeral were preferred over verticality and solidity; dislocation and disturbance were premised over comfort and reconciliation. Now regarded as the origins of the ‘counter-monument’, the conceptual base was articulated by contextual ﬁne artists, who asserted that ﬁxed statuary induces national amnesia rather than meaningful acts of remembering. Their principal aim was to register protest or disagreement with the ‘untenable prime object’ (invariably, the ‘hero on the horse’ – the plinthbound exalted statue) and to stage an alternative that might arouse reﬂection and debate, however uncomfortable or radical (Michalski, 1998, 207). Through their extraordinary interventions, artists such as Christian Boltanski, Jochen Gerz and Krzysztof Wodiczko were not commemorating particular wars as such. Rather they were oﬀering up a complex critique of how nations repressed or 224

C

W subverted uncomfortable memory. One example brilliantly illustrates the radical shis in the nature of commemoration brought about by such thinking. The Harburg Monument Against War and Fascism and for Peace was unveiled in October 1986 by Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz, but had ‘disappeared’ by November 1993, not through vandalism or the but to meet the artist’s radical agenda. Having asked the critical question, ‘What do we need another monument for?’, and answered, ‘We have too many already’, they created one that would gradually disappear, and in so doing challenge the traditional connotations of permanence, durability and ‘authoritarian rigidity’ normally aributed to monuments (Young, 2000, 128). In a nondescript suburb of Hamburg, in an obscure pedestrian mall, they unveiled a 40-foot high, three-foot square pillar of hollow aluminium, sheathed in a layer of so lead. A temporary inscription in several languages invited all citizens of the town to add their names – and so ‘commit ourselves to be vigilant’ – and become aware that over time the column would gradually be lowered into the ground. ‘In the end,’ concluded the inscription, ‘it is only we ourselves who can rise up against injustice.’ As sections of the tower were inscribed with graﬃti – names, messages, obscenities, political slogans and aerosol-painted tags – it was lowered into its chamber until all that was le was a simple capstone. Provocative and uncomfortable, the vanishing monument returned the burden of memory to visitors. As Young notes, ‘all that stands here are the memory-tourists, forced to rise and remember for themselves’ (Young, 2000, 131). In France, Gerz transformed a stereotypical provincial memorial to Les Morts of the First World War by gathering statements, reminiscences and observations from local inhabitants about their feelings and responses to the existing memorial, inscribing some of them on to plaques which were then aﬃxed to the stonework. The intervention is planned to carry on, possibly for years, each new inscription covering the others and radiating from the locus of ‘oﬃcial’ memory. While counter-monuments are oen shocking in their confrontational polemic, can it be said that they have subverted the cultures of commemoration? Have they re-invigorated the material form of memory-creation? In northern Europe, recently built war museums, including ‘L’Historial de la Grande Guerre’ at Peronne and ‘In Flanders Fields’ at Ypres, have engaged more fully with their audiences, creating participatory and interactive exhibits that genuinely aempt to engage all levels of involvement and suﬀering. However, only miles away, the former balegrounds of the old Western Front are being systematically bedecked with monumentalia of uneven aesthetic quality, occasionally based on dubious history. Capital cities such as London are being liberally furnished with additional monuments – to women’s contribution in the Second World War; to animals who died in wars – arches, memorial gateways, and other commemorative objets de memoire designed to stave oﬀ that ‘anxiety of erasure’ felt by generations of combatants and their relatives, for whom their war contribution is a fast fading memory. In ending, it is worth questioning how might the ‘war on terror’ be remembered? If the ‘war’ is ever resolved, what commemorative forms might result? If closure is one day achieved, what will be its inscription and markers? Will it ﬁnd commemorative shape in three dimensions? Pervasive warfare may be matched by 225

T A R C

H I pervasive technologies of commemoration. The public space that once housed the reverential monuments of the twentieth century has become fragmented, serialized and digitally accessible as a consequence of the rapid expansion of communications technologies and digital cultures. In an age when the local has exploded, it is now understood that ‘the Internet provides a medium in which public art can be created speciﬁcally for non-localized, interactive and lasting memorializations’ (Gérin, 2002, 11). One example will illustrate this transformation: ‘The Numbers and the Names’ is an online memorial to September 11. It was created by Mac Dunlop and Neil Jenkins, with a visual prologue by Annie Lovejoy, as a component of an extensive collaborative art project. Eschewing the naming of names, the four-dimensional memorial consists of words drawn from Dunlop’s poems, ‘11.09.01’; using an orbital engine created by Jenkins, they ﬂoat on a colourless screen in a steady rotation around a central void. The order in which they appear is generated according to an inverse reading of the viewer’s IP address and those of previous visitors to the website. The visitor-participant can use the mouse to slow down or re-orient the orbiting words, but they cannot stop or reverse the process. As a virtual monument, ‘The Numbers and the Names’ both records and functions because of the history of mourners who have visited the site; it continues to exist only if visited by those who wish to participate, or as long as people continue to show any interest. Whereas many virtual memorial sites are lile more than online petitions, Dunlop’s interactive site may indeed represent a paradigm shi in the nature of commemoration.

References Adhead, S.D. (1917), ‘Monumental Memorials and Town Planning’, Journal of the Town Planning Institute 3:5, 17–28. Ashworth, G.J. and Graham, B. (eds) (2005), Senses of Place: Senses of Time (Aldershot: Ashgate). Ayliﬀe, R., Dubin, M. and Gawthorp, J. (1991), Turkey: the Rough Guide (London: Harrap Columbus). Barnes, J. (1995), Cross Channel (London: Jonathan Cape). Bender, B. (1983), ‘Stonehenge: Contested Landscapes (Medieval to Present Day)’, in B. Bender (ed.), Landscape: Politics and Perspectives (Oxford: Berg). Bender, B. (ed.) (1983), Landscape: Politics and Perspectives (Oxford: Berg). Blomﬁeld, R. (1932), Memoirs of an Architect (London: Macmillan). Borg, A. (1991), War Memorials (London: Leo Cooper). Burstow, R. (2001), ‘Materialising Memory: Mementoes, Memorials and Modernism’, catalogue essay for In Memoriam, Walsall Art Gallery, 22 November 2000–21 January 2001, 8–12. Carman, J. and Carman, P. (2006), Bloody Meadows: Investigating Landscapes of Bale (Stroud: Suon Publishing).

226

C

W Charlesworth, A. and Addis, M. (2002), ‘Memorialisation and the Ecological Landscapes of Holocaust Sites: The Cases of Płaszow and Auschwitz-Birkenau’, Landscape Research 27:3, 229–52. Cousins, M. (1996), ‘Inside, Outside’, Tate Magazine, Winter, 36–41. Danto, A. (1986), ‘The Vietnam Veterans Memorial’, The Nation, 31 August, 152. Dunlop, M., ‘Here and There’, , accessed 11 November 2006. Dyer, G. (1995), The Missing of the Somme (London: Penguin). Eliot, T.S. (1963), ‘Burnt Norton’, Collected Poems: 1909–1962 (London: Faber). Forster, J. (2004), ‘Creating a Tenemos, Positing “South Africanism”: Material Memory, Landscape Practice, and the Circulation of Identity at Delville Wood’, Cultural Geographies 11, 209–34. Freestone, R. (1995), ‘From Icons to Institutions: Heritage Conservation in Sydney’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 1:2, 79–90. Gérin, A. (2002), ‘The Four-dimensional Monument: Public Art Futures on the World Wide Web’, Fuse 25:4, 11. Gillis, J.R. (ed.) (1994), Commemorations (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Gough, P. (1996), ‘Conifers and Commemoration: The Politics and Protocol of Planting in Military Cemeteries’, Landscape Research 21:1, 73–87. Gough, P. (2000), ‘From Heroes’ Groves to Parks of Peace’, Landscape Research 5:2, 213–29. Gough, P. (2004), ‘Sites in the Imagination: The Beaumont Hamel Newfoundland Memorial on the Somme’, Cultural Geographies 11, 235–58. Gough, P. (2007), ‘Planting Peace: The Greater London Council and the Community Gardens of Central London’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 13:1, 22–41. Gough, P. and Morgan, S.J. (2004), ‘Manipulating the Metonymic: the Bristol Cenotaph, 1919–1932’, Journal of Historical Geography 30, 665–84. Halbwachs, M. (1950), The Collective Memory (New York: Harper Colophon). Hallam, E. and Hockey, J. (2001), Death, Memory and Material Culture (Oxford: Berg). Hansard, 25 January 1945. Harbison, R. (1991), The Built, the Unbuilt and the Unbuildable (London: Thames and Hudson). Haslingden Gazee, 17 May 1919, et passim, in William Turner (1995), ‘The Talk of the Town: How a Branch of the Discharged Soldiers and Sailors Association Fought for a Place in Haslingden’s Peace Celebrations’, The Poppy and the Owl 25. Heﬀernan, M. (1995), ‘For Ever England: The Western Front and the Politics of Remembrance in Britain’, Ecumene 2:3, 293–324. Horne, A. (1984), The Price of Glory: Verdun, 1916 (New York: Marshall Cavendish Publishers). Huyssen, A. (1995), Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge). Hynes, S. (1990), A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (London: Bodley Head). Inglis, K. (1992), ‘The Homecoming: the War Memorial Movement in Cambridge, England’, Journal of Contemporary History 27, 583–605. 227

T A R C

H I Johnson, N. (1995), ‘Monuments, Geography and Nationalism’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13, 51–65. King, A. (1998), Memorials of the Great War in Britain: The Symbolism and Politics of Remembrance (Oxford: Berg). Koonz, C. (1994), ‘Between Memory and Oblivion: Concentration Camps in German Memory’, in J.R. Gillis (ed.), Commemorations (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 258–80. Lacquer, T. (1994), ‘Memory and Naming in the Great War’, in J.R. Gillis (ed.), Commemorations (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 150–68. Lacquer, T. (1996), ‘The Past’s Past’, London Review of Books, 19 September 1996, 3–7. Lambek, M. (2002), The Weight of the Past (New York: Palgrave Macmillan). Latham, J., quoted in Harding, D. and Buchler, P. (1997), DECADEnt: Public Art, Contentious Term and Contested Practice (Glasgow: Foulis Press). Longworth, P. (1985), The Unending Vigil, 2nd edition (London: Leo Cooper). Lowenthal, D. (1979), ‘Age and Artifact: Dilemmas of Appreciation’, in D.S. Meinig (ed.), The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 109–11. Lowenthal, D. (1985), The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Maseﬁeld, J. (1916), leer to his wife, 21 October 1916, cited in C. Babington-Smith (1978), John Maseﬁeld: A Life (New York: Macmillan). Mayo, J.M. (1988), War Memorials as Political Landscape: The American Experience and Beyond (New York: Praeger). Michalski, S. (1998), Public Monuments: Art in Political Bondage, 1870–1997 (London: Reaktion). Mosse, G.L. (1990), Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Owens, G. (1994), ‘Nationalist Monuments in Ireland, 1870–1914: Symbolism and Ritual’, in R. Gillespie and B.P. Kennedy (eds), Ireland: Art into History (Dublin: TownHouse), 103–17. Penny, N. (1987), ‘“Amor publicus posuit”: Monuments for the People and of the People’, The Burlington Magazine 109:1017, December 1987, 793–800. Rainey, R.M. (1983), ‘The Memory of War: Reﬂections on Baleﬁeld Preservation’, in R.L. Austin (ed.), Yearbook of Landscape Architecture (New York: Van Nostrund Reinold), 68–89. Riegl, A. (1903), ‘Der Moderne Denkmalkultus’, cited in R. Burstow (2001), ‘Materialising Memory: Mementoes, Memorials and Modernism’, catalogue essay for In Memoriam, Walsall Art Gallery, 22 November 2000–21 January 2001, 8–12. Rowlands, M. (1999), ‘Remembering to Forget: Sublimation as Sacriﬁce in War Memorials’, in A. Forty and S. Kuchler (eds), The Art of Forgeing (Oxford: Berg), 129–47. Saunders, N. (2001), ‘Maer and Memory in the Landscapes of Conﬂict: The Western Front 1914–1919’, in B. Bender and M. Winer (eds), Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile and Place (Oxford: Berg), 37–54. 228

C

W Shepheard, P. (1997), The Cultivated Wilderness: or, What is Landscape? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Treib, M. (2001), ‘The Landscape of Loved Ones’, in J. Wolschke-Bulmahn (ed.), Places of Commemoration: Search for Identity and Landscape Design (Washington: Dumbarton Oaks), 45–64. Turner, W. (1995), ‘The Talk of the Town: How a Branch of the Discharged Soldiers and Sailors Association Fought for a Place in Haslingden’s Peace Celebrations’, The Poppy and the Owl 25. Ware, F. (1929), ‘The Price of Peace’, The Listener II, 636–7. Warnke, M. (1994), Political Landscape: The Art History of Nature (London: Reaktion). Whelan, Y. (2005), ‘Mapping Meanings’, in G.J Ashworth and B. Graham (eds), Senses of Place: Senses of Time (Aldershot: Ashgate), 61–71. Winter, J. (1995), Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Winter, J. (2000), BBC History, November, 22–5. Young, J. (2000), At Memory’s Edge: Aer-images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press).

229

This page intentionally left blank

13

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

The Memorialization of Violence and Tragedy: Human Trauma as Heritage G.J. Ashworth

Heritage and Violence All heritage is a deliberate selection from pasts in order to satisfy present needs and demands. As such, the question immediately arises as to why past human violence, with the resulting consequences in human trauma and suﬀering, should be deliberately selected for memorialization. Unhappiness and pain are the lot of much of humanity much of the time, and death is a universal inevitability. Why then should people wish to be reminded of this? Which and whose needs is such a heritage satisfying? As with all heritage, the question of who is selecting such heritage, for what reasons and on whose behalf, must always be posed. Violence is provoked by strong emotions and in turn evokes strong emotions, which renders it both more noticeable and more memorable than most human actions. However, there is an inherent ambivalence in people’s aitude towards violence and its consequences. It contains elements of both aversion and araction; it is simultaneously to be avoided and sought, forgoen and remembered. Violence is, to say the least, unpleasant most obviously for victims and those who could associate themselves or identify with them, but also for others, such as spectators, who may not feel themselves so directly involved but nevertheless empathize to varying degrees. There is an additional element in that much heritage consumption is individual and voluntary. It is a use of discretionary time, money and aention, oen as part of a leisure activity, freely indulged in for the pleasure it conveys, whether that pleasure is composed of enlightenment, excitement, relaxation or just enjoyment. This sharpens the inherent contradiction between the relating of human suﬀering and entertainment. Such a juxtaposition of conﬂicting and even contradictory ideas may seem bizarre, distasteful and ethically unacceptable. Linking violence and entertainment through heritage introduces an element of seriousness into an activity engaged in for fun, as well as it introduces a trivialization of the serious. The

T A R C

H I importance of the topic and the inherent tension and diﬃculties of its management both stem from these contradictions. This chapter will ﬁrst aempt to position the heritage of violence within heritage in general and, secondly, discuss the reasons for its memorialization by individuals and by public agencies in pursuit of collective policies. Finally, having explored answers to the general question of why violence is remembered in memorials, I consider the question: which strategies are employed in the creation and management of such heritage? People and heritage are linked by the activity of management. Much heritage, and most that is considered here, is undertaken for collective goals and thus is collectively managed. Implicit, therefore, in most of the analysis that follows is the assumption that the conjunction of visitors and the heritage of violence is not fortuitous. On the supply side, sites, memorials and collections are selected, interpreted, packaged and promoted through deliberate policy. On the demand side, management intervenes initially to aract the aention of consumers and subsequently inﬂuence their behaviour. At every stage there is selection and thus choices. The need for choice raises the ‘should’ questions, which are the ultimate justiﬁcation for the pursuit of this topic. Conﬂict resolution or mitigation reintroduces something of a moral dimension as society arbitrates between conﬂicting claims on the past, conﬂicting interpretations of it and thus on the sites that commemorate it.

The Heritage of Violence: Violence in Heritage It is diﬃcult to conceive of the heritage of violence as a separate category of heritage sites or objects; it is more a leitmotif that runs through many heritage resources, instruments and objectives. So much of the past was violent that a wide variety of such events could be, and generally have been, memorialized. These include wars, natural and man-made disasters and accidents, atrocities, violent crimes and even violence-dependent sports and entertainments. No aempt will be made either to inventorize or classify these. The focus will be upon the motivations, usages, impacts and management strategies, rather than on the almost inﬁnitely varied resources available for the construction of such heritage. Public heritage is created and managed for a wide range of diﬀerent purposes, whether social, political or economic, as are described elsewhere in this book. It is not the argument here that invoking a heritage of violence is the only device for realizing these goals; only that memorialized violence is a particularly powerful instrument in the pursuit of most of these heritage policy objectives. It is intrinsically likely to be more noticeable, more memorable and laden with stronger, more enduring emotions. The pursuit, for example, of the goals of social group cohesion and inclusion and the avoidance of the converse of social fragmentation and exclusion, is facilitated by the group feeling that it has been the victim of violence in the past. A heritage of victimization strengthens solidarity within the group and deﬁnes it in relation to the external perpetrator. Similarly, the political legitimation of dominant groups 232

T M

V T and ideologies within society is strongly reinforced by the existence of a heritage of a ‘freedom struggle’, with its accompanying pantheon of steadfast heroes and treacherous villains, as almost a sine qua non of the ‘birth of a nation’ (Ashworth, Graham and Tunbridge, 2007). At a less ideological level, past violence is eﬀective in simply endowing places with memorable identities. Just to see a sign of a place name such as Glencoe, Andersonville, Buchenwald or Sharpeville will trigger immediate recognition and associations in many observers. A space becomes a place needing no further interpretation. Tourism has been quick to identify and exploit the potential of the heritage of violence and has spawned a large and growing number of overlapping adjectival tourisms to describe these activities, which do not, however, refer just to tourists but oen relate more widely to non-tourist aitudes and behaviour. There is ‘hotspot’ tourism, focusing on the sites of recent dramatic and newsworthy events, where the drama may be heightened by violence. Ground Zero in New York City is an obvious example underlined by the graphic and endlessly repeated worldwide television coverage, and it has become not just a crucial visitor araction but instant heritage awaiting physical memorialization. A more speciﬁc variant is ‘killing ﬁelds tourism’, ﬁrst developed in Cambodia and also now extant at other sites of well-publicized large-scale massacre such as those in Rwanda and Bosnia, in which place markers, victim documentation centres, ossuaries and mass graves become visitable and interpreted aractions as part of tourism packages. A diﬀerent category is ‘intrepid traveller’ tourism, where it is not the violence done to others that is the araction but the deliberate seeking out of the possibility, however remote, of violence being perpetrated on the visitor, which contributes a frisson of excitement and the satisfaction of retrospectively relating the achievement. The long history of human warfare, the ultimate exercise in organized violence, provides the resources for a major industry and leisure-time activity. This is reﬂected in major industries engaged in: publishing; ﬁlming; programme making; simulation gaming; re-enactment; and toy and model-making. Unsurprisingly, therefore, it is also reﬂected in war heritage activities, in which the historical events, personalities, architecture, instruments and equipment of warfare through the centuries are related and experienced through: museums; theme parks; monuments; military architecture; cemeteries and the like. ‘Baleﬁeld heritage’ locates these activities in a visitable space and has itself a long history (Seaton, 2002). Civilians drove out from Brussels to view the baleﬁeld of Waterloo immediately aer the bale in 1815 (Seaton, 1999), while the second bale of Manassas (Bull Run), which took place near Washington DC in 1862 during the US Civil War, was itself treated as a viewable spectacle. Interpretation of the heritage of war has oscillated between diﬀerent approaches to the violence inherent in the activity. Violence suitably sanitized and transformed into valour and sacriﬁce for a cause becomes celebrated as dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. An industrial heritage approach focuses upon technical advances in hardware, while a strategic/tactical approach reduces military actions to a game of move and countermove. Both of these aempt to ignore or contain the intrinsic violence. In contrast to these approaches, there are interpretations that use the violence to stress the horror, pity or just futility of war. 233

T A R C

H I Most war-associated museum and monument interpretations are ambivalent and oen oscillate between these approaches (Mayo, 1988). Historic sites associated with violence can generate two opposite forms of tourism. There is ‘victim tourism’ in which the visitor identiﬁes with the victims, which can become a ‘grudge’ or even ‘revenge tourism’ when an identiﬁed perpetrator is blamed. Such identiﬁcation with victims of past violence may extend into the present, deﬁning and strengthening the solidarity of the victimized group and even justifying the group’s present actions. Its converse is ‘mea culpa tourism’ in which those identifying with the perpetrators of the violence are motivated by a desire for reconciliation or resolution of past violence. Three major historical events that have been used in these ways and which support a global tourism are: the Atlantic slave trade of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Dann and Seaton, 2003); the Holocaust of the Jewish people, 1933–45 (Ashworth and Hartmann, 2005a); and, more recently, the imposition of legalized racial discrimination through apartheid policies, predominantly but not only in South Africa, 1948–94 (Ashworth, 2004). An even wider ﬁeld of tourism has been labelled ‘thana-’ or ‘dark’ tourism (Lennon and Foley, 2000; Seaton, 1996). This is where the tourist’s experience is essentially composed of ‘dark’ emotions (such as pain, death, horror or sadness, many of which result from the inﬂiction of violence) that are not usually associated with a voluntary entertainment experience. The darkness relates to the emotions experienced rather than the intrinsic qualities of a site or exhibit. Thus the same heritage object such as a war cemetery or extermination camp could evoke both dark and non-dark emotions in the experience of the consumer. All of the above deliberately utilize the emotional power of memorialized violence to create tourism products and enhance the tourism experience. However, they also create, actually or potentially, various dissonances; these are conditions in which there is a lack of congruence at a particular time or place between people and the heritage they are experiencing. Violence is one important and even prevalent ingredient in such heritage, not least because much of it has elements of being undesirable, embarrassing or even hurtful to some. Management policy and practice in heritage, as discussed below, oen revolves around aempts to manage or mitigate the dissonances caused by the memorialization of the violence of the past.

Memorability Much of the past for most people everywhere has been violent. Only a small fraction from this vast stock of experiences will ever be selected by individuals and collective agencies for remembrance. Violence cannot be memorialized if it is not noticed and reported. Therefore it is reasonable to enquire about the aributes that allow or encourage one violent act to be memorialized when untold thousands more go unnoticed and unremembered. A number of factors determine whether an event will be both selected and subsequently remembered. These include: the nature of the event itself, including its scale and uniqueness; the ease of identiﬁcation of the observer with that event, which may include its recentness; 234

T M

V T and, ﬁnally, its memorability in terms of recordability, current relevance and usability and its intrinsic promotional qualities. If such factors determine success in remembrance, changes in them can equally lead to a fading of memory and, ultimately, forgeing. In terms of the nature of the violence itself, it would seem reasonable that the scale of the violence, the extent and intensity of its consequences, or just its bizarre and unique character would contribute to its unusualness and thus ease of memorialization. However, memorable historical atrocities have involved violence inﬂicted upon only a handful of victims while many millions may die quite unnoticed elsewhere. Equally, large-scale violence may be easier to grasp if it can be personalized by being reduced to a more comprehensible scale. This could be called the ‘Anne Frank phenomenon’, in which personal empathy is easier to evoke for one named and known individual than for an amorphous and anonymous group of many millions (Hartmann, 2001; 2005). The same is the case for the perpetrators of violence who are easier to remember if personalized (the ‘butcher of x’ or ‘Jack the Ripper’). The closeness and relevance of the event to the observer is as important as its scale. The renowned, but probably apocryphal, British newspaper headline, ‘Small earthquake in Chile; not many hurt’, combines both scale and distance from the observer. It seems obvious that the more recent the historical occurrence, the more likely it is that it will be remembered. Many recent violent events subjected to intense media coverage appear to conform to a paern of immediate notice, rising rapidly to a peak of interest, followed by a precipitous decline and erasure from public consciousness as curiosity is satiated and newer events are superimposed upon memory. For a short period in the late 1990s, the homes of the serial rapists and murderers, Detroux (Charleroi, Belgium) and West (Gloucester, England) became major unoﬃcial tourism aractions, as did the sites of a succession of US high school shooting incidents. However, in a maer of weeks public interest had waned and moved on to new events and their sites. Many people, not directly involved in the event, would not now immediately recognize the signiﬁcance of such places as Columbine High School (1999, 14 dead), Omagh, Northern Ireland (1998, 29 dead and two unborn children), Dunblane, Scotland (1996, 16 dead), Waco, Texas (1993, 76 dead), Aberfan, Wales (1966, 144 dead) or Lynmouth, Devon (1952, 34 dead), despite their former media notoriety. They have faded from public memory. Our cities and churches are full of memorials to violent events that now evoke lile emotion or even recognition from an observer. However, the relationship between the enduring strength of the memory and the lapse of time is oen not so straightforward. Some events are more ephemeral than others, while some remain memorable and usable for certain contemporary purposes for many centuries. Some violent events that were publicized in the service of a particular political purpose just pass out of memory when that purpose disappears. The need to ‘remember Amritsar’ (1919), ‘avenge the Maine’ (1898) or indeed the ‘Black Hole of Calcua’ (1756) no longer exists and few have any incentive to encourage the transmission of such memories to future generations. However, dormant heritage can be rediscovered and revived and the heritage of violence 235

T A R C

H I can be periodically re-invigorated and re-interpreted for diﬀerent generations as contemporary needs and ideologies change. General George Custer’s ‘Last Stand’ (1876) has been, at least oﬃcially, renamed less partisanly as ‘Bale of the Lile Big Horn’, and there has even been a noticeable reversal of the roles of perpetrators and victims, heroes and villains. There is one ﬁnal characteristic of memorability, namely knowledge. The event must be noticed before it can be remembered and the dissemination of knowledge about violent events has become a task of professional communication media using global information distribution techniques. It is not unduly cynical to note that the presence of an international television reporting team guarantees this knowledge, while, conversely, a strategy of forgeing presupposes control of such media and thus of knowledge.

The Attraction of Violence Before describing the uses of the heritage of violence, the reasons why people are aracted to it must be explored. Posing the question ‘why remember violence?’ has an ever-present converse, namely ‘why not forget violence?’ A characteristic of this topic is that violence is both aractive and repellent and encourages both remembering and forgeing. There are many reasons why individuals and groups may wish not to remember or to forget. Distress, pain and ultimately death are the unavoidable experience of us all and the lapse or erasure of memories of unpleasant pasts and reminders of unpleasant futures would seem more in the current interests of individuals and their societies. Therefore, the deliberate choice to remember needs a justiﬁcation that must be clariﬁed and the interests of the beneﬁciaries must be made explicit. The uses are oen collective but these depend upon the araction of violence to the individual. Violence may be memorialized because of its appeal to the individual as a psychological ‘selement of memory’ through mourning and closure (as typiﬁed by cemeteries and by spontaneous memorials that spring up at the sites of violent death, whether road accidents or notable murders). However, the araction to the individual who is not directly involved as victim or perpetrator to the memorialized violence of the past can usually be explained as an inextricable mixture of three main universal human emotions. People are aracted to sites of these events through a mix of curiosity, empathy and araction to horror.

Curiosity The unusual catches and holds the aention of people. The spectacular natural phenomenon, built structure or event satisﬁes a human curiosity. It aracts and holds aention because it is out of the ordinary, daily familiarity. In so far as violence is unusual, it will therefore be as interesting and as aractive as the Grand Canyon, Taj Mahal or a royal coronation. Although we now regard gladiatorial combats, viewing mental patients (as at London’s Bedlam), watching public executions, or even treating 236

T M

V T bales as a spectator araction, as distasteful, the main motive was and remains just the experience of the unusual. The behaviour of people who stop to view the results of road accidents or air crashes, or visit areas aﬀected by natural disasters (such as recently the 2004 South-east Asian Tsunami or 2005 Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans) is oen roundly condemned by a media whose reporting stimulated the interest in the ﬁrst instance. Such ‘disaster tourism’ can be seen as being irresponsible, in that it hinders emergency services, but also distasteful in that it intrudes on the suﬀerings of others, which borders on the psychotically disturbed. However, it is only one expression of a seemingly universal and insatiable appetite for witnessing, through many media, the unusual. Also some dangerous spectator sports, and even traditional circus activities, owe their entertainment value to the simultaneously feared and eagerly anticipated possibility of a personal disaster overtaking the participants.

Empathy On a more socially acceptable level, empathy relies upon the capacity of heritage consumers to identify themselves with the individuals involved in the violence memorialized. It may seem more acceptable to experience an empathetic identiﬁcation than an ethically less acceptable voyeurism, although it is diﬃcult to draw this distinction in human emotion and equally diﬃcult to express it through memorial interpretation. Empathy is usually assumed to be with the memorialized victims (‘this could have been me’). It could equally, however, be with the perpetrators of the violence (‘I could have done that’), which raises diﬃcult and highly sensitive issues of heritage interpretation. In particular, the creators and managers of the heritage of violence may justify graphic description as creating empathy with victims and thus preventing a recurrence of similar events. They have, however, lile knowledge or control of the motives or reactions of the consumers who may be empathizing with the perpetrators and may even be stimulated to replicate the violent events. Dann’s (1981) idea of the visitor engaging in fantasy poses the questions as to which fantasy has been selected and which role is being acted out here – that of the victim or the perpetrator or both?

Horror It may seem repugnant and just morally unacceptable for people to be entertained by the accounts of the suﬀering of others. However, there has always been a link between descriptions of violence and entertainment. The portrayal of horror, once safely distanced or contained, and the evocation of emotions of fear and fascination have long been staples of literature, folk stories and, more recently, ﬁlm and television. The heritage of violence may be as entertaining as any of these media, convey similar emotions, and may be as morally acceptable. There may a qualitative diﬀerence between an interpreted baleﬁeld site or museum display and a tourist ‘murder trail’, ‘ghost walk’, ‘chamber of horrors’ and the like, but they all depend on the same exciting frisson of proximity to horror. The dungeon is usually the most visited part of a castle, and ‘death row’ is the highpoint of a visit to a prison 237

T A R C

H I museum, such as Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay. This araction to horror, bizarre as it may seem, can be exploited as a major entertainment resource, which in turn raises the question as to whether this is the aberrant behaviour of psychologically unbalanced and socially anomalous individuals, or quite normal, as we are all to a greater or lesser degree ‘children of the dark’ (Dann, 2005).

Management Strategies for the Heritage of Violence Why Manage? Events and places associated with violence not only aract the aention of individuals, but they are also put to various collective uses by public agencies. Why should governments wish the violence of the past to be remembered or, conversely, forgoen, and what are the strategies designed to achieve either goal? Many sites, memorials, museums and exhibitions relating to the heritage of violence encourage visitors as part of their educational mission and justiﬁcation for their existence. Visitors, however, may have many motives, and their private motivations may diverge from public goals, so management policies that discriminate between visitors who are acceptably or unacceptably motivated are almost impossible to devise. The most important use of all public heritage, and the main reason for its intentional creation by public authorities, is the creation and strengthening of group identity. People are encouraged to identify with a social group, place or ideology. The heritage of violence is likely to be a particularly eﬀective instrument for achieving such goals of social cohesion, place identiﬁcation or political legitimation because of its memorability and the powerful emotions it evokes for the reasons already argued. An awareness of being, directly or indirectly, a victim of violence both strengthens solidarity with others of the perceived victimized group, and distinguishes this group clearly from outsiders and particularly from the nominated perpetrators and their descendants: The cry ‘remember the Alamo/Dingaan’s Kraal/Drogheda/Londonderry/etc’, combines a powerful sense of injustice and desire for revenge whose eﬀect is both internal cohesion for the perceived victimized group (Texans, Afrikaners, Catholics and Protestants respectively) and externally directed enmity against the perceived group of perpetrators (in these cases, Mexicans, Zulus, Protestants and Catholics). The question, why remember or in whose interest is it that we remember is the most signiﬁcant (Ashworth and Hartmann, 2005b, 258). The range of possible management strategies must now be considered. The motives, whether to remember or to forget, and the resulting strategies for the management of memorialized violence can be viewed from three perspectives, namely: that of the victims and those identifying with them; the perpetrators and those identifying with them; and the bystanders who feel not directly involved. Each perspective 238

T M

V T results in its own range of strategies. Any given site may, of course, include a range of diﬀerent interpretations from diﬀerent perspectives. In addition, as with all heritage interpretation, the messages may ultimately be received by quite diﬀerent people and understood in quite diﬀerent ways than was intended by the heritage managers originally transmiing them.

Motives and Strategies of the Victims Victims, and those associating with them, have many reasons to erase distressing memories of past violence done to them. The memory itself may be traumatic, personally psychically destabilizing, and may also be an obstacle to the shaping of beer futures for the individual or the group. Especially in situations where the victims or their descendants must still co-exist in the same place as the perceived perpetrators or beneﬁciaries of the violence, then some forgeing or at least the absence of public remembering may be in their own interest. A mutually agreed strategy of collective amnesia in the interests of social cohesion, harmony, or just the eﬃcient functioning of government, may be beneﬁcial to both groups. This is exempliﬁed by the post-World War II consensus in much of Western Europe regarding the German occupation, and later in Eastern and Central Europe regarding the Soviet one. Consensual amnesia tends to be a short-term strategy, as subsequent, less directly involved, generations oen wish to remember. Post-apartheid South Africa, in contrast, chose a path of public confrontation with the past through deliberate public recall and relating of events in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the idea being that the former would lead to the laer. Conversely, as argued earlier, a strategy of memorialized victimization can be used as the basis for group identity, providing internal cohesion and external demarcation. In its extreme form, the memorialization of a permanent and universal victimization can go beyond a founding mythology to forming the basis for continuing statehood, as well as a justiﬁcation for present actions, as in Israel and, more recently, to an extent in Serbia. Public heritage in these cases has the straightforward task of continually relating past injustices, and the resistance of the group to them. There are, of course, dangers inherent in the creation of a heritage through the memorialization of a perpetual victimization. The internal solidarity is achieved at the cost of external divisiveness. At the least a dominating sense of past injustice may not be an ideal paradigm for the guidance of future action, and may become lile more than an excuse for current diﬃculties or failings.

Motives and Strategies of the Perpetrators It is more diﬃcult to understand why the perpetrators or their descendants should want violence to be memorialized, when they would seem to have an interest in avoiding the creation of a heritage that is likely to be uncomfortably dissonant and disruptive to social harmony. However, violence has long been perpetrated with the deliberate intent of being publicized and memorialized, at least in the short term, for particular military or strategic advantage. Many post-siege massacres in history (Jerusalem, 70; 239

T A R C

H I Naarden, 1572; Magdeburg, 1631; Wexford, 1649) were commied as a deterrent to others not to resist, as was the nuclear bombing of Japan in 1945. Terrorist violence, similarly, depends upon publicity and memorability to achieve its objectives: terrorism in which the perpetrators were unknown would have no purpose. Perpetrators, or those identiﬁed by themselves or by others as inheritors of complicity in perpetration, generally react with ﬁve main strategies. At its simplest there is denial that the violence occurred at all or, if it did, it has been greatly exaggerated or was merely an unfortunate by-product of an unavoidable circumstance. Thus there is no heritage to interpret (Cohen, 2001). In extreme cases any aempt to create such a heritage is not only oﬃcially discouraged but also provokes legal sanctions. A currently widely publicized case would be the deaths of Armenians in the Ooman Empire in the period 1915–18, which it is illegal to call genocide in Turkey and equally illegal not to do so in France. Similarly the relationships between Japan and its neighbours continue to be blighted by the lack of consciousness, both in oﬃcial and unoﬃcial spheres, and recognition in public histories of the violence perpetrated by Japanese authorities in the countries they occupied during World War II. Secondly, there are a number of justiﬁcations for pursuing strategies of collective amnesia, whether as oﬃcial policy or as voluntary agreement. The memory, especially if relatively fresh, may just be too painful for perpetrator and victim alike. Opinion on the future of the Berlin Wall aer 1989 remains sharply polarized between those who favour complete demolition and erasure and those who wish to preserve or even rebuild it as a monument to its victims, a warning for the future or just as a tourist araction (Klausmeier and Schmidt, 2004). When perpetrators and victims are drawn from the same society and must coexist in the future, there is a strong argument for the maintenance of social harmony through an agreed amnesia or at least suspension of memory. In post-World War II Germany, the physical relics of the Nazi period, including the bodies of leaders, were destroyed by the Allies out of an anxiety of a revival of political extremism focused upon heritage sites and objects. Buildings and spaces associated with the Nazi regime such as the Nuremberg rally grounds, the Weimar Gauforum and the Führer Bunker under the Reichstag were generally unmarked and oﬃcially ignored for a generation until such a ‘history that hurts’ (Baker, 1988) could be safely preserved and interpreted Thirdly, a less defensive strategy is to use heritage interpretation to shi culpability for the violence to another group. This can involve either narrowing or conversely widening the allocation of blame. The former requires the demonization of preferably defunct regimes, cliques or individuals, which minimizes potential dissonances among present populations by distancing them from the events; the laer involves spreading culpability as widely as possible so as to dilute it to a chronic and universal historical condition and thus render it innocuous. Fourthly, in much of the heritage of violence, the distinction between deliberate perpetrators and innocent victims is not so clear, or can be purposefully blurred. In much wartime violence especially, the victims are to an extent complicit in their own fate, or at least their innocence can be balanced by a compensating violence commied on their behalf. Aerial bombardment, merchant ship sinkings and 240

T M

V T economic blockade can all be justiﬁed in this way. A number of German cities have inscribed memorials to their bombing during World War II but, almost without exception, reference is also made to the bombing of Allied cities by the Luwaﬀe. Finally, there are apologetic stances in which the events of the past are regreed, memorialized and even various compensations oﬀered to the victims. The problem, manifested, for example, in museums of the Atlantic slave trade in a number of British cities, is oen to determine who, aer the passage of time and migration, now represents either the victims or the perpetrators. With all of these perpetrator management strategies it cannot be assumed that oﬃcial agencies will implement, or society will accept, one clear-cut strategy. The oﬃcial policies of public agencies may not be the same as the opinions of local populations. In the United States, for example, many Civil War and ‘Indian War’ monuments have been removed, altered or reinterpreted as governments have adopted apologetic perpetrator strategies unacceptable to local people who favour either denial or victim-complicity strategies.

Motives and Strategies of Bystanders Those not directly involved, and not identifying with either victims or perpetrators, may have an interest in remembering. The educational argument asserts that the past has lessons relevant to the future and a memorialization of past violence may prevent its recurrence. The interpretation of many of the sites of historical violence, as well as numerous ‘peace’ museums and memorials, has the quite explicit objective of the prevention of recurrence. Past violence is memorialized as a lesson for the present and hope for the future as much as a description of the past (Uzzell, 1989, 46). A fundamental diﬃculty with the reconciliation and prevention approach is that the message projected by the interpreters and that received by the consumers may be quite diﬀerent. Simply, the promoted message may not be heard, if heard not noticed, and if noticed not understood in the way intended. The producers of the heritage may regard their didactic function of educating visitors in worthy ideas as a paramount justiﬁcation, while the consumer has many other oen quite diﬀerent motives, including simply being entertained by the less savoury aspects of humanity. The strongest misgiving about the use of the heritage of violence in order to prevent its recurrence is simply that historically it has not worked. Increasing knowledge of violence in a shrinking world has not led to a diminution of it and even arguably may have increased it through technology transfer, replication and the existence of a potential instant world audience.

A Confusion of Roles, Markets and Goals All of the above assumes that recipients of the messages contained in heritage can be allocated to one of three groups, that the heritage is serving a single contemporary consumer market and that the goals of the producers are unambiguous. In the political and social reality of public-heritage policy none of these assumptions is likely to be 241

T A R C

H I correct. A confusion of roles occurs when the same group can be identiﬁed as both victim and perpetrator in the same or subsequent events. The mutinous sepoys of the British East India Company in 1857 can interchange the two roles of victim and perpetrator in diﬀerent events and interpretations. West Africans were both victims and fellow perpetrators of the Atlantic slave trade (see Dann and Seaton, 2003; Richards, 2005). A confusion of markets occurs when the same heritage site or artefact serves, by design or circumstance, diﬀerent heritage consumers with quite diﬀerent motives. Frequently a heritage site may serve internal political or social needs for solidarity, cohesion or legitimation while, simultaneously, being sold on external tourism markets as entertainment. Either diﬀerent interpretations are presented to segmented markets that must be separated, or a single interpretation is presented, which is unlikely to satisfy either consumer group and may, in some cases, be oﬀensive to one of them. Much heritage experience can be labelled as ‘edutainment’ in that both producer and consumer are aempting to combine educational and entertainment elements, but the sensitive nature of the heritage of violence renders market management both especially diﬃcult and necessary. The long-standing series of controversies surrounding re-interpretation and visitor management at the former concentration camp at Dachau near Munich is a clear example of the problem and, in this case, the diﬃculty of ﬁnding sensitive management solutions (Marcuse, 2001). Finally there is the confusion, or at least ambiguity, in the objectives of the creators and interpreters of a heritage of violence, especially around the central issue of whether the memorialization of violence makes its repetition more or less likely. Memorializing the violence of the past may anaesthetize rather than sensitize recipients, making violence more normal and acceptable rather than shocking and unacceptable. Relating past violence may even encourage others to copy it. There is also an argument that memorializing and promoting sites related to terrorist violence may publicize and legitimate the violence and those who commied it and thus encourage more in the same or a diﬀerent ideological cause. The many sectarian wall murals and graﬃti laced with accounts of 30 years of sectarian terrorist violence in Northern Ireland have become a routine part of a tourist experience. Such heritage tourism can be seen as a socially and politically undesirable recognition and legitimation of past violence and encouragement to future violent acts. Finally, although the violence of the past may be aractive to consumers, as argued above, it may equally be repellent if they feel that they themselves could become victims of a continuing violence, inconvenienced by its consequences or just merely because they ﬁnd its recent memory distasteful rather than aractive. Against these arguments must be balanced the explicit intentions of many of the creators and interpreters of the public heritage of violence, who frequently have a quite openly expressed pedagogic purpose. Past violence is to be remembered and related, not only to forge empathy with past victims but also to make any future repetition of such events in comparable circumstances less likely. Further, many interpretations aempt to draw philanthropic lessons from the past that are considered to be relevant for the present and the future. There is evidence that the traditional war-museum interpretations, dominated by narratives of heroic and righteous national struggle against folk enemies, are being increasingly 242

T M

V T supplemented with accounts of the unpleasant experiences of war upon both military and civilians on all sides, as is especially noticeable in the recently opened Imperial War Museum North at Salford, UK. There are also museums explicitly dedicated to peace reconciliation such as at Verdun, Caen or on the River Kwai at Khanchanaburi. The agenda has clearly changed from the glory, or at least grim necessity, of war to the suﬀering it engenders and thus the need to avoid it. The moo ‘lest we forget’ has been extended to ‘never again’. All these interpretations of memorials, museums and sites of memorialized violence raise a major uncertainty. The objectives of such heritage producers are oen clear, altruistic and humanitarian. How their pedagogic moralizing messages are received by the consumers of such heritage, whether they are actually received at all, and whether consumer behaviour is altered to the beneﬁt of future societies as a result of the heritage experience, remains unknown. Thus in exploring the heritage of violence, the questions ‘What is it?’, ‘Why is it remembered?’, and ‘How is it interpreted?’ can elicit some answers, however ambiguous; but the question ‘Should it be remembered?’ remains stubbornly unanswered and unresearched.

References Ashworth, G.J. (2004), ‘Tourism and the Heritage of Atrocity: Managing the Heritage of South African Apartheid for Entertainment’, in T.V. Singh (ed.), New Horizons in Tourism: Strange Experiences and Stranger Practices (Basingstoke: CABI), 95–108. Ashworth, G.J., Graham, B. and Tunbridge, J.E. (2007), Pluralising Pasts: Heritage, Identity and Place in Multicultural Societies (London: Pluto). Ashworth, G.J. and Hartmann, R. (eds) (2005a), Horror and Human Tragedy Revisited: The Management of Sites of Atrocities for Tourism (New York: Cognizant). Ashworth, G.J. and Hartmann, R. (2005b), ‘The Management of Horror and Human Tragedy’, in G.J. Ashworth and R. Hartmann (eds), Horror and Human Tragedy Revisited: The Management of Sites of Atrocities for Tourism (New York: Cognizant), 253–62. Baker, F. (1988), ‘The History that Hurts: Excavating 1933–1945’, Archaeological Review from Cambridge 1, 93–109. Cohen, S. (2001), States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suﬀering (London: Polity). Dann, G. (1981), ‘Tourism Motivation: An Appraisal’, Annals of Tourism Research 8, 187– 219. Dann, G.M.S. (2005), ‘Children of the Dark’, in G.J. Ashworth and R. Hartmann (eds), Horror and Human Tragedy Revisited: The Management of Sites of Atrocities for Tourism (New York: Cognizant), 233–52. Dann, G.M.S and Seaton, A.V. (eds) (2003), Slavery, Contested Heritage and Thanatourism (New York/London: Haworth).

243

T A R C

H I Hartmann, R. (2001), ‘Tourism to the Anne Frank House’, in V. Smith and M. Brent (eds), Hosts and Guests Revisited: Tourism Issues of the 21st Century (New York: Cognizant), 210–16. Hartmann, R. (2005), ‘Holocaust Memorials Without Holocaust Survivors: The Management of Museums and Memorials to Victims of Nazi Germany in 21st Century Europe’, in G.J. Ashworth and R. Hartmann (eds), Horror and Human Tragedy Revisited: The Management of Sites of Atrocities for Tourism (New York: Cognizant), 89–107. Klausmeier, A. and Schmidt, L. (2004), Wall Remnants – Wall Traces (Berlin: Westkreuz-verlag). Lennon, J.J. and Foley, M. (2000), Dark Tourism: In the Footsteps of Death and Disaster (London: Cassell). Marcuse, H. (2001), Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp 1933–2001 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Mayo, J. (1988), ‘War Memorials as Political Memory’, Geographical Review 78:1, 62–75. Richards, S.L. ( 2005), ‘Performing Family: Cultural Travel to Ghana’s Slave Castles’, in G.J. Ashworth and R. Hartmann (eds), Horror and Human Tragedy Revisited: The Management of Sites of Atrocities for Tourism (New York: Cognizant), 224–32. Seaton, A.V. (1996), ‘Guided by the Dark: From Thanatopsis to Thanatourism’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 2:4, 234–44. Seaton, A.V. (1999), ‘War and Thanatourism: Waterloo 1815–1914’, Annals of Tourism Research 26:1, 130–59. Seaton, A.V. (2002), ‘Another Weekend Away Looking for Dead Bodies: Baleﬁeld Tourism on the Somme and in Flanders’, Tourism Recreation Research 25:3, 63–78. Singh, T.V. (ed.) (2004), New Horizons in Tourism: Strange Experiences and Stranger Practices (Basingstoke: CABI). Smith, V. and Brent, M. (eds) (2001), Hosts and Guests Revisited: Tourism Issues of the 21st Century (New York: Cognizant). Uzzell, D. (ed.) (1989), Heritage Interpretation (London: Belhaven).

244

14

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

Conservation and Restoration in Built Heritage: A Western European Perspective Ascensión Hernández Martínez

There is no doubt that the modern concept of heritage is a product of European culture. Its birth can be traced to eighteenth-century France and linked to the Enlightenment, especially as related to architecture. At that time, the term was used in reference to ruins and monuments, exempliﬁed by the Gothic cathedrals, that were constructions of singular character and represented historical, moral and social values in a way that made them national symbols. The concept was gradually extended to include urban centres (the ‘old towns’ that are of such importance to many European cities), intangible assets (folklore, music customs and rites) and ‘natural heritage’ (from historic gardens to untouched virgin landscapes). In the twentieth century, a further change took place as we were forced to examine notions traditionally related to heritage, such as authenticity, on the basis that not all cultures understand the concept in the same way. Examples of this would be the inclusion in the World Heritage List of African adobe architecture (Tombuctu, Mali, in 1988) or the wooden constructions of the Orient (various Japanese Buddhist and Shinto temples in 1998 and 1999). Returning to Europe, a consequence of the development of ‘a heritage consciousness’ was the need for conservation. The end of the eighteenth century saw the dawning of the discipline of restoration, born out of an interest in preserving these monuments to our history and safeguarding them for future generations. This was the result of a long process that started in the Renaissance period of the sixteenth century, when a fascination with the ancient world led to the collecting of works of art. The phenomenon of collecting began with a passion for rare objects, was followed by the desire to possess objects of great beauty, and ﬁnally focused on antiquity. What diﬀerentiates the contemporary approach to heritage is a consciousness of historicity that was absent in previous centuries. This absence of consciousness is the reason why, throughout the centuries, many valuable buildings have been demolished or transformed beyond recognition: it was believed that they lacked any historic or artistic worth. A good example of this mentality would

T A R C

H I be the disappearance of the Islamic mosques in Spain in the Middle Ages. Aer the Christian Reconquest, the Spanish monarchs built great city cathedrals as symbols of the new faith, and they generally built them over the ruins of the mosques. The history of Europe is replete with many similar stories. The consciousness of historicity was a product of the Enlightenment and would serve as a basis for the nationalism of the nineteenth century. It was clearly inﬂuenced by the arrival, from the middle of the eighteenth century onward, of the historical sciences, particularly the history of art and archaeology. In many cases, these disciplines were supported and promoted by the state – it was the Spanish monarch, Charles III, who was the driving force behind the ﬁrst scientiﬁc, archaeological excavations in Europe (Pompeii and Herculano in Italy). The systematic study and cataloguing of the artefacts of the past led to the deﬁnition of styles and historic periods (Winckelmann, 1764); this was the ﬁrst time we understood that all historical periods have a beginning and an end and leave material evidence as a testimony to the past. The periodization of the history of art is what helps to deﬁne what is, or is not, a monument and, by extension, heritage. It was no coincidence that the interest of the archaeologists, historians and architects, who were strongly inﬂuenced by Romanticism, was centred on European medieval architecture to the detriment of other periods, such as Baroque, because this justiﬁed the immediate restoration of a number of medieval temples and cathedrals like those in Cologne (Germany), León (Spain) and Durham (England) (Jokilehto, 1999a). Since the nineteenth century, there has been a very close relationship between historical knowledge, value and the restoration of architectural heritage. This chapter draws upon a succession of Western European examples to address the long-contested interconnections between the concepts of conservation and restoration in heritage. It deals ﬁrst with an account of this debate, before a more detailed discussion that examines the issues from three particular perspectives: restoration visibility; the visual distinction of the restoration; and, ﬁnally, the idea of compatibility. The debate is informed by the methodology and perspective of art history.

The Protection of Western Architectural Heritage: Conservation versus Restoration The concept of heritage implied the need for its restoration and from the very beginning there were disagreements as to how this should be done. A polemic developed between those who were in favour of the complete restoration of monuments and those who believed in simple conservation (Carbonara, 1997; Jokilehto, 1999a; See, 2001). Restoration, in its etymological sense, ‘to bring back to a former, original or normal condition’, had always occurred, with the repair of damage caused by war, use or lack of maintenance. Buildings were also changed according to the fashions and tastes of each epoch. It must not be forgoen that an architectural object is a living organism that is always subject to a process of change and degeneration, and this must be mitigated by maintenance and, when necessary, restoration. 246

C

R

B H Nevertheless, restoration, as understood today, is a scientiﬁc discipline that is very diﬀerent from the artisanal practices of the past. It has a rigorous methodology that employs instruments from other scientiﬁc disciplines (archaeology, chemistry, history) and is based on the conviction that historical architecture represents a complex document that has passed through time and been subjected to many modiﬁcations. Therefore, any intervention must involve a critical analysis and the taking of important decisions. When a building is restored, it is also transformed. In any intervention, some parts will disappear (for structural reasons, for adaptation to new use, irreparably bad condition or economic non-viability), some will remain (those that are testimony to its historical evolution or have great artistic value), and new structures may be added (to give a historic building a new use). The debate on architectural restoration is based on these issues: Should we conserve those parts of a building that were not original and added during its history? Is it legitimate to add new structures to a historic monument? In which formal language or style should new structures be added so that they do not completely change the nature of the building? The fundamental question at the core of the contemporary restoration debate is where to establish the limits of the intervention. Modern restoration began in the nineteenth century with the French architect Eugène Emmanuele Viollet-le-Duc (1814–79). He formulated the ﬁrst theory of restoration known as ‘stylistic restoration’, which dominated the international panorama for most of the nineteenth and the ﬁrst third of the twentieth century. Viollet-le-Duc believed that the value of a monument was in its form or style; restoration should therefore be concerned with the recovery of that form. This was made possible by studying the history of art, the classiﬁcation of buildings by schools or epochs, and through analogical-comparative analysis. Underpinning these ideas was the belief that contemporary architecture could improve and perfect the historic building. The knowledge of past forms and styles meant that missing parts could be rebuilt with the mimetic reproduction of the existing parts. This reduced the restoration of monuments to a simple process, as each building had to conform to a style which was well understood due to the comparative study of monuments of similar chronology and origin. The walls of Carcassonne (Figure 14.1), the Basilica at Vézelay and Saint Sernin in Toulouse were some of the most important monuments restored by Viollet-le-Duc, whose school of restoration became popular throughout Europe. In reality, Viollet-le-Duc had done lile more than put into practice the theories of predecessors such as Prosper Mérimée (1803–70), the Inspecteur General du Service des monuments historiques de la France. In 1843, Mérimée had announced that the restoration of French monuments should be carried out in accordance with the following instructions: All innovation should be avoided, and the forms of the conserved models should be faithfully copied. Where no trace is le of the original, the artist should double his eﬀorts in research and study by consulting monuments of the same period, of the same style, from the same country, and should reproduce these types under the same circumstances and proportions (Jokilehto, 1999a, 138). 247

T A R C

H I

Figure 14.1 Design for the restoration of the walls of Carcassonne However, this total conﬁdence in a restoration methodology that could be equally applied to all monuments and the desire to impose a uniform style on buildings that had been changed many times in their history was oen taken to extremes. This was sometimes manifested in the complete reconstruction of ruined ediﬁces (as in the chateau at Pierrefonds in France, rebuilt between 1857 and 1887) and sometimes evidenced in the elimination of historically valuable parts of buildings that had been added in later epochs. The obsession with stylistic purity and the revaluation of medieval architecture resulted in some lamentable actions which included the destruction of numerous Baroque facades that had been superimposed on medieval structures. A notable example was the destruction of the Baroque façade of Santa María in Cosmedin (Rome) built by Giuseppe Sardi in 1718; it was demolished between 1892 and 1898 on the orders of the architect, Giovenale. 248

C

R

B H At the opposite end of the spectrum to Viollet-le-Duc was the English intellectual John Ruskin (1819–1900). He was the leader of the anti-restoration movement whose ideas were the inspiration for the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (Morris, 1877). Although misunderstood at the time, some of the ideas put forward by Ruskin and his disciple, William Morris, are today considered as fundamental to modern cultural heritage conservation. They believed in minimum intervention, the idea that buildings do not belong exclusively to us but also to our ancestors and descendants. We, therefore, have a moral duty to protect them so we should be vigilant in terms of daily maintenance. They encouraged a more respectful aitude to monuments, an approach that was close to the Romanticist sense of the ruin as picturesque and sublime. Ruskin poetically expressed these ideas with ‘The Lamp of Memory’ in The Seven Lamps of Architecture (Ruskin, 1849): Neither by the public, nor by those who have the care of public monuments, is the true meaning of the word restoration understood. It means the total destruction which a building can suﬀer: a destruction out of which no remnants can be gathered; a destruction accompanied with false description of the thing destroyed … Do not let us talk then of restoration. The thing is a Lie from beginning to end. You may make a model of a building as you may of a corpse, and your model may have the shell of the old walls within it as your cast might have the skeleton, with what advantage I neither see nor care: but the old building is destroyed, and that more totally and mercilessly than if it had sunk into a heap of dust, or melted into a mass of clay: more has been gleaned out of desolated Nineveh than ever will be out of rebuilt Milan (cited in Jokilehto, 1999a, 175). Amidst this restoration/conservation dilemma, the end of the nineteenth century saw the emergence in Italy of a ‘third way’; an approach which avoided both the style-obsessed excesses of the restorers and the radicalism of those that preferred to see the disappearance of a building rather than an intervention. The Italian architect, Camillo Boito (1836–1914), advocated the ‘theory of philological restoration’ that was clearly inﬂuenced by the ideas of Ruskin and Morris. Boito emphasized conservation over restoration. The laer should take place only when the monument is in danger of disappearance and absolutely necessary, and the intervention should be kept to the minimum, avoiding any kind of stylistic reconstruction. In addition, Boito believed in preserving the authenticity of the monument and in respecting its epochs and modiﬁcations. He argued that it was necessary that the parts that were added in a restoration should be visually diﬀerent from the original material. Boito ﬁrst expressed these ideas at the Fourth Congress of Engineers and Architects in Rome in January 1883, and they were reﬁned, through speeches and wrien works, into the celebrated ‘eight points’ (Boito, 1889) that were adopted by the Italian administration and became the ﬁrst modern document that set out criteria for intervention. Boito recommended minimum restoration and argued that new construction should use materials and forms that were diﬀerent from the original. He was in favour of the introduction of contemporary architecture, 249

T A R C

H I arguing that the date of the restoration should appear on the monument and that the intervention should be fully documented and archived. His belief was that the monument deserved scrupulous respect and that it should be a faithful reﬂection of its history: Considering that architectural monuments from the past are not only valuable for the study of architecture but contribute as essential documents to explain and illustrate all the facets of the history of various peoples throughout the ages, they should, therefore, be scrupulously and religiously respected as documents in which any alteration, however slight, if it appears to be part of the original could be misleading and eventually give rise to erroneous assumptions (Boito, 1893, cited in Jokilehto, 1999a, 201). Boito had enormous inﬂuence, not least on and through the Italian engineer Gustavo Giovannoni (1873–1947) who adopted and meliorated his principles. Giovannoni became one of the most important voices in the restoration debate and, at the 1931 Athens Conference, was instrumental in draing the Athens Charter. This was the ﬁrst international document that marked the transformation of the concept of restoration as a process of re-integration (the Viollet-le-Duc tendency that dominated the nineteenth century) to the concept of restoration as a process of conservation (the current tendency). The Carta Italiana del Restauro of 1932 consolidated this position. Giovannoni’s theories were based on minimum intervention, minimum addition and vehemently rejected stylistic intervention. For this engineer and historian, scientiﬁc restoration signiﬁed defending the conservation of the monument as a historic document (respecting the historical epochs of the construction) and as a work of art. These beliefs had been postulated by Boito but Giovannoni added the concept of the value of the ambience of the monument (as in ‘old towns’) and an interest in ‘lesser [vernacular] architecture’. This was a key development as conventional restoration practice had looked at monuments in isolation, a process that ignored and ultimately led to the loss of many urban areas of historical importance in Western cities. The evolution of restoration as an arena of international concern in the twentieth century is symbolized by Giovannoni’s ideas. Nevertheless, in spite of a voluminous bibliography, diﬀerences between theory and practice were made very clear in the diﬃculty of adapting individual cases to a general methodology, a problem exacaerbated by World War II. The trauma of the destruction of a number of European cities required a stylistic reconstruction of the lost monuments, a practice that had been rejected from the times of Boito to the Athens Charter. The rebuilding of Warsaw is probably the most emblematic example, although other cities like Cologne, Brussels, Milan, Munich and Naples were all part of a process that questioned established restoration beliefs and principles (Hernández Martínez, 2007). The answer, once again, came from Italy. Post-war Italian intellectualism produced brilliant historians and architects such as Giulio Carlo Argan (1909–94), Roberto Pane (1897–1987) and Renato Bonelli (1911–2004) (See, 2001). But perhaps the most famous of all was Cesare Brandi (1906–86), art historian, founder and 250

C

R

B H director of the Instituto Centrale del Restauro in Rome from 1939 to 1959, and author of the Teoria del Restauro (1963), a work recognized as the cornerstone of modern conservation and restoration, and inspiration for the Venice Charter of 1964 and the Carta Italiana del Restauro of 1972. Brandi’s primary and original contribution was to deﬁne restoration as more of a critical act than a technical one. His concept of ‘critical restoration’ argues that without renouncing the historical and documentary values of a work of art, restoration should be fundamentally based on aesthetic value. For Brandi, the objective of restoration was the re-establishment of the ‘potential unity’ of the work of art. An ancient sculpture broken into pieces or a painting missing an important section are perceived by the viewer as damaged or ruined objects; restoration is the medium through which their artistic condition can be recovered, be they altered by the passage of time or damaged. The original material should also be respected and, as much as possible, conserved. This reinforced the transcendence of physical knowledge of the work of art and the research methods applied to it. The same respect should be shown to the process of ageing, to the patina on the work of art; this should also be conserved, avoiding, for example, excessive cleaning of paintings. Paying strict aention to the original material is characteristic of the twentieth century and contrasts with the indiﬀerence shown by earlier architects who were more preoccupied by form, which was easily reproducible. Aged materials were systematically rejected and substituted without remorse. Brandi’s aim was to overcome the restoration/reconstruction dilemma through the assertion that the generalist methods used until that time had outlived their usefulness; each work of art had its own individual history and therefore involved the resolving of diﬀerent, individual problems. Each case had to be individually analysed. From this position, Brandi put forward a modern deﬁnition of restoration that, although polemical, has guided the discipline for the last 40 years: Restoration must be directed at the reestablishment of the potential unity of the work of art, as long as this is possible without commiing an artistic falsiﬁcation or a historical falsiﬁcation and without eliminating any trace of the work of art’s passage through time (Brandi, 1963, 11). In contrast with nineteenth-century thought, Brandi believed that the objective of restoration was not the renovation of historic architecture but its conservation. Restoration should adapt the modern reintegration work to the historic parts, in other words, submit the contemporary additions to the pre-existing architecture. This thinking was encapsulated in three fundamental principles: • • •

Any reintegration should be easily recognizable at close distance but, at the same time, it should not oﬀend the unity that is being restored; The part of material that directly results in the images is irreplaceable so far as it forms the aspect and not the structure; Any restoration should be so made that it will not be an obstacle for necessary future interventions; indeed, these should be facilitated (Brandi, 1963, cited in Jokilehto, 1999a, 236).

251

T A R C

H I Brandi’s ideas were incorporated into the International Charter for the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Sites, more widely known as the ‘Venice Charter’ of 1964. Backed by both UNESCO and the International Council of Museums (ICOM), this was eﬀectively a revision of the Athens Charter of 1931. It was adopted as the principal doctrinal document by ICOMOS, founded in 1965, and since then has become the main reference for the assessment of cultural heritage sites inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. The Charter’s great achievement is that it deﬁnitively sets out the contemporary criteria for heritage restoration (Varagnoli, 2004, 31). This includes the rejection of stylistic reconstruction, respect for historical additions and patina, support for minimum intervention, compatibility between old and new materials and the necessity of restoration reversibility. All these criteria are now accepted as part of general restoration methodology. Later documents such as the Italian Restoration Charters (1972 and 1985), the Amsterdam Charter (1975), the Nara Charter (1994) and the Krakow Charter (2000) have done lile more than widen the debate and develop the issues raised in Venice.

Restoration Reversibility: a Main Objective of Current Heritage Conservation Restoration must be reversible because when a part is missing from a monument we cannot always be sure what its original state was. An intervention is based more on hypotheses and interpretation (open to criticism with the passing of time) than certainty. Therefore, if new information about the monument, with respect of form or materials, should be found, we must be able to eliminate the restoration without damaging the monument. The objective of the intervention is to conserve the potential historic, artistic or cultural value of the monument in such a way that it may be reinterpreted at some point in the future. The reversible nature of interventions can be seen in the restoration of ancient sculptures, particularly from the sixteenth century, when it became fashionable to collect these works of art. Renaissance, Baroque and neo-classical sculptors searched for formulae and materials to return Greek and Roman ﬁgures (oen found in dispersed fragments) to their original state of perfection and beauty (Conti, 1988). In many cases, prestigious artists (Miguel Ángel, Bernini, Canova, Thorwaldsen), using their full range of skills and expertise, were charged with the restorations. In the course of the twentieth century, the natural deterioration of these works revealed the artiﬁcial nature of these additions, and the great European art galleries had to consider the merits of their elimination and reversing the restoration (Moltessen, 2005). A speciﬁc example is the Laocoon, a Hellenistic sculpture now in the Vatican Museum that was found in a fragmented state in the Roman ruins of the Baths of Titus in 1506. The sculpture has been restored, reintegrated and taken apart again in accordance with the changing hypotheses of restoration (Buranelli, 2006). Today the sculpture of three ﬁgures appears to be more or less complete, aer the de252

C

R

B H restoration – the reversal of previous interventions – by Filippo Magi between 1957 and 1960, of an arm that was reintegrated by Montorsoli in the sixteenth century and was itself a substitute for the wax arm ﬁed by Baccio Bandinelli between 1520 and 1525. The restoration history of the Laocoon illustrates another relevant observation that can be made about the nature of Western heritage; the diverse interventions made on the Greco-Roman statue make it clear that restoration is more than just a simple technique. Rather it is a sophisticated cultural act that reveals the tastes of the restorers – in other words, it reﬂects the societal values of the time. As can be seen in numerous sculptures, restored from the sixteenth century to the present day, the restorers of each epoch have adapted the works inherited from the past to suit their own tastes (Rossi Pinelli, 2003). In the modern age, it was deemed necessary to rebuild the broken and fragmented ancient works of art as, for a number of centuries, humankind had become used to a concept of beauty that was based on stylistic unity and a ‘ﬁnished’ work; it was not possible to assimilate and enjoy works of art in a state of archaeological ruin. The erudite comments of French archaeologist Quatremère de Quincy on the sculptor Thorwaldsen’s restoration of the gables of the Aegina Greek temple make the same point: I believe that from the restoration of the gables of the Aegina temple, we will learn and understand; we will not only learn to appreciate the gable statue compositions but we will also learn to appreciate the style of this ancient school … I am persuaded that ancient art would never have produced the eﬀect that it has had on public taste in the last half a century if all sculptural monuments had been le in a state of mutilation (Quatremère de Quincy, 1818, 82). Nevertheless, the twentieth-century artistic vanguard led to a radical transformation of tastes and aesthetics and the concept of an ‘open work’, which rejected historicist and academic art. This new panorama saw the appearance of the fragment, an original and aesthetic category that penetrated all manifestations of contemporary culture. From the fragmentary, interwoven tales of John Dos Passos’ Manhaan Transfer (1925), to the music of Arnold Schoenberg, jazz or the contemporary plastic of any genre, the progressive triumph of the fragment can be traced through its key works such as Rodin’s Meditation (1897), Frank Dobson’s Torso (1933), Sirens by Henri Laurens (1945) or Hans Arp’s Torso (1953). Aer the assimilation of these incomplete works (bodies without limbs), we became accustomed to, and capable of enjoying, ancient sculptures like Pollux (the Torso of Discobolo at the Louvre in Paris) in incomplete states. They became more approachable, almost as products of our time, and today that is how we appreciate these works in our museums, but only aer previous restorations and interventions have been eliminated. Perhaps one of the most spectacular and controversial cases of de-restoration was with the sculptures of the gables of Aphaia, Aegina, dated to 490 BC and restored by Thorwaldsen between 1816 and 1818. The internationally recognized Danish artist had tried to give unity to the group of statues, integrating the missing parts in 253

T A R C

H I a rigid, inexpressive style that was in line with the Greek work. In spite of its artistic quality, Thorwaldsen’s work was eliminated between 1962 and 1975, under the direction of Dieter Ohly, leaving only the original parts. The sculpture is currently on view in accordance with the latest museological thinking – a series of fragments supported by a metal structure. It is an open work that must be completed by the imagination of the viewer. For some experts, the extremism of this de-restoration is on a par with Thorwaldsen’s equally radical completion. What is certainly true is that both interventions reﬂect the changing tastes of each epoch, a phenomenon that the eminent art historian, Aloïs Riegl (1858–1905) had already foreseen and commented on at the beginning of the twentieth century. Riegl ﬁrst mentioned the tendency in ‘The Modern Cult of Monuments’, an essay wrien in 1903 and a classic text in which he set out principles for the conservation of monuments in Europe. He was curator of the Vienna Museum of Decorative Arts, a professor at Vienna University, President of the Commission of Historic Monuments in 1902 and a member of the acclaimed Vienna School. From this background, Riegl advanced a new perspective on world heritage, contrasting the relativism of the twentieth century with the positivism and absolutism of the nineteenth and how this aﬀected what he deﬁned as a monument and what we call heritage. He argued that not all viewers look at, or have looked at, works of art in the same way; what a contemporary viewer might consider as a monument might not have been considered as such when it was created. The same argument applies to restoration; according to the valuation of heritage, a restoration may be seen as unacceptable (if the primary consideration is antiquity) or as absolutely necessary (if the primary consideration is artistic quality and originality). Riegl recognized the inﬂuence that the art of the past could have on the present; he called this ‘relative artistic value’ and spoke of the complex nature of the values that aﬀect our conception of cultural heritage. Of no less importance were Riegl’s observations on the importance of the cult of the monument for humankind, monuments being the manifestation of an unalterable order that contrasts with the rapidly changing contemporary world. Although only brieﬂy mentioned in his text, this idea has been the inspiration for innumerable studies on the social and anthropological transcendence of heritage as a key element in the development of the individual. Many other artists and intellectuals followed Riegl’s lead. If we accept that the restoration is inﬂuenced by the culture of its epoch, we can beer understand the present trend for the elimination of previous interventions known as ‘de-restoration’ (from the French dérestauration). These actions are nothing more than a reﬂection of the current period that is dominated by postmodernist philosophy which has aﬀected criteria and judgements and imposed a plurality of viewpoints. From this perspective we can more easily comprehend the present situation which contrasts ‘old school’ methodological unity with the diversiﬁcation of aitudes towards restoration. Some of these aitudes question the historical and aesthetic validity of previous interventions to the point of postulating their elimination. The English restorer, David Bomford, encapsulated this new order in a simple sentence: ‘There are no absolute principles of restoration, there are only subjective ones; truth is not objective but subjective’ (Bomford, 1994, 39). This 254

C

R

B H position justiﬁes radical interventions that include the elimination of restorative repainting and re-colouring of paintings and sculptures that should have been conserved as a part of the history of the work of art (Scultura Lignea: Lucca, 1995). This type of intervention, as much with a building or a piece of furniture, makes the work of art a restored object that has been altered countless times. Furthermore, contemporary art practices have made us accustomed to viewing collages, montages and installations and this has given deconstructed ruins and monuments a new lease of life (for example, the ruined church project of Tadashi Kawamata for the Kassel Dokumenta, 1987). The public has once again become more tolerant about the possibility of contemplating alterations and modiﬁcations to the habitually consolidated image of historic architecture. Nevertheless, this permissive aitude towards changes in heritage caused by contemporary restorations is not risk free – with so many transformations taking place, irreplaceable data or parts of the work may be lost, something that should be avoided at all costs.

The Visual Distinction of the Restoration and the Problematic Relationship between the Past and the Present Once we accept that heritage intervention must be reversible (to avoid the presentation of an erroneous image), the next challenge is how to replace the missing parts of cultural assets. Such assets are oen found in incomplete states. A sculpture with no arms or legs, the crumbled remains of a part of a building or an ancient amphora found broken into pieces are objects that represent the greatest diﬃculties for conservation; the reintegration or completion of the ‘lacune’1 (Carbonara, 1976; Jokilehto, 1997). As is oen the case with heritage restoration, it may be beer to decide against intervention. When dealing with an archaeological site or monuments that are very deteriorated or reduced to ruins, such as the Pantheon in Athens, the Greek temples of Sicily or the Cistercian Fountains Abbey in England (all included on the UNESCO World Heritage List), the completion of the missing parts could destroy the evocative nature of the remains and falsify their historic value (Jokilehto, 1997). In these cases, minimum intervention would be advised, based on consolidation and respect for the historical authenticity of the monument. This kind of approach was taken with the remains of the Salemi church in Sicily in 2000, restored by Alvaro Siza and Roberto Collovà (Hernández León, 2000). The intervention was limited to the consolidation of the lile that was le of the Baroque temple aer an earthquake in 1968 had reduced it to rubble. Without evading the ruined condition of the monument, the original size and form of the church was suggested by the treatment of the temple ﬂoor, and the position of the naves was shown by the in situ conservation of the space-dividing columns. A contrasting example would be the restoration of the ruined Roman theatre in 1

An Italian term used to describe the missing parts of a painting where the layer of paint has fallen away; by extension, it is used to allude to everything that must be completed to restore a work of art. 255

T A R C

H I

Figure 14.2 Sagunto, restoration of the Roman theatre Sagunto, Spain, undertaken by Giorgio Grassi and Manuel Portaceli (1983–93) (Figure 14.2). The intervention destroyed the original spirit of the monument by eﬀectively constructing a new theatre which is disproportionately imposed over the original theatre remains (Almagro, 1993). This Spanish case illustrates a circumstance that has regularly caused diﬃculties, namely excessive restoration intervention at the cost of the original historic remains. Given that it is necessary to respect the principle of visual distinction (the intervention should be easily recognizable so as not to give a false impression of the history of the monument and imply that it is only from one historical epoch), we must be careful to avoid the opposite extreme of forcing the expression of the diﬀerence between the old and the new. For example, the completion of a white marble monument with red brick would not be a very elegant solution and it would endanger the perception of the original monument, as it would focus the aention of the viewer on the new part, impeding the appreciation of the original. The task of restoration is a very diﬃcult one and many professionals claim the right of the contemporary epoch to manipulate and interpret an ediﬁce, using current styles and language to replace the disappeared parts. This brings us to a new problem, the relationship between historical and contemporary architecture – the debate between the past and the present. We have seen how every epoch puts forward its own ideas on the interpretation and restoration of heritage – from Viollet-le-Duc’s mimesis of the original monument 256

C

R

B H to the critical restoration of the twentieth century that defends the use of modern materials and styles. The problem, as always, is one of limitation – to what extent can we intervene or add new architecture without the monument losing its cultural value and becoming a new and very diﬀerent object? The question is fundamental to the concept of restoration as we are dealing with extremely fragile objects and any modiﬁcation could cause irreplaceable loss. The decisions and criteria for intervention must be prudent and carefully considered. We must also take into account that the situation is now very diﬀerent to past centuries when regular modiﬁcations were made to buildings to adapt them for new uses; nowadays, we cannot act with indiﬀerence, we have been imbued with a consciousness that heritage has historical, artistic and cultural value, and we cannot arbitrarily modify or change it. There are two very diﬀerent approaches to the resolution of these issues. The ﬁrst is an extreme position that argues for radical interventions, in which modern architecture imposes itself with lile concession to history. The restorations make great contrasts with the use of colours and textures that are very diﬀerent from those used in the original, or they alter scale with respect to the historic architecture

Figure 14.3 Restoration of the old church of Escuelas Pias, now a public library, Madrid, Spain 257

T A R C

H I and that of the surrounding urban area. Examples of this tendency are: the Ara Pacis in Rome (2005, architect Richard Meier), the ampliﬁcation of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (Daniel Libeskind, 1996) or the ampliﬁcation of the Reina Sofía Museum of Contemporary Art in Madrid (Jean Nouvel, 2004). The second approach advocates more discreet interventions in which the architects show respect for the formal typology and materials of the pre-existing architecture and use the new construction as a means of strengthening the values of the restored ediﬁce. Examples of this school of thought can be seen in the restoration, as a library, of the ruins of the Escuelas Pías church in Madrid (José Ignacio Linazasoro, 2004) (Figure 14.3), the reconstruction of the Alte Pinakotek in Munich (Hans Döllgast, 1996) or the Museum of Ospedale de Santa Maria de la Scala, in Siena (Guido Canali, 2002) (Carbonara, 2005). Without expressing an opinion in favour of either tendency, it is obvious that there should be a dialogue within the ﬁeld of conservation, a dialogue that does not always exist. André De Naeyer has oﬀered an apposite deﬁnition of what the restoration of historical architecture should be: ‘Conservation should not put obstacles in the way of architecture, and good architecture must respect and promote the memory of our predecessors. Good architecture must safeguard and guarantee permanence; it must rescue ancient materials, structures and historical spaces’ (De Naeyer, 2003, 164). We should also take note of less an historical document than a receptor of extrinsic values (identity, economic proﬁtability, cultural democratization, the leisure industry, the rebirth of the city, and so on), and this puts heritage in an emergent position in the new social and economic order established by globalization and the cultural industry (Seis, 2002). This new context has resulted in a situation where we restore like never before, oen without considering the requirement or real need for an intervention. As English historian Sarah Walden has pointed out: The extent of the restoration of painting during the last ﬁy years is unprecedented, both in quantity and in the extreme methods used, which oen range from the injudicious to the plain irresponsible. If we do not restrain ourselves soon, we shall have done to painting what was done to many of the great cathedrals and churches of Europe in the nineteenth century (Walden, 1985, 7). She particularly laments the fact that restorers do not think about the necessity for intervention: The ﬁrst practical decision the restorer faces is whether to do anything at all. There is a regreable assumption that, because a picture is not in pristine condition and has not been cleaned for some years and because the modern means are there to do it, it should be done. The sad fact is that if there is money to restore a picture, it will probably be treated whether it needs aention or not. It is equally true that, if a dealer thinks a painting would look beer and fetch more on the market by being spruced up and titivated a lile, it 258

C

R

B H will be given suitable treatment, which might indeed increase its appeal to contemporary taste, but is almost certain to diminish both its integrity and life expectancy in the process (Walden, 1985, 127). In other cases, restoration has been conditioned by objectives external to simple conservation and the transmission of a cultural asset. This aitude has been condemned by professionals such as architect and historian Giovanni Carbonara, Director of the Scuola di Specializzazione in Restauro di Monumenti at La Sapienza University in Rome. Carbonara believes that these kinds of restorations occur because state administrations, and the political powers, are more interested in the social and economic beneﬁts of heritage exploitation than in guardianship (Carbonara, 1997). The public system, therefore, backs ‘quick-ﬁx’ restoration operations, generally cleaning, that give a new sheen to monuments, as was exempliﬁed, for example, by the restoration campaign undertaken in Rome in 2000 on the occasion of the city’s Jubilee. There were projects without ideas and without quality, while more reﬂexive, moderate and long-term interventions aimed at a beer understanding of the monument received neither governmental nor media support. It is clear that in both heritage restoration and new architecture, the greatest relevance is given to ﬂagship projects which become phenomena for the masses and local tourist traps (Beck, 1993; Carbonara, 1997). Carbonara argues that the economic weight of restoration has meant that a part of the profession has oriented its business toward this activity, without having adequate training or experience in the ﬁeld.

Compatibility Along with reversibility and visual distinction, compatibility is a basic criterion to be taken into account in questions concerning heritage restoration. Through the compatibility of materials and use, we aim to avoid damaging the object or ediﬁce that is being restored. Knowledge of the materials of which the work of art is composed and with which it has been previously restored is of utmost importance. We must avoid the use of substances that could provoke adverse chemical reactions or degenerative damage. While the analysis of materials is vital, of no less importance is the issue of use and function; the introduction of new functions that are incompatible with historic architecture could be more damaging than not intervening at all. The reutilization of heritage is another challenge that must be confronted by the restorers. Without doubt, one way to guarantee the conservation of a monument is to keep it in use. There are innumerable examples of buildings and even old towns that are in ruins due to abandonment; the great European migrations at the end of the nineteenth century and later have contributed to a dangerous territorial population imbalance and the loss of a signiﬁcant part of our heritage. The history of the Iberian Peninsula is testament to this grave situation: a massive migration towards the capital cities and coastal areas has le thousands of inland villages, especially in the Pyrenees, in a state of decline and decay. Our history, quite literally, is disappearing. 259

T A R C

H I Clearly a use must be found to guarantee the survival of our heritage because many of these buildings are ‘dead monuments’, that is to say, they have lost their original function. Abandoned monasteries, deconsecrated churches and brokendown windmills are examples of a casuistic variation that is part of our cultural heritage. Of course, some monuments should be conserved for their cultural value alone, but the conservation of others is socially unsustainable without ﬁnding a use. This is exactly the situation of industrial architecture, a typology that has recently been elevated to the category of a heritage asset. Many of these buildings threatened by functional obsolescence or urban speculation can only be saved through re-conversion and reuse. In order to maintain these assets, rehabilitations are oen inadequate and bear lile relationship to the typology of the monument; they alter the structure and spatial dimensions and introduce functions that are incompatible with the original building. These operations are oen presented as the only way to ensure the survival of the heritage. Such actions include the tactic of ‘façadism’ – conserving only the façade of a historic building followed by the complete reconstruction of the interior. This speculative practice has very lile to do with concepts of conservation and restoration. The reconstruction of the old sugar factory in Parma, resulting in the ‘Auditorio Niccolò Paganini’ (architect, Renzo Piano, 2002) (Varagnoli, 2006) or the Caixa Fórum Cultural Centre in Madrid, built behind the frontage of an old power station (architects, Herzog and De Meuron, 2007) are examples of this trend. In other cases, rehabilitation is used to ‘modernize’ the building by adding new parts that visually impose themselves over the pre-existing architecture; this is oen done with poorer quality materials which have a detrimental eﬀect on the value of the original ediﬁce. The access to the old Casarramona factory, now the Caixa Fórum Cultural Centre in Barcelona (2002), designed by Arata Isozaki, or the National School for Contemporary Art in Lille, built on an industrial site by Bernard Tschumi in 1998, are paradigms of this type of intervention in which the priority is the spectacular nature of the new architecture and the contrast with the original style. The rehabilitation of industrial units to create housing, museums and cultural centres illustrates how diﬃcult it is to achieve compatibility in the modern use of historic buildings and this has become one of the identifying characteristics of the postmodern world (Powell, 1999). Europe has pioneered the adaptation of this typology through both public and private initiatives and there are many such projects that have been successfully completed: London’s Tate Modern, set in a reconverted power station (architects, Herzog and De Meuron, 2000); the rehabilitation of the old slaughterhouse in Toulouse, France (Antoine Stinco and Rémi Papillot, 2000) and the Contemporary Art Museum housed in the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin (Josef-Paul Kleihues, 1996) (Figure 14.4); all followed the example of the Quai d’Orsay train station in Paris, now the famous impressionist art museum (Gae Aulenti, 1980). These projects have been aided by the huge number of industrial and factory sites that exist in Europe and the fact that they oen include large, open and well-lit spaces that lend themselves to the requirements of the modern museum or art gallery. A further incentive has been the growing demand, especially in the last 260

C

R

B H

Figure 14.4 Contemporary Art Museum, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin

two decades, for visiting museums and cultural centres as a leisure pursuit. These institutions generate important social, urban and economic beneﬁts; nowadays, having a museum of contemporary art is a sign of the distinction and modernity of the city. This phenomenon can be considered as a meeting of a recently identiﬁed sector of cultural heritage (industrial heritage) and the new cultural context (the development of a cultural industry); it is a circumstance that has already been the subject of much research and study (Hernández Martínez, 2006). 261

T A R C

H I There are many examples of the rehabilitation of industrial architecture becoming a stimulus and basis for much wider ranging operations of urban renovation (Lorente, 1996). The Temporary Contemporary Museum (Frank Gehry & Associates, 1988), installed in a conjunct of warehouses and garages, was the symbol of the regeneration of part of central Los Angeles and coincided with the inauguration of the Contemporary Art Museum (Arata Isozaki, 1986) in the same sector. The former was originally conceived as a provisional installation, but its public success meant that it became one of the main stages in the cultural life of Los Angeles and was made a permanent institution in 1995. At much the same time, the re-conversion of the Albert Dock in Liverpool (one of the most important examples of Western port architecture) with the installation of another branch of the Tate (James Stirling, 1988 and Michael Wilford, 1996–98) provided the stimulus for the regeneration of the whole area (Lorente, 2002). The Tate Gallery was followed by a range of commercial enterprises, new housing and even a TV station, and this helped to bring not just the docks but the whole city out of its economic and cultural stagnation. A similar operation was recently instigated in Rome with the installation (provisionally in 1997, deﬁnitively in 2005) of a part of the ancient collection of sculptures of the Museos Capitolinos in the reconverted Centrale Montemartini power station (Francesco Stefanori, 1989–97). This was the catalyst for the regeneration of the oldest industrial area of the Italian capital and includes the rehabilitation of the slaughterhouse, the market and the gas works which will be home to a City of Sciences, cultural centres and various faculties of the University of Rome (Varagnoli, 2006).

Provisional Conclusions on an Open Debate The concept of heritage is anchored in Western culture. It has become a key economic resource and a vital element in the construction of a collective identity of the people (Lowenthal, 1998). The awareness of its importance has led our society to develop judicial, administrative and scientiﬁc–technical instruments to ensure its survival and transference to future generations. In the last two centuries a signiﬁcant theoretical corpus has been developed in relation to heritage and its conservation and restoration. Restoration criteria have been established that are agreed by institutions and professional collectives. These criteria are known to restorers, historians and architects who debate them at meetings and conferences, advancing knowledge of the discipline. However, in practice, we witness fraudulent interventions that take place in the name of restoration but respond to interests that have lile to do with respect for the historic, aesthetic or material values on which the discipline is founded. The current superﬁcial exploitation of cultural heritage, subject to the rules of the market and exempliﬁed by residential speculation and the cultural industry, depreciates its values and dangerously facilitates irreversible transformations. Two hundred years aer the origin of the conservation and restoration of cultural assets, Western heritage must confront an autocracy. It must reﬂect on the 262

C

R

B H real criteria that regulate interventions in works of art and historic buildings and assume that there must be a limit that is not dictated by political, economic or social questions but by the historic and cultural importance of the monument. In the ﬁnal analysis, we must understand that cultural heritage cannot react or defend itself against aack; it is the weak link in a very complex structure. Its conservation, as expressed by the Italian architect Amedeo Bellini, is, more than anything else, a moral obligation: through the preservation of heritage we preserve our memory: … restoration, and in any case, every aitude that considers the testimonies of the past, involves the recognition of the cultural value of experience, of the possibility of relationships, of the necessity of memory. The object is not conserved for its own value; it is conserved for its value to man … The defence of cultural assets, in the widest sense of the term, their conservation, constitutes a moral objective of the utmost importance (Bellini, 2000, 105).

References Almagro, M. (1993), ‘Arde Sagunto. La Polémica Restauración del Teatro Romano’, A&V. Arquitectura Viva 32, 66–9. Banca del Monte di Lucca (1995), Scultura Lignea: Lucca 1200–1425 (a cura di Clara Baracchini) (Lucca: Firenze). Beck, J. (1993), Art Restoration: The Culture, the Business and the Scandal (New York: Norton). Bellini, A. (2000), ‘De la Restauración a la Conservación: de la Ética a la Estética’, Loggia 9, 10–15 (English version, 105–6). Boito, C. (1889), Il Nuovo e l’Antico in Architeura, A.A. Crippa (ed.) (Milan: Jaca Book). Bomford, D. (1994), ‘Changing Taste in the Restoration of Paintings’, Restoration: Is It Acceptable? (London: British Museum, Occasional Papers, 99). Brandi, C. (1963), Teoria del Restauro (Torino: Edizioni di Storia e Leeratura). Buranelli, F. (a cura di) (2006), Laooconte. Alle origini dei Musei Vaticani (Roma: L’Erma Bretschneider). Carbonara, G. (1976), La Reintegrazione dell’Immagine (Roma: Bulzoni Editore). Carbonara, G. (1997), Avvicinamento al Restauro: Teoria, Storia, Monumenti (Napoli: Liguori). Carbonara, G. (2005), ‘Orientamenti del Restauro in Italia Alcuni Esempi’, L’architeo Italiano 8, 66–71. Conti, A. (1988), Storia del Restauro e Della Conservazione Delle Opere d’Arte (Milano: Electa). Crane, D., Kawashima, N. and Kawasaki, K. (eds) (2002), Global Culture: Media, Arts, Policy, and Globalization (New York, London: Routledge).

263

T A R C

H I De Naeyer, A. (2003), ‘Tendencias Actuales en la Restauración en Europa’, in J. Rivera (ed.), AR&PA. Actas del Congreso Internacional ‘Restaurar la memoria’, Valladolid 2002 (Valladolid: Junta de Castilla-León), 163–75. De Quincy, Q. (1818), Leres Écrites de Londres à Rome, et Adressées à M. Canova, sur les Marbres d’Elgin, ou les Sculptures du Temple de Minerve à Athènes (Rome: no publisher). Giovannoni, G. (1945), Il Restauro dei Monumenti (Roma: no publisher). Hernández León, J.M. (2000), ‘Bartleby y la Ruina. Sobre la Conservación del Centro de Salemi’, A&V. Arquitectura Viva, 72–7. Hernández Martínez, A. (2006), ‘La Musealización de la Arquitectura Industrial. Algunos Casos de Estudio’, in J. Rivera (ed.), AR&PA. Actas del Congreso Internacional ‘Restaurar la memoria’, Valladolid 2002 (Valladolid: Junta de CastillaLeón), 533–56. Hernández Martínez, A. (2007), La Clonación Arquitectónica (Madrid: Editorial Siruela). ICOMOS (1994), Scientiﬁc Journal, The Venice Charter – La Charte de Venise 1964–1994 (ICOMOS: Paris). Jokilehto, J. (1997), ‘Il Problema Della Reintegrazione’, La Reintegrazione nel Restauro Dell’antico (Roma: Gangemi Editore), 47–56. Jokilehto, J. (1999a), A History of Architectural Conservation (Oxford: BuerworthHeinemann). Jokilehto, J. (1999b), ‘Conservation of Historic Architecture’, Conservation: The GCI Newsleer 14:3, 22–4. Lorente, J.P. (1996), The Role of Museums and the Arts in the Urban Regeneration of Liverpool (Leicester: Centre for Urban History). Lorente, J.P. (2002), ‘Urban Cultural Policy and Urban Regeneration. The Special Case of Declining Port Cities: Liverpool, Marseilles, Bilbao’, in D. Crane, N. Kawashima and K. Kawasaki (eds), Global Culture: Media, Arts, Policy, and Globalization (New York, London: Routledge), 93–104. Lowenthal, D. (1998), ‘La Fabrication d’un Heritage’, Patrimoine et Modernité (París: L’Harmaan), 107–27. Lowenthal, D. (1999), ‘Authenticity: Rock of Faith or Quicksand Quagmire’, Conservation: The GCI Newsleer 14:3, 5–8. Lumia, C. (2003), A Proposito del Restauro e Della Conservazione. Colloquio con Amedeo Bellini, Salvatore Boscarino, Giovanni Carbonara e B. Paolo Torsello (Roma: Gangemi Editore). Moltessen, M. (2005), ‘I Ri-restauri Della Statuaria Antica Nella Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek di Copenhagen’, in C. Piva and I. Sgarbozza (eds), Studi in Ricordo di Michele Cordaro (Roma: De Luca Editori d’Arte), 81–95. Morris, W. (1877), ‘The Principles of The Society (for the Protection of Ancient Buildings) As Set Forth upon its Foundation’, Builder 35 (25 August), 41–3. Powell, K. (1999), Architecture Reborn. The Construction and Reconstruction of Old Buildings (London: Calmann & King). Riegl, A. (1903), Der Moderne Denkmalkultus und seine Entstebung (Vienna and Leipzig: no publisher). 264

C

R

B H Rossi Pinelli, O. (2003), ‘From the Need for Completion to the Cult of the Fragment. How Tastes, Scholarship, and Museum Curators’ Choices Changed our View of Ancient Sculpture’, History of Restoration of Ancient Stone Sculpture (Los Angeles: The Paul Gey Museum), 61–74. Ruskin, J. (1849), The Seven Lamps of Architecture (Reprint: 1925, London: G. Allen & Unwin). See, M.P. (2001), Il Restauro in Architeura. Quadro Storico (Torino: UTET). Seis, S. (2002), Italia S.p.A. L’assalto al Patrimonio Culturale (Torino: Einaudi). Varagnoli, C. (2004), ‘Restauro una Storia Italiana’, Progeo & Pubblicoo 13, 30–34. Varagnoli, C. (2006), ‘La Restauración de la Arquitectura Industrial en Italia Entre Proyecto y Conservación’, in J. Rivera (ed.), AR&PA. Actas del Congreso Internacional ‘Restaurar la memoria’, Valladolid 2002 (Valladolid: Junta de CastillaLeón), 251–74. Walden, S. (1985), The Ravished Image or How to Ruin Masterpieces by Restoration (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson). Winckelmann, J.J. (1764), Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (Dresden: no publisher). Yourcenar, M. (1954), ‘Le Temps, ce Grand Sculpteur’, La Revue des Voyages 15, 6–9.

265

This page intentionally left blank

15

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

Heritage Tourism: Conﬂicting Identities in the Modern World Benjamin W. Porter

This chapter examines the entanglement of heritage and identity within the context of heritage tourism. Ever since heritage was recognized as one of modernity’s most powerful cultural forces (Appadurai, 2001; Graham, Ashworth and Tunbridge, 2000; Kirshenbla-Gimble, 1998; Lowenthal, 1985; 1996), scholars have examined how individuals, communities, and nations use discourse about the past to cra identities, places, and landscapes. Tourism, in particular, has proved to be an evocative window in which to examine heritage as a powerful cultural force for social change. Whether it is the self-conscious revaluation of under-appreciated ruins placed on display for economic gain, or contests between self-proclaimed descent groups and site managers over presentation, heritage plays a transformative role in the ways we travel. This chapter explores the intersections of heritage and tourism, identity and conﬂict in four parts. First, the term heritage is contextualized within the practice of tourism by way of a discussion of the ways scholars have aempted to specify the term ‘heritage tourism.’ Second, the diﬀerent agents who together cra heritage tourism destinations are scrutinized – nation-states, international non-governmental organizations (NGOs), local development agencies, and visitors. Third, the reasons why conﬂicts arise between interest groups over alienation, access, stewardship and representation are examined using a handful of case studies. A ﬁnal section reﬂects on the future of heritage tourism, especially as transnational communities begin to cra new cosmopolitan identities.

Defining Heritage Tourism Heritage tourism is a particularly evocative practice for examination as it combines two powerful cultural forces of modernity. Heritage, a re-imagining of the past in terms of the present, has become a popular means of deﬁning identities in an increasingly cosmopolitan world. Such acts exhibit both intensional and extensional

T A R C

H I components (Porter and Salazar, 2005, 362).1 Heritage is an intensional phenomenon, a sense of the self in the past where the subjective component of ‘self’ is ascribed at increasingly broad scales of the individual, community, nation, and globe, and the temporal links between the subject and the past are based on perceived genealogical, biological, or community connections. But heritage also possesses an extensional component, where these subjective meanings are externalized in language, practice, and objects that are concrete and publicly accessible. Both intensional and extensional modes of heritage play an important role in craing personal, local, national, and cosmopolitan identities. Tourism, yet another powerful cultural force in the modern world, is one of several practices that mediate the performance of identities, especially those linked to heritage. The investigation of how what was once a leisured practice of European elites has grown to become a global network of hosts, guests, and destinations is a discipline in its own right, exhibiting encyclopaedias (Jafari, 2000), professional associations (for example, International Academy for the Study of Tourism, Association for Tourism and Leisure Education) and more than 40 regularly published research journals (for example, Annals of Tourism Research, Journal of Heritage Tourism, Journal of Tourism Studies), all dedicated to tourism’s investigations in economic, political, and cultural spheres. The tourism literature is indeed vast, although the ﬁeld exhibits a handful of celebrated statements that collectively assert that the strange habits and rituals of tourists are productive venues for investigating the complexities of modernity (see especially MacCannell, 1999, but also Chambers, 2000; Kirshenbla-Gimble, 1998; Urry, 1990). Early investigations focused almost exclusively on tourism as an industry, and although management remains an important area of inquiry in leisure and hospitality studies today, scholars, particularly anthropologists, folklorists, geographers, and sociologists, have focused on tourism as a social phenomenon. This work has demonstrated how tourism potentially reorganizes societies beyond recognition, fostering opportunities for economic development while at the same time creating asymmetries in wealth and power between the global North and South, the First and Third Worlds (Mowforth and Munt, 2003). At the same time, examinations of tourism have shown how the practice creates conditions on which hosts display themselves for their guests in museums, performances, and archaeological sites, creating exciting – and oen problematic – cultural exchanges between societies (see Bruner, 2004 and Kirshenbla-Gimble, 1998 for illustrative case studies). When combined, heritage and tourism result in a particular type of travel aimed not at exploring the unknown or the exotic, but at learning, celebrating, and displaying one’s relationship with the past. Similar to the broader discussion over heritage, deﬁnitions of heritage tourism are bountiful, unanimously concurring on the practice’s import. Tourism and hospitality experts quickly established

1

This idea of intensional/extensional to deﬁne phenomena, in this case heritage, is popular in the philosophy of language to separate what happens in the mind of the subject (interior processes) to what is externalized in practice and language (tourism, language, and so on). 268

H T : C

I M W heritage tourism as a unique sector in tourism economies, devising ways to manage destinations and the particular kinds of tourists they would aract, and placing emphasis on planning visitors’ experience, satisfaction, interpretations, and impact on local communities (for example, Garrod and Fyall, 2000; Moscardo, 1996; Nuryanti, 1996). Although these studies bear an applied tone in their research goals, they nevertheless are interesting statements on the nature of heritage tourism. At the same time, scholars interested in heritage as a phenomenon embraced the investigation of heritage tourism in order to understand the connection between travel and modern society’s engagement with the past (Bender, 1998; Breglia, 2006; Castañeda, 1996; Yalouri, 2001). Less applied in tone, these studies concern themselves with the ways sites such as Stonehenge, Chichén Itzá, and the Parthenon act as powerful and oen contested heritage tourism destinations. Because geography, landscape, and tourism scholars have tended to dominate investigations of heritage tourism, discussions have oen modelled the practice using spatial, environmental, or economic categories. Such models oen depend on structuralist labels such as nature/human and rural/urban to discuss practices in binary and scalar terms (see, for example, Timothy and Boyd, 2003, Figures 1.1, 1.2). While such models are helpful in identifying and classifying diﬀerent genres of heritage tourism, techniques such as interviews with and observations of planners, managers, guides, and visitors, and participant observation, where the analyst partakes in planning meetings and guided tours in order to gain an understanding through the eyes of both hosts and guests, permit discourse-centered and practicecentered approaches to understanding the phenomenon (for example, Stanton, 2005). Additional methods include the analysis of policy and planning documents in government and non-governmental organizations’ archives. Increasingly common now are multi-site investigations comparing development strategies and economic impacts. While they may share similar investigative methods regardless of their interests in applied or theoretical aspects, scholars oen disagree on deﬁnitions of heritage tourism that can simultaneously account for the practice as both an industry and a phenomenon. This is apparent in a brief rejoinder by Poria, Butler and Airey (2001) to an investigation by Garrod and Fyall (2000) into the sustainability of heritage sites. They point out the tendency shown by the laer to label sites unquestionably as ‘heritage’ because they possess historical aributes. Alternatively, Poria, Butler and Airey suggest heritage tourism is based more on tourists’ motivations for visiting particular sites, acknowledging that not all visitors will necessarily share the same perceptions of the site’s importance. Making this distinction, they argue, will permit analysts to diﬀerentiate between historic and heritage tourism. Garrod and Fyall (2001) rebued by acknowledging the importance of motivation, but also by pointing out how such a perspective is insuﬃcient for applied research in heritage tourism, where the roles of developers, managers, and organization are under scrutiny. They also ask whether it is possible for tourists to distinguish between historic and heritage aributes when visiting a site. Both sets of authors raise important issues in deﬁning heritage tourism, but, as of yet, there appears to be lile consensus on what heritage tourism is and who exactly is a heritage tourist! Timothy, for example, suggests 269

T A R C

H I investigators measure visitors’ aachment to the destination, applying a scale that moves upward from the personal to the local, national, and world levels of heritage tourism experiences (Timothy, 1997, Figure 1).2

Preserving, Presenting, and Managing Heritage Tourism One implicit problem when deﬁning heritage tourism is that producers and consumers are not easily segmented into discrete groups. Rather, we ﬁnd a convergence of diﬀerent actors that together or in conﬂict project their identities onto places, natural landscapes, or cultural objects, for reasons ranging from nation building and monetary gain to nostalgia and a lust for preservation. Consequently, at any one time, those who cra heritage tourism destinations are potentially that same destination’s consumers, requiring us to set aside binary analytical frameworks of production and consumption. Doing so allows us to understand how sites, museums, and objects enter into regimes of heritage, a revaluing that is oen the result of deliberate acts. The question as to who possesses the agency – the capital, knowledge, and connections – to cra these narratives is, however, an unpredictable one. In this section, therefore, a handful of groups who regularly play a role in craing heritage tourism destinations are distinguished for analysis. These groups include nation-states, NGOs, local development agencies, and, perhaps surprisingly, visitors to heritage tourism destinations themselves. While it is true that a combination of these groups oen cooperates and collides in the production of heritage tourism, we can learn much about their mechanics by momentarily separating them for analysis. More than any other actor we shall consider, nation-states hold dramatic powers to transform heritage tourism practices within their borders. Nation-states (a genre of political organization based on imagined religious, ethnic, or linguistic relationships) began in the late eighteenth century and continue to be forged to the present day.3 In scrutinizing how nation-states establish themselves, what is particularly transparent is how they self-fashion the raw materials of history and tradition – archaeological sites and landscapes, relics and cultural practices – into claims that authenticate national identities and narratives. For this transformation to be successful, however, states must oen appropriate speciﬁc places and things and re-inscribe them as inalienable national patrimony. The nation-state’s presentation of its past is not only designed to convey notions of heritage to its own citizens, but also to visitors who wish to learn about or question the historical legitimacy of the nation. As representations of national patrimony, these destinations make evocative locales in which to investigate the phenomenon of heritage tourism. Thousands 2 3

See Timothy and Boyd (2003) for a recent and relatively comprehensive discussion of heritage tourism. See Anderson (1991) (originally 1983) and Appadurai (1996) for detailed discussion of the rise of nation-states. 270

H T : C

I M W

Figure 15.1 The ruined palaces of Herod the Great at Masada, Israel

of archaeological ruins, baleﬁelds, and museums that have been commandeered under nationalist rubrics are available for scrutiny, of course, but one worth singling out for brief analysis is Masada, located in the modern state of Israel. A large plateau located next to the Dead Sea, Masada is now a popular archaeological 271

T A R C

H I site where visitors explore Herod’s winter palaces, constructed during the Roman occupation of Palestine in the ﬁrst centuries BC and AD. During their tour, visitors also encounter one of modern Israel’s most important national narratives, a powerful story describing the decision of Jewish zealots to commit suicide rather than surrender to the Roman army who had besieged the fortress (see Figure 15.1). Tourists are not the only visitors to Masada, as new recruits for the Israel Defense Forces are oen sworn in aer making a long night-time climb to the top. The retelling of these tragic yet heroic events to both indigenous and foreign visitors displays Israel’s determination to persist as a modern nation-state.4 Like nation-states, international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and agencies also play an important role in transforming natural and cultural places into heritage tourism destinations. NGOs establish destinations using a variety of means, usually centering on economic and environmental analysis, international fundraising, and activism for the site’s preservation and development. Nowhere has the role of heritage tourism felt more of an impact from NGOs than organizations such as UNESCO and ICOMOS. These organizations aempt to preserve and develop sites they consider essential to a self-deﬁned ‘global’ heritage. Since 1972, UNESCO has maintained the World Heritage List that currently lists 830 cultural and natural properties in 138 participating countries. A rotating council of representatives from member states vets applications from sites that are of exceptional universal value and meet selection criteria. Sites range from the familiar, such as Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and Yellowstone National Park to the unfamiliar or recently discovered, such as prehistoric rock art sites in Africa and Central Asia. UNESCO also maintains a list of sites that are currently in danger of destruction by human or natural forces, such as Bam in Iran and Nepal’s Katmandu Valley. Inscribing places as World Heritage Sites makes a notable impact, aracting granting agencies as well as international tourists (Leask and Fyall, 2006). While national governments and NGOs no doubt play a powerful role in identifying and marking out heritage tourism destinations, local and private initiatives can also play a dynamic part. Possibly the most dramatic case where private interests stimulated the construction of heritage tourism destinations can be found in Colonial Williamsburg, a reconstructed American colonial town located in Virginia.5 In the early twentieth century, eﬀorts to preserve the town’s colonialera buildings were spearheaded with funds from the wealthy philanthropist, John D. Rockefeller Jr. Returning the town to its colonial past, however, required purchasing several dilapidated buildings; those not dating to the eighteenth century were destroyed, and in their place buildings emulating the earlier colonial period were built. Today, the historic area is one of the United States’ most visited theme parks, a living history museum where visitors can walk the colonial streets,

4

5

Scholars have not ignored the sway that the Masada myth carries today in Israeli society as well as in Biblical tourism, and several good studies are available (Bruner and Gorfain, 2004; Ben-Yehuda, 1995; 2002; Zerubavel, 1995;). Visit Colonial Williamsburg’s oﬃcial website, , for more information. 272

H T : C

I M W

Figure 15.2 Visitors to Colonial Williamsburg watch an historical re-enactment by ‘Thomas Jeﬀerson’ in the garden of the Governor’s palace watching re-enactments of historical events and listening to famous speeches by actors wearing colonial costumes (see Figure 15.2). Prominent themes of America’s political heritage – democracy, revolution, and independence – are displayed throughout the historic district. Alongside these themes have arisen problematic representations of American history such as African-American slave auctions; not surprisingly, complaints from interest groups have required modiﬁcations to these representations of American heritage. Like Masada, Colonial Williamsburg has not escaped the critical scrutiny of scholarly investigation (for example, Handler and Gable, 1997), and the historic center’s evolution continues to make an excellent venue for examining the phenomenon of heritage tourism and identity in the United States. Private initiatives need not be expensive undertakings, however, when presenting and managing heritage tourism destinations. Neighborhood organizations and local preservation societies may petition larger organizations for recognition and funding to undertake their own projects. These local, oen grass-roots, initiatives are becoming increasingly common across the globe as neighborhoods realize the monetary beneﬁts to be gained from tourists seeking representations of the past. Small and medium-sized towns in the United States, for example, have revitalized 273

T A R C

H I depressed central business districts, transforming them into mixed-use spaces that blend businesses, residences, and entertainment venues. Such initiatives aempt to draw consumers dissatisﬁed with suburban life and impersonal shopping malls. Outside the United States, Scarpaci (2005) has documented similar trends in Latin American and Caribbean towns that have transformed downtown plazas into centros históricos that draw visitors and stem the tide of neo-liberal commercial development projects. Other private initiatives connected to the management of heritage tourism destinations include the local industries that entrepreneurs establish to provide services for, and seek to proﬁt from, visitors. These services usually include hotels, souvenir kiosks, restaurants, and guiding services. These initiatives oen draw on and replicate meanings and identities broadly classiﬁed as heritage, whether through hotel names, cuisine, replicas of relics, or guides’ interpretations of local history. Scholars are only now beginning to understand the role that private initiatives play in establishing and replicating identities at heritage tourism destinations (for example, Kersel and Luke, 2004; Salazar, 2005). The visitors themselves play an important role in preserving, presenting, and managing heritage tourism destinations. Nation-states and NGOs need not declare sites heritage tourism destinations for visitors to treat them as such. In fact, destinations can take on meanings that developers never anticipated, aracting groups who demand a role in the preservation and presentation of the past. This tendency for tourists to demand a greater say in heritage tourism industries grows increasingly common. African-American tourists, by way of one example, have been drawn to West African colonial forts, particularly in Ghana, from which African slaves embarked for the Western hemisphere (Bruner, 1996). While these forts had served local functions (for example, schools and warehouses) and some had seen limited development before their rediscovery by African-American tourists, the local communities feel lile connection to these sites and in fact see them as part of a colonial past they would rather disavow than highlight through tourism. The interests of African-American tourists, however, have led to their development, and several industries catering to these tourists have arisen.

Conflict in Heritage Tourism As places are transformed into heritage tourism destinations, they become the stages on which communities and nations perform their identities. Strict distinctions between guests and hosts oen break down; communities take interest in how their homes and neighborhoods are preserved while visitors report feelings of returning ‘home’ upon arrival. This sense of stewardship that is tightly woven into the notion of heritage tourism not surprisingly sets up potential conﬂicts between groups over how sites are to be presented, preserved, and accessed. These debates are best examined as conﬂicts between interest groups who promote their own agendas at the expense of other groups or the larger public’s interests. Such groups may range in character from informal grass-roots collectives who carry out direct-action activities like strikes and boycos, to highly specialized organizations who lobby 274

H T : C

I M W governmental agencies for representation. This section therefore examines these groups as well as investigating how and why conﬂicts arise in heritage tourism, paying particular aention to four issues: alienation; access; stewardship; and representation. When embarking on such an investigation, however, we must remember that conﬂict is not a natural condition of heritage tourism and not all heritage sites are contested. Contemporary questions of power and inequity that dominate the academy draw our analytical gaze toward contested destinations like Jerusalem and Stonehenge, and away from situations where stakeholders have produced inclusive representations with ﬂexible stewardship rights. When conﬂict is examined, though, researchers oen concentrate more on documenting and describing strife, stopping short of explaining how and why conﬂict appears in the ﬁrst instance. In seing out a framework for examining conﬂict, the intensional and extensional deﬁnitions of heritage discussed earlier are once again applicable here. When objects, places, and practices come to embody the subjective meanings that constitute identities, these items move between regimes of value, from valueless to valuable, from what was once taken for granted to what is now considered inalienable. This perception of objects as inalienable germinates opinions that resources are non-renewable and non-replicable. This link between value and identity is key to understanding a second component: stewardship. When materials are rare and beyond replication, stakeholders whose identities are projected onto particular places and things will feel a greater sense of urgency to ﬁght for stewardship rights. Therefore, we ﬁnd ourselves on the verge of conﬂict when the value groups place on heritage is inversely proportional to their role as stewards.

Alienation Unfortunately, there is only room here to discuss four reasons why conﬂict arises in heritage tourism. At a basic level, local communities can grow alienated from places and objects when governments and private companies develop them for broader consumption. Such estrangement commonly occurs wherever tourism industries are emerging, but an illustrative example is Haw Par Villa in Singapore. First constructed in 1937 by Aw Boon Haw and Aw Boon Par, successful entrepreneurs noted for the manufacture of Tiger Balm, the villa was a lavish estate complete with gardens and statues depicting folklore, history and Buddhist morality tales. In 1954, the villa was declared public property and local Singaporeans gladly used the site for family outings. In the 1980s, however, the Singapore government, concerned with an uncompetitive tourism economy, charged private development companies with developing Haw Par Villa to aract international tourists. Consequently, the park was transformed into a Western-style amusement park accentuating exotic ‘Oriental’ themes (for example, dragons). The local community was now required to pay an admission fee, ending public access to the park. Not surprisingly, a disjuncture between local and tourist sentiments of the new ‘Dragon World’ have emerged, a point that Teo and Yeoh have demonstrated through interviews with both locals and tourists (1997). While tourists describe how much they enjoy the theme park’s rides

275

T A R C

H I and multimedia shows, locals recall their personal memories from the days when the park was a local gathering place. Although local discourse connecting Singaporean heritage with the Haw Par Villa, coupled with dissatisfaction with the Dragon World amusement park, have not led to outright physical conﬂict, the example is nonetheless illustrative of the process of alienation that local communities may experience when once public spaces are nationalized for tourism.

Access Interest groups’ demands for access to places and objects is a second common reason why conﬂict emerges in heritage tourism. When groups deﬁne objects and places as integral to their identity, they oen require access to them for rituals and pilgrimages. Compared to alienation, conﬂicts over access more oen lead to violent confrontations. Such has been the case at Stonehenge, the Neolithic and Bronze Age megalithic monument located near Amesbury in Wiltshire. Modern visitors have been intrigued with the monument’s function, making it one of the world’s most recognized and visited archaeological sites (Bender, 1998). Among these visitors have been itinerants, so-called ‘New Age’ travellers, who believe Stonehenge to be an important ritual site for marking the summer solstice. Aer several years of ‘free festivals’ to commemorate the solar event (see Figure 15.3), British authorities put an end to the annual celebrations in 1985, fearing the site’s

Figure 15.3 Dancers celebrate the summer solstice at a 1984 ‘free festival’ at Stonehenge 276

H T : C

I M W further destruction (and the group’s Leist political leanings) (Chippendale, 1986). These decisions led to a violent confrontation between police and summer-solstice visitors near Stonehenge; many believe the smashing of car windows and several arrests were acts of excessive police brutality in an event that was later coined ‘The Bale of the Beanﬁeld.’6

Stewardship Like alienation and denial of access, stewardship rights can provoke conﬂicts in heritage tourism. Who holds the right to monitor and, in some instances, beneﬁt ﬁnancially from places and objects classiﬁed as local or national heritage is a common point of contention when ownership rights overlap. Breglia has recently documented the local tensions of stewardship at Chichén Itzá, an important Mayan archaeological cite located on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula (Breglia, 2005; 2006). Antiguos, the Mayan families who once lived among the ruins and were employed in their excavation and protection, today control a local labor monopoly over custodial jobs. Both alienated community stakeholders who desire employment and the government, which is developing Chichén Itzá for international tourism, have aempted to dismantle the group’s power over the local economy. In order to resist these changes, the antiguos justify their patrimonial rights in terms of inherited rights to jobs, rather than the monuments themselves. As Breglia has demonstrated, these aempts to widen the stewardship of the site to a larger number of stakeholders have fostered contention in local community politics.

Representation Finally, conﬂicts in heritage tourism may arise due to disagreements over representations of heritage, especially when this information is potentially controversial or unfavorable. Conﬂicts over display and commemoration are common, whether the topic is nationalism, religion, or language. In the United States, interest groups have debated for more than a decade how to exhibit the ‘Enola Gay’ (see also Chapter 3), the B-29 bomber that dropped the ﬁrst atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945.7 An important World War II relic and part of America’s military heritage, the plane has had a problematic biography. In 1994, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum aempted to display it as part of an exhibit commemorating the 50th anniversary of the bombing. As plans for the exhibit were made known to the public, military veterans associations argued that the information displayed with the plane placed too much emphasis on casualties, and provided few reasons why the aacks were justiﬁed at the time. A heated public 6

7

Visit for a BBC video report of the event. Together, scholars, journalists, and interested laypersons have produced an enormous amount of sources on this debate (see Gieryn, 1998; Harwit, 1996; O’Reilly and Rooney, 2005). 277

T A R C

H I debate ensued, involving scientists, scholars, veterans, and politicians, eventually leading to the exhibition’s cancellation. In the end, only the plane’s fuselage was placed on display in the Smithsonian. Aer further restoration – and a period of cooling oﬀ between parties – the ‘Enola Gay’ is currently on exhibit at the new National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center near Washington’s Dulles International Airport. Only technical information describing the plane is displayed and the relic is well protected from vandalism.

Conclusion: Cosmopolitan Identities and the Future of Heritage Tourism This chapter has examined the problematic entanglements of heritage and identity within the context of heritage tourism. In the coming decades, heritage tourism practices will no doubt grow more complex as groups build new identities around objects and places, and use tourism as an evocative means with which to connect themselves to an imagined past. At the same time, conﬂict over heritage tourism destinations will probably continue as groups ﬁght for access to sites and stewardship rights in decision-making bodies. When considering the course that heritage tourism will take in the coming decades, we must not ignore the ways that globalization is remapping the world’s political and economic networks. As societies grow more aware of each other thanks to media technologies, they have the ability to envision their identities in ways far more nuanced than the ones that nation-states have oﬀered them in the past. One such trend is cosmopolitanism – the ability to designate oneself as a member of communities deﬁned more by practices and ideologies than citizenship, religion, and ethnicity (Appiah, 2006). Global in their reach and fuelled by media, migration, and capitalism, cosmopolitan identities cut across national boundaries and hemispheres. They also challenge those who investigate the entanglement of heritage, tourism, and identity, whether their interests are pragmatic or theoretical. How will these new identities cra their heritage and project them onto places and things? How will conﬂict be mitigated when these transnational identities collide with pre-existing ones that have already staked their ownership of exclusive patrimony? To some extent, the conﬂicts between international agencies like UNESCO and ICOMOS and nation-states over the preservation of monuments provide some idea of the way these conﬂicts will proceed. The radical sense of global stewardship that UNESCO and ICOMOS carry can oen overshadow latent local and national sentiments that can conﬂict in the preservation and management of important monuments. The Afghan Taliban government’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001 is only one example where diplomacy and negotiation can do lile to preserve what many may consider global patrimony. While identities born of cosmopolitan and nationalist eﬀorts will no doubt complicate the politics of heritage tourism, we can, at the same time, remain hopeful that the genre will remain a ﬂexible enough practice to create spaces where multiple groups may come together to discover overlapping and productive 278

H T : C

I M W identities. Such a process was observed recently at the United States’ most recent and contentious national monument, New York City’s Ground Zero, the former site of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers. Here, Greenspan (2005) discovered that, beneath the nationalist rhetoric of loss and revenge, an impromptu international tourism destination had emerged where visitors from all backgrounds could come together not only to mourn the tragedy and speak out against fundamentalism, but also to celebrate their membership in a global cosmopolitan community. We can only hope that in the future such spontaneous places of memorialization – where inclusive cosmopolitan identities are produced and shared, where the past and present meet – will only increase as more communities take up what has become one of modernity’s most powerful cultural forces, heritage tourism.

References Anderson, B. (1991), Imagined Communities, 2nd edition (London: Verso). Appadurai, A. (1996), Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Appadurai, A. (2001), ‘The Globalization of Archaeology and Heritage’, Journal of Social Archaeology 1:1, 35–49. Appiah, K. (2006), Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W.W. Norton). Ben-Yehuda, N. (1995), The Masada Myth: Collective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press). Ben-Yehuda, N. (2002), Sacriﬁcing Truth: Archaeology and the Myth of Masada (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books). Bender, B. (1998), Stonehenge: Making Space (Oxford: Berg). Breglia, L. (2005), ‘Keeping World Heritage in the Family: A Genealogy of Maya Labour at Chichén Itzá’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 11:5, 385–98. Breglia, L. (2006), Monumental Ambivalence: The Politics of Heritage (Austin: University of Texas Press). Bruner, E. (1996), ‘Tourism in Ghana: The Representation of Slavery and the Return of the Black Diaspora’, American Anthropologist 98:2, 290–304. Bruner, E. (ed.) (2004), Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Bruner, E. and Gorfain, P. (2004), ‘Dialogic Narration and the Paradoxes of Masada’, in Edward M. Bruner (ed.), Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 169–88. Castañeda, Q. (1996), In the Museum of Maya Culture: Touring Chichén Itzá (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Chambers, E. (2000), Native Tours: The Anthropology of Travel and Tourism (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press). Chippendale, C. (1986), ‘Stoned Henge: Events and Issues at the Summer Solstice, 1985’, World Archaeology 18:1, 38–58.

279

T A R C

H I Garrod, B. and Fyall, A. (2000), ‘Managing Heritage Tourism’, Annals of Tourism Research 27, 682–708. Garrod, B. and Fyall, A. (2001), ‘Heritage Tourism: A Question of Deﬁnition’, Annals of Tourism Research 28, 1049–52. Gieryn, T. (1998), ‘Balancing Acts: Science, Enola Gay, and History Wars at the Smithsonian’, in S. Macdonald (ed.), The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture (London: Routledge), 197–228. Graham, B., Ashworth, G.J. and Tunbridge, J.E. (2000), A Geography of Heritage: Power, Culture and Economy (London: Arnold). Greenspan, E. (2005), ‘A Global Site of Heritage? Constructing Spaces of Memory at the World Trade Center Site’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 11:5, 371–84. Handler, R. and Gable, E. (1997), The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg (Durham: Duke University Press). Harwit, M. (1996), An Exhibit Denied: Lobbying the History of Enola Gay (New York: Copernicus). Jafari, J. (2000), Encyclopedia of Tourism (London: Routledge). Kersel, M. and Luke, C. (2004), ‘Selling a Replicated Past: Power and Identity in Marketing Archaeological Replicas’, Anthropology in Action 11:2/3, 32–43. Kirshenbla-Gimble, B. (1998), Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley: University of California Press). Leask, A. and Fyall, A. (eds) (2006), Managing World Heritage Sites (Amsterdam: Elsevier BH). Lowenthal, D. (1985), The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Lowenthal, D. (1996), The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (London: Viking). MacCannell, D. (1999 [1976]), The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (Berkeley: University of California Press). Macdonald, S. (ed.) (1998), The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture (London: Routledge). Moscardo, G. (1996), ‘Mindful Visitors: Heritage and Tourism’, Annals of Tourism Research 23:2, 376–97. Mowforth, M. and Munt, I. (2003), Tourism and Sustainability: Development and New Tourism in the Third World (London: Routledge). Nuryanti, W. (1996), ‘Heritage and Postmodern Tourism’, Annals of Tourism Research 23:2, 249–60. O’Reilly, C. and Rooney, W. (2005), The Enola Gay and the Smithsonian Institution (Jeﬀerson, NC: McFarland). Poria, Y., Butler, R. and Airey, D. (2001), ‘Clarifying Heritage Tourism’, Annals of Tourism Research 28:4, 1047–9. Porter, B. and Salazar, N. (2005), ‘Heritage Tourism, Conﬂict, and the Public Interest: An Introduction’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 11:5, 361–70. Salazar, N. (2005), ‘Tourism and Glocalization: “Local” Tour Guiding’, Annals of Tourism Research 32:3, 628–46.

280

H T : C

I M W Scarpaci, J. (2005), Plazas and Barrios: Heritage Tourism and Globalization in the Latin American Centro Histórico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press). Stanton, C. (2005), ‘Serving up Culture: Heritage and Its Discontents at an Industrial Heritage Site’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 11:5, 415–31. Teo, P. and Yeoh, B. (1997), ‘Remaking Local Heritage for Tourism’, Annals of Tourism Research 24, 192–213. Timothy, D. (1997), ‘Tourism and the Personal Heritage Experience’, Annals of Tourism Research 24:3, 751–4. Timothy, D. and Boyd, S. (2003), Heritage Tourism (Harlow: Prentice Hall). Urry, J. (1990), The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage). Yalouri, E. (2001), The Acropolis: Global Fame, Local Claim (Oxford: Berg). Zerubavel, Y. (1995), Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

281

This page intentionally left blank

16

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

Museums and the Representation of Identity Fiona McLean

The museum is arguably the most fertile heritage arena in which to undertake identity work, and also the most complex. The mix of co-creators in identity construction and the resulting potent soup of identity negotiation are symptomatic of the very nature of the museum. From its inception to its current status, the museum has been implicit in accessing, ignoring, confronting, re-aﬃrming and forging identities. Surprisingly, though, it is only recently that the museum’s identity-conferring status has been fully acknowledged and interrogated. This chapter will brieﬂy consider the historical legacy of identity negotiation in the museum and will then discuss more recent interpretations of identity work, which acknowledge that the museum is a potent force for engendering respect for diﬀerence in identities. Museums diﬀer from other forms of heritage through their emphasis on a collection. In the UK, for example, to qualify for ‘museum’ status, an institution is required to have a collection of artefacts which are put on display to a visiting public. Although the emphasis on both the existence of a collection and the requirement to display to visitors may not be as pertinent in other nations, there is usually a degree of both elements. A museum, then, constitutes a collection of artefacts which are put on display to be viewed by an audience. This viewing of the collection is more subtle when it is represented and interpreted, forming the focus of the other key function of a museum, to engender learning. By endeavouring to educate the visiting public, the museum is developing understandings of the people and cultures which it displays. These two aspects form the focus of the ensuing discussion – the representation of a collection and the reception of that representation by an audience. The factors which lead to an object’s representation include the object’s accession to the museum, the decision to display it, and the way in which it is represented and interpreted. A number of people are involved in these decisions, and in some way they are all implicit in the ultimate identitynegotiation work undertaken by the audience to the museum. It will be argued in this chapter that there are three layers to the negotiation of identity in the museum: the identities of those encoding the representations; the identities of those decoding the representations; and the identities of those being represented. The signiﬁcance

T A R C

H I of this layering of the representation of identity is played out in some of the most pressing contemporary concerns for museums. The ﬁrst layer has only recently been recognized as a signiﬁcant factor in identity negotiation, the identities of those who regulate the museum and create the displays. Much of the debate related to this layer centres around the politics of regulation of museums and also the aempts to aract a more diverse proﬁle of museum workers, particularly ethnic minorities. The second layer of identity negotiation in the museum has become a particular focus where the museum is increasingly confronting its social responsibilities. This manifests itself both in the inclusion of minority groups in the representation process and in the diversiﬁcation of the museum visiting public. The third layer, that is the representation of the identities of those people being represented in the museum, has implications for those contemporary people who associate themselves with these cultures. The chapter will locate this layer within the theoretical constructs of the poetics and politics of representation. The response of the museum will then be considered, in terms of democratization of the processes of collection, selection, display and interpretation. This has given the contemporary museum one of its greatest challenges, the emotive demands for repatriation of objects and human remains. The three layers are not mutually exclusive, but are contingent through the democratization of the representation process. The chapter will consider each of these three layers in turn, with illustrative examples being given which draw on the author’s own research in Scotland. First, though, the chapter will consider the historical legacy of diﬀerence in the museum and the ways in which museums have historically been bound up with identity work.

The Museum, Identity and Difference Drawing from Bhabha (1994), the museum has shied from the continuity of ‘Tradition’ to facing its responsibilities in an era of ‘Translation’. From their inception, museums have upheld historical Tradition and the continuity of identity. Museums were the product of the Enlightenment, when in the mid-nineteenth century the British Empire was in its prime. The advent of the modern museum is inextricably linked to the emergence of the modern nation-state, where ‘through its historicist schema is made tangible the state’s claim to be the guardian of a universalized civilization’ (Evans, 1999, 239). During this era, from 1840 to 1930, the identities that framed the age of the museum were, according to Pieterse (2005), national, imperial and modern. National identity was constructed in history museums, national art galleries, and military and war museums, imperial identities in colonial and ethnographic museums, and modern identities in world exhibitions, science and modern art museums. The representational frames for these identities were race, class and gender (Pieterse, 2005). These frames were still largely in operation in the 1970s when heritage commentators such as Hewison (1987) and Wright (1985) addressed the British propensity for nostalgia, for the continuity and comfort of historical tradition. Museums at that time did not actively challenge the status quo, preferring to take what they presumed to be a neutral stance on heritage, but which, 284

M R

I as we shall see, was in itself an inherently political stance, being conservative and largely imperialistic in approach. Museums can play a signiﬁcant role in forging national identities for, as Anderson (1983) has argued, it is the task of museums to recover and recharge the ‘past’, becoming a space in which the nation could present itself as an ‘imagined community’. The museum assumes a symbolic meaning for the nation which it represents, to the extent that it has been argued that the tendency to create national museums coincides with surges of nationalism and a sense of national identity (Gellner, 1996; Kaplan, 1994; McLean and Cooke, 2003a). It is not surprising, then, that the contemporary instability of nations is reﬂected in the creation of new national museums in, for example, Australia, New Zealand and Scotland. The forging of identities, though, is not only conﬁned to national museums. Regional and local identities are also given signiﬁcance through cultural objects (Newman and McLean, 2002) and it has been acknowledged that any form of identity can be manifest in museums. Recent work investigating diversity and social inclusion in museums (see, for example, Sandell, 2002) aﬃrms the role museums play in the negotiation and construction of identities. The shi to globalization and post-imperialism has emphasized the responsibility of cultural Translation, that is ‘the deep, the profoundly perturbed and perturbing question of our relationship to others – other cultures, other states, other histories, other experiences, traditions, peoples, and destinies’ (Said, 1989, cited in Robins, 1999, 16). The museum, which represents others through their material culture, is inevitably implicit in this cultural Translation. Until recently, it could be argued that the museum was implicit in an agenda of Tradition, representing diﬀerence as a dichotomy between civilized nations and barbaric indigenous tribes. Few museums would continue to subscribe to such an imperialistic stance. As Prior lucidly comments: No longer is the museum deiﬁed as a neutral storehouse of civilisation’s most cherished values, an object out of time and place whose history is adequately captured by ‘oﬃcial’ accounts wrien within the institutions themselves. It is revealed to be a vital institution in the formation of powerful ideologies, categories and identities, perpetuating dominant national myths or providing cultural cement for socio-political order (2002, 4). Recognizing this powerful role, many museums have embraced what Bhabha (1994) considers to be our social responsibility, although there is still a long way to go before the museum could be considered an agent of Translation, not least because of the dangers of mis-Translation, which will always threaten any aempts to mediate between diﬀerent cultures. Translation also requires a signiﬁcant sea change in the psyche of the museum. As Pieterse has argued: Museums are institutions of modernity. Their concern with conservation reﬂects the modern esprit of control and appropriation through classiﬁcation 285

T A R C

H I and taxonomy; as such, museum displays are triumphal processions of modernity. The history of museums parallels the career of modernity; this also means that museums take part in reﬂexive modernity and thus become sites of reﬂexivity, both with respect to multicultural takes on modernity (or, modernities) and to modernity’s evolution (2005, 169–70). Since the 1970s, there has been a turn within museums to ‘new museology’, which reﬂects a turn from Tradition to Translation, whereby the focus is both on the community museum (or eco-museum) as well as the critical study of the ideological purposes of the museum (Boylan, 1990). Much of the impetus for this ideological turn has been the post-colonial critiques within ethnography and anthropology. Linked to these discussions are the clamours for cultural artefacts removed by colonizing nations to be restored to the indigenous peoples from whom they were taken. The ways in which the museum is regulated can signiﬁcantly impact on its response and propensity to change. Both the museum’s political function and the individuals who perform that function can reinforce or alter the museum’s representational positioning. A number of local authority museums services in the UK, for example, have adopted inclusive approaches to museum provision, which have reinforced the social intervention activities of their service museums. For example, St Mungo Museum of Religious Life and Art, a Glasgow City Council museum, has as its underpinning philosophy the notion of respect, with its aim being ‘to promote understanding and respect between people of diﬀerent faiths and none’.1 Equally, notable individuals have reinforced these inclusive approaches through their appointment of staﬀ, policy drivers, and inﬂuence on institutional aitudes. The appointment of David Fleming and subsequently Alec Coles at Tyne and Wear Museums Service and Mark O’Neill at Glasgow Museums has resulted in local authority policy of social inclusion being enthusiastically embraced by the museums services. It is worthwhile at this juncture to consider what has been termed the politics of exhibiting. By this is meant that museums make certain cultures visible (and others invisible), and by doing so ‘allow them to be subjected to the scrutiny of power’, where Western powers put on display the ‘other’ or colonized cultures (Lidchi, 1997, 198). In other words, objects are appropriated and displayed for speciﬁc ends. As Lidchi highlights: Objects are incorporated and constructed by the articulation of pre-existing discourses. The museum becomes an arbiter of meaning since its institutional position allows it to articulate and reinforce the scientiﬁc credibility of frameworks of knowledge or discursive formations through its methods of display (1997, 198). As Enlightenment institutions, museums inevitably reﬂected the modernist assumptions on progress, both as a reﬂection of industrial progress and the 1

. 286

M R

I achievements of the West, but also as a reﬂection of progress in relation to the ‘backward’ cultures of non-Western civilizations. However, as the modernist approach is being questioned and revised, contemporary world views are being imposed on the museum function. As Hall has suggested: Heritage as a discursive activity inevitably reﬂects the governing assumptions of its time and context. It is always inﬂected by the power and authority of those whose versions of history maer. These assumptions and co-ordinates of power are inhabited as natural – given, timeless, true and inevitable. But it only takes the passage of time, the shi of circumstances, the reversals of history, to reveal those assumptions as time – and context – bound, historically speciﬁc, and thus open to contestation, and revision (1999, 15). In the present century, many of these assumptions are changing, as museums become more reﬂexive about their activities and their relationship with their audiences. Radical shis in museum thinking have challenged the taxonomies of practice, and have juxtaposed ‘self’ and ‘other’ in new frameworks of representation. Museums reﬂect diﬀerence, and are inevitably at the forefront of Translation. To reconcile diﬀerence, as St Mungo Museum advocates, requires respect for diﬀerence. Respect becomes the precursor of understanding, which is bound up with the learning function of the museum. As some museums have discovered, they have the capacity to engender respect and understanding (O’Neill, 2006). To appreciate how this is played out in practice requires a deeper investigation of the ways in which diﬀerence is produced and consumed in the museum context. The following sections consider these processes by focusing on the poetics of representation, and the encoding and decoding of cultural artefacts.

Encoding Identity The focus here will be on the production of meaning through representation in the museum. An approach which is proving useful in developing deeper understandings of the process of representation and its reception is encoding and decoding. Originally devised by Hall (1980) to interrogate television programmes, this model has been applied to the museum context, notably by Lidchi (1997) and Dicks (2000). According to Dicks (2000), museum displays are not ‘authored’ by their designers but encoded. That is, the conditions and processes of production are articulated to, rather than determine, the form and nature of representation. Museum displays mobilize and echo signs and discourses which are in general cultural circulation and which are necessarily organized according to certain principles and conventions of representation, which are adopted by museum interpreters. Equally, representations do not have inherent meanings. The audience brings its own active processes of interpretation, some representations clearly being more deterministic than others. The extent to which the preferred reading

287

T A R C

H I of the representation is reproduced depends on the visitor’s prior experiences and frameworks of knowledge. Thus, echoing Dicks (2000), the museum does not just tell us how history is represented, but tells us about the particular articulation of identity which is being represented. As she claims: ‘Local feelings about heritage are forged out of quite diﬀerent spaces from those held by professional encoders, whose practice is orientated towards the capturing of a visitor market’ (2000, 149). In the example she cites, of the Rhondda Heritage Park, three diﬀerent kinds of expert knowledge were involved in encoding the mining heritage: local ‘lay’ knowledge; academic knowledge of local historians; and the exhibitionary, professional knowledge of heritage interpreters. The result is multiple forms of knowledge that are organized into a hierarchy determined by the project’s management ethos. Exhibitions are systems or practices of representation, and every decision made in constructing the exhibition is a choice about the representation of other cultures; this has consequences both for what meanings are produced and for how meaning is produced (Lidchi, 1997). Decisions need to be made on the material to be selected for display, the design of the exhibition, and its interpretation. St Mungo Museum of Religious Life and Art in Glasgow is an excellent example of Translation in action. In its Life Gallery the Museum takes a thematic approach to religion, focusing on key life events from birth to death, such as coming of age and the aerlife. Using objects to illustrate diﬀerent beliefs, the gallery also evokes belief through oral testimony. The museum does not shy away from confronting issues, such as circumcision and the Jewish Holocaust, using emotive images and oral testimony, not in a sensationalist way, but to provoke thought. The juxtaposition of objects drawn from diﬀerent religions in itself obviates diﬀerence, and suggests that all religions are concerned with the same key issues. The museum equalizes and demythologizes diﬀerent religions, without making judgements. As O’Neill, one of the creators of the museum, suggests, St Mungo’s represents identity ‘as a complex exploration of the historical, communal belief systems with which individuals negotiate in making sense of the major existential issues of life and death’ (2006, 42). The museum arranges workshops and events around key themes, such as antisectarianism and the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. Through this it has become a meeting place for interfaith dialogue and debate, creating what O’Neill calls a new type of public space, ‘a safe arena which is secular but borders the religious or spiritual domain, where issues of faith can be discussed’ (2006, 42). St Mungo’s is a reﬂection both of a political ethos and the motivation of key individuals. Politically, it reﬂects Glasgow City Council’s anti-racism and multicultural policies. The role of the individual, though, cannot be underplayed in the approach taken by St Mungo’s, which fully aempts to facilitate Translation. The team who created the museum and continue to drive its philosophy include Mark O’Neill and Harry Dunlop, who have taken an innovative approach to the museum’s theme. It is interdisciplinary, drawing on the city’s wide collections to reﬂect religion not through traditional museum categories, but across cultures and periods. As O’Neill claims, ‘It aims to reﬂect the much more complex identity of Glasgow and Scotland as a multi-faith rather than a mono-cultural society, and to

288

M R

I link high culture objects with the real emotions and experience of human meaning, ritual and identity’ (2006, 41). The signiﬁcance of political intervention in museums has been long acknowledged (Benne, 1995). However, the role of key individuals and the museum staﬀ is not so readily appreciated. The ethos of the museum, as with other organizations, is largely determined by the leader, while the representation of the museum’s collection is dependent on the curatorial voice and the approach of the designers. Oen, the role of the museum staﬀ is underplayed, although increasingly there are calls for more representation in the profession, in particular for more qualiﬁed ethnic minority professionals in museums (Young, 2002). Equally implicit in the encoding process in museums is the audience, which is increasingly being given a voice in the representation of both themselves and others. The process of Translation requires a degree of democratization in the production process. In other words, the voice both of those being represented and of those who are making meaning from the representation need to be taken into account in the creation of museum exhibitions. Although not mutually exclusive, there are two approaches to this, each of which can diﬀer in degree and extent of implementation. The ﬁrst approach to democratization is adopting a degree of what Cliﬀord (1999) terms ‘contact zones’. In this approach, those who are being represented are included in the process of representation through reciprocity. Cliﬀord draws on the work of Pra (1992) who originally deﬁned a ‘contact zone’ as ‘the space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations …’ (cited in Cliﬀord, 1999, 438). It is a practice which is increasingly adopted by museums to diﬀerent degrees, and not always necessarily between those who are geographically and historically separated in the colonial sense as Cliﬀord suggests. A radical approach to contact zones can be seen in the creation of the Greater Pollok Kist in Glasgow. Glasgow Museums was awarded a Heritage Loery Fund grant to enable the community of Pollok, a deprived area of Glasgow, to create and sustain their own museum. It was felt that, ‘A partial solution to the social ills of the area was considered to lie in the ability of the project to resurrect a sense of community based upon a shared identity, constructed using the social history of the area’ (Newman and McLean, 2006, 62). Glasgow Museum staﬀ acted as facilitators and gave their expertise to a core group of Pollok residents, who designed their ﬁrst exhibition which was displayed in the foyer of Pollok Leisure Centre. This small local museum was an example of a contact zone where the encounter was with those who are dispossessed. The sense of ownership and pride in the area of Pollok was palpable both in the process of its creation and in the response of the people of Pollok to the exhibition (Newman and McLean, 2006). The second approach to democratization is the evaluation of the representation process. This method has been carefully explained by Economou (2004) in her examination of the evaluation of the refurbishment of the Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery. She argues that:

289

T A R C

H I The strategy was a real step forward for the Museum and the ﬁeld as a whole, as it outlined a wide range of evaluation activities and examined the issues that these raise for the whole of the institution, and not just for small independent projects or services ... the strategy addressed evaluation holistically, and planned extensively and in-depth how it could be used as a useful tool to support the key activities throughout the organization (2004, 31). Economou explained how the evaluation systematically recorded quantitative and qualitative information about the visitors’ proﬁle, needs and preferences by combining various methods at diﬀerent stages of the design process. These included: the formative testing of information technology exhibits; the involvement of diﬀerent visitor and community groups and the use of Education, Community and Access Advisory Panels, in an eﬀort to improve physical and intellectual access to the collections and the building; front-end analysis; developing relationships with non-visitors; and the involvement of members of staﬀ with evaluation work and communication with visitors (Economou, 2004, 42). The evaluation approach links the encoding and decoding processes by allowing for the dynamic of the articulation between production and consumption of museum exhibitions. It integrates the identities of the audience within the exhibition process, the audiences who ultimately will be decoding the museum’s representations.

Decoding Identity Decoding is an active process undertaken by the museum audience. As Dicks suggests: Visitors are not on the receiving end of messages emanating from within the exhibition, rather, these messages are constructed in their interaction with the texts. Decoding is an active practice of untangling the multilayered narratives, impressions, ideas and images of heritage, which visitors assimilate into their existing repertoires of historical knowledge (2000, 219). What identity positions do the audience take in the museum? It depends on the individual, their past experiences, their frameworks of knowledge, who they are with at the time of the visit, and their relationships to those being represented. Each of these factors impacts on the moment of identity negotiation, and will reﬂect the ﬂuidity and contingency of identity work. An example of the ways in which identity is decoded could be drawn from recent work undertaken by the author and Steven Cooke at the Museum of Scotland. Interviews with visitors to the newly opened Museum of Scotland suggested that the audience identiﬁed with the Museum at an individual and collective level. Thus, ‘Rather than reading a one-dimensional static narrative of a nation, the visitors

290

M R

I constructed multifarious readings that reﬂected both their individual identities and their collective identities in an imagined community’ (McLean and Cooke, 2003b, 161). The Museum was felt to reﬂect a pride in Scotland, and many Scoish visitors le it feeling proud to be Scoish. At the same time, many visitors felt a personal connection to the Museum, such as the Scoish diaspora who experienced an explicit connection to their own history and ancestors. Others oﬀered ambivalent readings of the Museum which reﬂected alternative identities other than national identity. The Museum of Scotland acts as a symbol of Scotland (McLean and Cooke, 2003a), but, interestingly, the symbolism is both national and personal at the same time. The question, then, is that when understandings of Scoish identity change (and they are going through intense scrutiny at the present time), how does the Museum continue to reﬂect these understandings? The Kelvingrove Museum has allowed for this need to develop as contemporary understandings change, and has planned for eight displays per annum to be renewed in order to retain a contemporary position. As well as considering the processes of decoding, it is also helpful to interrogate more fully the ways in which identity is negotiated and constructed through the exhibition itself. The production of meaning through the internal ordering and conjugation of the components of an exhibition is known as the poetics of exhibiting (Lidchi, 1997). A potent example of poetics is the inscription of the Declaration of Arbroath on the walls of the ‘Scotland Deﬁned’ gallery in the Museum of Scotland. The Declaration is oen appropriated for nationalistic purposes, and strongly delineates diﬀerence between Scotland and England. The Declaration was a leer to Pope John XXII in 1320 in response to an English aempt to have Scotland’s king, Robert the Bruce, excommunicated. The section quoted within the Museum of Scotland reads: For, so long as but a hundred remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, not honours that we are ﬁghting, but for freedom – for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself. Some English visitors to the Museum were found to confront their own identities as a result of reading this inscription. Some even found it to be ‘dangerous’, and highly nationalistic in ﬂavour. For them, it problematized their understandings of their own English national identity. Such museological approaches acted as a potent symbol of Scotland’s self-determination (McLean and Cooke, 2003a). Equally, in St Mungo Museum the juxtaposition of cultural objects of diﬀerent faiths to represent diﬀerent stages of life confronts the diﬀerences which are placed between religions. Instead, it suggests that all religions have the same concerns but that they are manifest in diﬀerent ways. The poetics of the display of the religious artefacts oﬀers a reading, which obfuscates diﬀerence in what are usually highly polarized religious concerns. The Museum mediates between the diﬀerent religions, at the same time recognizing diﬀerence but also aempting to Translate

291

T A R C

H I that diﬀerence into our contemporary context. As Appadurai and Breckenridge have suggested: there are a number of contradictory pressures, some toward ﬁxing and stabilizing group identities through museums (and the potential of their artefacts to be used to emblematize existing or emergent group identities), and others that aempt to free and destabilize these identities through diﬀerent ways of displaying and viewing objects (1999, 406). The decoding of the Museum of Scotland’s display is an example of the former, while St Mungo’s reﬂects the laer approach. What marks museums out from other heritage contexts in identity work, though, is their dependence on a collection in their representations. The next section considers how identity is bound up with cultural artefacts.

Representing Identity Exhibitions are systems of representation, and as Hall postulates: ‘Every choice – to show this rather than that, to show this in relation to that, to say this about that – is a choice about how to represent “other cultures”; and each choice has consequences both for what meanings are produced and for how meaning is produced’ (1997, 8). It is through the dialogue between the encoder and decoder, through shared cultural codes, that the potential for museums for Translation is manifest. By acknowledging that power intervenes in the discourse through the very aempt to ﬁx meaning in the museum exhibition, the museum can facilitate cultural communication which recognizes diﬀerence. The assertion of the rights of indigenous peoples in other political contexts has been paralleled by an assertion of indigenous inﬂuence over their representation in museums as discussed above, but also in the holding and use of cultural artefacts associated with these peoples. Demands are being made for representation of cultures which have previously been ignored by museums or which in the past have been treated as exotic or irrelevant to contemporary concerns. In particular, repatriation has become an emotive issue in the post-colonial museum era. Many museums contain an abundance of objects which were acquired by various means from indigenous communities in the European empires. One of the reasons for amassing this material was ‘to document dying cultures, to preserve for posterity the last remains of the material evidence of dying races’ (Simpson, 2001, 246). But as Simpson rightly points out, these cultures did not die. Instead, ‘they live and thrive today and their people seek the return of objects which are symbols of cultural identity and survival, potent and necessary ceremonial items and resources for teaching the young and ensuring cultural continuity’ (2001, 246). Museums are increasingly recognizing that adopting a ‘no returns’ stance is inappropriate, and that each request for de-accessioning needs to be dealt with on its own merits. There are now a number of examples of best practice in dealing with 292

M R

I repatriation. One of the more notable recounted by Simpson (2001) is the request by the Wounded Knee Survivors’ Association for the return of a Lakota Ghost Dance Shirt, which was displayed in the Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow. Aer initially refusing to return the shirt on the grounds that it was not unique and that there were a number of other similar shirts in the US, the request was re-examined in 1998 through public consultation. Wrien submissions were considered, with only six of the 150 received arguing for the retention of the shirt. A public hearing was also convened, where support was voiced for the return of the shirt. Eventually it was decided to return the shirt, with the proviso that it could be returned to Glasgow for public display, while a replica shirt donated by the Lakota was put on display in the Museum, recounting not only the history of the original Ghost Shirt, but also its acquisition and repatriation. The post-colonial era has brought with it new challenges for museums, not just through repatriation, but also in forging links with indigenous people, and thereby revitalizing their cultures both through creating contact zones and through the rediscovery of former skills. As Simpson has argued: Museums can provide valuable resources for the renewal of dead or dying cultural practices or artistic and technological skills, lost through the colonisation process and the subsequent acquisition of important material culture by collectors and museums. In recent years many indigenous artists have drawn upon these collections in order to re-discover the imagery and technological methodology of the arts in which few of their contemporaries were trained (2001, 249). This does not just apply to ethnographic representation of colonized indigenous communities. It is relevant to all communities. A case in point is the Gaelic culture of Scotland, which is experiencing a revival, and has been shown to be far from dead, as some critics would have it. The Highland Folk Museum reﬂects a largely Gaelic culture in its collections and displays. It is part of a proliferation of museums displaying the vernacular, reﬂecting a more inclusive approach to representation than the traditional collection museums that exhibit elite forms of knowledge (Dicks, 2000; Urry, 1990). The visitor to the Highland Folk Museum can wander round a reconstructed blackhouse village, meet staﬀ dressed in period costume, and try out some of the traditional activities, such as weaving and waulking the cloth. Moreover, through the creation of vernacular buildings using traditional skills, the Museum has enabled old skills to be re-learned. The propensity for museums to engender respect for diﬀerence is also manifest in their inclusionary work. Recent studies suggest that museums can have a social interventionist role and can be active agents in shaping identities. As O’Neill argues about Glasgow Museums: ‘Based on an underlying commitment to equity in the distribution of cultural services and to a citizenship which everyone shares, Glasgow Museums seek to play a role in supporting, enriching and challenging people in the continuous task of creating, negotiating and re-creating their individual and communal identities’ (2006, 45). 293

T A R C

H I Conclusions This chapter has argued that museums are at the forefront of identity work, and that the emphasis on cultural artefacts renders them unique in the heritage sector. The layering of identities in representational practices in museums has been examined. These layers are constituted through the politics of the practices of representation of cultural artefacts and their encoding through the poetics of their display and their decoding by the museum audience. Each of these layers is in constant ﬂux, whilst the relationships between and amongst them are constantly evolving. The dynamic of the museum representation has also been shown to be both time- and contextbound, with contemporary concerns being played out through the evolution of the displays. The increased signiﬁcance of the public, both the visiting public and those on display, has been demonstrated, through more inclusionary practices. The examination has been western-centric in its approach, and has drawn on examples from the author’s experience in Scotland. These do not necessarily translate in all other geographical and historical contexts. However, they do give insights which can be compared and contrasted, not least because the concerns for Translation of diﬀerence which they reﬂect are universal.

References Anderson, B. (1983), Imagined Communities: Reﬂections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso). Appadurai, A. and Breckenridge, C.A. (1999), ‘Museums are Good to Think: Heritage on View on India’, in D. Boswell and J. Evans (eds), Representing the Nation: A Reader: History, Heritage and Museums (London, Routledge), 404–20. Arts Council of England (1999), Whose Heritage? The Impact of Cultural Diversity on Britain’s Living Heritage (London: Arts Council of England). Balakrishnan, G. (ed.) (1996), Mapping the Nation (London: Verso). Benne, T. (1995), The Birth of the Museum (London: Routledge). Bhabha, H.K. (1994), The Location of Culture (London: Routledge). Boswell, D. and Evans, J. (eds) (1999), Representing the Nation: A Reader: History, Heritage and Museums (London, Routledge). Boylan, P. (1990), ‘Museums and Cultural Identity’, Museums Journal, October, 29– 33. Cliﬀord, J. (1999), ‘Museums as Contact Zones’, in D. Boswell and J. Evans (eds), Representing the Nation: A Reader: History, Heritage and Museums (London, Routledge), 435–57. Corsane, G. (ed.) (2005), Heritage, Museums and Galleries (London: Routledge). Dicks, B. (2000), Heritage, Place and Community (Cardiﬀ: University of Wales Press). Economou, M. (2004), ‘Evaluation Strategies in the Cultural Sector: The Case of Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery’, Museum and Society 2:1, 30–46.

294

M R

I Evans, J. (1999), ‘Introduction’, in D. Boswell and J. Evans (eds), Representing the Nation: A Reader: History, Heritage and Museums (London, Routledge), 1–8. Gellner, E. (1996), ‘The Coming of Nationalism and its Interpretation: The Myths of Nation and Class’, in G. Balakrishnan (ed.), Mapping the Nation (London: Verso), 56–72. Hall, S. (1980), ‘Encoding/Decoding’, in S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe and P. Willis (eds), Culture, Media, Language (London: Hutchinson), 128–38. Hall, S. (ed.) (1997), Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Sage). Hall, S. (1999), ‘Unseling “The Heritage”: Re-imagining the Post-nation’, in Arts Council of England, Whose Heritage? The Impact of Cultural Diversity on Britain’s Living Heritage (London: Arts Council of England), 13–22. Hall, S., Hobson, D., Lowe, A. and Willis, P. (eds) (1980), Culture, Media, Language (London: Hutchinson). Hewison, R. (1987), The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline (London: Methuen). Kaplan, F. (1994), Museums and the Making of ‘Ourselves’: The Role of Objects in National Identity (London: Leicester University Press). Lidchi, H. (1997), ‘The Poetics and Politics of Exhibiting Other Cultures’, in S. Hall (ed.), Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Sage), 151–208. McLean, F. and Cooke, S. (2003a), ‘The National Museum of Scotland: A Symbol for a New Scotland?’, Scoish Aﬀairs 45, Autumn, 111–27. McLean, F. and Cooke, S. (2003b), ‘Constructing the Identity of a Nation: The Tourist Gaze at the Museum of Scotland’, Tourism, Culture and Communication 4, 153–62. Newman, A. and McLean, F. (2002), ‘Architectures of Inclusion: Museums, Galleries and Inclusive Communities’, in R. Sandell (ed.), Museums, Society, Inequality (London: Routledge), 56–68. Newman, A. and McLean, F. (2006), ‘The Impact of Museums upon Identity’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 12:1, 49–68. O’Neill, M. (2002), ‘The Good Enough Visitor’, in R. Sandell (ed.), Museums, Society, Inequality (London: Routledge), 24–40. O’Neill, M. (2006), ‘Museums and Identity in Glasgow’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 12:1, 29–48. Pieterse, J.N. (2005), ‘Multiculturalism and Museums: Discourse About Others in the Age of Globalization’, in G. Corsane (ed.), Heritage, Museums and Galleries (London: Routledge), 163–83. Pra, M.L. (1992), Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge). Prior, N. (2002), Museums and Modernity: Art Galleries and the Making of Modern Culture (Oxford: Berg). Robins, K. (1999), ‘Tradition and Translation: National Culture in its Global Context’, in D. Boswell and J. Evans (eds), Representing the Nation: A Reader: History, Heritage and Museums (London, Routledge), 15–32. 295

T A R C

H I Said, E.W. (1989), ‘Representing the Colonised: Anthropology’s Interlocutors’, Critical Inquiry, cited in Robins (1999). Sandell, R. (ed.) (2002), Museums, Society, Inequality (London: Routledge). Simpson, M.G. (2001), Making Representations: Museums in the Post-Colonial Era, revised edition (London: Routledge). Urry, J. (1990), The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage). Wright, P. (1985), On Living in an Old Country (London: Verso). Young, L. (2002), ‘Rethinking Heritage: Cultural Policy and Inclusion’, in R. Sandell (ed.), Museums, Society, Inequality (London: Routledge), 203–12.

296

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

PART IV THE CHALLENGES OF A POSTMODERN AND POST-COLONIAL WORLD

This page intentionally left blank

17

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

Plural and Multicultural Heritages John E. Tunbridge

Some three centuries ago, French Huguenots found refuge from persecution in London. They were by no means the ﬁrst exotic minority to gravitate there and they were very far from being the last, being followed by nineteenth-century Jews, twentieth-century Poles and the legion of post-colonial migrants, all long before the present-day globalization of immigration. No realistic interpretation of the heritage of London, or of its global tourist-historic primacy, can be other than ethnically plural – to say nothing of its historic imperial ties with peoples above and beyond those who physically migrated there, its even older magnetism for regionally diverse migrants from within the British islands, or its human diversity otherwise deﬁned. Where London has led, other world cities have followed, and increasingly lesser places, to the point where national populations are enthusiastically claimed – or grudgingly recognized – to represent a plurality of heritages.

Multiculturalism, Pluralism and Heritage Geographical research recognized long ago the existence of plural societies, at least in ethnic terms. With their proliferation in the late twentieth century, however, the global imagination has been inspired (or alienated) by the use of the term ‘multiculturalism’ in the rhetoric of governments and popular culture. Not surprisingly, multiculturalism has become loosely equated with pluralism, but the terms are not synonymous, either generally or as focal themes for the creation of heritage. Multiculturalism is arguably a concept born of expediency, appropriated by fashion, fraught with conﬂict potential and, ultimately, undermined by deﬁnitional ambiguity. Increasing ethnic diversity, especially in Western societies where low birth rates and labour shortages have contributed to liberal immigration policies, has led to the oﬃcial construction of multicultural social regimes which have sought to make a virtue of necessity, in the promotion of equality of esteem for all constituent elements without their obligatory acculturation. Laerly the concept has

T A R C

H I been appropriated by intellectual fashion as it neatly ﬁts the promotion of diversity in the ideology of postmodernism. A predictable result of this association is that multiculturalism, like postmodernism, has become an overworked term loosely bandied about both academic literature and popular parlance, with diminishing linkages to any clearly identiﬁable meaning. Furthermore oﬃcial promotion of multicultural social policies has generated conﬂict, both with majorities fearing the loss of hegemonic status and also with minorities resenting the trivialization of their own cultural values by such initiatives as multicultural food festivals (Stanton, 2005). It has also generated widespread concerns that the unity in diversity supposedly achieved may prove an unaainable contradiction. However, pluralism is a much older and more wide-ranging phenomenon than the contemporary preoccupation with multiculturalism. As the history of London illustrates, ethnically diverse urban populations are nothing new; indeed, quarters of tolerance for exotic minorities were institutionalized in the European Middle Ages and earlier (Vance, 1977). They have, however, seldom been the objects of policy designed both to respect and perpetuate their diversity. Social policy has oen been spatially or otherwise restrictive of minorities, if not coercive of their assimilation; where benign it has more likely been tolerant than proactively supportive; and both policy towards minorities and protection of them may well have been absent altogether. The wide range of plural policy responses has usually been based on a narrow ethnic conception of what constitutes plurality. However, social plurality is not only a maer of ethnicity and/or religious aﬃliation but of class and of identity or predilection variously deﬁned. Traditionally, plural societies might take class for granted and otherwise not perceive such multilateral diversity. These are now usually embodied in the multicultural concept, as beﬁts both the breadth of contemporary conceptions of culture and the diversity inherent in the postmodern aﬃliation of multiculturalism. Plural societies, however, whether ethnically or now more broadly deﬁned, have by no means all adopted the inclusivity implied in multicultural perspectives: some have no such intention, some do not match multicultural rhetoric with substance, some are withdrawing in fright from the implications of multiculturalism for the values and indeed the security of majority populations. In sum, through the deﬁnitional haze, pluralism can be regarded as a timeless human condition in which a traditionally narrow conception of plurality has engendered a broad spectrum of policy responses. Multiculturalism, in contrast, can arguably be a contemporary conceit which seeks to channel a wide range of perceived human diversities into a narrow policy option in which a generous ideology is typically masking political pragmatism. Our concern is with the heritage signiﬁcance of all this. We do not need to review the nature of heritage, extensively explored over the past three decades by the contributors to this book among many others. Suﬃce it to remember that the heritages we create are reciprocally related to our identities, both at the individual and collective level: heritage both reﬂects and reinforces identity. It is inseparable from policy which is responsive to social identity and concerned with its future 300

P M H management. Heritage becomes a key instrument in shaping various models of plural identity, of which the multicultural vision as generally perceived is but one option. These plural models will now be considered; their complex, evolving relationship to multicultural endeavours in the real world, and the role of heritage in this, will then be examined with primary reference to three leading national examples of multiculturalism.

Diversity of Pluralisms Ashworth, Graham and Tunbridge (2007) have examined pluralism with respect to its heritage signiﬁcance and have identiﬁed a spectrum of plural scenarios, ranging from the least to the most accepting of minority identity, however deﬁned, and its reﬂection and entrenchment through heritage. They visualize ﬁve identiﬁable conditions within what nevertheless remains a spectrum of gradational possibilities. These are discussed below in broadly ascending order of minority status, from non-recognition through tolerance to degrees of recognition culminating in multicultural celebration.

Assimilation In this scenario, the minority identity is not acknowledged, other than temporarily during a process of absorption into the mainstream. While willingness, more or less, to countenance such absorption might be regarded as preferable to the minority’s expulsion as a foreign body, its heritage representations must be discouraged or suppressed in order for assimilation to mainstream identity and values to succeed. Language is typically central to these values, a classic historical case being the absorption of French Huguenots into Afrikanerdom in South Africa, even though the restoration of their group memory was in time to prove useful politically and for the tourism economy (notably for Franschhoek in the Western Cape). The Welsh are among various comparable minorities in Argentina, though they may illustrate the retention of a somewhat higher proﬁle by virtue of their more speciﬁc identiﬁcation with the geographically distinct area of Patagonia. A currently dangerous case of identity suppression, supposedly to minimize geopolitical consequences, is that of the ‘Mountain Turks’, actually Turkey’s share of the transborder Kurdish population of the Middle East. In Europe, recent measures taken by the Dutch government could be construed as a fear-driven eﬀort to assimilate their Muslim minority.

Melting Pot In this scenario, the assimilation process is not to a pre-existing mainstream identity but to an evolving composite identity distinct from the original ingredients. The melting pot ﬁts circumstances of greater openness to a wider range of minority immigration, with the end result that the name implies. Minority heritages are 301

T A R C

H I accepted during the generational melting process and indeed beyond, but in the subordinate adjectival role of hyphenated identities which pivot on unequivocal loyalty to national heritage values. The United States is, of course, the ideological mainspring and classic case, requiring the allegiance of citizens to a dominant national foundation mythology that was, however, extended by the concept of its continuing openness and adaptability to all comers. But in practice open entry and the absorption of new values did not continue indeﬁnitely, as established society sought to protect national identity as of the late nineteenth century; furthermore ultimate melting of then-existing minorities did not necessarily occur. Thus the melting pot took on some qualities of assimilation to pre-existing heritage identity and perpetuated others applicable to the core-plus model (below). Melting-pot rhetoric is no more accurate a depiction of US society than are many other national visions of plural identity, posing the question of whether an unqualiﬁed meltingpot pluralism is likely to occur in practice.

Core-plus Model In this case, minority add-on identities are at least tolerated, at best positively accepted, even accorded degrees of formal recognition, where the majority feels its values to be secure and the minority identity to be a more or less beneﬁcial addition, either for its political proﬁle or its tourism economy. Spatially discrete indigenous groups such as the Sámi of the northern Scandinavian countries might ﬁt this scenario. European Jews historically constituted a more or less tolerated ‘add-on’ in times of low tension, such as their medieval zenith in the Rhenish cities of Speyer and Worms, a heritage now restored in the Jewish Museum in Berlin. They poignantly illustrate, however, the impermanence of plural models by their intervening heritage destruction and, of course, far worse in the Holocaust. Recent arrivals scaered around the poorer quarters of European cities, and with distinct identities more visibly obvious, are a delicate issue uneasily resonant of the historic Jewish case, and as susceptible to volatility over time. Primarily on this account, several Western European societies, Britain notable amongst them, are arguably hovering in a core-plus condition which falls short of the multicultural rhetoric of some of their opinion leaders. This may be reﬂected in heritage marginalization, even if inadvertent through misunderstanding and inappropriate standards, as in the Brick Lane area of East London (Gard’ner, 2004).

Pillar Model Societies founded on separate pillars coexisting more or less in mutual heritage solitudes have functioned in various contexts; such a situation implies, however, that an obvious national instability and disintegration or mutation are likely outcomes. Ashworth, Graham and Tunbridge (2007) point to the Netherlands as the classic example, historically a compromise between Protestant north and Catholic south, but note that the more recently inserted Asian immigrants destabilize the model since their greater cultural distance and their dispersal, especially in cities, challenge the geographical foundation of the existing pillars, thereby engendering political 302

P M H hostility. Belgium is a historically similar case in which the Flemish, Walloon and German pillars have demonstrated the innate centrifugality of the model, in this case linguistically based, even before consideration of the exotic minorities. However, most pillar societies are likely to be found in Africa, where the wellknown problem of ethnically misﬁt colonial boundaries has le many centrifugal populations and discordant tribal heritages of language and tradition. Such circumstances are further compounded in cases such as Nigeria and Ghana by south–north Christian versus Muslim overlays, and in Liberia and Sierra Leone by the descendants of freed, returned slaves who have constituted detribalized and aloof populations for most of the past two centuries since their return. But South Africa most clearly demonstrated the sinister potential which can discredit this model: apartheid was the ultimate case of a society pillared on the pretext of grossly incompatible racial/cultural heritages but with power retained exclusively by one group – a massive legacy which its democratic successor state is striving to eradicate speciﬁcally by the reconﬁguration of heritage values around all that can be identiﬁed or postulated as common ground.

Salad Bowl This scenario envisages a coreless society composed of diverse elements which retain their distinctive identities, sustained by distinctive heritages and, at the most liberal extreme, are collectively celebrated for so doing. This is the plural context which can be identiﬁed with multiculturalism, as usually understood. It is the context into which various, mostly Western, societies are oen seen or assumed to be evolving, mainly by virtue of receiving globalized immigration ﬂows. Notably, all four of the principal former British Dominions are now so regarded, Canada being most extreme in its present population diversity, through Australia to New Zealand as least so, with South Africa as a special case in which the former identity was deﬁned by power rather than numbers. We consider below the most clearly multicultural cases, Canada and South Africa, as well as the highly distinctive citystate case of Singapore, with reference to their changing heritage expressions.

Multicultural Heritages: Diversity in Place and Time Canada The principal geographical foundations for Canada’s profession of multiculturalism were two-fold: an internal Anglo-French dichotomy, in eﬀect a dual-pillar society; and the external shadow eﬀect of the United States (following Britain). Both created a century-long problem for the formation of a credible national identity and thereby predisposed the country to reach out to multiculturalism, when conditions allowed, as a basis for creating a distinctive identity and one that made a virtue of its lack of a generally accepted pre-existing cultural core.

303

T A R C

H I The Anglo-French partnership had been formalized from Canada’s national foundation in 1867, but the British imperial link continued to dominate until it was challenged by growing nationalism and, discordantly, by French assertiveness aer World War II. Broad-based European immigration, especially during the postwar years, was assimilated in varying degrees without greatly disturbing the perceived national dichotomy or distracting from francophone, mainly Quebecois, demands for greater equality or even separation. These were appeased by bilingual legislation in the 1960s. Reduced European immigration thereaer, and its replacement (necessary to maintain demographic growth and viable socioeconomic mechanisms) by a global population inﬂux, mandated a contentious, but also opportunistic, reconﬁguration of national identity, away from both the Anglo-French tension and the US melting pot, to become the world’s ﬁrst avowedly multicultural society. This has been enshrined in a succession of federal legislation and policies from the early 1970s, most particularly in the Canadian Constitution of 1982 (replacing the British North America Act of 1867) and its associated Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which established a protective foundation for human diversity (Tunbridge and Ashworth, 1996). Multiculturalism has become, to all appearances, a national mantra, matched by high quotas (by global standards) of immigration, so that Canada has evolved as a culturally ‘coreless’ society, markedly more so than its Commonwealth peers or any European society. In the process the Indian, Metis (mixed Franco-Indian) and Inuit native peoples have retrospectively found recognition as Canada’s third founding pillar, and contemporary status as a multicultural component with unique claims on the redress of grievances, centred most notably on the protracted land-claims process (Saku and Bone, 2000). Diversity of cultural heritages is actively encouraged and celebrated by national agencies, notably Parks Canada, through national parks and historic sites, and is widely visible in the streetscapes of much of urban Canada and audible in the discourse of younger generations. Oawa, the national capital, has emerged as the showcase of multicultural identity. In the absence of a federal district, the National Capital Commission (NCC) is the agency mandated to uphold and develop the capital identity as the focus of national values for all Canadians. This it has done for half a century (following the work of predecessors) primarily through the direct ownership of strategic land in both the Ontario (Oawa proper) and Quebec (Gatineau) halves of what has been designated the National Capital Region. It owns the core area focused upon Parliament and the main federal buildings, and manages the manicured landscape and the messages conveyed in its iconography. Remoulding this story into a seamless multicultural narrative is a continuous challenge in view of the obsolescence of past messages, the removal of which would both generate sectional hostility and detract from the ethos of a peacefully evolved democracy, and the competing claims of contemporary interest groups for pride of place in the present and future national pantheon. This challenge has been met primarily by the monumental representation of multiculturally inclusive values, notably peacekeeping and various aspects of human rights, and the avoidance of cultural speciﬁcity except to redress grievances (as of indigenous peoples). The NCC’s mandate is complemented by the Canadian 304

P M H Museum of Civilization, which reinterprets the human story of Canada by the overt inclusion of speciﬁc cultural components in rotating if not permanent displays (albeit with debatable justice to the main contributors, particularly the British). There are, however, tensions and problems in this multicultural enterprise (Bissoondath, 2002). Notable among them is the malaise of both displaced hegemons and trivialized newcomers. The world’s quarrels were imported, as reﬂected, for example, in the bombing of an Air India airliner over the Atlantic in 1985, which killed 329 people, an act allegedly perpetrated by Sikh dissidents resident in Canada, and in a series of issues since, of which Islamic fundamentalism, and US reaction to its presence in Canada, is but the most recent. Outside of Montreal, most of Quebec favoured separation in its 1995 referendum, the long-standing grievances of many Quebecois being compounded by perceptions that they were now regarded not as a founding partner of Confederation but as just another ethnic minority (albeit French Canadians overall still constituted 24 per cent of the national population in 2000). More generally, a problem of geographical scale exists; the national vision may be regionally equivocal, as in those Atlantic and Prairie provinces which experience more out- than in-migration. In particular, Newfoundland and Labrador, a highly distinctive province of almost entirely Anglo/Irish/native stock (that passionately debated its 1949 confederation with Canada some 50 years later), has shown lile multicultural motivation outside of federally run National Historic Sites and the new provincial museum in St John’s opened in 2005 (Ashworth, Graham and Tunbridge, 2007; Tunbridge and Ashworth, 1996). However, the most fundamental dissonance over multicultural versus sectional heritage identity may be at the local level. Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal are overwhelmingly the focal points of multicultural immigration (see Hiebert, 2000). Oawa as capital and fourth city (one million metropolitan population, 2001) has its particular mandate to showcase multiculturalism; in other non-Quebec cities, cultural diversity is of variable relevance. The multicultural message appears also in rural locations, usually in designated historic sites or other places concerned with minority refuge. In Ontario, the Mennonite district near Kitchener-Waterloo, tourism-centred on St Jacobs (Ashworth and Tunbridge, 2000), is one classic example, and the Underground Railroad refuges of escaped US slaves, symbolized by Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Buxton (Pollock-Ellwand, 2006) are another. In general, however, the persistent voting paerns of small-town and rural Canada reﬂect a rejection of the Liberal party which has championed multiculturalism. Furthermore, it is entirely possible that the tourism and retirement industries of small-town Canada provide a refuge for those metropolitan Canadians who seek a temporary – or permanent – respite from multicultural life. Meanwhile questions have arisen regarding the management of ethnic minorities in the metropolitan centres themselves, and whether it accords with the proclaimed ethos of multiculturalism. Constraints on public expenditure have induced cities, notably Toronto, to resort to the collective commercial resources of designated Business Improvement Areas to fund the improvement of district centres. These are commonly marketed under an ethnic label which provides a consumer illusion of multicultural celebration when, in fact, neither the ethnicity 305

T A R C

H I nor the proﬁts from its promotion necessarily relate to the identity or the wellbeing of the local community – particularly if gentriﬁcation ensues (Bissoondath, 2002; Hackworth and Rekers, 2005; Hoyt, 2005).

South Africa South Africa’s historical and geographical circumstances diﬀer radically from Canada’s in that it constitutes the extremity of a continent in which the indigenous population not only outnumbered the controlling European groups who founded the country but has increasingly outnumbered them in the past century. There is, however, one striking similarity, namely the historical tension between the same dominant British imperial element and a similar European population of mainly Dutch origin, the Boers/Afrikaners, seeking to redress their conquered status – in this case achieving hegemony for two generations under the infamous system of apartheid which ended in the early 1990s. In other respects, post-apartheid South Africa’s multicultural challenge diﬀers in being primarily internal, although continuing immigrants are secondary beneﬁciaries. The challenge is to reconcile the collective white minority to African majority rule and the country’s numerous African ethnic divisions, Coloured (or mixed-race) and Indian minorities to one another. The various non-white groups were mutually polarized under apartheid’s ‘divide and rule’, but their distinctions and rivalries, still felt by many of their members, have deep historical roots. They were clearly visible in the democratic constitutional negotiations over new regional boundaries (Christopher, 1995), and in the voting paerns in subsequent elections. Academic classiﬁcation of all nonwhites as ‘black’ is too simplistic, though ironically it retains currency in South Africa’s application of reverse discrimination to all ‘blacks’ as victims, more or less, of apartheid. Nevertheless, South Africa has re-imaged itself as the ‘Rainbow Nation’ from the outset of democracy and has recognized the pressing need to reconﬁgure its public heritage representations around themes and values which can ﬁnally unite its multicultural spectrum. Common ground in sport was recognized in the late apartheid era and was actively cultivated by the ﬁrst democratic President, Nelson Mandela. His dedication to reconciliation, despite his long ordeal as a political prisoner, won wide respect for his views and the heritage interpretations more generally which he endorsed, particularly since his international prestige cast a positive reﬂection upon a South Africa accustomed to opprobrium. Heritage resources so associated have appeared widely, including: the Amandla (Freedom) and Apartheid Museums in the Rand; the Nelson Mandela Museum in Qunu (his birthplace in the Eastern Cape); and the Nelson Mandela Gateway Museum in Cape Town, at the Robben Island ferry terminal. Pre-existing museums are in various stages of revising their interpretations; and grassroots local museums have appeared in the African townships, most notably commemorating Cape Town’s District Six displacement of the Coloured population (Worden, 1997). Urban monuments reﬂecting the colonial seler society essentially remain, notably Queen Victoria, Rhodes (in the Cape), Kruger (as in Pretoria) and Smuts, wartime and

306

P M H last pre-apartheid leader; but the apartheid prime ministers have been withdrawn from monuments, airport names and the like. The white iconography is, however, becoming broadly juxtaposed with statues commemorating mainly non-white ﬁgures who represent consensus-seeking values. The ﬁrst, unveiled in Mandela’s presence, was in Pietermaritzburg to mark the 1993 centennial of Gandhi’s ejection from a ﬁrst-class railway carriage there and dedicated, with wide-ranging approval, to the non-violent opposition to racism (Tunbridge and Ashworth, 1996). Most recently, South Africa’s four Nobel Peace Prize laureates, Luthuli, Tutu, Mandela and, interestingly, the last apartheid President, De Klerk, have been so honoured in Cape Town’s Victoria and Alfred Waterfront. Meanwhile gradual street renaming is not conﬁned to African heroes; Pietermaritzburg includes white liberals such as Alan Paton among its new street pantheon. The central icon of democratic multicultural heritage is, however, Robben Island oﬀ Cape Town, the infamous prison for Mandela and other African National Congress leaders. It has been re-imaged as a museum not of racist crime but of the triumph of the human spirit and the cradle of South African non-racial democracy, emergent from a system of which all were victims. This heritage interpretation, based tenuously on the material evidence and selecting out a range of other natural and cultural resources, has not gone unchallenged (Deacon, 2004; Graham, Ashworth and Tunbridge, 2000). It is, however, a remarkable self-eﬀacement by the post-apartheid leadership in quest of national reconciliation, achieving World Heritage status to the beneﬁt of both political and economic ends. Baleﬁeld heritage is an obvious target for reconciliatory reinterpretation, particularly in Kwazulu-Natal where most is found. Urban monuments to seler victories are still in place, as in Pietermaritzburg, but changes are occurring at some of the sites of the Anglo-Boer War (Nasson, 2004). At Talana, Dundee, the role of Indian stretcher bearers, notably Gandhi, has been recorded by that local community within a more comprehensive Wall of Peace and Reconciliation. Blood River, the central foundation of Boer/Afrikaner racist mythology, is a still more sensitive case. Its evocative life-size laager of wagons, cast metal replicas of those from which the Voortrekkers defeated the Zulu army, no longer receives state support and its museum now acknowledges questions of historical interpretation. In 1999, however, it was matched by the nationally supported Ncome Museum across the river, where the Zulu background and interpretation are presented, querying the perspective of its neighbour and co-marketed as the Ncome-Blood River Heritage Site (see Figure 19.3, p. 358). Such baleﬁeld heritage revision, though not yet undertaken at nearby Isandlwana and Rorke’s Dri (Anglo-Zulu War), has particular resonance for overseas tourism. Much heritage contestation does, however, remain (Coombes, 2003). A prime focus is the Voortrekker Monument commemorating the 1938 Centennial of the Boer Great Trek, which still overshadows Pretoria with its symbolism of racial supremacy visibly akin to the Nazi iconography of its time. The media continue (2006) to report incidents such as the paint defacement by Afrikaner extremists of an African chief’s statue erected in central Pretoria, portending similar treatment of another planned for Pietermaritzburg. Challenges to public multicultural 307

T A R C

H I reconciliation could also be provoked by controversial entrepreneurial placebranding initiatives such as the giant Mandela statue proposed for Port Elizabeth’s waterfront (Marschall, 2006). However, eﬀective heritage representation may shi to outlying locations including privately controlled and security-patrolled themed recreational sites. City centres are being marginalized by crime fears associated with their Africanization, in eﬀect disinheriting non-Africans from their identities. This can be recognized in Cape Town’s focal dri to the Victoria and Alfred (V and A) Waterfront; the city centre has new museum initiatives such as the Slave Lodge and Jewish Museum, but the V and A has added Robben Island, the Gateway Museum and the Nobel laureates to its historic port environment. Durban is also experiencing corporate docklands revitalization around the Zulu-themed uShaka Village and Marine World, which may similarly challenge the city centre’s heritage role. A further challenge to the public multicultural heritage agenda may be the development of rural tourist/recreational heritage circuits. They exploit all perceived heritage resources, cra and hospitality amenities but tend to reinforce the traditionally hegemonic seler imagery. They provide ‘bolt-holes’ from urban multicultural realities and, intentionally or not, become benign breathing spaces or subversive locations of denial, perhaps just for an excursion but ultimately for residential relocation. They can be seen as the leading edge, in South Africa’s sensitive white-seler minority circumstance, of the same phenomenon in Canada and other multicultural societies. Pietermaritzburg’s heritage marketing has been re-slanted from its urban colonial Victoriana not only to its baleﬁelds accessibility, but also to its centrality in the Midlands Meander of Natal rural heritage (Tunbridge, 1999). The Cape Winelands are Cape Town’s famous equivalent, replete with Cape Dutch and Huguenot heritage, as in Stellenbosch and Franschhoek. There are widespread communities such as Matjiesfontein, McGregor and Greyton in the Western Cape and Clarens in the Free State which individually ﬁll this role, oen with artistic associations. Whether South Africa’s oﬃcial heritage reconﬁguration can prevail, despite the uncertainties of contest, private space control and urban locational marginalization, is a question of vital relevance to its future multicultural success and, like Canada, the impact of its example upon plural societies elsewhere.

Singapore Like Canada and South Africa, Singapore has promoted multicultural heritage to resolve a national identity problem. It not only shares the internal plural society challenge of all three but is faced with an external positioning problem greater than Canada’s, being not only very closely juxtaposed to its large neighbours but a small state of diverse religions surrounded by a potentially hostile Islamic world. Singapore’s breakaway from Malaysia at independence in the 1960s, and its subsequent radical programme of structural and social redevelopment to create a society with common identity and purpose, have been well documented (recently by Jones and Shaw, 2006). It sought to overcome the colonial legacy of ethnic sectionalism which dated from Raﬄes, the founder of modern Singapore

308

P M H (Home, 1997), the Muslim Malay domination of Malaysia and the derivative tensions at independence between its ethnic Chinese and mainly Malay and Indian minorities. Drastic structural redevelopment has served both literally to sanitize its insalubrious equatorial environment and to disrupt ethnic power bases in favour of greater social mixing within a completely re-imaged, uniﬁed city state of the ‘4Ms’: multi-racialism; multi-lingualism; multiculturalism; and multiple religions. Its redevelopment zeal to this end le it out of step with the Western world’s retreat from urban renewal, and by the 1980s its vital tourism economy faltered as its ethnicity-rich heritage identity largely disappeared. Its response has been an innovative regeneration of lost heritage resources from what remained and what could be re-created, suitably orchestrated for tourism and controlled domestic consumption. Thus sanitized versions of Chinatown, Lile India, Kampong Glam (Malay) and Emerald Hill (representing the Peranakan Malay-Chinese community) have re-emerged, to create what Shaw, Jones and Ling (1997) describe as a pastiche heritage environment. Meanwhile the ethnically neutral colonial heritage of government and institutional buildings, most famously Raﬄes Hotel, have not only been retained in belated recognition of the need for continuity of identity as well as tourism resources, but have also been re-imaged as uniﬁed Singaporean institutions (Henderson, 2001). Most recently, the 50th and 60th anniversaries focused overseas and domestic interest on Singapore’s traumatic World War II experience. This has been addressed by museum developments in the former Changi Jail, a colonial bungalow reused for ‘Reﬂections at Bukit Chandu’, and in the ‘Bale Box’ (Bale Headquarters, Malaya Command) beneath Fort Canning in the inner city. For the domestic audience these are used to underscore the need for national solidarity, to ensure that the Fall of Singapore is never repeated, its anniversary now being Total Defence Day. Recounting the heroism of the Malay Regiment in bale near Bukit Chandu opportunistically honours one ethnic group and exhorts all to a shared identiﬁcation with place and continued united defence of the nation (Brunero, 2006; Lunn, 2007). Other memorials commemorate Japanese atrocities towards the civilian population. While more widely encountered in Asia, here they encourage intergenerational empathy and contribute to the national communal identity formation (Blackburn, 2005).

Pluralism, Multiculturalism and Global Migration These three leading cases illustrate the variable perspectives and prospects to which multicultural heritage development is subject, in which national size, the nature of social pluralism and regional geographical context clearly play important roles, whatever the detailed political priorities. However, it would be myopic to ascribe the existence of any plural heritage model, or nuanced variant, purely to a state’s immediate circumstances. Like it or not, it must respond to the pluralization dynamics of an interdependent world.

309

T A R C

H I Discussion of multiculturalism usually concerns Western or otherwise aﬄuent societies which have the material means and political/institutional sophistication to aempt positive pluralizing redirections of social policy and its heritage foundations. Much of the world, however, not only lacks these means but is beset by major plural disparities that it may, in addition, lack the motivation to redress. This certainly cannot all be ascribed to the colonial legacy, but much reﬂects the post-colonial condition of ethnically misﬁt national boundaries and immigrant minorities. There are a number of post-colonial states, such as Botswana, which have established stable democracies with variously pluralized accommodations where needed. Many states, however, post-colonial or not, have fallen far short. Extreme cases have orchestrated ethnic cleansing by expulsion (the Ugandan Asians in the 1960s) or even alleged or documented genocide (Turkish Armenians, Rwandan Tutsis and Hutus, multilateral victims in the former Yugoslavia) rather than perpetuate any kind of plural society. Less drastic is the assertion of a national heritage which excludes a minimally tolerated minority, provoking civil war and/ or partition: Ceylon aer its Buddhist Sinhalese reimaging as Sri Lanka, or Cyprus aer its aempted union with Greece (Hyndman, 2003; Sco, 2002). In such cases, what amounts to a negative core-plus model is liable to end up as being forcibly translated into a pillar model, or disintegrated altogether. In ostensible contrast is the case of professed multicultural societies which have proven less able to achieve a uniﬁed identity. Trinidad and Tobago could perhaps claim to have created a multicultural heritage identity as successfully as Canada, despite the persistence of African/Indian sectionalisms. Guyana, however, which from independence was an avowedly ‘co-operative’ multicultural society, and continues through its National Trust to promote a uniﬁed heritage identity, has so far been unable to overcome its African, Indian and Amerindian divisions which are commonly aligned with violent crime in an economy of scarcity. It is lile wonder, therefore, that Toronto is now the largest urban centre of Sri Lankan Tamils (Hyndman, 2003) or that the Guyanese media discuss the national diaspora to the UK and Canada along with the crime rate, both ethnically linked and otherwise, which it substantially reﬂects. Global migration, of course, reﬂects pull factors of opportunity and push factors of poverty and violence which do not necessarily relate to the lack of pluralizing accommodations in the society of origin. Thus the pressures in Western societies for identity pluralizations, most speciﬁcally multiculturalism, do not simplistically mirror plural denial and multicultural failure in the erstwhile Third World; but they are clearly linked to them. Moreover, this is not new; refugee South Moluccans have been a pluralization issue in the Netherlands since Indonesian independence in 1949. As this and numerous British and French examples remind us, for many migrants their global geographical movement directly reﬂects the imperial historical legacy. Thus, within its complex motivation, there is oen a link between the failure of pluralization in migrants’ places of origin and the need for heritage-based multicultural success in their now post-imperial destinations.

310

P M H Plural Heritage Identities: Geographies and Judgement Calls Very large states have limited power to control regional and local heritage dissonances; city-states have far greater potential to micro-manage heritage messages. Otherwise wide variations in the nature of their social plurality and their geographical circumstances will further nuance their vision of multiculturalism, not to speak of ideological diﬀerences. All this also applies to pluralisms which fall short of multiculturalism by intent or actual aainment. Furthermore, no national plural heritage scenario can be understood in isolation from the globalization forces that shape societies as they do economies. Whatever the rhetoric of multiculturalism, however, the reality of plural heritage is that it exists at a scale normally less than the national entity. As the opening reference to London indicates, it is primarily a reality of major cities, with limited trickle-down to secondary centres and few resonances for rural hinterlands, except where ethnic minorities are long established. Furthermore, this paern has oen been the case for far longer than plural heritage has engaged academic aention. Not only has it a long pedigree in major cities but it has oen been associated with particular quarters of them, from the medieval quarters of tolerance to the docklands of Liverpool and London, where human diversity has long existed in virtual estrangement from the wider cities and their hinterlands. The profusion of immigrant districts which have now been added to these may or may not have evolved or legislated their own very local plural heritage accommodations. It is tempting, therefore, to dismiss national multicultural rhetorics as oen no more than empty posturing unrelated to geographical scale and diversity. They elide the evidence that there will be political diﬀerences between the national and local scales over the meaning and acceptability of multicultural as against alternative plural heritage identities, a contemporary aspect of liberal versus conservative values which is not necessarily deﬁned by minority membership. However, the internal tensions over the legitimacy and place of minority heritages are central to the political contest over national identity which besets many contemporary nations – a nele which has to be grasped, not avoided. In so doing, a negative view of commitment to multicultural heritage identity would see imperfect global examples oﬀering no standard formula for success, and national circumstances of internal division and local divergence, in which a multicultural eﬀort would degenerate into less accommodating plural relationships of mutual solitude, marginalization or worse. Minority heritages might then run the gamut of plural possibilities, even to the point of outright denial. Such a negative view in Western societies would likely oppose global immigration, especially if it is seen as the reciprocal burden of multicultural failure elsewhere. In contrast the positive view would see a multiculturalism which incorporates all minority heritages into a composite heritage identity as being vital, for both the socio-political and economic value of heritage. Taking an optimistic and convergent view of global experience, cultivation of a multicultural identity may be seen as the best long-term prospect for national socio-political cohesion and stability, whatever the dissonances of perspective and heritage encountered along the way. For this 311

T A R C

H I purpose a multicultural heritage identity needs to emphasize the core values which are shared, rather than the sectional identities of those expected to share them; those values will have much in common in any multicultural context but will be slanted to the internal and external needs of particular geographic circumstances, such as peacekeeping, triumph of the human spirit or vigilance, as in our three examples. However, the economic value of multiculturalism in competitive place-marketing may be equally compelling and, for this purpose, the individual heritage facets that shape the surface of the composite identity need to be accented. While individual minority skills beneﬁt the nation in the global marketplace, minority heritages not only diversify the cultural package on oﬀer but can, and should, provide minorities with a stake in the enterprise, so making a bonus investment in local social equity and, it may be hoped, social harmony.

References Ashworth, G.J., Graham, B. and Tunbridge, J.E. (2007), Pluralising Pasts: Heritages, Societies and Place Identities (London: Pluto). Ashworth, G.J. and Tunbridge, J.E. (2000), The Tourist-Historic City: Retrospect and Prospect of Managing the Heritage City (Oxford: Elsevier). Bissoondath, N. (2002), Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada (Toronto: Penguin Group). Blackburn, K. (2005), ‘Reminiscence and War Trauma: Recalling the Japanese Occupation of Singapore, 1942–1945’, Oral History 33:2, 91–8. Brunero, D. (2006), ‘Archives and Heritage in Singapore: The Development of “Reﬂections at Bukit Chandu”, a World War II Interpretive Centre’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 12:5, 427–39. Christopher, A.J. (1995), ‘Regionalisation and Ethnicity in South Africa 1990–1994’, Area 27:1, 1–11. Coombes, A.E. (2003), History aer Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory (Durham: Duke University Press). Deacon, H. (2004), ‘Intangible Heritage in Conservation Management Planning: The Case of Robben Island’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 10:3, 309–19. Gard’ner, J.M. (2004), ‘Heritage Protection and Social Inclusion: A Case Study From the Bangladeshi Community of East London’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 10:1, 75–92. Graham, B., Ashworth, G.J. and Tunbridge, J.E. (2000), A Geography of Heritage: Power, Culture and Economy (London: Arnold). Hackworth, J. and Rekers, J. (2005), ‘Ethnic Packaging and Gentriﬁcation: The Case of Four Neighbourhoods in Toronto’, Urban Aﬀairs Review 41:2, 211–36. Henderson, J.C. (2001), ‘Conserving Colonial Heritage: Raﬄes Hotel in Singapore’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 7:1, 7–24. Hiebert, D. (2000), ‘Immigration and the Changing Canadian City’, Canadian Geographer 44:1, 25–43.

312

P M H Home, R. (1997), Of Planting and Planning: The Making of British Colonial Cities (London: Chapman & Hall). Hoyt, L. (2005), ‘Planning Through Compulsory Commercial Clubs – Business Improvement Districts’, Economic Aﬀairs 25:4, 24–7. Hyndman, J. (2003), ‘Aid, Conﬂict and Migration: The Canada-Sri Lanka Connection’, Canadian Geographer 47:3, 251–68. Jones, R. and Shaw, B.J. (2006), ‘Palimpsests of Progress: Erasing the Past and Rewriting the Future in Developing Societies – Case Studies of Singapore and Jakarta’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 12:2 122–38. Lunn, K. (2007), ‘War Memorialisation and Public Heritage in Southeast Asia: Some Case Studies and Comparative Reﬂections’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 13:1, 81–95. Marschall, S. (2006), ‘Commemorating “Struggle Heroes”: Constructing a Genealogy for the New South Africa’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 12:2, 176–93. Nasson, W. (2004), ‘Commemorating the Anglo-Boer War in Postapartheid South Africa’, in D.J. Walkowitz and L.M. Knauer (eds), Memory and the Impact of Political Transformation in Public Space (Durham: Duke University Press), 277–94. Pollock-Ellwand, N. (2006), ‘Travelling the Route from Designation to Local Action: The Case of the Underground Railroad Selement in Buxton, Ontario, Canada’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 12:4, 372–88. Saku, J.C. and Bone, R.M. (2000), ‘Looking for Solutions in the Canadian North: Modern Treaties as a New Strategy’, Canadian Geographer 44:3, 259–70. Sco, J. (2002), ‘World Heritage as a Model for Citizenship: The Case of Cyprus’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 8:2, 99–115. Shaw, B.J. and Jones, R. (eds) (1997), Contested Urban Heritage: Voices from the Periphery (Aldershot: Ashgate). Shaw, B.J., Jones, R. and Ling, O.G. (1997), ‘Urban Heritage, Development and Tourism in Southeast Asian Cities: A Contestation Continuum’, in B.J. Shaw and R. Jones (eds), Contested Urban Heritage: Voices from the Periphery (Aldershot: Ashgate), 119–37. Stanton, C. (2005), ‘Serving up Culture: Heritage and its Discontents at an Industrial History Site’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 11:5, 415–31. Tunbridge, J.E. and Ashworth, G.J. (1996), Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conﬂict (Chichester: Wiley). Tunbridge, J.E. (1999), ‘Pietermaritzburg: Trials and Traumas of Conservation’, Built Environment 25:3, 222–35. Vance, J.E. (1977), This Scene of Man: The Role and Structure of the City in the Geography of Western Civilization (New York: Harper and Row). Walkowitz, D.J. and Knauer, L.M. (eds) (2004), Memory and the Impact of Political Transformation in Public Space (Durham: Duke University Press). Worden, N. (1997), ‘Contesting Heritage in a South African City: Cape Town’, in B.J. Shaw and R. Jones (eds), Contested Urban Heritage: Voices from the Periphery (Aldershot: Ashgate), 31–61.

313

This page intentionally left blank

18

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

Heritage Transformation in Central and Eastern Europe Monika A. Murzyn

Central and Eastern Europe: Diversity and Uniqueness of Heritage What are the common features shared by the heritage of the states and nations of Central and Eastern Europe, in broadest terms understood as the area stretching from the Baltic states, Poland, eastern German regions, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Ukraine and Hungary to Croatia, Slovenia, and to the countries of the Balkan peninsula such as Romania and Bulgaria (see, for instance, Garton-Ash, 1989; Johnson, 1996; Podraza, 2002; Samsonowicz, 2002; Wandycz, 1992)? In the 1980s, Milan Kundera referred to the region as ‘the part of Europe situated geographically in the centre, culturally in the West, and politically in the East’ (Kundera, 1984, 33). György Konrad (1995, 157) saw it as ‘neither East nor West; it is both East and West’. Perhaps the concept of ‘in-between’ Europe (Zwischen-europa) is most suitable, deﬁned as the lands between, on the one hand, the West and the inﬂuences of European civilization with its constitutive pillars such as the experience of Antiquity, Roman Catholic and Protestant versions of Christianity, ideas of democracy and self-government, and, on the other, the East with its Orthodox Christianity and the legacy of Byzantine empire (Bideleux and Jeﬀries, 1999). While having developed in close dialogue with Western European culture and strongly inﬂuenced by it, the heritage of Central and Eastern Europe thus possesses its own unique features, stemming from the region’s geographical location, its peculiar, turbulent history, as well as ethnic and religious diversity.1 It serves both as a buﬀer and a crossroads, a 1

For example, a hypothetical inhabitant of a West Ukrainian town such as Lviv, born in the early 1900s, could very well be either a Roman Catholic, a Greek Catholic, a member of a Uniate or an Armenian Church, a Protestant or an adherent of Judaism, born in Galicia – a peripheral province of the Austro-Hungarian empire, raised as an inhabitant of the interwar Republic of Poland, who then became resident in the territories occupied by the German Third Reich, a citizen of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic – a province of the Soviet Union, and, relatively recently, the citizen of an independent Ukrainian state, all without ever changing the place of residence. Furthermore, in the course of

T A R C

H I melting pot (Sucháček, 2006) and a transmiing belt of diﬀerent ideas and cultural values and forms between the West and Asia. Moreover, for several reasons its inhabitants display a peculiar aitude towards heritage and a diﬀerent understanding of the past. Firstly, although it also includes traditionally beer-developed regions, it was an area of economic backwardness, delayed industrialization and modernization, where the remnants of feudal relations and serfdom lasted well into the nineteenth century (Johnson, 1996; Wandycz, 1992). The second important feature of Central Europe is the ﬂuidity and instability of state borders, as well as frequent changes of political systems in the region in the past 200 years. Such border shis also mean that cultural and ethnic frontiers do not overlap with oen arbitrarily delimited political ones. Since the loss of independence of the First Polish Republic (1795), almost the entire ethnically diverse region was, for over a century, under the rule of three European superpowers – Habsburg Austria (since 1867, the Austro-Hungarian Empire), imperial Russia, and Prussia (aer German uniﬁcation in 1871 – the Second German Reich). Modern nationalism as conceived and deﬁned in the nineteenth century thus found its expression in two contradictory strivings. On the one hand were aempts by the superpowers to make the diverse peoples of the region succumb to the idea of a powerful dominating nation-state (for example, the policy of Kulturkampf – ‘Germanization’ – in the Polish lands under the authority of Prussia, paralleled by the ‘Russiﬁcation’ policy in the Russian partition, see Davies, 2001). On the other hand, the region witnessed the phenomenon of the deﬁnition and rise of national consciousness, mythology and a cult of heritage of nations without independent nation-states. This pertained to nations that had possessed independent states with their own ruling dynasties in the more or less distant past (for example, Czechs, Poles, Hungarians) but also to ethnic groups which newly identiﬁed themselves as separate nations (for example, Slovaks, Ukrainians). Such conditions made the question of choosing and supporting a speciﬁc kind of heritage that would suit national ambitions and goals extremely important (Trencsényi and Kopecek, 2007). It also meant that the material and immaterial elements of the past, interpreted and conserved as heritage, were more prone to be used in the process of nation building, to become ideologically important and sacralized. Thirdly, frequent political changes and wars that devastated the region meant that oen communities and minorities that for many centuries had created the rich heritage of some places do not live there any longer. Thus the question of ‘heritage without heirs’, the acceptance and inheriting of a dissonant heritage, becomes especially important (Tomaszewski, 2002; Tunbridge and Ashworth, 1996). Following World War II, Central Europe lost two important ethnic groups

a lifetime the oﬃcial language used could alternate between German, Polish, Russian and Ukrainian in addition to everyday languages which before World War II would also include Yiddish. The ethnic diversity and interwoven national and ethnic histories also make the national stereotypes of nations of Central and Eastern Europe extremely interesting and puzzling (see, for example, Walas, 1995). 316

H T

C E E who should be seen as the catalysts of Central European culture, namely the Jews and the Germans (Avineri, 2002; Haumann, 2002; Johnson, 1996). The numerous and diverse Jewish diaspora of Central Europe almost entirely perished in the Holocaust. In the aermath of the war, huge, forced population movements from east to west meant that, for example, Polish inhabitants of the territories of today’s Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine had to leave behind their heritage and move to the newly deﬁned territory of Poland. Room for them was in turn made, equally unhappily and involuntarily, by the expelled German-speakers who had to leave their homes and relocate to what was deﬁned within the framework of the postYalta order as Germany proper. Much of Central Europe possesses a similar cultural landscape and may be regarded as one cultural area. Common cultural links are visible if one looks at the architecture of cities which were once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Whether it is Brno in Moravia, Bratislava, Vienna, Budapest, Krakow, Lviv, Ljubljana, or peripheral Chernivtsi in Ukraine, one may ﬁnd the same type of theatre architecture, similar city hall ediﬁces and railway stations from about 1900 (see Grodziska and Purchla, 2002; Krakowski and Purchla, 1999; Purchla, 1998). Conversely, at the same time around 1900, each nation tried to devise and promote its own and distinctive national architectural style (Purchla, 2001).2 Furthermore, in the region there are many culturally mixed areas, which may be at the same time a periphery, a nostalgic borderland and a cultural cradle (for example, Transylvania – a Hungarian Erdély, Romanian Ardeal, and German Siebenbürgen) (Lagzi, 2006). It is impossible to translate the very idea of the ‘borderland’ (Polish – ‘Kresy’, Hungarian – ‘határvidék’) into English in a way that reveals all its rich connotations, but it exists and thrives in contemporary Polish or Hungarian discourse. The same is true of the diverse, at times connected, at times contradictory, myths well grounded in the Central and Eastern European popular consciousness such as Antemurale Christianitatis (the bulwark or rampart of Christianity) or the myth of a German civilizing mission in the East (Delsol, Maslowski and Nowicki, 2002; Walas, 1995; Wandycz, 2002). The heritage treasures of a given ethnic or national group may thus oen be found outside the presentday borders of their territorial state. As Kiss (2002) argues, the symbolic lieux de mémoire in Central Europe oen belong to many nationalities at the same time; involuntarily, they are a shared, multicultural common heritage (Tomaszewski, 2002).3 2

3

Such a unique, national style was, for example, sought and promoted by Hungarians (for example, Károly Kós), Slovaks (for example, Dušan Jurkovič), Slovenes (for example, Joze Plečnik) and Poles (for example, Stanisław Witkiewicz), architects and intellectuals who strived to create a model, picturesque national architectural style oen by mixing art nouveau and vernacular motifs (see Purchla, 2001). For example, the diﬀerent identities of Vilnius as the historic and present-day capital of the independent Lithuanian state, a Polish city and a Jewish city, or diﬀerent meanings of Bratislava, whether one uses the present day Slavic name acquired as recently as 1919, its Hungarian name (Pozsony), or the name used by German and Yiddish speakers (Pressburg). 317

T A R C

H I Lastly, another common, tragic fate shared by the countries of Central Europe was, within the framework of the post-Yalta political order, falling under the sphere of inﬂuence of the Soviet Union, the experience of communist terror, socialism and a centrally planned economy (Wandycz, 1992). Aer the Velvet Revolution of 1989, most of them have undergone substantial political and economic transformation, although conducted at diﬀerent speeds and in diﬀerent ways. The milestone which crowned the process of overthrowing communist rule, returning to democracy and the market economy, and symbolically fulﬁlling the aspiration of a ‘return to Europe’4 was the countries’ accession to the European Union, either on 1 May 2004 (Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia), or on 1 January 2007 (Romania, Bulgaria).

Heritage versus Political, Economic and Social Transformation in Central and Eastern Europe The political, economic and social transformation has carried with it important implications for the landscape and heritage of the region. The aitude, usage and interpretation of many elements of heritage have substantially changed or at least evolved since 1989. This section will thus focus on some of the observed changes regarding issues such as: the role of heritage in redeﬁning, enhancing and constructing national identity; the new emphasis put on local and regional heritage aer a period of promoting a uniﬁed, monocultural socialist vision of heritage; commercialization of the heritage of historic cities and villages brought about by a market economy; and the discovery and re-evaluation of once dissonant heritage including the problem of the heritage of the recent past, the interwar period, wartime and the communist era.

Heritage and Expressions of National Identity in Post-socialist Countries Commenting on the ways of organizing common memory and approaches to the past in Poland since 1989, Traba (2006, 65) distinguishes two diﬀerent forms. The ﬁrst involves the construction of a new ‘iconosphere’ of monuments and symbols, visible in the creation of new, or a return to pre-war, national holidays and festivities, changes in street names, removing statues of unwanted heroes and puing new ones on the pedestal. The second concerns an open discussion and uncovering of that past considered taboo in socialist times, as well as pluralization of the ways of remembering the past. This issue of using heritage in deﬁning and presenting a new national identity and dominant ideology is timely for all Central and Eastern countries, and pertains both to its tangible and intangible expressions. Thus, for example, by stressing

4

The leitmotif behind the discussions on Central Europe of the 1980s and early 1990s. 318

H T

C E E the value of Estonian (thus non-Soviet) heritage and using Estonian symbols, the Estonian Heritage Society, founded in 1987, has been, according to Hallas-Murula (2007), the inspiration and basis of a new national liberation movement. Similarly, the newly independent Lithuanian state immediately started drawing plans for the rebuilding of the Royal Castle in Vilnius – the Palace of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (a ruin for several centuries) – on a hill overlooking the old town. The project, now almost completed, derives from a conscious will to strengthen national identity and present a tangible proof of the long traditions and grandeur of the Lithuanian state. The intensive revitalization programme conducted in Vilnius Old Town complements this ﬂagship reconstruction project (Vilnius Old Town Renewal Agency, 2000). In the centre of Riga, another Baltic capital, the showcase conservation project of the 1990s involved the complete reconstruction of two buildings on Town Hall Square. The Town Hall and the Gothic House of BlackHeads were destroyed by bombing in World War II; the remnants of both buildings were then cleared by the Soviets as unnecessary relics symbolizing the power of the city as a member of the Hanseatic League and its cultural links with Western Europe. The change of political system created the circumstances to rebuild these two emblematic monuments (Sparitis, 2003). In Dresden, the capital of the land of Saxony, a long-missed landmark has recently been added to the city’s skyline. The elegant ediﬁce of the baroque Frauenkirche adorned with a monumental dome was destroyed, along with most of Dresden’s inner city, in Allied bombing at the end of World War II, and remained a complete ruin until the 1990s. The rubble was cleared only in 1993 and the reconstruction completed in 2006, recreating a symbolic monument and, at the same time, creating a new tourist araction, visited perhaps more as a unique case of rebuilding and a symbolic ‘phoenix risen from the ashes’ than for its beauty. Costly urban regeneration programmes aimed at restoring historic city centres in many towns and cities of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) may also be seen as a conscious aempt by the united German state to demonstrate both its strength and its commitment to preserve and revitalize the heritage of the country’s eastern regions (for example, revitalization programmes in cities such as Bautzen, Leipzig, Görlitz, Weimar, Meissen or Quedlinburg) (cf. Billert, 2001; Klimpke and Krammeier, 2006). At the same time, an intensive programme aimed at a complete change of the appearance of Berlin as the capital of the united Germany shows a clear will to emphasize the change of system and arrival of a new political era (Czepczyński, 2004). Similarly, the cultural investments in Budapest for the millennium expressed the clear will of the national authorities, especially those representing the more conservative and right-wing part of the political scene, to stress the change of ideology and aﬃrm the power of the now free Hungarian nation (Murzyn, 2003). In 2000, the construction of the new Hungarian National Theatre commenced on the Pest bank of the Danube, south of Budapest city centre, in the area formerly designated as the Expo exhibition grounds. The oﬃcial opening of the building took place on 15 March 2002, on the anniversary of the outbreak of the 1848 revolution, aer just 17 months of construction work and the expenditure of some 12 billion forints (approximately 319

T A R C

H I

Figure 18.1 Millennium Exhibition and Park grounds Budapest – an adapted post-industrial site 88 million euros). The intention was to create a new national symbol, alluding to the turbulent history of the Hungarian National Theatre and the achievements of Hungarian drama, as well as to the tradition of cultural investment as the reﬂection of the strength of national spirit as willingly practised in Budapest a century earlier within the dual Austro-Hungarian monarchy (cf. Keresztély, 2005; Lukacs, 1989). The theatre’s architecture, both interior and exterior, especially sculptural decoration, as well as its dialogue with the surrounding riverbank park, were clearly designed as the key showcase of the Hungarian capital’s newly designated cultural quarter. The other buildings erected there include the Museum of Contemporary Art, National Philharmonic Hall and House of Traditions, the laer focused on research into the intangible cultural heritage of Hungary. A celebration of the national spirit and achievements was also the initial focus of another important cultural project in Budapest. In 2000–01, the dilapidated and disused area of the Ganz factory at the foot of Buda Hill was regenerated and transformed into the main celebration ground for the millennium anniversary of the Hungarian nation. Some buildings were demolished, others renovated and redesigned to create the spacious, modern Millenáris Kiállítócsarnok – Millennium Exposition Hall, Millennium Theatre Hall and the surrounding Millennium Park grounds – modern but full of references to Hungarian traditions and legends (Figure 18.1). The ﬁrst long-term exhibition shown in the new grounds, ‘Dreamers of Dreams – Famous Hungarians’, oﬀered a striking example of an aempt to deﬁne the greatness of the nation through its 320

H T

C E E achievements and contribution in every imaginable form of art and science. Its main purpose was to teach the young generation and enforce pride in the achievements of Hungarians, both those living within the borders of present-day Hungary and those working and creating abroad. This need for ‘the aﬃrmative approach to the national past’ is also clearly expressed in present-day Poland, oen appearing in the discussions on the issue of ‘historical policy’. It will, among others, take the form of the Museum of History of Poland (Muzeum Historii Polski) oﬃcially founded on 2 May 2006. Its task is envisioned as being: to conduct citizen and patriotic education … there should be an emphasis put on underlining what is unique, speciﬁc and fascinating in the past of Poland … In this positive vision of our history the leading idea should be that of freedom, commonly regarded in Poland as a value especially important both in the life of an individual and of a community (citation aer Traba, 2006, 104). Smaller-scale projects such as removing unwanted statues of formerly heroic ﬁgures and erecting new monuments are equally important in conveying certain values. The demolition of the Mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov5 in Soﬁa has been described as ‘the symbolic reappropriation of the central city square from previous ideological signs’ (Vukov and Toncheva, 2006, 128). In Ukraine, especially in the western part of the country,6 the traces of Polish or Soviet rule are being cleared away, the statues of ‘old’ heroes, who were oen ‘forced upon the nation’, are being torn down, whether pre-war Polish or post-war Soviet, and new monuments are abundant, dedicated to famous Ukrainian ﬁgures such as the poets, Ivan Franko and Taras Shevchenko, poetess Lesya Ukrainka, or Bogdan Chmielnicky, the leader of the seventeenth-century Cossack uprising against Polish rule. In Poland, in turn, while statues of Lenin and other communist leaders quickly disappeared, many statues and monuments to heroes banned by the communist regime were erected during the 1990s. Some commemorated ﬁgures of the interwar period despised by the communists, such as Marshal Józef Piłsudski, while others marked events oﬃcially erased from national memory as incongruent with the image of longlasting friendship between the Soviet state and Poland. These included: the Polish army oﬃcers murdered by the Soviets at Katyń; deportations to the East; or the ﬁgures and organizations persecuted and despised by the new socialist regime aer it came to power (for example, the soldiers of the Armia Krajowa, a Home Army right-wing underground anti-Nazi movement). In Slovakia, there are statues in many places to Reverend Andrej Hlinka, the leader of the Slovak People’s Party which supported the autonomy of Slovakia within Czechoslovakia in the interwar period, and who is referred to as ‘the father of the nation’.

5 6

The most famous Bulgarian communist leader. The complicated nature of Ukraine’s transformation and divisions in the country in relation to its heritage are well explained by Riabczuk (2007). 321

T A R C

H I Naming and re-naming has also been very important in aﬃrming the new post-socialist identity of many places and sites. In Riga, the main boulevard – the ‘Street of Freedom’ – demonstrates the changing identity of the city. Originally named ‘Aleksandra iela’ during Tsarist rule, the boulevard was renamed ‘Brīvības iela’ (Street of Freedom) when Latvia became an independent state aer 1918. During World War II, it was ﬁrst ‘Lenina iela’ (Lenin Boulevard), then ‘Ādolfa Hiltera aleja’ (Hitler Strasse), then again, when the Soviets came back, ‘Lenin Boulevard’. Finally in 1991, when Latvia regained independence, this key urban axis returned to its Latvian name – the ‘Street of Freedom’. The change of meaning and interpretation of one of the city’s main symbols – the Brīvības or Freedom Monument – likewise followed ideological and political changes. It was built in 1935 as a monument of Latvian independence, portraying a mythical goddess holding three stars representing three Latvian regions (KurzemeCourland, Vidzeme and Latgale). During Soviet times it was not torn down but reinterpreted as the statue of Mother Russia with her three children – the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. The return to the original meaning of the statue was possible only aer 1990 (Figure 18.2). Figure 18.2 Freedom Monument While new monuments were erected – the symbol of Riga, in many countries of Central and Latvia Eastern Europe, the statues of Soviet and communist heroes are still being torn down and removed. The heated discussion and conﬂict between Estonia and Russia over cemeteries and monuments to the memory of the Red Army which ‘liberated’ Estonia at the end of World War II show the dissonant nature of the country’s heritage. From Russia’s point of view, those are places of rest and monuments to the memory of Soviet soldiers who lost their lives to aid fellow Estonians; to Estonians, those are sad reminders of changing one occupier for another. 322

H T

C E E In addition to puing new or reinstated heroes on display, despite the many years of atheist propaganda and the anti-clerical stance of the communist regimes, as well as the ongoing secularization of society in general, the 1990s also witnessed a renewed stress on sacral landscapes, visible in renovation but most of all in the erection of many new houses of worship, especially in states – as in Ukraine and Russia – where religion had been almost completely marginalized (Czepczyński, 2005). Another trend is a fashion for the neo-vernacular as opposed to the previously promoted and enforced ‘universal’ socialist modernism, which contributed much to the destruction of the cultural landscapes of Central Europe under socialism, whether in the form of pre-fabricated housing blocks forming socialist housing estates or uniform cube-like designs for single-family homes oen ill-suited both to the landscape and the climate. Since the early 1990s, it has become fashionable for the growing Polish middle and upper classes to give their newly built single-family homes the shape, or at least some characteristic features, of a traditional Polish manor house, such as a neo-classicist porch with a triangular pediment resting on columns. The oﬃcial Polish Pavilion at the World Expo Exhibition in Japan in 2005, with a striking hand-made wicker façade referring to traditional Polish landscapes and handicras, may be regarded as a contrasting expression of the same phenomenon. Similarly in Hungary, the popularity and esteem for architecture designed by the Hungarian architect Imre Makovecs and his followers testiﬁes to the need and will of Hungarians to present their own architectural style, rooted in the mythical history of the Magyars. This is visible both in smaller-scale ediﬁces and in larger architectural complexes. For example, the former Soviet military barracks and grounds in the town of Piliscaba, several kilometres north of Budapest, have been converted into the modern campus of the Catholic university – Pázmány Péter Katolikus Egyetem. The site was altered and transformed according to plans by I. Makovecs in his characteristic expressive, neo-vernacular, postmodern style, thus erasing the former and creating a new outlook of place.

Rediscovery of Local and Regional Identities as Part of the Post-socialist Transformation In the post-World War II period, a uniform ‘socialist’ identity was promoted. Such a monocultural vision of state and society demanded that certain references to, and remains of, the past had to be brought explicitly to the fore, while others were forgoen, allowed to become dilapidated through lack of maintenance, or even purposefully destroyed. Thus, for example, in Poland the legacy of the ﬁrst Polish ruling dynasty (the Piasts) and the Romanesque monuments conﬁrming the rights of the People’s Republic of Poland to the Western and Northern Territories7

7

The term ‘Western and Northern Territories’ (for socialist propaganda purposes also referred to as Ziemie Odzyskane – ‘Reclaimed Lands’) was coined to describe the former German territory east of the river Oder. It was given to Poland as compensation for the Soviet Union annexing former Polish territory in the east, as the result of the decisions undertaken at the Yalta and Potsdam conferences in 1945. 323

T A R C

H I received much aention, as well as sites seen as expressions of the revival of the state aer the Nazi destruction of World War II, such as the rebuilt old city centres in Warsaw or Gdańsk (Gwosdz and Murzyn, 2003; Tung, 2001). Since the basis of the new socialist society was to be peasants and workers – and most workers had just migrated from the countryside – it seemed natural that a rather shallow, folkloristic version of local culture should be promoted, either through folk dance and song ensembles, or the mass production of ‘folk souvenirs’ and their sale through specialist state-owned agencies such as Cepelia in Poland. In other words: ‘Ethnic folk traditions could persist if labelled those of the working people’ (Peil, 2005, 56). Other dimensions and expressions of local identity and history, such as the presence of ethnic and religious minorities, or strong bourgeois or aristocratic traditions, were thus eagerly relegated to the sidelines, completely forgoen or even destroyed as incongruent with the dominant ideology. Moreover, in socialist times, heritage was most of all seen as part of an unproductive cultural realm – a costly superstructure, albeit possessing prestige and ideological value (Keresztély, 2005; Purchla, 2005). Socialism was thus not only responsible for creating a fashion for pastiche, simpliﬁed folklore heritage, but also promoted a very passive aitude towards the protection of authentic heritage which was regarded as public and thus not belonging to anyone. Consequently, the obligations for safeguarding such heritage did not fall on individual owners and users but on enigmatically understood state and conservation authorities. The challenge currently experienced with respect to safeguarding heritage is also the result of the destruction in large part of civil society under communism and its very slow re-emergence, burdened, moreover, with suspicion towards any kind of voluntary work or concern for the public good (Sedlakova and Tokolyova, 2006). Lastly, there was no real local self-government under state socialism and the existing local authorities were no more than administrative branches of the central authorities, fully dependent on the laer from both ﬁnancial and political points of view. Even though some local political elites (for example, in industrial towns, see Domański, 1997) could partly shape local space according to their own visions, the most signiﬁcant priorities were imposed by the central authorities. The 1990s witnessed a process of decentralization of political power and the reintroduction of democratically elected local government. Many such local authorities quickly recognized the need to deﬁne a distinct and multi-dimensional local identity, whether for the purpose of facilitating social integration, aracting tourists or competing for investors. This, in turn, led to a search for speciﬁc traits and features of place, conﬁrming its uniqueness. Opening to the world thus meant for Central Europe participating in the ‘glocalization’ process – being part of global networks, yet, at the same time, making an aempt to retain and enhance local traits and ﬂavours (Giddens, 1990). Tourist promotion strategies are a good example of the above trend. For instance, the newly designed and promoted heritage trails in Warsaw, as with other Central European cities, involve a multi-dimensional presentation of the city’s past and heritage. In addition to the standard Old Town or Royal Route, there are now 324

H T

C E E

Figure 18.3 The UNESCO World Heritage site including a Jewish quarter and a Romanesque basilica in Trěbič, Moravia, Czech Republic diverse possibilities: the Route of Frederic Chopin; Warsaw Legends; Art Nouveau Architecture; Jewish Warsaw; the trail of Warsaw Fortress; the Prague district; the Trail of Insurgents’ Memories (the trail of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944); or Warsaw of Socialist Realism. Even the well-known Royal Route, stretching from the Royal Castle on the edge of the reconstructed Old Town to the Wilanów Royal Palace, is currently being reinterpreted and remarketed as a ‘National Tourist Product of the Capital City of Warsaw – Royal Route’ within a strategy for 2004–13. Some 30 diﬀerent institutions located nearby and alongside the route are participating (Dębczyński, 2004; for parallel examples from Krakow, see Murzyn, 2006b). Similarly, in many places the heritage of ethnic and religious minorities has been rediscovered as an element enhancing the uniqueness of place. The success of the small towns of Třebič in Moravia in the Czech Republic and Bardejov in Slovakia in being inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List was very much dependent on both presenting themselves as multicultural urban centres where Christian and Jewish heritages (albeit for many years unwanted and forgoen) still coexist (Murzyn, 2005) (Figure 18.3). It is also increasingly noticed that local folklore, heritage and customs might be the driving force in developing rural and agro-tourism. In Poland, following the administrative reform of 1999, each of the 16 new regions has tried to present itself as unique in terms of landscape and traditions. The process of discovery of local uniqueness is also facilitated by the commercialization 325

T A R C

H I

Figure 18.4 Commodiﬁcation of heritage – gingerbread boxes in the shape of the city’s most important monuments sold in Krakow, Poland of the culture, leisure and tourism market. The campaign conducted by the authorities of the Malopolska region,8 which focused on the promotion of the local wooden architecture, may serve as a good example. ‘The Trail of Wooden Architecture in Malopolska’, which stretches to some 1,500 km and has more than 600 signs, includes 237 diﬀerent sites such as: Catholic and Uniate churches; wayside chapels and inns; manor houses and villas; granaries; and open-air museums of wooden architecture. The trail was conceived as an idea in the 1960s and 1970s, but was put into practice and marketed only in the late 1990s (Cisowski and Duda, 2005). Similarly, the admiration for Highlander or Podhale culture in the southern, mountainous part of the Malopolska region has existed in Poland since the nineteenth century (Moździerz, 2001), ﬁnding its expression in art, architecture and literature, and encouraging a growing number of tourist visitors. Again since 1989, a large number of purpose-built mountain-style restaurants, inns and guest houses have been constructed to capitalize on the fashion. Likewise, the traditional highland sheep cheese of the area, the so-called oscypek, used to be sold in small quantities, exclusively in the mountain area. It is now extremely popular, sold in

8

The region in Southern Poland with Krakow as its capital. 326

H T

C E E hundreds of shops and ‘regional style’ stalls, and is about to become the ﬁrst Polish agricultural product branded and protected as an exclusive regional product by the EU – another sign that regional culinary traditions are now recognized in Central and Eastern Europe as an expression of heritage with a strong economic dimension. The renewed stress on and pride in the traditions of viticulture in many Central European regions such as Moravia in the Czech Republic, Malé Karpaty in Slovakia or Tokaj in Hungary are part of a similar trend.

Commercialisation of Heritage and Landscape What do a Hassidim puppet doll, a miniature clay Golem or Charles’ Bridge bought in Prague, a plush Dragon and a gingerbread box in the shape of St Mary’s Church purchased in Krakow (Figure 18.4), or perhaps a puzzle showing a picturesque row of pastel-coloured burgher houses acquired in Telč have in common? Irrespective of their aesthetic value, they are all commodifed representations of the sites’ heritage conceived as a souvenir idea and produced by private entrepreneurs. In the new socio-political context, heritage has ceased to be merely a costly, unproductive ‘superstructure’, as one may term it using Marxist concepts. It has become to a large extent a commercially exploited resource, the ﬁnal shape of which is partly the outcome of social and political factors, but most of all the result of the complex interplay of commercial demand and available supply. Thus in no time at all some fossilized historic reservations and conservation areas, especially the most historically and culturally valuable urban and rural complexes in Central and Eastern Europe, have turned into fashionable tourism and leisure zones, while many ethnographic and cultural curios have been transformed by private entrepreneurs into commercial heritage products. Factors increasing the scope and pace of changes observed in the historic towns and villages of the region include: the restitution of private property; the possibility of freely exercising ownership rights; the growing and increasingly active realestate market; and the upward trend of property prices. The laer factor has led to growing pressure on places which have become fashionable or are favourably located both within particular cities or within countries (Baše, 2007; Murzyn, 2006a; Štulc, 2001). Growing tourist traﬃc, both international (due to the liing of travel restrictions)9 and domestic (aer the initial slump of the early 1990s) is yet another factor speeding the observed changes (Williams and Balaz, 2000). Moreover, in the post-socialist countries, the outlook on tourism has evolved. Under socialism, tourism was seen mainly as a means of providing recreation possibilities and inexpensive leisure for the working masses, coupled with the introduction of selected sites within the country to limited groups of foreign tourists under more or less open vigilance. Tourism is now seen as the main development possibility and one of the most important economic functions of many places (Gwosdz and 9

Despite, or perhaps partly thanks to, the still existing and widespread stereotypes of this part of the world existing in Western Europe and North America. For the mean, yet very convincing and funny, summary of them, see the mock guidebook entitled Molvanîa: The Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry (Cilauro, Gleisner and Stich, 2004). 327

T A R C

H I Murzyn, 2003). In this respect a market economy constitutes both an opportunity and a threat to tangible heritage. The 1990s saw a striking growth in the number and diversity of actors impacting on the cultural landscape and making use of heritage. Such a multiplicity of stakeholders, ranging from local government and local residents to private entrepreneurs, developers, tourist and gastronomic chains, as well as NGOs, means that there are now many areas of potential conﬂict between private and public interests. Naturally, those various actors and bodies do not have the same aims and are motivated by diﬀerent considerations. Moreover, as within a market economy, change is much more dynamic and proﬁt-oriented, and previously practised public interest-oriented strategies and conservation programmes are now hard to implement (Baše, 2007; Hammersley and Westlake, 1994; Murzyn, 2006a). Oen the economically stronger actors win any disputes over historic landscape, despite the existence of legislation on monument protection and building codes. In many areas of Central and Eastern Europe, we are now oen witnessing uncontrolled, rather chaotic and spontaneous changes of landscape (Purchla, 2005; Štulc, 2001). The growing pace of changes brought about by transformation is yet another factor and a challenge for the construction and conservation authorities. In historically valuable quarters and sites, the changes include the introduction of a wider variety of commercial functions and the intensiﬁcation of uses of historic buildings and urban spaces, as well as an increased number of privately ﬁnanced restoration and renovation projects. These contribute to an improved aesthetic appearance of historic areas but also to changes in the historic fabric. As commercial functions now oen push out less proﬁtable uses (Enyedi and Kovács, 2006), including housing, there is a growing pressure to redevelop plots of high commercial value, which oen leads to replacement of the original structures by new ones (Dimitrovska Andrews, 2005). In the process, entire townscapes, street fronts or squares change their appearance, as the newly erected or thoroughly renovated ediﬁces are oen higher than the original ones and are built of nonlocal materials. They retain only the historic façades or display a rather nondescript international style, rather than allude to local architectural traditions. Some areas have lost their traditional residential function and shied towards a form of gentriﬁed inner-city area with short-term or weekend residents, or have become predominantly tourist-oriented zones with restaurants, bars, hotels, pensions and youth hostels. This process pertains both to centrally located historic quarters in larger urban centres such as Prague, Krakow, Budapest or Tallinn, and to smaller towns and villages possessing a unique landscape. Prague of the early 1990s was the forerunner of problems associated with mass tourism, arriving in a rather dilapidated, sleepy and quiet, though very charming, post-socialist capital, and transforming it into an intensively used, mass tourism site (Baše, 2007; Hammersley and Westlake, 1994). This is well summarized in Timothy Garton-Ash’s (2000, 117) metaphorical comment on Prague: ‘The sleeping beauty of Central Europe has not merely been awakened by a prince’s velvet kiss. She has put on black tights and gone oﬀ to the disco.’

328

H T

C E E In recent years the extraordinary fashion for Krakow as a tourist destination (in 2005, the city aracted over seven million tourists – cf. Raport o Stanie Miasta 2005, 2006) has led to rapidly increasing real-estate prices and a consequent growing pressure on its historic tissue, whether in the city centre proper or in its other historic districts such as Kazimierz or Podgórze (Murzyn, 2006a). Such processes are also observed in Tallinn, a city of 400,000 inhabitants receiving some three million visitors in 2004 (Hallas-Murula, 2007). Similarly, in Budapest, although it was already the focus of a sizeable tourist traﬃc prior to 1989, commercial pressure is growing and visible in many parts of the city, again especially in centrally located historic quarters. For example, a complex revitalization programme is being implemented in the Ferencváros quarter. On the other hand, the ongoing destruction of the built environment of the Erzsebetváros quarter, famous for its Jewish monuments, may serve as a rather negative example. Its nineteenth-century tissue is being steadily replaced with modern ediﬁces which do not even pretend to match the historic milieu, despite the aempts of spontaneously formed civic organizations and citizen groups such as OVAS! (Polyák, 2006). Perhaps the current state of aﬀairs is also partially the result of a lack of rational vision and negotiating abilities displayed by conservators educated under the former regime. With respect to the historic nineteenth-century quarters in Budapest, even by the mid1990s Katalin Pallai recognized that change would come sooner or later and that there was an urgent need for an active and well-deﬁned conservation policy which would not only ‘demonize’ private investment, but also make clear which features and parts of the historic tissue should be saved and prioritized and which it might be necessary to demolish. The much decayed and dilapidated physical condition of the nineteenth-century building stock inherited aer communism and growing market pressures had to be taken into account. If ‘dangerous private investment’ comes later, the increasing value gap (between the existing value of the decaying territory and the possibly achievable value by redevelopment) might make the investment even more proﬁtable for the invested capital, but authorities lose position and will have no chance for any portion of conservation … no intervention is a decision (Pallai, 1996, 149–50). The ‘touristiﬁcation’ and commercialization of most picturesque landscapes does not pertain only to historic metropolises but also to smaller selements. Whether one visits well-preserved lile towns such as Český Krumlov or Telč in the Czech Republic (World Heritage Sites), Szentendre in Hungary (the main destination for day-trippers from Budapest), or Kazimierz Dolny on the Vistula River in central Poland (the main weekend destination for inhabitants of Warsaw and famous for its Renaissance architecture and artistic atmosphere), one may see that without tourism those towns would lose their economic basis. Yet, when visitor traﬃc is growing beyond rational carrying capacity limits, as oen seen since 1989, the very core and basic resource of the tourism product – the picturesque landscape – is in

329

T A R C

H I threat of disappearing or at least undergoing dangerous, irreversible modiﬁcation and steady downgrading (Szmygin, 2006). Aer 1989, ‘“Marketism” succeeded Marxism as an economic dogma’ (Johnson, 1996, 289). Following years of a centrally planned economy and limitations on exercising ownership rights, most citizens of Central and Eastern Europe are now more than happy to embrace free-market rules, seeing conservation and spatial planning regulations as an unnecessary corset limiting personal freedom and private initiative in historic complexes and urban centres. In theory, most people are happy to acknowledge that … heritage is of value, but in practice economic pressures clearly prevail and territories and objects are utilized to their maximum economic capacity irrespective of their character, age, cultural value or the protection provided by law (Štulc, 2001, 58). The new challenge and dilemma for heritage professionals and conservation authorities in Central and Eastern Europe is thus ﬁnding a balance between economic rationale and conservation requirements, eﬀective execution of existing laws and making the local communities and authorities understand that preservation of landscape and sustainable use of heritage sites is in the long-term interest of all actors. As mentioned earlier, there is also a problem of a certain general ‘aitude or approach gap’ between the visions of heritage professionals and ‘conservationists’, educated mostly under the old regime, and the commercialized reality of everyday life.

Dissonant Heritage Re-examined The period aer 1989 brought about the possibility of revaluating once unwanted or dissonant heritage, which prior to the Velvet Revolution did not ﬁt into the vision of uniform, ideologically correct national heritages promoted by communist authorities. The heritages of ethnic minorities such as the Jews, numerous in Central and Eastern Europe prior to 1939, were oen marginalized, forgoen or purposely destroyed in communist times.10 Since 1989, however, they have increasingly been revived. In the case of Jewish heritage: More than half a century aer the Holocaust, an apparent longing for lost Jews – or for what Jews are seen to represent – is … evident. In a trend that … accrued particular force aer the fall of communism in 1989–90, Europeans … have stretched open their arms to embrace a Jewish component back into the social, political, historical and cultural mainstream (Gruber, 2002, 4).

10

The almost complete demolition of the Bratislava Jewish quarter at the foot of the Bratislava castle hill, conducted in the 1970s to make way for the new motorway in the centre of the city, is an example. 330

H T

C E E Thus, there is now a certain fashion for Jewish culture and heritage in Europe, especially in its Central and Eastern part, the Jewish past being rediscovered, reinvented or even created anew by Jews and non-Jews for a largely gentile, commercial audience (Gruber, 2002; Murzyn, 2005; 2006a). This involves, among others: regenerating former Jewish quarters and turning them into tourism aractions and cultural zones; reconstructing and changing the function of synagogues and other former Jewish community buildings; endowing monuments of Jewish culture with signage and explanatory boards; creating Jewish heritage trails; and erecting monuments recalling important ﬁgures, such as the statue of Franz Ka a in Prague, and monuments commemorating Jews who perished in the Holocaust (for example: the memorial tree behind the Dohány Street Synagogue in Budapest; the monumental memorial to the victims of the Nazi extermination camp in Bełżec in eastern Poland; the monument to those who perished in Krakow gheo). The reconstruction of part of the former Jewish cemetery and the creation of Chatam Sofer Memorial in Bratislava has also been a way to reassert Jewish symbolism within the city. A signiﬁcant part of this trend for ‘virtual Jewishness’ also consists of materializing intangible heritage into tangible forms such as tourist souvenirs, its recreation through festivals of Jewish culture, concerts of Klezmer and Jewish music or refurbishing old and founding new Jewish museums (Murzyn, 2005). For example, the best-known Festival of Jewish Culture in Europe now takes place in Krakow, another Jewish Summer Festival is organized in Budapest each year, while Prague hosts the Musica Judaica Festival. Even the small town of Třebíč has for several years been organizing a Šamajim Festival of Jewish Culture. Similarly, the organizational structure and management of the Jewish Museum in Prague – the institution boasting the most signiﬁcant Judaica collection in Central Europe – has undergone substantial changes, while in other cities new institutions have been established such as: the Budapest Holocaust Memorial Centre; a Jewish Museum and a Holocaust museum in Vilnius; and the Centre for Jewish Culture – Judaica Foundation – in Krakow. There is also a comprehensive, multimedia exhibition of the History of Polish Jews planned in Warsaw. The issue of discussing the painful past and the fate of the Jews, both during and aer World War II, is also a part of the important process of coming to terms with the diﬃcult past. In some countries the process is under way although, in others, it has yet to start (for example, the discussion on Jedwabne in Poland, cf. Traba, 2006; the issue of the aitude of the Slovak state towards the Jews during World War II, cf. Kružliak, 2002). Manor houses, palaces and villas from around 1900 in a garden or park seing, which were formerly treated as unnecessary reminders of the power of the aristocracy and bourgeoisie, and thus the symbol of social injustice and the subjugation of peasants and workers, comprise yet another type of heritage considered dissonant by the communist regimes. This justiﬁed their expropriation from lawful owners, nationalization and handing them over to newly formed collective farms, educational and social care institutions or other types of stateowned ﬁrms, and allowing for the gradual destruction and dilapidation of many of them. In this process, which occurred in all socialist countries, the buildings’ ﬁxtures 331

T A R C

H I

Figure 18.5 Kliczków Palace in Lower Silesia (Poland) and ﬁings were oen completely destroyed or dispersed, while their historic fabric suﬀered much, both from irresponsible usage and from lack of day-to-day maintenance. The scope of destruction of this type of building is clearly visible from statistical data. For example, about 20,000 historic manor houses were counted in Poland aer World War II. By 1972 only about 1,000 still existed (Dobosz, 1997, 60), many in a state of near-complete dilapidation. As aer 1989 it was no longer inappropriate openly to underline one’s wealth or aachment to the aristocratic ethos, this depleted and downgraded resource gradually started to aract the aention, not only of former owners and local authorities, but also of a growing number of nouveau riche individuals and commercial ﬁrms, most especially in the tourism and catering sector. Many co-operatives, dissolved collective farms and municipalities sold this type of real estate to new owners and investors who have restored the buildings to a variety of uses. These range from comfortable upperclass dwellings or summer residences to oﬃce quarters, conference facilities, tourist aractions and hotels. The increasingly numerous restoration projects conducted in the palaces, castles and villas in the region of Lower Silesia in Poland are a good example of this trend. In the palace complex in Krzyżowa, there is an International Centre for Meeting of Youth, the palaces in Czernica and Kowary (the so-called Neuhof) are

332

H T

C E E again well-maintained private residences, while Kliczków (Figure 18.5), Krasków, Łomnica, Staniszów and Paulinum in Jelenia Góraare are now all luxury leisure and hotel complexes. Tourists will soon also be able to enjoy the interiors of hotels and pensions in the palaces in Wojanów and Miłków, as well as a hunting-lodge in Karpniki. A palace in Kobierzyce, near to Wrocław, was renovated by local authorities and serves a mix of administrative and commercial functions ranging from the oﬃces of local authorities and a registry for civil marriages to hotel and restaurant, while in Tuszyn, instead of constructing a new school building, a palace was restored and adapted to serve the educational function. Even though such complex projects have by now been conducted in only a fraction of over 500 such buildings in Lower Silesia, from the monument protection point of view this is already a huge and much welcomed change (Napierała, 2005). The restoration and adaptation of palaces in Lower Silesia for new functions should also be seen as an expression of a more complex overlapping trend – of the acceptance of not only aristocratic but also once ethnically dissonant German heritage by the now predominantly Polish inhabitants and investors (cf. Table 18.1) and of the role played by political and commercial considerations as a necessary stimulus for the conservation and restoration activities in historic buildings. Table 18.1

Evolution of aitudes towards cultural heritage in the so-called Western and Northern Territories in Poland aer 1945

Phase

Material heritage Uses of heritage I. Hostility, Removing German destruction symbolism, irresponsible usage, devastation II. Adaptation, partial Caring for heritage assimilation because of its utility value, usage III. Acceptance, Care, initiatives leading to preservation and internalization, recreation of heritage assimilation, reconstruction

Perception of heritage Values aached to it Hostility, strangeness, inadaptability, aempt at ‘de-Germanization’, temporary abode Indiﬀerence, geing used to, slow familiarization Lile homeland (Heimat), identiﬁcation with, part of identity, curiosity about the past, wish to rediscover the lost heritage

Source: Gwosdz and Murzyn, 2003, 191.

Of course this process is much dependent on the level of economic development and the degree of transformation of the economy as well as ethnic and national considerations. Consequently, it is now clearly visible in Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Estonia or Lithuania, but less so in Slovakia or western Ukraine where economic transformation was retarded and where the issue of returning to the vestiges of the gentry and aristocratic past is more problematic as it intertwines with the problem of accepting the heritage of former Hungarian (in the case of Slovakia) or Polish (in the case of western Ukraine) ruling elites. 333

T A R C

H I The scope of what is regarded as heritage and thus found worthy of preserving or displaying is also constantly broadening to include new, previously disregarded elements. Following the fashion for industrial heritage visible in Western Europe, the same process can be observed in Central and Eastern Europe. Initially aer 1989 market forces exerted pressure mainly to clear away those underused structures, but there is now a growing fashion for industrial heritage, and many sites and structures are being renovated and adapted for various new functions, most especially those in good locations in the very heart of cities. Many industrial monuments have thus been or are being transformed into: museums; cultural centres; theatres; shopping and leisure complexes; prestigious oﬃce premises; or luxury lo-type apartments. An old sewage treatment plant in the 6th district of Prague-Bubeneč houses the Ecotechnical Museum, the former salt storehouse in Tallinn is now home to the Museum of Estonian Architecture, a tramway power station in Warsaw serves as the grounds for the Museum of the Warsaw Uprising, while the historic tram depot in the Kazimierz quarter of Krakow has been transformed into the Museum of Public Transport and City Engineering. Former industrial premises are also very popular with artists and oen become sites of avant-garde artistic projects and institutions: Fabryka Trzciny Artistic Centre in the Prague district of Warsaw; Karlin Studios in the former industrial 8th quarter of Prague; Gallery Art Factory in the former newspaper printing hall in Prague; and the MEO Contemporary Art Gallery in the former leather factory in the industrial district of Ujpest in Budapest. Industrial buildings are also more and more frequently transformed into oﬃce premises or luxury los, whether in larger urban centres such as Warsaw, Prague and Budapest or smaller ones. Commercial adaptation and reconstruction also involves the transformation of larger industrial complexes into shopping and entertainment centres. For example, in Poland such projects have now been completed in the former Poznański Textile Company Complex in Łódź – Manufaktura Centre; Stary Browar (Old Brewery) Shopping, Art and Business Centre in Poznań; and the former municipal slaughterhouse grounds in Krakow, now the Kazimierz Gallery. The extent to which the industrial past of the site is emphasized and preserved is of course much dependent on the sensitivity of the investor and the possibility of adapting the structures to present-day uses. As Andri Ksenofontov (<www.ihp.lt/ee/ee-index.html>) observes with respect to the industrial heritage of the Baltic states: In Soviet times all factories, power plants, ports, etc. including the historic ones, were considered military and espionage targets and were closed to the public … It caused both the political and cultural alienation of local people from their industrial heritage. The growing recognition of industrial vestiges as heritage is then also dependent on the change of approach and possibility to access this heritage.

334

H T

C E E Uses and Attitudes towards the Heritage of the ‘Recent Past’ Until 1989 the heritage of atrocity of the communist times was oﬃcially taboo in the socialist countries. At the same time the dissonant and tragic heritage of World War II was presented in a selective, ideologically focused manner. Now both types of heritage are frequently presented and explained anew as part of the national canon of historical knowledge which it is important to convey most especially to younger generations. For democratic governments and right-wing parties, this is also the heritage of national ‘martyrology’ the presentation of which is needed to strengthen the feeling of justice among citizens and present a ‘correct’ version of national history and suﬀering. Numerous museums of occupation and communism have been founded in the 1990s in most Central and Eastern European countries and regions, ranging from small institutions of local importance with rather oldfashioned presentations to state-of-the-art, modern multimedia exhibitions created in large part thanks to explicit ﬁnancial commitment of state budgets. In Berlin one may visit: a Stasi Museum; Checkpoint Charlie Museum; the new Jewish Museum; and, since 2006, the Museum of the German Democratic Republic. Budapest has the House of Terror Museum, focusing on both the Nazi (brown) and communist (red) terror, and the Holocaust Memorial Centre. In Poland, Gdańsk houses the ‘Roads to Freedom’ Solidarity exhibition, while in Warsaw,11 there is the Museum of the Warsaw Uprising12 and the Katyń Museum. Krakow has the Armia Krajowa (Home Army) Museum and the up-dated Eagle’s Pharmacy exhibition on the city’s Gheo.13 Both Tallinn and Riga have Museums of Occupation. The mission of the laer, the Museum of Occupation in Riga, shows that presenting heritage of atrocity has a strong political dimension. The Museum was established in 1993 in order to show the 51 years of Latvia’s occupation by the Soviets and the Nazis, namely to: • show what happened to Latvia, its land and people under two occupying totalitarian regimes from 1940 to 1991; • remind the world of the crimes commied by foreign powers against the state and the people of Latvia; • remember the victims of the occupation: those who perished, were persecuted, forcefully deported or ﬂed the terror of the occupation regimes (Nollendorfs and Celle, 2005, 47). Moreover, it is located in a building which also symbolically changed function, from that of a Red Riﬂemen Museum serving communist propaganda purposes and educating the young in the communist spirit, to housing the institution which serves the Latvian national historical policy of teaching the general public and commemorating the nation’s suﬀerings under totalitarian regimes. In addition to fulﬁlling important educational functions, some of these places have become focal 11 12 13

SocLand – the Museum of Communism and the Museum of the Holocaust are yet other institutions which are supposed to be opened in Warsaw. N.b. the most modern, multimedia museum exhibition in Poland. There are also plans to adapt the former Schindler’s Factory in Krakow for the purpose of a museum focused on the issue of the Holocaust. 335

T A R C

H I points of tourism traﬃc – both new institutions such as the House of Terror in Budapest or the Museum of the Warsaw Uprising, and old symbolic sites which have survived the aempts of communists to destroy them, for example, Kriziu Kalnas (the Hill of Crosses) near Šiaulai in Lithuania.

Figure 18.6 Tangible proofs of ‘ostalgia’; miniature Trabant cars sold at a souvenir stand in Dresden, Saxony (Germany) The aitudes, stances and usage of the oﬃcial heritage of the socialist era are another interesting issue. In the ﬁrst years aer the fall of communism, while all signs of Western culture and consumerism were eagerly embraced, there was an open disdain for anything related to the communist rule coupled with a desire quickly to erase the heritage of socialist times. Statues were torn down, buildings demolished, street names changed to wipe away any trace of reverence to unwanted heroes. A few years later, a certain ‘ostalgia’ – a nostalgia for the ‘good old times’ of the old regime – appeared (Figure 18.6). Socialist sites have become increasingly popular sites as tourist aractions and the commercialization of this heritage means that it is less dissonant than nostalgically recalled, mockingly enjoyed and/or commercially exploited (Czepczyński, 2005; Young and Light, 2006). The statues that once adorned the main squares and streets and other public spaces have in many cases been preserved and are now displayed as part of socialist quasi-theme parks such as: 336

H T

C E E Grūtas Parkas near Druskininkai in Lithuania; the Socialist Sculpture Park in the peripheral district of Budapest; Socrealist Gallery in the Kórnik Palace complex in central-east Poland; and a Museum of Communism in Prague; to name but a few. The growing popularity of the Nowa Huta (New Steel Mill) quarter in Krakow as a tourist araction alongside the royal castle and the medieval city centre, and the tourist services oﬀered by some ﬁrms, also conﬁrms the trend. In order to meet the tourists’ needs and promote this heritage, the City of Krakow has installed a special heritage trail with maps and signs explaining various landmarks of Nowa Huta, and established a Nowa Huta Museum in the very centre of the former communist quarter. Guided tours to it are oﬀered both by general-interest and specialist tour agencies, such as ‘Crazy Guides – Communist Tours’ in Krakow. One advertisement reads: ‘Communism tours of Nowa Huta district and steelworks – take a crazy journey into Poland’s communist past; experience Stalin’s gi to Krakow; witness one of the world’s few centrally planned cities in a genuine East German Trabant 601 automobile’. The package comprises a tour to the socialist quarter combined with a meal in a socialist-style restaurant and a visit to an apartment with ﬁxtures and ﬁings from socialist times. The tour is completed with a ride in an authentic car from the same period, a so-called ‘Small Fiat 125p’ (once the most popular car in Poland) or the East German Trabant, driven by a guide dressed in factory worker’s uniform and a Russian-style winter cap. Such tours oﬀer an enjoyable and easily understandable, although somewhat distorted, narrative of the communist past, simplifying the complex socialist experience into one digestible by foreign tourists. Similar tours of sites of socialism are available in other post-socialist metropolises such as Prague (for example, ‘Prague Communist Walking Tour’), Bucharest (‘Bucharest and the Communist Times: Relics of a By-gone Era’), Soﬁa (‘Soﬁa Nostalgia Tour’) and Budapest (‘Hammer and Sickle Tour’). The last mentioned is advertised in the following manner: ‘The way it was Comrade! Go back to the good old times when we drove Trabants, lived in block ﬂats, stood in banana lines, had coupon books, dollar shops, no TV on Mondays and two passports.’ Large ediﬁces and imposing structures built in socialist times, such as Bucharest’s House of the People or the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw (Figure 18.7) have also, whether wanted or not, become mainstream tourist aractions and important symbols of the respective cities (Czepczyński, 2005; Light, 2000). Communiststyle pubs, with telling names such as ‘Propaganda’ in Krakow or ‘Proletaryat’ in Poznań in Poland, may be placed within the same trend. It is ironic that the heritage of the system founded and conceived as the opposite and negation of capitalism is now exploited by capitalist entrepreneurs who easily turn it into a commercial product. The contested nature of heritage of the post-1945 period was clearly revealed in Poland at the end of 2006 in the heated discussion, both in professional circles and among the general public, on whether the appearance of the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw should be preserved and the building listed as a monument in the oﬃcial monument register. The gigantic ediﬁce was built in the very centre of Warsaw in 1952–55, on the ruins of the destroyed nineteenth-century quarter, in the worst years of Stalinist terror. It was designed by a Soviet architect and promoted 337

T A R C

H I

Figure 18.7 Dissonant heritage of communism; the monumental Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw as a gi of friendship from the Soviet people to the people of the socialist People’s Republic of Poland. The supporters and propagators of the buildings’ listing pointed out the value of the building as a testimony to a certain, even if unpleasant, historical period and a unique example of the so-called socrealist (socialist realism) architectural style, both in terms of the building’s overall form and its interiors. As such, they argued, the monument should be preserved as a symbol of a certain historical period and a good example of a unique artistic style. Opponents of making the building a registered monument would either rather see it demolished because of the political content that it embodies or else changed in appearance to make it less visible and obtrusive. They ask the diﬃcult question: in preserving 338

H T

C E E the building, do Poles want to commemorate the sad times of Stalinist terror, the disappearance of the pre-war urban fabric of the capital, and the architectural style enforced by the communists? Similar questions are oen posed with regard to the numerous statues and monuments commemorating the ‘liberation’ of Central and Eastern Europe by Soviet troops at the end of World War II. Moreover, some places do not have any signiﬁcant heritage other than that of communism, especially if they were founded in communist times. The outward rejection of the heritage of socialism may then also be replaced with the need to search for the ‘hidden’ multi-dimensional identity of such places. In Nowa Huta in Krakow, the local cultural centres and the avant-garde Łaźnia Nowa theatre seek to uncover the quarter’s memories and heritage as created in times of socialism but locally embedded and important to contemporary inhabitants (Piekarska-Duraj, 2006).

Heritage Transformation as an Ambivalent Process The period since 1989 has been one of immense change in most of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Heritage, understood not only as material and intangible relics of the past, but most of all as the diverse ways in which they are used by contemporary societies as a social, political or economic resource (Graham, Ashworth and Tunbridge, 2000), has naturally been subject to the inﬂuence of the transformation. This conﬁrms that changes of ideology and economic system inspire and are paralleled by shis in the aitude, usage and interpretation of the past, bringing about many opportunities but also threats and challenges. Consequently, in this respect Central and Eastern Europe may be seen as a land of paradoxes. First, heritage remains an important expression of identity and is still largely understood as a national sacrum, yet the very same heritage is willingly commercialized and sold in diverse markets. Secondly, the fast ‘Westernization’ or ‘Americanization’ of mass culture leads to rather shallow and kitschy references to heritage or complete disregard for the past and marginalization of historical knowledge, visible especially among younger generations. One may also witness the renaissance of forgoen heroes, national symbols and traditions, oen leading to their manipulation and ‘instrumentalization’. According to Traba (2006, 41) those processes ‘[f]it, in an almost model-like manner, into the processes of identity transformation of post-communist societies, in the space between globalisation and “ethnisation”’. Thirdly, the market economy has created new impulses for restoration and regeneration projects, reversing the economic stagnation and hibernation of many historic areas and sites and giving them a new economic basis through functions such as tourism, catering and entertainment. The very market forces might though prove very challenging or even destructive to the authenticity of the historic tissue as well as its multifaceted interpretation. Fourthly, oscillating between global fashion and the need to underline distinctive local features may involve a return to the region’s cultural and ethnic diversity destroyed by the tragic events of war and by communist policies, yet as Timothy Garton-Ash observes: 339

T A R C

H I It has been something close to a rule in the 1990s that the greater the ethnic mix in a post-communist country, the more likely the country has been to take a nationalist authoritarian rather than a liberal democratic path (…) There’s a great irony here so far as the Central European debate is concerned. The 1980s revival of the Central European idea involved a celebration of the region’s pre-war ethnic and cultural mélange: mixed cities, like Prague or Czernowitz or Bratislava before it was called Bratislava, where people habitually spoke three or four languages; large minorities, especially Jewish and German ones; multiculturalism avant la lere. Yet it seems that one of the preconditions for being seen as part of the political Central Europe in the 1990s was precisely not to be Central European in this earlier sense (GartonAsh, 2000, 191–2). A willing return to cultural diversity, and nostalgia for it, are more oen present in those Central European countries where it is no longer experienced in everyday life. The renewal of Jewish quarters and rediscovery of Jewish heritage was thus, for example, more quickly possible in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland – countries with long, medieval traditions of nationhood and, due to historical developments, at present largely ethnically uniﬁed societies. It is quite diﬀerent in the case of new-born nation-states such as Slovakia or Ukraine, which in addition have sizeable ethnic minorities within their borders, such as Hungarians in Slovakia and Poles in Ukraine. Transformation should be seen as an important impetus for changing the understanding, aitudes, interpretation and uses of heritage, taking into consideration a broad range of scales (from European through national to regional and local), and actors (from public, through local communities, private individuals to commercial enterprises). Some processes, such as the discovery of the value of industrial heritage, or the regeneration and gentriﬁcation of aractively located inner-city quarters, are similar to those observed earlier in Western Europe. Some, such as the remaking of symbolic landscapes, are in many ways unique and closely related to political changes. The backwardness of the economy, and in many cases a certain ‘freezing the historic tissue’ of cities and villages in Central and Eastern Europe, in contrast to the fast-changing urban landscape of Western Europe in the post-war period (Purchla, 2005), presents an unique opportunity for the region to avoid the mistakes and use the experiences of the West. Conversely, devaluation of the concept of public good, still weak civil society and distrust in the structures of governance inherited from socialist times, all coupled with a reverence for the unrestricted practice of freedom of economic activities, are a serious threat to the cultural landscape. The demand for and idea of ‘consuming heritage, literally and ﬁguratively’ (Trayanova-Boneva, 2006, 81) is similar to the rising fashion for heritage products and experiences observed all over the world, although the very idea of market-driven ‘consumption’ is new in a Central European context. Moreover, the transformation process may be seen as conducive to accepting, re-examining or presenting many kinds of once dissonant heritage. The change

340

H T

C E E of dominant ideology, and shis in political aﬃliations and dependencies, have, however, created new types of dissonance and new conﬂicts resulting from the multi-use of heritage by diﬀerent actors (see, for example, Lagerspetz and Joons, 2005). Another concern voiced in recent years pertains to the question of what legacy the present generations will bequeath to those in the future, taking into consideration spontaneity and speed of change, as well as the fact that, very oen, the nations of Central and Eastern Europe may be prone to one-sided ‘cultural import’ instead of export of cultural ideas and values (Keresztély, 2005, 62). Again, the growing polarization and diﬀerentiation of society also leads to a pluralization of understanding and interpreting heritage. Finally, although similar processes have been observed throughout the region, there are strong diﬀerences with respect to scope, magnitude and pace of changes which are much dependent on a range of factors. These include: the speed and depth of economic and political reforms undertaken by particular countries; the speciﬁcity of their heritage; the degree of openness to international markets; integration with European structures; and the strength and size of the domestic market.

References Avineri, S. (2002), ‘The Changing Meaning of Central Europe: A View From Jerusalem’, in J. Purchla (ed.), Central Europe – New Dimension of Heritage (Krakow: International Cultural Centre), 47–50. Baše, M. (2007), ‘Heritage Management in the Czech Republic. Changes Since the Velvet Revolution’, in M.A. Murzyn and J. Purchla (eds), Cultural Heritage in the 21st Century: Opportunities and Challenges (Krakow: International Cultural Centre), 109–16. Bideleux, R. and Jeﬀries, I. (1999), A History of Eastern Europe: Crisis and Change (London and New York: Routledge). Billert, A. (ed.) (2001), Nowoczesne Zarządzanie Rozwojem Miast (Słubice: Collegium Polonicum). Cilauro, S., Gleisner, T. and Stich, R. (2004), Molvanîa: The Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry (Toronto: Penguin Books). Cisowski, B. and Duda, M. (2005), Szlak Architektury Drewnianej (Kraków: Województwo Malopolskie i Wydawnictwo Bezdroza). Czepczyński, M. (2004), Berlin Urban Landscape as a Cultural Product, Bulletin of Geography (Nicolaus Copernicus University: Toruń, Socio-economic Series: 3), 135–42. Czepczyński, M. (2005), Post-socialist Landscape Management and Reinterpretation, in CABERNET 2005, Proceedings of CABERNET 2005: International Conference on Managing Urban Land (Noingham: Land Quality Press), 64–7. Davies, N. (2001), Heart of Europe: The Past in Poland’s Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

341

T A R C

H I Dębczyński, J. (ed.) (2004), Strategia Rozwoju Narodowego Produktu Turystycznego Miasta Stołecznego Warszawy Trakt Królewski” do roku 2013 (Warszawa: Part S.A., Res Consulting). Delsol, C., Maslowski, M. and Nowicki, J. (eds) (2002), Mythes et Symboles Politiques en Europe Centrale (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France). Dimitrovska Andrews, K. (2005), ‘Mastering the Post-socialist City: Impacts on Planning the Built Environment’, in F.I. Hamilton, K. Dimitrovska Andrews and N. Pichler (eds), Transformation of Cities in Central and Eastern Europe: Towards Globalization (Tokyo, New York and Paris: UN University), 153–88. Dobosz, P. (1997), Administracyjnoprawne Instrumenty Kształtowania Ochrony Zabytków (Krakow: Dajwór). Domański, B. (1997), Industrial Control Over the Socialist Town. Benevolence or Exploitation? (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers). Enyedi, G. and Kovács, Z. (2006), ‘Social Sustainability of Historical City Centres in Central Europe – an Introduction’, in G. Enyedi and Z. Kovács (eds), Social Changes and Social Sustainability in Historical Urban Centres: The Case of Central Europe (Pecs: Hungarian Academy of Sciences), 11–19. Frank, S. (2006), ‘Disputed Tourist Stages, Heritage Stories and Cultural Scripts at Checkpoint Charlie Berlin’, in S. Schröder-Esch and J. Ulbricht (eds), The Politics of Heritage and Regional Development Strategies – Actors, Interests, Conﬂicts (Weimar: Bauhaus Universität), 175–85. Garton-Ash, T.G. (1989), The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central Europe (Cambridge: Granta Books). Garton-Ash, T.G. (2000), History of the Present: Essays, Sketches and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s (London: Penguin Books). Giddens, A. (1990), The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press). Graham, B., Ashworth, G.J. and Tunbridge, J.E. (2000), A Geography of Heritage (London: Arnold). Grodziska, K. and Purchla, J. (eds) (2002), Śmierć, Przestrzeń, Czas, Tożsamość w Europie Środkowej Około 1900 (Krakow: International Cultural Centre). Gruber, R.E. (2002), Virtually Jewish. Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press). Gwosdz, K. and Murzyn, M.A. (2003), ‘Dilemmas Encountered in the Development of Tourism in a Degraded Town. The Case of Chełmsko Śląskie (Schömberg) in Lower Silesia’, in W. Kurek (ed.), Issues of Tourism and Health Resort Management (Krakow: Institute of Geography and Spatial Management, Jagiellonian University), 183–99. Hallas-Murula, K. (2007), ‘A Changing Society, A Changing City: The Building Boom and Heritage Protection in Tallin, Estonia’, in M.A. Murzyn and J. Purchla (eds), Cultural Heritage in the 21st Century: Opportunities and Challenges (Krakow: International Cultural Centre), 117–28. Hammersley, R. and Westlake, T. (1994), ‘Urban Heritage in the Czech Republic’, in G.J. Ashworth and P.J. Larkham (eds), Building a New Heritage: Tourism, Culture and Identity in the New Europe (London and New York: Routledge), 178–200.

342

H T

C E E Haumann, H. (2002), A History of East European Jews (Budapest: Central European University Press). Johnson, L.R. (1996), Central Europe. Enemies, Neighbors, Friends (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Keresztély, K. (2005), ‘Budapest, Ville-pont Culturelle?’, Revue d’Etudes Comparatives Est-Ouest 36:2, 39–69. Kiss, C.G. (2002), ‘Places of Common Memory’, in J. Purchla (ed.), Central Europe – New Dimension of Heritage (Krakow: International Cultural Centre), 43—50. Klimpke, U. and Krammeier, H.D. (2006), ‘Quedlinburg – 10 Years on the World Heritage List: East-West Transformations of a Small Historic Town in Central Germany’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 12:2, 139–58. Konrad, G. (1995), ‘Central Europe Redivivus’, in The Melancholy of Rebirth: Essays from Post-Communist Central Europe, 1989–1994 (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company), 156–63. Krakowski, P. and Purchla, J. (eds) (1999), Art Around 1900 in Central Europe. Art Centres and Provinces (Krakow: International Cultural Centre). Kružliak, I. (2002), ‘Dylemat Słowacki’, in R. Chmel (ed.), Kwestia Słowacka w XX Wieku (Gliwice: Kalligram et al.), 524–43. Ksenofontov, A., ‘Industrial Heritage in Estonia’, Industrial Heritage Platform, <www.ihp.lt/gateway/ee/ee_index.html>, accessed 1 February 2007. Kundera, M. (1984), ‘The Tragedy of Central Europe’, New York Review of Books, 26 April, 33–8. Lagerspetz, M. and Joons, S. (2005), ‘Tallinn as a Multicultural City: Structures, Initiatives, Debate’, in Metropolis of Europe: Urban Cultural Life and Inter-city Cultural Interactions for ‘Cultural Diversity’ in Europe. Conference Reader (Warsaw), 87–114. Lagzi, G. (2006), ‘Czy Węgrzy mają swoje Kresy Wschodnie?’, in J. Purchla (ed.), Dziedzictwo Kresów – Nasze Wspólne Dziedzictwo? (Krakow: International Cultural Centre), 69–82. Light, D. (2000), ‘An Unwanted Past: Contemporary Tourism and the Heritage of Communism in Romania’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 6:2, 145–60. Lukacs, J. (1989), Budapest 1900: A Historical Portrait of a City and its Culture (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicholson). Moździerz, Z. (2001), ‘The Zakopane Style and the Vernacular Movement in European Architecture of the Second Half of the 19th Century’, in J. Purchla (ed.), Vernacular Art in Central Europe (Krakow: International Cultural Centre), 307–23. Murzyn, M.A. (2003), ‘Kultura Jako Funkcja Metropolitalna w Przestrzeni Współczesnego Miasta. Przypadek Budapesztu’, in I. Jażdżewska (ed.), Funkcje Metropolitalne i ich Rola w Organizacji Przestrzeni (Łódź: Uniwersytet Łódzki), 285–97. Murzyn, M.A. (2005), ‘Changes in the Jewish Quarters in Central Europe aer 1989’, in I. Sagan and D. Smith (eds), Society, Economy, Environment – Towards the Sustainable City (Gdańsk-Poznań: Uniwersytet Gdański, Bogucki Wydawnictwo Naukowe), 121—34. Murzyn, M.A. (2006a), Kazimierz. The Central European Experience of Urban Regeneration (Krakow: International Cultural Centre). 343

T A R C

H I Murzyn, M.A. (2006b), ‘New Interpretations and Commercialization of Heritage in Krakow aer 1989’, in S. Schröder-Esch (ed.), Practical Aspects of Cultural Heritage – Presentation, Revaluation, Development, Hermes Project, Volume 1 (Weimar: Bauhaus-Universität), 167–88. Napierała, P. (2005), ‘Adaptacje Zespołów Pałacowo-parkowych i ich Wpływ na Rozwój Ruchu Turystycznego na Przykładzie Dolnego Śląska’, in Kongres Konserwatorów Polskich 5-7.10.2005 (Wrocław: Dolnośląskie Wydawnictwo Edukacyjne), 150–61. Nollendorfs, V. and Celle, O. (eds) (2005), The Three Occupations of Latvia 1940–1991, Soviet and Nazi Take-overs and Their Consequences (Riga: Occupation Museum Foundation). Pallai, K. (1996), ‘Historic Areas: Destroyed or Destructive or the Role of Heritage in the Metropolitan Development of Budapest in the 19th and 20th Century’, in J. Purchla (ed.), The Historical Metropolis. A Hidden Potential (Krakow: International Cultural Centre), 139–51. Peil, T. (2005), ‘Estonian Heritage Connections – People, Past and Place: The Pakri Peninsula’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 12:1, 53–65. Piekarska-Duraj, Ł. (2006), ‘Negotiating Historical Narratives for Nowa Huta – Heritage as a Factor for Local Identity Building’, in S. Schröder-Esch (ed.), Practical Aspects of Cultural Heritage – Presentation, Revaluation, Development, Hermes Project, Volume 1 (Weimar: Bauhaus-Universität), 167–74. Podraza, A. (2002), ‘How Should We Understand the Term “Central Europe” at the Turn of the 21st Century’, in J. Purchla (ed.), Central Europe – New Dimension of Heritage (Krakow: International Cultural Centre), 23–8. Polyák, L. (2006), ‘Heritage as Argument, Heritage as Authority: Notions and Positions in Contemporary Budapest Urban Planning Discourse’, in S. Schröder-Esch (ed.), Practical Aspects of Cultural Heritage – Presentation, Revaluation, Development, Hermes Project, Volume 1 (Weimar: Bauhaus-Universität), 153–65. Purchla, J. (ed.) (1998), Mayors and City Halls. Local Government and the Cultural Space of the Late Habsburg Monarch (Krakow: International Cultural Centre). Purchla, J. (ed.) (2001), Vernacular Art in Central Europe (Krakow: International Cultural Centre). Purchla, J. (2005), Heritage and Transformation (Krakow: International Cultural Centre). Raport o Stanie Miasta 2005 (2006) (Krakow: Urząd Miasta Krakowa). Riabczuk, M. (2007), ‘Between the “Wild West” and “CIS”: Ukraine’s Ambiguous Transformation’, in M.A. Murzyn and J. Purchla (eds), Cultural Heritage in the 21st Century: Opportunities and Challenges (Krakow: International Cultural Centre), 97–107. Samsonowicz, H. (2002), ‘Family Member or Unwanted Child? Values Contributed to the European Heritage by the Countries of Central Europe’, in J. Purchla (ed.), Central Europe – New Dimension of Heritage (Krakow: International Cultural Centre), 29–32. Sedlakova, L. and Tokolyova, T. (2006), ‘Development of the Civil Society of the Visegrad Region’, in I. Tarrosy and G. Rosskogler (eds), Social, Economic and

344

H T

C E E Political Cohesion in the Danube Region in the Light of EU Enlargement (Pecs: Europe Centre PBC), 27–37. Sparitis, O. (2003), ‘The Rebirth and Restoration of Administrative, Political and Cultural Symbols in Riga’s Town Hall Square’, in J.J. Czaplicka and B.A. Ruble (eds), Composing Urban History and the Constitution of Civic Identities (Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press), 341–71. Štulc, J. (2001), ‘Czech Republic’, in R. Pickard (ed.), Policy and Law in Heritage Conservation (London and New York: Spon Press), 41–72. Sucháček, J. (2006), ‘Central Europe as Semi-border and Semi-urban Region and its Marketisation’, in I. Tarrosy and G. Rosskogler (eds), Social, Economic and Political Cohesion in the Danube Region in the Light of EU Enlargement (Pecs: Europe Centre PBC), 12–19. Szmygin, B. (2006), ‘Kazimierz – Turystyka i jej Wyzwania dla Ochrony Dziedzictwa’, Spotkania z Zabytkami 12, 3–7. Tomaszewski, A. (2002), ‘Central Europe: Cultural Property and Cultural Heritage’, in J. Purchla (ed.), Central Europe – New Dimension of Heritage (Krakow: International Cultural Centre), 131–5. Traba, R. (2006), Historia – Przestrzeń Dialogu (Warszawa: Instytut Studiów Politycznych PAN). Trayanova-Boneva, L. (2006), ‘Making Meaning and the Construction of Heritage as Socio-cultural Mission’, in S. Schröder-Esch (ed.), Practical Aspects of Cultural Heritage – Presentation, Revaluation, Development, Hermes Project, Volume 1 (Weimar: Bauhaus-Universität), 79–87. Trencsényi, B. and Kopecek, M. (eds) (2007), Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe 1770–1945, vol. II – National Omanticism: The Formation of National Movements (Budapest: Central European University Press). Tunbridge, J.E. and Ashworth, G.J. (1996), Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conﬂict (Chichester: Wiley). Tung, A. (2001), Preserving the World’s Great Cities: The Destruction and Renewal of the Historic Metropolis (New York: Clarkson Poer). Vilnius Old Town Renewal Agency (2000), Vilnius Old Town Revitalisation Strategy. Implementation, Cooperation, Results, Vision (Vilnius: Vilnius Old Town Renewal Agency). Vukov, N. and Toncheva, S. (2006), ‘Town Squares and Socialist Heritage: The Reworking of Memorial Landscapes in Post-socialist Bulgaria’, in S. Schröder-Esch (ed.), Practical Aspects of Cultural Heritage – Presentation, Revaluation, Development, Hermes Project, Volume 1 (Weimar: Bauhaus-Universität), 175–85. Walas, T. (ed.) (1995), Stereotypes and Nations (Krakow: International Cultural Centre). Wandycz, P. (1992), The Price of Freedom: A History of East-Central Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present (London: Routledge). Wandycz, P. (2002), ‘Myths, Stereotypes and Complexes in the History of Eastern and Central Europe’, in J. Purchla (ed.), Central Europe – New Dimension of Heritage (Krakow: International Cultural Centre), 33–41.

345

T A R C

H I Williams, A. and Balaz, V. (2000), Tourism in Transition. Economic Change in Central Europe (London and New York: I.B. Tauris). Young, C. and Light, D. (2006), ‘Communist Heritage Tourism: Between Economic Development and European Integration’, in D. Hassenpﬂug (ed.), Heritage and Media in Europe – Contributing Towards Integration and Regional Development, Hermes Project, Volume 3 (Weimar: Bauhaus-Universität), 249–61. <www.occupationmuseum.lv>, accessed 24 January 2007.

346

19

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

The Heritage of Post-colonial Societies Sabine Marschall

Heritage is commonly understood as a process of conscious, purposeful remembrance for the political, cultural or economic needs of those in the present; it involves a subjective representation of valued objects, signiﬁcant persons, places and symbolic events of the past, closely allied with issues of identity and power. In all societies, major political change or the emergence of new socio-political forces tend to be reﬂected in radical or gradual transformations of the public landscape of memory, as existing heritage becomes contested and the new order aempts to legitimate itself through reference to the past. More especially so, post-colonial societies, following their aainment of independence from colonial rule, tend to be preoccupied with issues of representation and deﬁning a new identity, for which selected aspects of the past understood as heritage serve as inspiration or foundation. The seizing of self-representation is oen a key prerogative, as these societies aempt to complement (and complete) political freedom with a ‘decolonization of the mind’ (wa Thiong’o, 1986). Such self-representation pertains to many ﬁelds, including literature, the creative arts and the media, but the focus here is on what Germans call Erinnerungslandscha or ‘memory landscape’. This term connotes the mnemonic qualities not only of tangible heritage such as architectural landmarks, commemorative monuments and memorials, but also of less tangible aspects such as street names, public squares, historic sites and even entire townscapes or natural landscapes (Koshar, 2000, 9). Space does not allow an engagement with the controversial debate around deﬁning the post-colonial or the relationship between post-colonialism and postapartheid in South Africa (see, for example, Appiah, 1991; Thornton, 1996). One cannot ignore, in this context, Zine Magubane’s (2003) acerbic critique of the very concept of post-colonialism as an invention of Western academia, beneﬁting the professional needs of scholars in the North, but viewed with scepticism by Africanists and oen considered of lile use and relevance by scholars in the South. For the purposes of this chapter, however, the term post-colonialism is deﬁned exclusively in a chronological sense, as referring to societies aer the

T A R C

H I achievement of political independence from previous colonial domination. In the South African case, I use post-colonialism synonymously with post-apartheid – the period of black majority rule aer the ﬁrst general, democratic elections in 1994. Although this chapter focuses on heritage in post-colonial societies on the African continent and particularly South Africa, the reader will soon recognize that very similar identity discourses and socio-political challenges characterize the heritage ﬁeld in post-colonial societies elsewhere in the world.

Post-colonial Heritage as Global Phenomenon Having said that, it is important to remember that post-colonialism is really a global phenomenon, not one conﬁned to the Third World. Steinmetz and Hell’s (2006, 183) most recent case study on Namibia and Germany aptly illustrates to what extent issues of public memory among the formerly colonized are intertwined with and indeed to some extent are dependent on the relationship with their former colonizer (see similarly Aldrich, 2005 for France). As the former colonial power asserts its ongoing political, economic and cultural inﬂuence over the post-colonies, increasing numbers of asylum-seekers and immigrants from the ex-colonial periphery transform the demographic proﬁle and social realities of their host nation. Pressure groups of immigrants may bring critical discourses around colonial heritage and the legacies of the colonial project in general to public aention in the former metropolis. For tourists from the former metropolis, notably cultural and heritage tourists, a visit to their excolonies constitutes a favoured destination, where they become consumers of local heritage, but also presumably gain a more nuanced understanding of the complexities and contradictions faced by post-colonial societies (see Aldrich, 2005; Hall and Tucker, 2004). Due to its high symbolic and oen emotional value, heritage can play a seminal role in cultural politics and substantially redeﬁne the relationship between the post-colonial nation and its former colonial power. This occurs, for instance, when important cultural objects are being repatriated, including carved masks, ritual items or even human remains once taken for trophies. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, there has been much debate lately about re-erecting former colonial monuments in the capital, Kinshasa, as a symbol of redeﬁned relations between Belgium and its former colony. This culminated in an equestrian statue of King Leopold II (Figure 19.1), dismantled aer independence and stored in a warehouse on the outskirts of the city, being re-erected in the public arena, although controversy forced the authorities to take it down again only 12 hours later (Lagae, 2005). Throughout the formerly colonized world, heritage is oen the tangible focal point and barometer of how ex-colonizers and ex-colonials assess colonial spaces, artefacts and empire more generally (Buener, 2006).

348

T H P -

S Post-colonial Heritage in Africa When discussing heritage in post-colonial societies, two levels of diﬀerentiation, one temporal and one spatial, must be made. While a few countries in Africa have only very recently assumed self-governance, others aained their independence many decades ago. Oﬃcial and popular aitudes towards heritage tend to change over time; typically, a shi can be observed from the emotionally charged spirit of the immediate post-independence period, frequently associated with rash iconoclastic actions targeted at colonial monuments and an urge for ambitious, highly visible, new heritage projects, to a more considered, reﬂective stance in later years. Secondly, since post-colonial heritage is ideologically linked Figure 19.1 Equestrian statue of King Leopold with the experience of colonialism and oen formally inspired II in Kinshasa, Congo by colonial heritage practices, one must take into account fundamental diﬀerences between post-colonial societies and their varied historical experiences (Olaniyan, 2005). The principal European powers (Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal) diﬀered in terms of their respective approaches to colonial administration, the duration and intensity of colonial domination, and in terms of their social and cultural impact on the colonized society, including aitudes towards racial mixing. The emergence of a signiﬁcant creolized population and elite in parts of Angola (Fiddian, 2000), for instance, renders the prevailing notions of black versus white, oen played out in post-colonial heritage, complex and ambiguous.

Dealing with Colonial Heritage Post-colonial societies tend to have an ambiguous relationship to their colonial heritage, and how they deal with colonial names, museums, monuments and public statuary is dependent on psychological, political and economic factors. 349

T A R C

H I The immediate post-independence era is usually marked, as mentioned above, by an ideologically and emotionally driven quest for self-representation and the wholesale rejection of dominant colonial discourses, oen accompanied by a widespread antipathy, if not loathing, of the former colonial power, whose oppressive regime many have personally experienced. In this context, the destruction, removal or alteration of colonial heritage and, if possible, its replacement with symbols of the new socio-political order, appear not only desirable but indeed a psychological imperative. This applies both to ordinary people who may feel oﬀended by the continued presence of the symbolic representation of the old regime, and to the authorities of the post-colonial state, which may resort to staging spectacular iconoclastic measures as a way of bolstering its ideological position and legitimacy. In Kenya, for instance, a colonial statue of Lord Delamere, erected in the city centre of Nairobi in 1939 to symbolize the creation of a British seler identity, was removed on 6 November 1963, a few weeks before Kenya oﬃcially gained independence. It was a step towards eradicating British seler authority and a dramatically staged symbolic act in strengthening the evolving new Kenyan national identity (on 12 December). The ensuing debate about what should be done with the deposed bronze statue included suggestions to melt it down and refashion it in the likeness of independent Kenya’s ﬁrst president, Jomo Kenyaa (Larsen, 2004). In Algiers, an equestrian statue of the Duke of Orléans, symbol of French colonial occupation in the centre of the Place d’Armes, was taken down following Algeria’s independence in 1962. The statue was replaced with an abstract memorial and the public square renamed Place des Martyres to honour the victims of the Algerian War. However, as Çelik (1999/2000, 67) observes, 40 years aer independence, many local residents still refer to the square as ‘Place al-Auod’, or ‘Place du Cheval’ (Square of the Horse) in reminiscence of the once-familiar equestrian statue. This testiﬁes to the interlocked memory of the colonial and post-colonial eras and casts doubt on the success of erasing unwanted memories by removing their symbolic representations. It would be wrong to suggest that there is widespread consensus about the perceived need to remove colonial heritage. Caught up with daily routines in pursuit of making a living and oen faced with substantial problems of basic survival, many urban, but especially rural, African people arguably care very lile about the fate of colonial buildings and statues, or the exhibitions in a museum they have never visited. Some may even object to the mere expenditure associated with the removal of such objects as a waste of scare resources. Some statues and monuments, even if no longer politically correct, have in eﬀect become tolerated or even useful landmarks for orientation in the urban environment (see Johnson, 1995) or objects pragmatically appropriated for varied personal needs. Despite its widely contested nature, the Paul Kruger monument in the South African capital, Pretoria (Tshwane), for instance, serves as a popular backdrop for a number of black informal street photographers. In other cases, objects of colonial heritage may not be perceived as oﬀensive at all, because their intended meaning is unknown to passers-by or has been reinterpreted over time. The statue of Queen Victoria in Nairobi, for example, is commonly believed to represent the Virgin Mary and 350

T H P -

S as such presumably much respected and revered by some (Larsen, personal communication). Colonial buildings, even if clearly associated with oppressive memories of the previous regime, tend to constitute too valuable an asset to be dismantled; provided they are structurally sound, they are rather appropriated (sometimes with modiﬁcations) for the purposes of the new order. The process of decolonization, which includes the politics of heritage, is inﬁnitely more complex and problematic in those post-colonial countries where a substantial white minority remained aer independence, for instance, Zimbabwe and Kenya, but most notably Namibia and South Africa. In the laer two nations, heritage reﬂecting the values of the white population has largely been le intact, oﬃcially for the sake of reconciliation and nation-building. However, there can be no doubt that the abstention from a radical iconoclastic onslaught on ‘white heritage’ in both Namibia and South Africa was also a strategic political and economic move in the interest of stability and a peaceful transition of power. Although no longer politically empowered, the white minority in both countries retains substantial social and economic inﬂuence and their alienation could have ripple eﬀects in the global arena of international relations and foreign investment. Pierre Bourdieu (1990, 112–21) would call this an aempt of the new order to accumulate ‘symbolic capital’ by behaving honourably in its dealings with other groups. Symbolic capital, according to Bourdieu, is at least in part a disguised, mystiﬁed form of economic capital and may be ‘cashed in’ for various sorts of economic credit and assistance, thus literally being converted into material wealth. Most recently, South African society has been embroiled in heated debates about a spate of proposed name changes (of streets, towns, cities, landmarks and provinces), the most publicized and controversial of which is the African renaming of the capital as Tshwane. Resistance to such changes is not exclusively conﬁned to whites, and arguments include concerns about costs and logistics, such as the recognition value of ‘branded’ cities within the international tourism sector. However, it is indeed predominantly white members of the population that object to the elimination of their heritage through the politics of naming. Observation suggests that there are also many whites in South Africa who are not remotely interested in maers of heritage and who have never visited a local history museum, but it would be fair to say that most of them share a certain emotional aachment to the collective array of colonial monuments, statues, museums and place names. Although many individuals may not identify with, nor even know about, the speciﬁc symbolic values each of these heritage sites and objects represents, the cultural familiarity of the name, the continued presence of the time-honoured monument, convey a reassuring sense of stability and security in a rapidly transforming environment and society. As heritage is a symbolic representation of group identity, an aack on heritage is invariably a threat to identity, fuelling a community’s fear of dispossession and disempowerment.

The Need for Redressing a Biased Heritage Landscape In divided societies, the destruction of a cultural symbol or eradication of heritage can even lead to violent conﬂict; by the same token, heritage, proponents argue, can

351

T A R C

H I also lead to the resolution of conﬂict, to the reconciliation of former enemies and to harmony and unity. This is one of the key arguments oﬃcially substantiating the need for new public heritage projects in South Africa. Like many post-colonial societies, the post-apartheid nation inherited a heavily biased landscape of memory. Frescura (1992) calculated that at the beginning of the 1990s, 97 per cent of all heritage sites listed by the National Monuments Council (NMC) in South Africa related to the cultural values, historical leaders and signiﬁcant experiences of the white population minority. The remaining 3 per cent covered the heritage of all other population groups combined, much of which was taken up by San/ Bushmen rock-art sites. The unmistakable implication was that non-white people never produced any material culture of note, that they are generally deﬁcient in a record of achievement, and that they have in fact ‘no history’. This aﬃrmed oﬃcial racist discourses about black inferiority and lack of civilization, thus justifying discriminatory government legislation. Similar trends and implied value judgements about the native ‘other’ prevailed in colonial societies throughout the African continent and with local modiﬁcations throughout the world. While in many African countries, post-colonial heritage literally replaced colonial heritage, government policy in South Africa and Namibia rather calls for complementing existing heritage. The continued overwhelming presence of the white minority’s symbolic representations throughout these countries arguably fuelled the process of identifying, proclaiming and constructing new heritage sites. This is particularly noticeable in South Africa, where a ﬂurry of activity has characterized the heritage sector since the early 1990s and new heritage sites are oen very consciously and systematically juxtaposed with older sites to establish a critical response and open up discursive perspectives of historical processes (Marschall, 2003; 2006).

State-sponsored Post-colonial Heritage Although a few African countries, especially in the Arab-dominated North, had already aained their freedom from colonial rule, it was Ghana’s achievement of independence in 1956 that ushered in a period of fundamental political change in Africa. As a powerful symbol of change, celebrating the new African nation and honouring the sacriﬁces made in its aainment, Independence Square was created in the heart of Accra under the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah. Its monumental Arc de Triomphe, topped by the ﬁve-pointed star aesting to the country’s socialist orientation at the time, is accompanied by expansive parade grounds with an eternal ﬂame lit by Nkrumah himself. Although still utilized for public appearances of government oﬃcials and a variety of state functions, a visit to this premier site of state memorialization today provides an ambiguous experience. On the one hand, one can still imagine the triumphant, celebratory spirit of the immediate post-independence period, with its overwhelming enthusiasm for freedom and widespread sense of pride and hope invested in the newly independent African independent nation. On the other hand, the glaring contrast of the imposing monument with the ubiquitous surrounding neglect, decay and poverty supports

352

T H P -

S

Figure 19.2 Monument celebrating the 20th anniversary of Kenya’s independence, Nairobi, Kenya common stereotypes about the self-aggrandizing projects of African political elites at the expense of the poor. Without wanting to justify monumental excesses, one must acknowledge, however, the deep emotional aachment to prominent leader ﬁgures shared by ordinary people in Africa, the pride they take in the achievements of those leaders and the resources they deem appropriate to devote to the celebration and especially the digniﬁed burial and commemoration of deceased heroes. During the immediate post-independence period, many African states promoted a reorientation of the heritage sector by identifying new heritage sites and initiating new monuments and museum exhibitions. These post-colonial heritage developments fall broadly into two categories. Projects in the ﬁrst group commemorate recent political history and the struggle for independence; they express a desire to celebrate the aainment of independence and pay respect to those who lost their lives or made signiﬁcant contributions to anti-colonial resistance and the liberation war. Projects in the second group aim to restore human dignity through: recovering and validating pre-colonial traditions; celebrating ethnic cultural values and beliefs previously declared inferior; paying tribute to the leaders of ‘the people’ formerly neglected by the oﬃcial heritage sector; and generally endorsing a history and culture of the previously marginalized. Such post-colonial memory practices, while oﬃcially positioned and endorsed as emancipating, empowering, inclusive, fostering unity and nation-building, may in reality entrench new hegemonies, sanctify exclusions and prescribe speciﬁc 353

T A R C

H I visions of national identity. In many post-colonial states, the anti-colonial forces were internally divided on ideological grounds or along ethnic lines. In Angola, for instance, the liberation movements were split along a largely ethnically determined tripartite division (Fiddian, 2000, 11). In Zimbabwe, the brutal suppression of the Ndebele as an ethnic minority by the Shona majority during the liberation war overshadows the political landscape to the present day. State-initiated postcolonial heritage oen negates such divisions and eﬀaces both the suﬀering and the contributions of others in an aempt at legitimating the ruling party and endorsing the political leadership as liberators of the people. Furthermore, in many countries the liberation struggle was fought on a nationalist platform, but the independent nation – comprising ethnically and linguistically heterogeneous populations within boundaries drawn up by the colonial powers – lacked a mutual historical past and shared points of identiﬁcation. A uniﬁed national identity ﬁrst had to be invented, strategically eliding histories of hostility and ethnic division in pursuit of peace and nation-building. Inspired by colonial practice, state-sponsored heritage could be utilized to deﬁne, endorse and publicly disseminate the new identity construct and accompanying value systems. The oﬃcial remembrance of the ﬁght against colonialism then came to constitute the liberation war as the founding moment, the myth of origin, of many post-colonial nations, with selected liberation heroes and fallen martyrs as founding fathers. In the case of Zimbabwe, Werbner (1998a, 8) highlights the elite character and hierarchical ordering of state-initiated post-colonial memorializations of selected heroic dead with shrines throughout the country, graded from the national to the provincial to the local. The culmination of this oﬃcial public-memory system is the national Heroes Acre at Harare, one of the boldest post-colonial monuments in Africa. Designed by a North Korean ﬁrm, the imposing structure was built immediately following Zimbabwe’s aainment of independence in 1980 and contains the actual graves of the liberation elite around the centrepiece of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. A series of ﬁgurative bas-relief plaques, rendered in social realist style, narrate the course of the liberation war with stereotypical images of white oppressors versus black freedom ﬁghters; Zimbabweans of racially mixed descent have no place in this foundational story of the new nation. Symbolic references to the pre-colonial Great Zimbabwe ruins are appropriated as new national emblems, but for some Zimbabweans this imagery constitutes distinctly Shona heritage, signalling ethnic nationalism to the exclusion of Ndebele and other groups (Werbner, 1998b; see also Arnold, 1989). A product of the same North Korean design team, the recently unveiled (August 2002) Namibian National Heroes Acre on the outskirts of Windhoek is equally imposing in design, stereotypical in its imagery and propagandistic in tone – perhaps a bold response to the persistent presence of German colonial heritage. In Kenya, it is not a heroes’ acre, but an emotionally charged, indeed mythical public space, that serves as a symbolic focal point of the nation. Uhuru Gardens in Nairobi (‘uhuru’ means freedom in Kiswahili) marks the place where on 12 December 1963, the Union Jack was lowered and the new Kenyan ﬂag was raised. The tall abstract monument with allegorical ﬁgures was commissioned in 1983 to 354

T H P -

S commemorate the 20th anniversary of Kenya’s independence (Larsen, 2004: Figure 19.2). Hecht (2005) explains how a sacred space can become a symbolic centre and focal point for building a nation. New nations virtually ‘need’ such a space and if none presents itself naturally, one can be created – its sacralization reinforced and its eﬃcacy renewed through periodically organized state functions. With the monument as backdrop, the memory of the liberation war is perpetually recalled and transferred onto the younger generation, thus legitimating the current political order in a context of fading memories and perhaps growing disillusionment. The concept of a proud Hall of Heroes and a symbolically charged national monument, preferably a solid, towering structure dominating the surrounding environment or imposingly situated on a hill, is closely associated with nineteenthcentury European nationalism. When equipped with parade grounds, expansive public gathering spaces and a stage-like arena, where public appearances of the leadership can eﬀectively be dramatized and oﬃcial state functions be performed, such structures furthermore resonate with the ideologically driven commemorative eﬀorts of militaristic twentieth-century totalitarian states (Koshar, 2000; Michalski, 1998). Many visitors from Europe (including heritage tourists) probably feel ambivalent, if not appalled, at the sight of the post-colonial re-workings of what many have come to consider as tainted heritage. Yet, for the post-colonial state the araction in constructing such national monuments and symbolic spaces lies in the absence of a uniﬁed national heritage. They give substance to the abstract imagining of the nation by constituting a highly authoritative, visual forum for the articulation of the new nation’s foundational moment and a critical site for the production of national identity.

New Hegemonies Drewal (1996, 110–11) provocatively suggested in 1996, that ‘… in many signiﬁcant ways a post-colonial, postmodern consciousness has not yet emerged, either outside or within Africa. Rather, what I see are essentially neocolonist, hegemonic aitudes and actions – and neocolonized reactions/responses.’ National heritage in post-colonial societies, as in all societies, is a discursive and highly selective practice, closely allied with prevailing power relations. The inherently subjective nature of heritage (what is signiﬁcant and who determines that?) tends to bolster preferred visions of national identity and hegemonic interpretations of the past. Oﬃcial memorialization of the liberation war, for instance, may be coupled with a strategic forgeing of atrocities commied against ethnic or political factions in the process of this war (as, for instance, in the case of the Ndebele in Zimbabwe) or the silencing of victims of later conﬂicts under the post-colonial government (as, for instance, in the case of the Nuer in Sudan). Exclusive visions of nation can lead to the neglect or irretrievable destruction of the heritage of marginalized groups, such as ethnic minorities, as a result of lacking state support. The neglect of Swahili cultural heritage in Kenya, for instance, is a case in point. As World Heritage Sites, places such as Zanzibar and Lamu oﬀ the East African coast are of considerable international interest and important

355

T A R C

H I tourist aractions associated with Swahili cultural heritage, thus warranting, even demanding, conservation eﬀorts. Yet, deep-seated prejudices among some sectors of the local Kenyan population, who do not consider the Swahili truly part of the nation, impede such eﬀorts (Kusimba, 1996). Similar paerns of reinforcing political marginalization through exclusive heritage practices can be observed elsewhere. They are oen sanctioned by the state, and in (military) dictatorships or countries ravaged by civil war, the targeted destruction of the ‘enemy’s’ cultural heritage can become a strategic weapon. Yet, even in post-colonial societies characterized by good governance and a democratically elected leadership, state policies may protect multicultural diversity in theory, but in practice, biased popular aitudes, coupled with traditional paerns of domination, may impede the successful implementation of heritage conservation.

State-promoted Heritage Versus Popular Memory Practices Heritage does not only fall victim to neglect, vandalism or destruction as a result of ethnic chauvinism or national ideological agendas, but an array of compounding logistical challenges typically encumber the conservation eﬀort in post-colonial societies. Across the continent the heritage sector suﬀers from a lack of funding for conservation, specialist human resources, and adequate storage or display facilities. Loss of traditional skills impedes the maintenance of historic buildings or other such heritage objects; the international illicit trade in African antiquities, coupled with corruption and inadequate security systems, pose a constant threat. Insuﬃcient protection of archaeological sites inhibits the uncovering of new dimensions of the African past and sometimes leads to the irreversible destruction of unique evidence that can set the historical record straight (Posnansky, 1996; Reid, 2004). Museums, monuments, archives, and the concept of conserving heritage for its intrinsic values and as ideologically motivated public-memory practice were introduced to Africa through colonialism. While the post-colonial state tends to appropriate these institutions and practices for its own political objectives, ordinary people are frequently found to ignore both heritage promoted by the colonial and post-colonial state. Some communities may engage in their own traditional ways of commemorating the past: in song, poetry and story-telling; in ritual actions and performances; in the veneration of natural elements or features of the landscape (a grove, a tree, a water source, a mountain). Just as the uneven presence of the colonizer and the incomplete success of the colonial project in various places enabled the survival of such local traditions of remembrance, the uneven presence and acceptance of the post-colonial state may turn such traditional memory rituals into acts of contestation, critiques of power or ‘counter heritage’. If the oﬃcially promoted institutions and practices of heritage conservation are thus subject to contestation and neglect, tourism, especially cultural and heritage tourism, is frequently invoked as a potential lifeline for threatened heritage including potentially contested colonial heritage. A striking boom in colonial nostalgia can be observed throughout post-colonial Africa (Werbner, 1998a, 1), 356

T H P -

S presumably appealing especially to heritage tourists from the former colonial powers. Tourism also serves to garner support for new interventions in the memory landscape. In post-apartheid South Africa, heritage conservation and economic development through tourism are ﬁrmly coupled in state policy, and new heritage projects habitually (and oen very problematically) produce high expectations about infrastructure development, employment creation, income generation and other tangible beneﬁts for impoverished communities. A tripartite alliance between the international interest in South Africa’s recent political history, the state’s desire to utilize heritage in the construction of a new national identity based on the values and principles of the anti-apartheid struggle, and the emotional desire of local communities and individuals to pay tribute to those who lost their lives in acts of resistance, is fuelling the establishment of countless new museums, memorials and heritage sites throughout the country. The euphoria for the post-apartheid ‘rainbow nation’ has somewhat worn oﬀ among all sectors of the population since the mid-1990s, but in maers of heritage South Africa is arguably still caught in the ﬁrst phase of post-colonial heritage development, characterized by a sense of urgency and a focus on the liberation struggle and nation-building. In most other post-colonial societies in Africa, popular aitudes towards heritage appear to have changed compared to the immediate post-independence period, although heritage with a nationalist ideological thrust holds continued appeal to the authorities of the state and some supporters. Decades aer the formal end of colonialism, the state’s vision of a uniﬁed nation, as invoked through shared heritage and national symbols, is marred almost everywhere by the harsh reality of continued ethnic division and sometimes violent conﬂict, persisting inequality along racial, ethnic, religious, class or gender lines, and continued high levels of poverty, underdevelopment and a variety of social ills. Disillusioned with the promises of the post-colonial state and its oﬃcially promoted models of identiﬁcation, some people ﬁnd meaningful orientation or refuge in their ethnic identity, traditions and social structures, which – celebrated as heritage – may simultaneously constitute a valuable economic resource in the expanding cultural tourism industry.

Heritage as Resource Ordinary people and communities are beginning to discover the use-value – both politically and economically – of heritage. Diﬀerent groups in rural Zambia, for instance, regularly approach the National Museums Board for assistance in establishing an ethnically based museum, oen near the site of their respective chief (Mizinga, 2004). In a context of an expanding heritage landscape and competing ethnic identities, one almost needs a museum or a monument to remain visible. The heritage industry in Namibia involves the reinvention of traditions and the revival of indigenous cultural practices, oen in novel forms. Increasingly such heritage is performed by members of a younger generation who have not personally experienced the liberation struggle. Although being inﬂuenced by Western values and American hip hop culture, the youth in Namibia shows marked interest in

357

T A R C

H I

Figure 19.3 Ncome monument and museum in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, commemorating the fallen Zulu warriors of the ‘Bale of Blood River’ indigenous traditional culture, oen as a result of their involvement in cultural tourism (Fairweather, 2003). As opposed to the familiar political idioms championed by the state, ethnically based heritage tends to hold greater appeal for tourists and is oen closely interlinked with the tourism industry’s eﬀort at branding speciﬁc regions and exoticizing associated cultures. Cultural and heritage tourism thrives on stereotypes, but it is by no means only uncritical foreign tourists, driven by fantasies of encountering primitive and exotic peoples, who buy into tropes of static cultures dwelling in a homogenized traditional past. Rather, local communities throughout Africa can be observed to embrace ethnic stereotypes, sometimes created by their former colonizers, and they construct romanticized historic narratives of a glorious, precolonial past. It may be surmised that such ‘memories’ of a golden age are a way of regaining a sense of pride and dignity. The danger associated with an overly enthusiastic embrace of ethnic heritage lies in the emergence of partisan identities that compete with the state’s political agenda of unity and nation-building. A South African case in point is the new Ncome monument (Figure 19.3) and museum in rural KwaZulu-Natal, which commemorates the fallen Zulu warriors of the famous ‘Bale of Blood River’, fought between Zulus and advancing Voortrekkers in 1838. Built opposite the existing Blood River monument, Ncome (unveiled on 12 December 1998) represents a critical response to an icon of Afrikaner nationalism. Being part of the 358

T H P -

S national Legacy Project, which the post-apartheid government legislated in 1996 to represent previously neglected or marginalized history, Ncome was primarily meant to symbolize reconciliation. Dlamini (2001), whose detailed historical analysis reveals interesting insights into the planning process of the Ncome project, however, shows that this supposedly inclusive, national commemorative initiative in reality represented a highly exclusive aﬀair, which ultimately fostered partisan Zulu nationalist agendas (see also Gershick, 2004). This is a critical point in a politically tenuous region with a long legacy of violent conﬂict, where ethnic identity and traditionalist values are largely overlaid by political party aﬃliation (Inkatha Freedom Party) in opposition to the African National Congress-led national government with its more urban, cosmopolitan outlook and ideological paradigms based on multicultural principles. Timothy (1997) makes a useful distinction between four types of heritage – world, national, local and personal – pointing out that the laer category has aracted disproportionately lile scholarly aention. All categories overlap to some extent, which means that a national or World Heritage Site may also be somebody’s personal heritage or a signiﬁcant resource for a local community. As a result, diﬀerent stakeholder constituencies will have varying expectations of their encounter with the heritage resource and its ‘use-value’. In post-colonial societies,

Figure 19.4 Great Zimbabwe archaeological ruins, World Heritage Site, near Bulawayo, Zimbabwe 359

T A R C

H I local communities, indigenous minorities or speciﬁc groups of individuals (for example, traditional healers) oen lack a voice to stake their claims to a heritage asset that is simultaneously of interest to the state or considered of universal signiﬁcance. Inadequate consultation about how the heritage asset should most suitably be preserved, protected, presented and made publicly accessible can hence lead to conﬂict or the disempowerment of local communities and stakeholders. For instance, local traditional healers were not consulted in the UNESCO application process for declaring the rock art at Kondoa-Irangi in Central Tanzania a World Heritage Site, although they still use these sites for spiritual purposes (Chalcra, 2004). Similarly, in Zimbabwe oﬃcial control of conservation and access to the Great Zimbabwe ruins, another World Heritage Site and tourist araction (Figure 19.4), inevitably deprives local communities, who traditionally consider the site an important shrine, of their customary rights to this signiﬁcant sacred place in their midst (Ndoro and Pwiti, 2005). At Heroes Acre in Harare, the ideological needs of the post-colonial state to entomb the bodies of liberation ﬁghters at this eminent national heritage site conﬂict with the emotional needs of the families to bury their loved ones (Werbner, 1998b). Post-colonial heritage is as much entangled with the strategic agendas of the political forces that promote and sustain it, as was true for colonial heritage. Its relationship with conservation management forces and their (changing) concepts of authenticity and historical purity has arguably become more complex and contradictory. Its entanglement with commercial interests, and its exposure to pressures about the production of sanitizing images and romanticizing ‘adjustments’ of the historical past in the interest of commodiﬁcation and entertainment, certainly far exceeds that of heritage in colonial times, due to the expansion and economic signiﬁcance of the tourism industry.

Conclusion In Mali, one of the poorest states in post-colonial Africa, the national government recently invested in an extensive programme of 25 public monuments (including an independence monument) for the capital Bamako, conceived by President Alpha Konaré (1992–2002) and his advisors (Arnoldi, 2003). Although the symbols and iconography of most of the architectural shapes and sculptural objects are largely based on local traditional sources of inspiration, there is certainly no tradition of such public statuary in Malian society. Rather the point of the venture was precisely to emulate the example of Western cities and bring Bamako in line with the appearance of international capitals, while simultaneously engaging African iconography and locally derived symbols in the enforcement of particular value systems linked to national political agendas. This example powerfully aests to the continued araction of the Western model, the deeply formative nature of the colonial project, and the continued popularity and convenience for post-colonial government elites to appropriate colonial mechanisms of public memory control for the dissemination of their own ideological purposes. 360

T H P -

S It is oen pointed out that the predominance of war and conﬂict in post-colonial Africa is at least in part aributable to the problematic nature of the nation-state model, and that the current practice of shoring up an artiﬁcially invented national identity with monuments and museum exhibitions aggravates the problem. In theory, it is indeed precisely on the basis of shared heritage that the existing entities could be reconstituted as truly African states. Yet, in practice, this scenario is, arguably, illusory, not only because of the deeply divisive and formative legacy of centuries of colonialism, but also due to a lack of political will on the part of the current political elites, who are unlikely to reorganize the national entity that sustains their power. Perhaps more importantly, the agency of post-colonial states is limited, embedded as they are in a complex global network, where the status quo serves the political and economic interests of powerful international players in the global arena. Hence, post-colonial heritage, while oﬃcially positioned in ideological opposition to colonial heritage, is in reality oen characterized by a complex and sometimes symbiotic interweaving with colonial heritage and memories.

References Aldrich, R. (2005), Vestiges of the Colonial Empire in France: Monuments, Museums and Colonial Memories (New York: Palgrave Macmillan). Appiah, K.A. (1991), ‘Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial’, Critical Inquiry 17 (Winter), 336–57. Arnold, M. (1989), ‘A Change of Regime: Art and Ideology in Rhodesia and Zimbabwe’, in A. Neleton and D. Hammond-Tooke (eds), African Art in Southern Africa. From Tradition to Township (Johannesburg: Ad Donker), 172–90. Arnoldi, M.J. (2003), ‘Symbolically Inscribing the City’, African Arts 36:2, 56–68. Bourdieu, P. (1990), The Logic of Practice (original French edition, 1980) (Cambridge and Oxford: Polity Press and Blackwell Publishers). Buener, E. (2006), ‘Cemeteries, Public Memory and Raj Nostalgia in Postcolonial Britain and India’, History and Memory 18:1, 5–42. Çelik, Z. (1999/2000), ‘Colonial/Postcolonial Intersections. Lieux de mémoire in Algiers’, Third Text 49 (Winter), 63–72. Chalcra, J.M. (2004), ‘The Hermeneutics of World Heritage in-the-making in Konoa-Irangi, Tanzania: A View from the Valcamonica’, paper presented at the BIEA-JSAS-ZNMB Conference, Heritage in Southern and Eastern Africa: Imagining and Marketing Public Culture and History, Livingstone (Zambia), 5–8 July. Corsane, G. (ed.) (2005), Heritage, Museums and Galleries: An Introductory Reader (London and New York: Routledge). Dlamini, N. (2001), ‘The Bale of Ncome Project: State Memorialism, Discomforting Spaces’, Southern African Humanities 13, 125–38. Drewal, H.J. (1996), ‘Past as Prologues’, in P.R. Schmidt and R.J. McIntosh (eds), Plundering Africa’s Past (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press), 110–24.

361

T A R C

H I Drummond, S. and Yeoman, I. (eds) (2001), Quality Issues in Heritage Visitor Aractions (Oxford: Buerworth Heinemann). Fairweather, I.S. (2003), ‘Showing Oﬀ – Nostalgia and Heritage in North-Central Namibia’, Journal of Southern African Studies 29:1, 279–96. Fiddian, R. (ed.) (2000), Post-colonial Perspectives on the Cultures of Latin America and Lusophone Africa (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press). Frescura, F. (1992), ‘Monuments and the Monumentalisation of Myths’, in Proceedings of the History Workshop, Myths, Monuments, Museums. New Premises (Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand). Gershick, P. (2004), ‘Ncome Museum/Monument: From Reconciliation to Resistance’, Museum Anthropology 27:1, 25–36. Hall, M. and Tucker, H. (eds) (2004), Tourism and Post-colonialism: Contested Discourses, Identities and Representations (London and New York: Routledge). Hecht, R. (2005), ‘Place Memory and Identity: Some Theoretical Reﬂections on the Power of Place’, paper presented at Contesting Culture. Narratives, Dramas and Representing Identity, Conference at Bryn Mawr College, Philadelphia, PA, February. Johnson, N. (1995), ‘Cast in Stone: Monuments, Geography, and Nationalism’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13, 51–65. Koshar, R. (2000), From Monuments to Traces: Artifacts of German Memory 1870–1990 (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press). Kusimba, C.M. (1996), ‘Kenya’s Destruction of the Swahili Cultural Heritage’, in P.R. Schmidt and R.J. McIntosh (eds), Plundering Africa’s Past (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press), 201–24. Lagae, J. (2005), ‘Rewriting Congo’s Colonial Past: History, Memory and Colonial Built Heritage in the Former Belgian Colony’, paper presented at the joint symposium of the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (INHA) and the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), Paris, 31 August–4 September. Larsen, L. (2004), ‘Monuments and Landscape Symbolism in Nairobi, Kenya’, paper presented at the BIEA-JSAS-ZNMB Conference, Heritage in Southern and Eastern Africa: Imagining and Marketing Public Culture and History, Livingstone (Zambia), 5–8 July. Magubane, Z. (ed.) (2003), Postmodernism, Postcoloniality and African Studies (Trenton, NJ and Asmara, Eritrea: Africa World Press). Marschall, S. (2003), ‘Seing up a Dialogue: Monuments as a Means of “Writing Back”’, Historia: Journal of the Historical Association of South Africa 48:1, 309–25. Marschall, S. (2006), ‘Transforming the Landscape of Memory: The South African Commemorative Eﬀort in International Perspective’, South African Historical Journal 55, 165–85. Michalski, S. (1998), Public Monuments: Art in Political Bondage 1870–1997 (London: Reaktion Books). Mizinga, F.M. (2004), ‘Museums as Platforms for Cultural Expressions: Zambian People’s Search for Identities’, paper presented at the BIEA-JSAS-ZNMB Conference, Heritage in Southern and Eastern Africa: Imagining and Marketing Public Culture and History, Livingstone (Zambia), 5–8 July. 362

T H P -

S Ndoro, W. and Pwiti, G. (2005), ‘Heritage Management in Southern Africa’, in G. Corsane (ed.), Heritage, Museums and Galleries: An Introductory Reader (London and New York: Routledge), 121–35. Neleton, A. and Hammond-Tooke, D. (eds) (1989), African Art in Southern Africa. From Tradition to Township (Johannesburg: Ad Donker). Olaniyan, T. (2005), ‘Africa: Varied Colonial Legacies’, in H. Schwarz and S. Ray (eds), A Companion to Postcolonial Studies (Malden, MA (USA), Oxford (UK), Carlton, Victoria (Australia): Blackwell), 182–201. Posnansky, M. (1996), ‘Coping with Collapse in the 1990s’, in P.R. Schmidt and R.J. McIntosh (eds), Plundering Africa’s Past (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press), 143–63. Reid, A. (2004), ‘Cultural Heritage and the Restored Kingdoms of Uganda’, paper presented at the BIEA-JSAS-ZNMB Conference, Heritage in Southern and Eastern Africa: Imagining and Marketing Public Culture and History, Livingstone (Zambia), 5–8 July. Schmidt, P.R. and McIntosh, R.J. (eds) (1996), Plundering Africa’s Past (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press). Schwarz, H. and Ray, S. (eds) (2005), A Companion to Postcolonial Studies (Malden, MA (USA), Oxford (UK), Carlton, Victoria (Australia): Blackwell). Steinmetz, G. and Hell, J. (2006), ‘The Visual Archive of Colonialism: Germany and Namibia’, Public Culture 48:1 (Winter), 147–83. Thornton, R. (1996), ‘The Potentials of Boundaries in South Africa: Steps Towards a Theory of the Social Edge’, in R. Werbner and T. Ranger (eds), Postcolonial Identities in Africa (London: Zed Books), 78–92. Timothy, D.J. (1997), ‘Tourism and the Personal Heritage Experience’, Annals of Tourism Research 24:3, 751–4. wa Thiong’o, N. (1986), Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Currey; Nairobi: Heinemann Kenya; New Hampshire: Heinemann). Werbner, R. (ed.) (1998a), Memory and the Postcolony: African Anthropology and the Critique of Power (London and New York: Zed Books). Werbner, R. (1998b), ‘Smoke from the Barrel of a Gun: Postwars of the Dead, Memory and Reinscription in Zimbabwe’, in R. Werbner (ed.), Memory and the Postcolony: African Anthropology and the Critique of Power (London and New York: Zed Books), 93–108. Werbner, R. and Ranger, T. (eds) (1996), Postcolonial Identities in Africa (London: Zed Books).

363

This page intentionally left blank

20

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

The Contestation of Heritage: The Colonizer and the Colonized in Australia Roy Jones and Christina Birdsall-Jones

Even before European colonization, the area now termed Australia was characterized by multiple identities and heritages and its indigenous inhabitants communicated through several hundred diﬀerent languages. What these peoples had in common were the highly localized scales of their social, political and cultural organization, and their economic dependence on hunting, gathering and ﬁshing. These indigenous populations were therefore neither suﬃciently numerous, nor technologically or organizationally advanced enough to put up any massive resistance to a determined aempt by the European imperial powers to conquer or to sele their territories. Nevertheless, European, in this case British, colonization and selement only occurred in the second ‘long wave’ (Taylor and Flint, 2000) of colonial expansion, largely during the nineteenth century, even though the adjacent, and wealthier, archipelago of Indonesia had excited considerable European aention centuries before. Searches for a comparably rich ‘Great South Land’ were unsuccessful and Australia’s ‘front door’ to Europe, the generally arid and navigationally dangerous coast of Western Australia, ‘aracted few and repelled many’ (Appleyard and Manford, 1980, 1). For most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, much of what the Europeans sought from the region – masts from the Norfolk Island pines and whale and seal products from the Southern Ocean (Blainey, 1968) – necessitated neither political annexation nor European selement. The colonies of Australia were thus late, frequently low priority and, on occasion, incidental additions to the British Empire. New South Wales only became a penal colony aer Britain’s defeat in the American War of Independence eliminated a closer alternative. Even though the British government was concerned by French scientiﬁc exploration of Australia’s coast, very limited support was provided for James Stirling’s commercially speculative initial selement of Western Australia in 1829 (Cameron, 1981). Nevertheless, as the nineteenth century progressed, British technological, demographic and organizational power was growing at such a rate

T A R C

H I that, when the need or the opportunity arose, it was able to colonize the whole of Australia with relative ease. The closing of the North American frontier took four centuries (Turner, 1961) but within 90 years of the ﬁrst European crossing of the Great Dividing Range in 1811, virtually all the land in Australia that was suitable for agricultural or pastoral selement had been taken up by white selers. In addition to the contrasting timescales of these colonization processes, the contrasting cultural ecologies should also be noted. In this context, North America experienced a long period of preadaptation to the colonizing process which was largely absent in the Australian seing (Jordan, 1989). That is, trade and religious missions emanating from the parent colonizers of Spain, France and Great Britain were present and deeply embedded in the indigenous economic and cultural systems in North America in a way that simply did not occur in Australia. This improved the capacity of indigenous North Americans to resist the colonizing process, in contrast to indigenous Australians who had comparatively lile economic or cultural experience on which to base their resistance to colonization and conquest. The central comparative feature of the colonizing processes in the United States, Canada, New Zealand and Australia is the largely English-speaking seler culture which has more or less supplanted the indigenous populations of those countries. Among the contrasts between these countries are the ways in which seler nationalism takes account of the indigenous (Moran, 2002). The United States, famously, has for long based its seler nationalism in the struggle between Native Americans and white (cowboy) Americans. In Australia, seler nationalism took no account of the indigenous presence at all. The fundamental point of conﬂict on which Australian seler nationalism turned was the land itself. In North America, this closing of the frontier involved the formal negotiation (and, admiedly, the breaking) of numerous treaties between the European selers and various indigenous groups. In Australia, the British saw the huntergatherer Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander populations as having no title to, or ownership of, land that they were not perceived to be ‘using’, and it was therefore claimed as terra nullius. The areal extent of the continent and the lack of any land, or even signiﬁcant river, transport infrastructure (Blainey, 1968) led to the establishment, between 1788 and 1836, of six separate colonies based on convict and free selements scaered around the coast. While they all aracted agricultural selers, it was the massive inﬂux of (mainly) Europeans associated with the gold rushes between 1850 and 1900 that provided them with suﬃcient seler numbers to justify the granting of internal self-government. In the late nineteenth century, local politicians in several of the colonies began to agitate for a federation of the Australian colonies, in part as a means of creating a ‘white’, and, ideally, a British, seler nation. Federation was achieved and the Commonwealth of Australia was proclaimed in 1901. For much of the twentieth century, the white Australia aim of the founders was largely upheld, but in 1967, Aboriginal Australians were granted citizenship rights, the 1972–75 Whitlam Labor government ﬁnally ended the (already diluted) white Australia immigration policies and the cultural diversity of the large post-war immigration streams has grown in recent decades. More 366

T C

H recently still, in 1992 and 1996, the Mabo and Wik decisions of the High Court granted (albeit limited) Native Title rights over Crown and Pastoral land. Over time, Australia has, therefore, contained diﬀering components of what Anderson (2000, 381) terms ‘three conventionally delimited social categories: ﬁrst those who collectively claim the status of “seler”, “host” or “charter group”; second, those who typically get ﬁgured as immigrants or “migrants” …; and third, indigenous people’, though the relative proportions of these groups in the national population, the levels of diversity within them and the clarity of the boundaries between them have varied considerably. The term ‘Anglo-Celtic’ is frequently applied to Australia’s ‘charter group’, though the ‘Ten Pound Poms’ of the mid and late twentieth century (British migrants brought to Australia for this heavily subsidized price) also found Australia ‘very familiar and awfully strange’ (Hammerton and Thomson, 2005, 124). The intersecting sets of the convicts/ex convicts and the Catholic Irish were also seen as being outside the Australian cultural mainstream during the colonial era. Australia’s indigenous population is broadly classiﬁed as either Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, but the former group is extremely diverse and its primary cultural loyalties are frequently given to extended family or clan groupings, rather than to wider linguistic or ethnic entities. Notwithstanding the early colonists’ fears of Asian, and particularly Chinese, population inﬂow, nineteenth-century migration to Australia was predominantly from the British Isles. This ﬂow eased in the early twentieth century and the proportion of overseas-born in Australia’s population fell. Migration rates rose again aer World War II, and the ethnic composition of the immigrant population has become increasingly diverse since then. As the postwar decades passed, ﬁrstly the continental Europeans, then the East and South East Asians and, currently, Middle Eastern and Islamic groups have borne the brunt of anti-migrant prejudice. In Australia, therefore, a geographical reality, with historical, demographic and cultural underpinnings, ‘unseles the ground beneath claims to ownership of a “core culture”, casting the full range of migrants, selers and indigenes into a variegated ﬁeld of struggle over rights to belong’ (Anderson, 2000, 385). In the ensuing sections, we will aempt to trace some of the heritage and identity markers placed in this ‘unseled ground’ by these three groups, before considering some of their aitudes to the ‘ground’ itself.

(Settler) Heritages from Above – Conquest and Nation-building The classical concept of Colonia provides a useful frame of reference for a consideration of Australian national heritage issues as seen from above: (Greek) colonists were ‘people from home’ dwelling in a diﬀerent environment there forming a self-governing polis, a selement autonomous from the mother city in every sense except in religion (culture). Membership of the classical polis was of course founded in the cultivation of land, and Rome’s colonists 367

T A R C

H I were primarily former soldiers given land for cultivation in newly conquered territories because, in cultivating land, they would develop visceral bonds to it and thus become its best defenders (Cosgrove, 1994, no page reference). This quote incorporates a number of the characteristics of what might be termed the establishment view of heritage and identity in Australia. First, it includes the ongoing cultural links with a British ‘home’. In the popular novel, The Far Country (1952), Nevil Shute’s Australian characters referred to Britain as ‘home’ as late as the 1950s, and a review of the book in an Adelaide newspaper referred to its characters as ‘English’ and ‘foreign’ migrants (Jones, 1995). These links initially went beyond such cultural dimensions as the English language, the Christian religion, the Westminster system of government and the symbolic retention of the monarchy and the union ﬂag. They incorporated economic interdependence, through Commonwealth trade preference agreements and national security understandings related to Britain’s global hegemony and military reach. Indeed, the narrowing of the British connection to a primarily cultural link was not necessarily sought by the colonia, but was forced on Australia by external events such as the fall of Singapore to the Japanese in the 1940s and Britain’s entry to the (then) European Economic Community in the 1970s. Second, the elite among the seler population sought autonomy and selfgovernment at an early stage. Although the welfare and even the survival of these colonial populations largely depended on British economic and imperial might, seler and imperial interests did not necessarily converge. Particularly at their expanding frontiers, the selers oen sought a freer hand in dealing with the indigenous populations than the imperial government might wish (Reynolds, 1990). And, as expressed clearly in the late nineteenth century campaign in the Bulletin (White, 1981), the push for Australian federalism and independence was, in part, driven by a local desire to control non-white immigration. Third, a central part of Australia’s national identity is related to a pioneer myth or legend (Ward, 1966) which is strongly tied to the conquest and occupation of (rural) land, rather than to the conquest and dispossession of peoples. The question of indigenous dispossession was and is particularly vexed. The characteristic claim, made inter alia in a West Australian newspaper editorial in 1897, that Australia was ‘occupied and subsequently governed without bloodshed’, is still being contested in the twenty-ﬁrst-century ‘History Wars’ (MacIntyre and Clark, 2004; Windschule, 2002). The conﬂation of rural iconographies with national identities is not peculiar to seler societies but, in Australia, the rural environments were not merely ‘diﬀerent’, as Cosgrove puts it, they were exceptionally remote and, frequently, physically challenging. They were also seled rapidly and recently by pastoralists, miners and farmers and, unlike the towns and cities, where the bulk of the seler population actually lived, these pastoral, agricultural and mining landscapes could be immediately depicted in art and literature as uniquely and distinctively Australian (Short, 1991). Finally, colonial rural selement became linked to military service at a pivotal point in the nation’s history. World War I broke out soon aer the Commonwealth of 368

T C

H Australia was established. Since the wars, or at least the conﬂicts, over indigenous dispossession were not seen from above as particularly desirable components of a national heritage, the service of the ANZAC soldiers in Europe and the Middle East between 1915 and 1918 came to symbolize Australia’s rite of passage to nationhood. In the aermath of the war, the government provided assistance to returning soldiers to take up virgin blocks of potential farmland (Powell, 1980) and the subsequent struggles of many soldier selers thus became entwined with both the ANZAC and the pioneer myths. This link was reinforced by Australia’s oﬃcial war historian, C.E.W. Bean (1934), who sought to conﬂate the legends of the ‘bushman’ (the rural pioneer) and the ‘digger’ (the Australian soldier). By World War I, however, other views from above had begun to shape national identities. Their former commander, Sir John Monash, a city-born engineer, saw the diggers’ qualities as emanating from ‘the democratic institutions under which he was reared and the advanced system of education by which he was trained’ (Monash, 1920, 290) while Smith’s Weekly, a Sydney newspaper, ‘styled itself as the defender of the digger, whose stereotype became a white-collar city worker with a larrikin streak’ (White, 1981, 133). Such establishment views were a somewhat belated acknowledgement that this seler nation had been, certainly from the late nineteenth century, a modern urbanized and, increasingly, suburbanized society. Although soldier-selement schemes also operated in Australia aer World War II, and war service in Vietnam was taken into account in the allocation of some of the last ‘new land’ blocks to farmers as late as the 1970s (Esperance Shire Council, 1995), from the early twentieth century onwards, major development projects were no longer solely seen in heroic or Arcadian pioneering terms. Many took place in the existing cities, such as the construction of the iconic Sydney Harbour Bridge in the depths of the depression, or in new urban areas, such as the creation, from the 1920s onwards, of the federal capital of Canberra. When major developments occurred in remote and rugged areas, such as the Snowy Mountains hydro-electric scheme of the mid-twentieth century, or the current mining, oil and gas developments in the north-west, the images associated with them privilege modernity and technological advancement over bushmanship and self-suﬃciency. And the workers involved are now seen as temporary – or even ﬂy-in ﬂy-out – residents with few ‘visceral bonds to the land’.

(Indigenous) Heritages from Below – Survival and Change By the time of federation, the survival of Australia’s indigenous population was widely seen as unlikely, if not counterproductive. As late as 1938, Daisy Bates’ exhortation to white Australia was to ‘smooth the dying pillow’ of an Aboriginal population which had been dispossessed of their lands and exposed to exotic diseases to which they had no immunity (Bates, 1938). Their numbers fell rapidly during the colonial era, from an estimate of c. 300,000 at ﬁrst European contact to a low of about 20,000 in 1911. One possible reason for this low population count is the fact that only Aboriginal people of the full descent were perceived as being 369

T A R C

H I Aboriginal. From the earliest days of colonization, the descendants of children fathered on Aboriginal women by white men were steadily supplanting this population. There was determined resistance to recognizing this ‘part’ Aboriginal population as white, and this resistance was overcome, ﬁrst, by the referendum in 1967 which ﬁnally enfranchised all indigenous Australians, and secondly by gradual acceptance between 1972 and 1981 of a ‘working deﬁnition’ of Aboriginality which stated simply that an Aboriginal person was one who self-identiﬁed as Aboriginal and was correspondingly so identiﬁed by the Aboriginal community. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, forced removal of entire Aboriginal groups from their homelands was a maer of government policy, though the success of this policy was highly variable. Until the early 1950s it was also government policy for the state to hold custody of all Aboriginal children so deﬁned under the various state and federal Aboriginal acts and, as a result, a still unknown number of Aboriginal children, identiﬁed as being either in unacceptable circumstances or of a ‘fair’ appearance, were removed from their families and either fostered, adopted into white families or institutionalized. These people have become known as the ‘stolen generation’. Owing to this two-pronged aack on Aboriginal culture, the capacity of Aboriginal people to retain their connections with land and community became compromised. It is the case, however, that the greater proportion of the Aboriginal community has retained its structure as a community and at least some connection with traditional regions of association. Furthermore, in more recent decades, the Aboriginal population has been growing rapidly, reaching 460,140 in 2001 (ABS, 2002). This growth has occurred both by natural increase and by self-ascription. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) estimates that the 16 per cent increase in the Aboriginal population between 1996 and 2001 was comprised of ‘12 per cent due to births and deaths and a further 4 per cent primarily due to an increasing propensity for people to be identiﬁed as Indigenous on census forms’ (ABS, 2002, 2). The increasing preparedness of individuals to be identiﬁed as indigenous, on census forms and more generally, clearly reﬂects a growing acceptance of indigenous heritages and identities not only among the indigenous populations but across the wider society. What it does not reﬂect, however, is the tendency for many of those in the wider society to perceive these indigenous heritages and identities as unchanging and, therefore, as locked into a pre-contact past. This phenomenon has various contemporary manifestations. Aboriginal groups are required to demonstrate ‘continuing connection’ with land over which they wish to lodge a Native Title claim. This connection can involve traditional hunting and gathering or spiritual pursuits, but it still assumes that these activities have had the ongoing power to survive dispossession, forced removal, conversion to Christianity and adaptation to radically diﬀerent economic and social circumstances. It is, therefore, diﬃcult if not impossible for many Aboriginal people to return to their country for spiritual purposes; group identities became blurred as individuals from diﬀerent groups were mixed in various institutions and camps, and many from the stolen generation never became aware of their indigenous identities (for example, Morgan, 1987). 370

T C

H In remote Australia, Aboriginal adaptation to European selement frequently involved incorporation into the pastoral economy, and Aboriginal people have played a major role in that industry for more than a century. But, as Gill and Paterson (2007) argue, pastoral heritage is still characteristically seen from above as being linked to ‘homesteads and woolsheds’ (Harrison, 2004) and thus to a frontier mythology which privileges the selers and their artefacts, and ignores a signiﬁcant proportion of the labour force that supported the industry. Furthermore, the indigenous population has frequently been obliged politically or pressured economically to leave its homelands and to move to the towns and cities. As Shaw (2007) argues, this large and growing urban indigenous population does not conform to the widely held view of ‘Indigenous heritage, as archaeological and exotic’ in which state it ‘is gloriﬁed and revered’ by at least a signiﬁcant proportion of the wider society. Seler–indigenous conﬂicts over urban space, such as those at the Block in Sydney (Anderson, 1993; Shaw, 2000) and the Old Swan Brewery in Perth (Jacobs, 1996; Jones and Birdsall-Jones, 2003) can thus be seen as incongruous, because ‘conceptualisations of “tradition” and “heritage” tend to remain discursively ﬁxed when applied to understandings of Indigeneity’ (Shaw, 2007). The diversity and dynamism of indigenous heritages and identities is undoubtedly ‘unseling’ to many selers.

(Migrant) Heritages from Below – Outsiders and Latecomers Outsider groups have made up a signiﬁcant component of the non-indigenous population from the onset of European colonization. Some 100,000 convicts were transported to Australia between 1788 and 1868, although many eventually returned to the British Isles. But, during this period, their very presence in Australia was thought to colour the entire society with a ‘convict stain’ whereby: ‘Free selers caught the contagion and lacked integrity and honour. Emancipists returned to lives of depravity, idleness, drunkenness and crime. Soldiers who chose to sele in the colony also abandoned themselves to drunkenness and other vices already too prevalent in the colony’ (Turnbull, 1805, cited in White, 1981, 22). With the ending of convict transportation, however, White (1981) argues that opinions within Australia began to shi, particularly with regard to the Australianborn descendants of those former convicts who had elected to stay in the country. He cites the view of one seler author, Alexander Harris, ‘that from convict blood on either or both sides, has sprung much more than the average strength and beauty of the colony’ (White, 1981, 25). For a time, aitudes towards convictism remained at least ambivalent. A former convict hulk, the Success, complete with feers and other prison paraphernalia, was a successful tourist araction in Hobart in the 1880s. But, when the ship was taken to Sydney, it was ‘sculed in the dead of night by indignant citizens’ (Hughes, 1987, 601). By the end of the twentieth century, and particularly aer the bicentennial celebrations of 1988, however, convict sites, such as Port Arthur, were among the country’s major tourist aractions, and Australians were eagerly searching databases to locate convict ancestors. 371

T A R C

H I Many migrant groups have experienced similar social trajectories to those of the convicts. They were initially admied only grudgingly to the country. They were characteristically seen as at best a necessary economic evil and at worst an economic threat, and almost invariably as a cultural problem. Nevertheless, the rates at which diﬀerent ethnic groups have aained wider social acceptance, and the smoothness of their transitions to this end, have varied considerably. Most non-British groups faced considerable initial prejudice as migration ﬂows into Australia increased in size and diversity during the gold rushes of the mid- and late-nineteenth century. The Chinese were particularly discriminated against. From below, a major anti-Chinese riot occurred at Lambing Flat on the New South Wales goldﬁelds in 1861. And, from above, governments in the Australian colonies passed legislation limiting Chinese immigration, and imposing Chinese-speciﬁc poll taxes and other restrictions. While the Chinese were singled out for particular aention, discrimination against virtually all migrants from outside the ‘charter group’ was widespread and oﬃcially entrenched. The original Australian constitution denied citizenship to all Asians, Paciﬁc Islanders and Africans, and the Immigration Restriction Act was the ﬁrst legislation passed by the federal parliament in 1901. In 1880, the New South Wales premier, Henry Parkes, even called for controls on Irish migration to maintain the ‘British’ nature of the population and, through the 1903 Naturalisation Act, male (continental) Europeans were not permied to bring their wives or children into Australia. But, with the end of the gold rushes and the onset of economic depression in the 1890s, immigration numbers began to decline and, from then until the end of World War II, Australian governments focused strongly on aracting British migrants. Only aer 1945, in conditions of economic growth and labour shortage, and with memories of the country’s vulnerability to Asian invasion fresh in the government’s mind, were immigration polices liberalized. Although ﬂuctuations have occurred as economic circumstances changed, the last six decades have been characterized by generally high and increasingly diverse immigration ﬂows. In part, the ability of the migrant groups to maintain their heritages and identities in Australia was and is controlled from above. German religious refugees who arrived in South Australia in the 1830s were initially welcomed as hard-working, white, rural selers in a very new colony. They were allowed to establish separate villages, with their own Lutheran churches and schools. But, during both world wars, many Australians of German extraction were interned as ‘enemy aliens’, in 1917 the South Australian Nomenclature Act expunged many long-standing German place names from the map (Rofe and Winchester, 2007) and the teaching of German was banned in Lutheran schools. Some of the earliest Muslim selers were ‘Afghan cameleers’ (who came, in fact, from many locations including Iran, Egypt and British India). They were initially welcomed because they provided vital transport services in the opening up of the outback, and the ﬁrst mosque in the country was established in remote Maree, South Australia in 1861. Their pioneering role was commemorated when the Adelaide to Alice Springs train service was named ‘The Ghan’. But more recent Muslim selers have 372

T C

H been viewed with considerable oﬃcial and community suspicion, and Dunn (2005) has documented the many bureaucratic barriers placed in the path of communities seeking to open mosques in Sydney in the 1980s and 1990s. In the larger cities, ethnic quarters have developed as a result of the initial desire of many migrants to live in surroundings which oﬀered a degree of cultural familiarity and community support. Indeed, some inner-city areas have provided a home to successive migrant groups. Northbridge in Perth became the city’s Chinatown in the late-nineteenth century, and was subsequently seled by southern European migrants in the mid-twentieth century and by South-east Asian groups in more recent decades. Such inner suburban areas once oﬀered the inexpensive accommodation that many migrants required. However, late-twentieth century gentriﬁcation of these areas has priced more recent migrant groups out of these markets and has resulted in newer ethnic concentrations developing in middle and outer suburbs, such as Sydney’s Lakemba (Lebanese) and Cabramaa (Vietnamese) (Dunn, 1998). But ethnic enclaves of this type are not necessarily permanent. Poulsen, Johnston and Forrest (2004, 375) use census data from Sydney to argue that ‘ongoing processes of hybridisation are clearly reﬂected in the city’s geography’ and that ‘the primary feature of the NESB (non-English-speaking background) population is that they live in areas of mix, not in polarized enclaves’ (Poulsen, Johnston and Forrest, 2004, 374). When Burnley (2005) traced three generations of Italian and Greek ancestry in Sydney, he discovered that dispersal from the original ethnic cores certainly occurs. However, aachment to these areas frequently endures across generations. Links to early (Italian) Catholic or Greek Orthodox churches continue and, over time, the original cores have oen become the sites for ethnic aged care facilities. Thus ‘[t]he streets where “ﬁrst” community formation began retained symbolic and emotional signiﬁers for many ﬁrst, second and third generation persons … [and] complex intergenerational geographies and landscapes of identity are manifest’ (Burnley, 2005, 390–91). The evidence suggests that it is possible to discern a broad, but irregular, process of hybridization whereby many, if not most, members of an increasingly diverse migrant population neither assimilate totally into the dominant Anglo-Celtic cultural group nor remain totally cut oﬀ from it.

Heritages in Place: Identities on the Ground All the human populations seling in Australia have had to come to terms with unfamiliar, unique, diverse and challenging environments. They have all thus had to ﬁnd ways of ‘coming to terms’ with the new places in which they found themselves using the technological and organizational powers available to them (Powell, 2006). Even though their powers were limited in these regards, Aboriginal groups did not necessarily preserve the natural environments which they ﬁrst encountered tens of thousands of years ago. It is now generally accepted that, through ‘ﬁrestick farming’ (Jones, 1969), they altered the forests of Australia signiﬁcantly. Using ﬁre to thin out the understorey made hunting easier and encouraged the growth 373

T A R C

H I of certain food plants. More controversially, it has been argued either that this burning deprived the Australian megafauna of food supplies (Kershaw, 1986) or that Aboriginal hunting brought about their extinction (Flannery, Kendall and Wynn-Moylan, 1990). Nevertheless, for these Aboriginal groups ‘belief systems associated with the “Dreaming” link speciﬁc places with dreaming events, and give every person living and dead, a place within a physically and spiritually united world’ (Frawley, 1999, 272). In such belief systems, humans are an inseparable part of their natural environment and the ‘place’ of humans in this environment is speciﬁc and ﬁxed. In traditional Aboriginal belief systems, therefore, identities are indissolubly linked to birthplaces, and individuals have a lifelong spiritual connection with the ‘country’ of their birth and with the indigenous community that occupies it. The post-conquest impacts of dispossession, dispersal and institutionalization have thus had profound impacts on indigenous identities by disrupting and, especially for the ‘stolen generation’, oen obliterating their vital locational and genealogical components. At the opposite extreme, however, mention should be made of the small and remote Aboriginal communities in some of the most isolated areas of the country. Here, clearly identiﬁable genealogical groups remain on their ‘country’ but the employment prospects are extremely limited, and health and education standards tend to be much lower than those elsewhere, as are many other social and housing indicators. These factors can make the preservation of Aboriginal heritage and identity as problematic ‘on country’ as it is in the cities. By contrast, the seler groups (both ‘charter’ and migrant) generally saw themselves as separate from Australia’s natural environment and their relationship with this environment has thus been more varied and has changed over time. Frawley (1999, 274) uses Heathcote’s (1972) categorization to summarize these changes. The ﬁrst Europeans to encounter Australia had a scientiﬁc vision of an exotic Australia full of strange animals and plants (as at Botany Bay) and a Romantic vision of wild landscapes and wild inhabitants, both of which caused them to deﬁne Australia as the ‘other’, rather than to identify with it. In the colonial vision, Australia was a site for ‘exploitative pioneering’ which, if it was successful, might allow the selers to ‘embellish’ (Stannage, 1990) and civilize the Australian landscapes so that they could be made to resemble those of their European, and predominantly British, homes. From the end of the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, and during a period of federation, war and slowing immigration, Frawley (1999) and Heathcote (1972) trace the emergence of a national vision which, although it remained developmentalist, sought to make ‘wise use’ of the nation’s resources. By the late twentieth century, however, they claim to discern the beginnings of an ecological vision which draws on elements of the earlier scientiﬁc, Romantic and national visions and on Aboriginal concepts of place and environment, and seeks a more sustainable future for Australia. Whether such a vision can be realized is, to say the least, questionable (Mercer and Marden, 2006). As migrants continue to head for the major cities (and the existing migrant concentrations) of Sydney and Melbourne, the Anglo-Celtic population is 374

T C

H either moving interstate to the resource-boom and employment-growth areas of Queensland and Western Australia or, as it ages, heading for the aesthetically and ecologically aractive sea-change and tree-change accessible rural areas (Burnley and Murphy, 2004), thus exploiting what have hitherto been relatively untouched resources. Meanwhile in January 2007 the federal government called, on the one hand, for greater controls over the use of water in the country’s largest river basin, the Murray-Darling, while, on the other, it sought to investigate the potential for opening up new farming areas in the country’s north in response to climate change. Notwithstanding the growing concern for Australia’s ecology and the ‘wise use’ of its natural heritage, it would seem that the national identity still retains an element of ‘pioneer exploitation’.

Conclusion: Demographics, Ideals and Reality It was, perhaps, axiomatic that the decades surrounding the date of Australian federation should span a critical period in the development of Australia’s national identity. But this period was marked by a particular and temporary set of demographic and geographical circumstances. Indigenous population numbers had experienced a catastrophic and long-term decline and it was widely expected that those who remained would either die out or, particularly if they were of mixed race, become invisibly assimilated into the white/colonial population. Immigration was slowing and the proportion of native-born in the (non-indigenous) population would continue to rise, reaching a historic high of 90 per cent by 1947. Furthermore, the new federal government used both legal restrictions and economic incentives to ensure that the vast majority of any new immigrants were British. Spatially, by 1901 Australia’s wheat and sheep farming frontier had been extending inland for several decades and would continue to do so at least until the onset of the Great Depression of the 1930s (Glynn, 1975). Globally, Australia gained its independence at the zenith (Christopher, 1988) of British imperial power and, even though a range of perceived slights, from British generalship in World War I to British bowling tactics in the bodyline series of cricket matches of the 1930s (Sissons and Stoddart, 1984) would foster Australian distinctiveness, Britain’s role as Australia’s primary protector and trading partner continued for several decades. What might be termed as the colonial view of Australian heritage, at least for the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century, was therefore predominantly rural in landscape terms – albeit with an emphasis on the establishment of farms in an environment containing distinctively Australian ﬂora and fauna – and overwhelmingly British in cultural terms. In the second half of the twentieth century, this ‘ground’ was, to use Anderson’s term, ‘unseled’. Indigenous population numbers recovered strongly. They have now outstripped virtually all estimates of their pre-contact total and, given their younger age structure and signiﬁcantly higher birth rate, the indigenous population is set to become an increasingly large component of the national total. Furthermore, the granting of citizenship rights in the 1960s and of (some) land rights in the 1990s 375

T A R C

H I to indigenous Australians has necessitated increasing acknowledgment of their heritages and identities. This has been relatively successful at the national level, as aested by the growing numbers self identifying as indigenous at successive censuses, and by the growing use and recognition of the Aboriginal ﬂag since its informal use in protests since 1972 and its oﬃcial recognition in 1995. However, indigenous identity challenges remain at what might be termed the intermediate levels between the local kinship group and the nation. Similar but somewhat arbitrarily deﬁned regions were established to enable the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Commission (ATSIC) to provide indigenous input into government policy and administration, and to facilitate the processing of Native Title claims through a number of indigenous land councils. However, these boundaries encompassed numerous kinship groups and, on occasion, ignored signiﬁcant cultural/linguistic boundaries. These cultural defects compromised any claims to representativeness by the ATSIC regional councillors and this was one of several reasons why the government disbanded ATSIC in 2004. It has also meant that diﬀering groups oen pursued conﬂicting and overlapping claims within the same land council regions, leading to accusations that the Native Title process is becoming a lawyers’ picnic, delivering lile beneﬁt to the indigenous population. In response to some of these diﬃculties, a ‘mainstreaming’ of indigenous aﬀairs has now been undertaken. This process was legitimized by a recent run of well-publicized management and leadership scandals in the aﬀairs of prominent Aboriginal ﬁgures which served to undermine, justiﬁably or not, the then current regime of indigenous leadership at state and national levels. Although indigenous aﬀairs have been mainstreamed at the federal level, they continue to be administered through specialist bureaucracies at the state level. With regard to the state and status of indigenous people as demonstrated in the national census, there has been a small increase between censuses (from 1 per cent in 1994 to 3 per cent in 2002) in the proportion of tertiary-educated indigenous people, and a more substantial increase in home ownership (from 22 per cent in 1994 to 27 per cent in 2002) (ABS, 2002). All other national indicators continue to demonstrate that its indigenous population remains Australia’s most disadvantaged identiﬁable group. The Howard government saw these levels of socio-economic disadvantage as justifying a focus on ‘practical reconciliation’, rather than on more symbolic gestures such as apologies to, or treaties with, the indigenous population, which would give greater acknowledgement to the indigenous population’s heritages and identities. In addition to the rapid growth of its indigenous population, the ‘ground’ of Australia has also been seled (and ‘unseled’) by the 6,500,000 or so immigrants who have arrived since World War II (Department of Immigration and Citizenship, 2007). Since 1947 the proportion of overseas-born has risen from 10 per cent to almost 25 per cent, and today 43 per cent of Australians were either born overseas or have at least one parent born overseas. While British migrants made up over a third of all seler arrivals in the second half of the twentieth century, their share of the total fell from 45.3 per cent in the 1950s to 12.5 per cent in the 1990s. In response to the growth of these ‘non-core’ components in the Australian population, government policy towards both the indigenous and the non-Anglo-Celtic immigrant population 376

T C

H has followed a remarkably similar trajectory, from moves towards assimilation in the 1950s to support for multiculturalism and greater indigenous autonomy in the 1970s and 1980s and, under the Howard Liberal government from 1996, a move back towards a more prescriptive and uniform declaration of ‘Australian values’ and, implicitly therefore, of Australian heritage and identity.1 In the multicultural ﬁeld, small sections of the migrant community have been depicted as responsible for: bringing ‘foreign’ concepts and conﬂicts to Australian soil, and particularly to the country’s Association Football pitches (in Australia, this sport was known commonly as soccer and colloquially as ‘wogball’) (Moore, 2000); the importation of exotic animosities (for example, Serb and Croat, Arab and Jew); or, as in the case of fundamentalist Islam, the placing of religious above national values. These conﬂicts and disputes generally involve small and relatively long-standing migrant communities. But, particularly in the context of the global ‘War on Terror’, they have been used by the current government to push for a greater degree of national uniformity, which is perhaps most vividly encapsulated by the retitling of the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Aﬀairs as the Department of Immigration and Citizenship in 2007. As Logan (2007) puts it, ‘such eﬀorts are characterized by some critics as a nostalgic quest to recapture the imaginary, homogenous culture of the 1960s, but others see an insidious curtailing of the rights of Indigenous peoples and recent ethnic immigrant groups to maintain their own cultures’. Logan calls for an Australian heritage research agenda which is inclusive, sympathetic to both tangible and intangible heritages and sensitive to the inherently contested political power plays that are particularly characteristic of seler societies. While he does not anticipate that such a research eﬀort is likely to be supported in the current political climate, the current demographic trends suggest that, in contrast with the situation in the ﬁrst half-century of Australian federation, the country does indeed face a future of increasing cultural diversity. This does not sit comfortably with an idealistic view of a relatively uniform Australian heritage and identity. While this view might have been in tune with the demographic trends and paerns of the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century, it is prudent to remember that ‘nothing ages faster than yesterday’s vision of tomorrow’ (Gold, 1991, 338).

References Anderson, K. (1993), ‘Place Narratives and the Origins of Inner Sydney’s Aboriginal Selement, 1972–73’, Journal of Historical Geography 19:3, 314–35. Anderson, K. (2000), ‘Thinking “Postnationally”: Dialogue across Multicultural, Indigenous and Seler Spaces’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90:2, 381–91.

1

See the timeline of government initiatives in . 377

T A R C

H I Anderson, K. and Gale, F. (eds) (1999), Cultural Geographies, 2nd edition, (Melbourne: Longman). Appleyard, R. and Manford, T. (1980), The Beginning. European Discovery and Early Selement of Swan River, Western Australia (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press). Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) (2002), 4705.0 – Population Distribution, Indigenous Australians, 2001 (Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics). Bates, D. (1938), The Passing of the Aborigines: A Lifetime Spent among the Aborigines of Australia (London: Murray). Bean, C. (1934), Oﬃcial History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918 (Sydney: Angus and Robertson). Blainey, G. (1968), The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia’s History (London: Macmillan). Brunn, S. and Leinbach, T. (eds) (1991), Collapsing Space and Time: Geographic Aspects of Communication and Information (London: Harper Collins). Burnley, I. (2005), ‘Generations, Mobility and Community: Geographies of Three Generations of Greek and Italian Ancestry in Sydney’, Geographical Research 43:4, 379–92. Burnley, I. and Murphy, P. (2004), Sea Change: Movement from Metropolitan to Arcadian Australia (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press). Cameron, J. (1981), Ambition’s Fire: The Agricultural Colonization of Pre-convict Western Australia (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press). Christopher, A. (1988), The British Empire at its Zenith (London: Croom Helm). Cosgrove, D. (1994), ‘Ecumene: Dwelling and Representation’, address at the launch of the journal, Ecumene, Institute of British Geographers Conference, University of Noingham. Department of Immigration and Citizenship (2007), Fact Sheet 4. More than 60 Years of Post-war Migration, , accessed 7 February 2007. Dunn, K. (1998), ‘Rethinking Ethnic Concentration: The Case of Cabramaa, Sydney’, Urban Studies 35:3, 503–27. Dunn, K. (2005), ‘Repetitive and Troubling Discourses of Nationalism in the Local Politics of Mosque Development in Sydney, Australia’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23:1, 29–50. Dyck, N. (ed.) (2000), Games, Sports and Cultures (Oxford: Berg). Esperance Shire Council (1995), Faith, Hope and Reality: Esperance 1895–1995 (Esperance: Esperance Shire Council). Flannery, T., Kendall, P. and Wynn-Moylan, K. (1990), Australia’s Vanishing Mammals: Endangered and Extinct Native Species (Surry Hills, NSW: RD Press). Frawley, K. (1999), ‘A“Green” Vision: The Evolution of Australian Environmentalism’, in K. Anderson and F. Gale (eds), Cultural Geographies, 2nd edition, (Melbourne: Longman), 271–84. Gill, N. and Paterson, A. (2007), ‘A Work in Progress: Aboriginal People and Pastoral Cultural Heritage in Australia’, in R. Jones and B. Shaw (eds), Geographies of Australian Heritages. Loving a Sunburnt Country? (Aldershot: Ashgate), 113–32. 378

T C

H Glynn, S. (1975), Government Policy and Agricultural Development: A Study of the Role of Government in the Development of the Western Australian Wheat Belt 1900–1930 (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press). Gold, J. (1991), ‘Fishing in Muddy Waters: Communication Media and the Myth of the Electronic Coage’, in S. Brunn and T. Leinbach (eds), Collapsing Space and Time: Geographic Aspects of Communication and Information (London: Harper Collins), 327–41. Hammerton, A. and Thomson, A. (2005), Ten Pound Poms: Australia’s Invisible Migrants (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Harrison, R. (2004), Shared Landscapes: Archaeologies of Aachment and the Pastoral Industry in New South Wales (Sydney: UNSW Press and Department of Environment and Conservation). Heathcote, R. (1972), ‘The Visions of Australia’, in A. Rapoport (ed.), Australia as Human Seing (Sydney: Angus and Robertson), 77–98. Hughes, R. (1987), The Fatal Shore (London: Pan). Jacobs, J. (1996), Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City (London: Routledge). Jones, R. (1969), ‘Firestick Farming’, Australian Natural History 14, 224–8. Jones, R. (1995), ‘Far Cities and Silver Countries: Migration to Australia in Fiction and on Film’, in R. King, J. Connell and P. White (eds), Writing across Worlds: Literature and Migration (London: Routledge), 248–62. Jones, R. and Birdsall-Jones, C. (2003), ‘Native or Manufactured? A Comparison of Indigenous-Industrial Heritage Conﬂicts in Perth and Oawa’, AustralianCanadian Studies 21:2, 73–106. Jones, R. and Shaw, B. (eds) (2007), Geographies of Australian Heritages. Loving a Sunburnt Country? (Aldershot: Ashgate). Jordan, T. (1989), ‘Presidential Address: Preadaptation and European Colonization in Rural North America’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 79:4, 489–500. Kershaw, P. (1986), ‘Climate Change and Aboriginal Burning in North-East Australia During the Last Glacial/Interglacial Cycles’, Nature 322:6074, 47–9. King, R., Connell, J. and White, P. (eds) (1995), Writing Across Worlds: Literature and Migration (London: Routledge). Logan, W. (2007), ‘Reshaping the “Sunburnt Country”: Heritage and Cultural Politics in Australia’, in R. Jones and B. Shaw (eds), Geographies of Australian Heritages. Loving a Sunburnt Country? (Aldershot: Ashgate), 207–23. MacIntyre, S. and Clark, A. (2004), The History Wars (Carlton: Melbourne University Press). Mercer, D. and Marden, P. (2006), ‘Ecologically Sustainable Development in a “Quarry” Economy: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back’, Geographical Research 44:2, 183–203. Monash, J. (1920), The Australian Victories in France in 1918 (London: Hutchinson). Moore, P. (2000), ‘Soccer and the Politics of Culture in Western Australia’, in N. Dyck (ed.), Games, Sports and Cultures (Oxford: Berg), 117–34.

379

T A R C

H I Moran, A. (2002), ‘As Australia Decolonizes: Indigenizing Seler Nationalism and the Challenges of Seler/Indigenous Relations’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 25:6, 1013–42. Morgan, S. (1987), My Place (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press). Poulsen, M., Johnston, R. and Forrest, J. (2004), ‘Is Sydney a Divided City Ethnically?’, Australian Geographical Studies 42:3, 356–77. Powell, J. (1980), ‘The Debt of Honour: Soldier Selement in the Dominions 1915– 1940’, Journal of Australian Studies 5, 64–87. Powell, J. (2006), ‘Environment-identity Convergences in Australia, 1880–1950’, in L. Proudfoot and M. Roche (eds), (Dis)Placing Empire: Renegotiating British Colonial Geographies (Aldershot: Ashgate), 117–34. Proudfoot, L. and Roche, M. (eds) (2006), (Dis)Placing Empire: Renegotiating British Colonial Geographies (Aldershot: Ashgate). Rapoport, A. (ed.) (1972), Australia as Human Seing (Sydney: Angus and Robertson). Reynolds, H. (1990), The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin). Rofe, M. and Winchester, H. (2007), ‘Lobethal “the Valley of Praise”: Inventing Tradition for the Purposes of Place Making in South Australia’, in R. Jones and B. Shaw (eds), Geographies of Australian Heritages. Loving a Sunburnt Country? (Aldershot: Ashgate), 133–50. Shaw, W. (2000), ‘Ways of Whiteness: Harlemising Sydney’s Aboriginal Redfern’, Australian Geographical Studies 38:3, 291–305. Shaw, W. (2007), ‘Fixed Traditions and Locked-up Heritages: Misrepresenting Indigeneity’, in R. Jones and B. Shaw (eds), Geographies of Australian Heritages. Loving a Sunburnt Country? (Aldershot: Ashgate), 95–112. Short, J. (1991), Imagined Country: Environment, Culture and Society (London: Routledge). Shute, N. (1952), The Far Country (London: Heinemann). Sissons, R. and Stoddart, B. (1984), Cricket’s Imperial Crisis: The 1932–33 Bodyline Tour of Australia (Sydney: George Allen and Unwin). Stannage, T. (1990), Embellishing the Landscape: The Images of Amy Heap and Fred Flood 1920–1940 (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press). Taylor, P. and Flint, C. (2000), Political Geography: World-economy, Nation-state and Locality, 4th edition (Harlow: Prentice Hall). Turner, F. (1961), Frontier and Section: Selected Essays of Frederick Jackson Turner (Englewood Cliﬀs, NJ: Prentice Hall). Ward, R. (1966), The Australian Legend, 2nd edition (Melbourne: Oxford University Press). White, R. (1981), Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688–1980 (Sydney: George Allen and Unwin). Windschule, K. (2002), The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Vol. 1, Van Dieman’s Land (Paddington, NSW: McLeay Press).

380

21

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

The Heritage of Mundane Places David Atkinson

Seeing Heritage Everywhere The latest edition of the popular Rough Guide to Britain accuses Britons of being obsessed by exploiting every last aspect of their heritage; it implies that the country is pock-marked by myriad indiscriminate and unimaginative invocations of the past that mask an increasingly homogenized present (Katz, 2006). There are undoubtedly plenty of bland, unimaginative heritage sites scaered across Britain, and for sure, some commentators perceive an unvariegated mush of heritage sites and museums where anything and everything from the past is celebrated uncritically and indiscriminately. Indeed, there is an established British tradition of penning sniﬀy critiques about popular sites of public memory. Yet in contrast to the simplistic critique of the Rough Guide, this chapter suggests that this plethora of new articulations of heritage and memory represents a wider, more far-reaching re-engagement with collective pasts. Perhaps the broader social interest in regional histories, local traditions and familial pasts results from the democratization of memory and its production in recent years? Certainly, increasing numbers of Britons are identifying, consuming and producing articulations of history and heritage themselves. Second, they are also shiing their gaze from the great stories of traditional historiography towards more commonplace social, industrial and cultural histories and learning to see and identify heritages all around them in their mundane, ordinary everyday spaces. In sum, now that they are more auned to heritage and memory, they see more history all around them, while also seeing more of their histories too. While these public articulations of heritage, memory and identity might not please traditional historians, curators and other arbiters of the past, they are nevertheless likely to remain constant presences in our contemporary landscapes. Therefore, they demand more serious and more critical aention. To this end the chapter ﬁrst explores the expanded ways that contemporary commentators theorize these emerging new terrains of heritage. It will outline aempts to conceptualize the undulating topographies of memory that are produced by plural, dissonant voices that intersect and collide in the constant reconstitution of space. These ghosts or hauntings of spaces have opened up new ways of thinking about social memory and its spatiality and ﬂuctuating presence throughout society.

T A R C

H I In a similar vein, other thinkers have tried to develop nomadic understandings of heritage and memory as continually shiing processes, erupting in ordinary, mundane places as well as the more formal, orthodox sites of heritage. Meanwhile, at another scale, others have shied the focus of memory-work indoors to domestic spaces and the routine material cultures and daily practices that likewise produce memory and heritage. Still others suggest that kitsch aesthetics are an elective form of comforting nostalgia. This phenomenon is here considered in relation to the ordinary, everyday landscapes of modern Britain that are increasingly inscribed with stories and invocations of the past. More speciﬁcally, some aspects of recent debates over the sites that celebrate maritime heritage in Britain are outlined – and particularly the city of Hull’s sometimes fraught, sometimes celebratory, stories of ordinary places and their maritime pasts. These discussions demonstrate how local negotiations inﬂect the wider circulation of heritage and memory in contemporary society, and how the results impact upon some of the more mundane, quotidian corners of our modern landscapes. They also show how rethinking memory as a less bounded and more ﬂuid, shiing, continually reconstituted process steers aention from high-proﬁle heritage sites towards the less spectacular, quotidian and mundane places where social memory is produced and mobilized. As such, these stand as elements of an expanded sense of how mundane heritage erupts and ﬂows across our modern world.

Democratizing Memory and Moving towards Mundane Spaces of Memory Once upon a time, the production and policing of memory was a serious, formal scholarly aﬀair. For most people, history was an esoteric business – something debated by learned academics in university cloisters and then published in dry, scholarly tomes; it was something arbitrated elsewhere by those qualiﬁed to discern its lessons (Champion, 2003; Lowenthal, 1998). Similarly, oﬃcial, state-sanctioned memory was oen dictated to us in the public realm; it was encapsulated in ﬁgurative statuary and monuments, and in the names and titles of streets and squares that told us who to commemorate and what we should remember about them (Bodnar, 1993; Hebbert, 2005). Or, and equally intimidating for some, the artefacts of formal memory were displayed in the glass cases of hushed civic museums, our collective ‘social memory’ – oen presented as a singular, uncontested ‘history’ – was curated by experts who knew best what was notable and important about our past. Their displays and their explanatory labels told us what we should remember and how we should remember it (Pearce, 1992). In all of these examples, history was outlined by those in positions of political, social or intellectual authority. Memory remained their preserve; ordinary people were supposed to consume history rather than produce it (Gross, 2000). Thanks to the promptings of the French Annales school of social history from 1929, radical history and the ‘History from Below’ movement of the 1960s, and more recent eﬀorts to address gender, post-colonial and intellectual histories 382

T H M P inter alia, professional historians now engage more rigorously with the histories of ordinary lives and concerns (Samuel, 1994). A parallel concern from the 1960s has been to render the discipline more accessible, and while progress was oen controversial, it remained steady (Jenkins, 1997). Yet just as the incorporation of ordinary people and mundane worlds into the intellectual discipline of history was resisted by some, similar controversy surrounded aempts in Britain to develop material heritage sites that moved beyond museum galleries and atria to create material spaces that narrated histories (Lowenthal, 1998). The newly opened country houses of aristocratic families, and the restored industrial mills, mines or docklands, frequently drew suspicion because of their partial versions of the past. For Wright (1985) and Hewison (1987) the stories told at stately homes erased the histories of the capital accumulation and class oppression behind their construction; and while restored industrial sites were ostensibly about ordinary lives and trades, they sometimes sentimentalized labour and erased further histories of exploitation, oppression, exclusion and prejudice. For those traditionalists anxious to preserve the imagined purity of historical scholarship, these sites oﬀered nothing more than parvenu, ‘bogus histories’. For others, engaged with serious eﬀorts to retell the pasts of ordinary communities, these initiatives were at best naïve and at worst politically suspect. Yet although problematic, as subsequent writers have noted these projects were not necessarily the travesties of historical narration that some alleged (Samuel, 1994; Urry, 1990).

Public Contestations of the Past Regardless of these academic mores, the momentum of public engagements with the past accelerated steadily. Scholarly critiques, for example, did lile to hinder the popularity or the rapid diﬀusion of heritage sites around the world (Lowenthal, 1998; Urry, 1990). Indeed, this evidences one way that public interests and practice had begun to set the pace in the wider democratization of heritage. The emergence of plural voices that complicate, expand upon, dispute or undermine traditional, ‘oﬃcial’ narratives of history is a welcome trend – particularly as it allows communities to reﬂect upon their individual and collective pasts. For example, contemporary Britons increasingly encounter memory, or beer, plural memories, all around them. In contrast to the singular versions of the past handed down by orthodox scholars, museums or monuments, a range of social memories now seems more open and navigable – something that may be encountered and negotiated through a range of diﬀerent media. While they still study history and sit the exams at school, they are also reading popular histories and watching celebrity historians and archaeologists on television (Champion, 2003; Corner, 2006). They still pay to see historical epics at the cinema, but also, increasingly, visit museums in large numbers and consume other historical places, sites and landscapes in the ﬂesh. They trace genealogies and restore buildings; conserve folk-cultures and preserve culinary traditions; aend historic festivals and watch re-enactments (Lowenthal, 1998). They have always had their memories, but they now seem increasingly keen actively to remember and celebrate their pasts themselves (Winter, 1996).

383

T A R C

H I Of course, some expressions of collective memory and heritage are still decided for us by experts. In response to the claims that we live amidst the evermore homogenous spaces of a globalizing world, many local authorities demand that their place-marketeers mark each locale as a distinctive, characterful candidate for inward investment, leisure spending and high-earning migrants (Gold and Ward, 1994). Frequently, such place promotion celebrates distinctiveness through a sense of the past – promoting heritage sites, historic buildings or even entire historic ‘quarters’. Here, heritage becomes an economic resource – a partial and selective vision of the past that is sold in the present to promote tourism, regeneration and economic development (Graham, 2002). Inevitably, such accounts focus on the positive, the distinctive and the heroic, while eliding the unpopular, the dirty and the unsavoury. The danger is that those elements excluded from oﬃcial heritage narratives are thereaer denied any place in social memory – making the process of remembering a politicized one that risks excluding some aspects of the past, some communities and some memories (Atkinson, 2005; Graham, Ashworth and Tunbridge, 2000). In turn, this has fuelled the growing belief that resisting oﬃcial narratives is acceptable and, indeed, productive and positive. And encouraged further by the growing belief that remembering is now open to all, communities are increasingly prepared to create a dissonance of voices, opinions and perspectives that together weave a richer tapestry of social memories.

A Dockside Example: Maritime Heritage and Slavery in Bristol My ﬁrst dockside example demonstrates this point. The 1996 Festival of the Sea in the historic port city of Bristol, England, ostensibly revolved around the launch of a replica of the ship which Giovanni Caboo sailed from Bristol to Newfoundland in 1497 (Laurier, 1998). The festival celebrated this anniversary and also exhibited over 800 vessels and a huge range of maritime-related cultures to some 35,000 paying spectators over four days (Nash, 2000). The event earned considerable local authority support for its celebration of a ‘proud’, ‘sea-faring’ past. Yet the festival’s version of heritage elided the wider complications of Bristol’s historic links to other places. In particular, it virtually ignored the city’s pivotal role in the seventeenthand eighteenth-century triangular Atlantic slave trade, and the wealth that the city accrued from imperialism more generally (Dresser, 2001). Instead, the event celebrated a largely white Bristolian history, excluding the local black community and other groups who jarred with the event’s genteel, middle-class ethos (Atkinson and Laurier, 1998). However, the elision of slavery and black histories from this story was contested by some of those who felt excluded by this narrative. It also sparked critique from local community groups, activists and artists who employed various strategies to highlight this partisan history. Artists scaered postcards, sachets of sugar and other artefacts that explained Bristol’s role in the triangular trade throughout the site. Posters appeared that highlighted the city’s unspoken slaving past, while the Bristol Black Writer’s group – granted a short slot on a festival stage at the last moment – also addressed this hidden history of transatlantic exchange through

384

T H M P their performance (Nash, 2000). Although regarded as dissident voices at ﬁrst, this critique rumbled on in the local media persistently and eventually the debate prompted a wider recognition of the politicized absences at the heart of Bristol’s ‘oﬃcial’ heritage. In practical terms, these protests eventually prompted the production of a Slave Trail around the plush districts that were built on the proﬁts of the triangular trade. They also produced school projects, books and articles and a new permanent exhibit at the city museum (Chivallon, 2001; Dresser, 2001). Despite the determination to obscure uncomfortable histories, these parallel versions of Bristolian history contested the dominant narrative and eventually forced a more permanent articulation of Bristol’s complex, plural heritages to be wrien into the fabric of the city. What Bristol witnessed was the emergence of ‘dissonant heritages’, diﬀerent voices telling diﬀerent (but no less valid) versions of the past than the singular narratives oﬀered by ‘oﬃcial’ heritages (Tunbridge and Ashworth, 1996). These alternative perspectives may undermine (or at least challenge) oﬃcial heritage and the result is a polyphony of voices that start to weave together a complex, shiing, contingent but continually evolving sense of the past and its abundant component elements. This presents one challenge to orthodox thinking about social memory; it democratizes interpretations of the past by making us conceptualize it not as a ﬁxed, constant, singular narrative, but as something that is continually being made and reproduced in our present. It also means rethinking memory as a social practice, as something that people and communities do, with or without oﬃcial sanction. As such, rather than one heritage, we get a series of socially constructed interpretations of the past that serve diﬀerent ends. They oﬀer, Jonathan Boyarin suggests, the ‘… potential for creative collaboration between present consciousness and the experience or expression of the past’ (Boyarin, 1994, 22).

Public Rethinking of the Past and its Mundane Spaces At the same time, a second challenge to traditional notions of heritage and histories emerged from a series of public thinkers who engaged with the spaces and places of everyday life in fresh and interesting new ways (Pinder, 2005). Michel de Certeau (1984) was a leading ﬁgure in the nascent tradition of identifying and acknowledging the manifold practices, moments and events that constitute quotidian places. Although just one element of his wider project (Crang, 2000), a signiﬁcant aspect of this focus involved addressing the overlapping, entwined memories and histories that swirl around our everyday spaces. Further, he demanded that those charged with planning and managing the city should look beyond their panoptic perspectives to engage also with urban ghosts and hauntings; they had a duty, de Certeau argued, to acknowledge the multiple, ephemeral, fragments of memory that constitute the histories of our contemporary places (de Certeau, 1998). In a similar vein, other public intellectuals like Keiller (1999), Maspero (1994) and Sinclair (2003) echo and augment this tradition with their transects through, or journeys around, cities. They too delve into the multiple histories, geographies and fragmentary associations of urban space. They dissect their embodied encounters

385

T A R C

H I with the city to explore and capture stories about the histories and hauntings of these landscapes – especially those that traditionally fell beyond the formal record of the academy (Pile, 2002). Maspero, for example, a writer tiring of international travel, decides to take the Roissy express train through the Parisian suburbs. There is no methodology to his journey except to stay overnight at every stop en route. His purpose is simply to: … look at the landscapes, admire or detest them as the case may be, search for traces of the past, visit museums and go to a show if the opportunity arose; [we] would try to grasp the geography of the place and the people – to see their faces. Who were the people who had lived there? How had they lived, loved, worked and suﬀered? Who lived there today? (Maspero, 1994, 13). He asks these questions of a series of apparently mundane places, but textures them with their pasts and animates them with people’s stories as he takes these everyday spaces seriously. He demonstrates how these ordinary places can host extraordinary stories of their pasts. Still more usefully, Maspero, Sinclair and Keiller publish their accounts in accessible styles, heavy with images, for a popular audience. Similar sentiments also exercise some thinkers and practitioners more directly concerned with the places of the past. The historian Pierre Nora, for instance, highlights the modern spatiality of memory (1989; 1984–92). He argues that the modern period witnessed the replacement of traditional forms of organic memory by more formal ‘sites of memory’, again, a potentially unlimited series of speciﬁc places – sometimes mundane, ordinary places – where both formal and popular memories are produced, negotiated and take root (Legg, 2005). The spread of heritage trails and sound walks across our modern world seems to support Nora’s thesis. With their origins in radical and oral historical methodologies, heritage studies and museology, and sonic art and sound ecology (Butler, 2006), these trails sit at the intersection of various ways of representing, engaging with, and practising place-histories. As with all heritage sites, the degree to which individual trails accommodate dissonant voices and perspectives deserves scrutiny, but the best try to relate the complex stories of places, their pasts and the lives that once animated these sites. They also tempt the public towards engaging with topographies of memory, and their popularity oen aracts local authority support and public awards (like National Loery Funds in the UK) for new trails. In Britain, such monies also fund new study facilities to render local archives more accessible to a public subject to the growing international fascination with genealogical research (Nash, 2002). All of these initiatives, be they theoretical or practical, address wider audiences and some of the quotidian spaces they inhabit. In combination, they nudge the study of place-histories away from the grand narratives of formal history and the oﬃcial stories prescribed by local authorities. Rather, they render heritage more open and accessible, as squarely positioned within the public sphere, and also, something that can be explored through a series of more everyday, mundane places. For 386

T H M P Samuel, with his concern to rethink history as a dynamic, engaged, useful ‘memory work’ open to all and to a multiplicity of sources, such gatherings of diﬀerent voices and the shi beyond the museum to a more democratic engagement with plural, quotidian heritages, would be most welcome (Samuel, 1994). Gradually, other academics responded to these challenges.

Academic Rethinking of the Past and its Mundane Spaces Although few academics focused until recently on the everyday stories that animate quotidian lives, several developments have changed this position. Feminist thinking, for example, focused aention onto gender identities and roles in ordinary workplaces, homes, public spaces and neighbourhoods. The emergence of cultural studies similarly trained aention on the identities, cultural understandings and social practices of those classes previously ignored by academics (Benne and Watson, 2002). As mentioned above, de Certeau (1984) placed issues of resistance, consumption and conformity on the agenda, but did so in the realm of ordinary streets and spaces; Lefebvre likewise argued that these everyday struggles are an inescapable facet of modern society (Moran, 2004). Meanwhile, Binnie et al. (2007) pinpoint Foucauldian perspectives and their emphasis on the regulation of bodies as a further moment that reoriented intellectual aention towards ordinary lives. Most of these perspectives involved concern for the embodied subject and social practices. Building upon this, scholars from a range of disciplines have recently extended these interests to explore the performative aspects of everyday life – and particularly the actions and practices through which we navigate, and constitute, our social worlds (Crouch, 2003; Thri, 2004). Elements of this project call for a greater focus upon the mundane aspects of daily practice: ‘… how life takes shape and gains expression in shared experiences, everyday routines, ﬂeeting encounters, embodied movements, pre-cognitive triggers, practical skills, aﬀective intensities, enduring urges, unexceptional interactions and sensuous dispositions’ (Lorimer, 2005, 125). Here, the academic gaze narrows to the dense, rich complexity of ordinary lives as commentators from across the humanities and social sciences are awakened to the signiﬁcance of the sites wherein most of us live our lives. A similar aentiveness to the micro-scale subjectivities of everyday life has also informed other recent thinking on how social memory is produced, negotiated and re-inscribed as it ﬂows around and through our modern world. An increasing number of scholars now conceptualize memory as a dynamic, shiing phenomenon – a continuous process, constantly creating and reproducing memories (Bruno, 2003; Terdiman, 2003; Thri, 1999). And rather than something locked into demarcated sites such as monuments or museums, they identify it operating throughout society and in all kinds of everyday spaces: an endless, undulating topology of memories, a constantly shiing and folding terrain of associations that is continually reconﬁgured by new eruptions of remembering (Crang and Travlou, 2001). By this reckoning, these contours of memory accommodate multiple pasts – and the continual remaking of memorial sites through recurrent practices like

387

T A R C

H I commemorations or other rituals only reinforces the plurality of the memories that can associate with any site (Landzelius, 2003). This more encompassing approach to memory also draws other forms of remembering within the academic purview. While earlier scholars might shun any mention of emotive phenomena like nostalgia, it is today assessed as a signiﬁcant cultural phenomenon that exposes the plural and overlapping histories of places (Boym, 2001; Legg, 2004). Meanwhile, other supposedly ‘non-rational’ elements of memory, like the ‘uncanny’ and the ghostly hauntings of the city, are also interrogated (Pile, 2002; Till, 2005). Even the ‘kitsch’– once a by-word for bad taste – is being rehabilitated as an articulation of comforting familiarity amidst this broader rethinking of how memory works within society (Atkinson, 2007). Equally, these approaches also shed light upon spaces that would not previously have been considered sites of memory. Edensor’s (2005) study of industrial ruins fails to name or locate any of the derelict industrial sites he photographs and describes; his point is that these are ubiquitous features of post-industrial societies. But rather than read these as brownﬁeld sites simply awaiting a more ‘productive’ re-invention, Edensor outlines how, amidst the increasing commodiﬁcation of memory that suﬀuses modern society, they are haunted by the ghosts of their past occupations, as well as providing a liminal space for invention, play, excitement and other activities. At another scale, others have shied the focus of memorywork to domestic spaces and the routine material cultures and practices that also produce memory (Anderson, 2004; Blunt, 2003). Tolia-Kelly’s discussion of BritishAsian diasporic identity explores the memories stimulated by vernacular, domestic spaces ﬁlled with souvenirs, artefacts and personalized decoration. These ‘artefacts of heritage and tradition’ (Tolia-Kelly, 2004, 318) refract belonging and identity through these ordinary spaces. They also permit the emergence of a collective ‘re-memory’ of shared cultural tradition, prompted by a scent, sight or sound. Together, these approaches oﬀer enhanced understandings of how people make sense of their pasts and their collective historical identity through routine spaces and their practices therein. Both initiatives also reﬂect the increased interest in conceptualizing heritage and memory as a more horizontal, open and democratic business than previous eras allowed. There are problems with these approaches. Hebbert (2005), for example, worries that any practice of memory inevitably still risks exclusions, while Landzelius (2003, 197) notes that every ‘act of memorialization invites questions about exclusion, institutionalized amnesia, nonrepresentation, nondisplay’. Nevertheless, these emergent ways of conceptualizing memory may prove less partial than the orthodox traditions they challenge. And given their impact, as mentioned above, contemporary post-structuralist theorists now look beyond the ﬁxed sites of heritage quarters and archives to conceptualize a more ﬂuid, liquid sense of memory that ebbs and ﬂows around society and that wells up in all kinds of places. It is discontinuous in places, and dense and overlapping in others. It may seep from strange, unexpected niches and artefacts, or it may deluge from sudden events – like heritage fairs, festivals or re-enactments – ﬂooding space with sudden spate of memory and associated meanings. For sure, memory is still found 388

T H M P in sharper focus at monuments and museums where it accrues and sediments; but equally, it also soaks into less obvious places that are nevertheless capable of hosting and reproducing memory. If we conceptualize social memory as this continuous, ebbing presence, we can begin to study it wherever it is produced – including those quotidian spaces that are simultaneously rich and extraordinary, but also mundane (Franklin and Crang, 2001).

Encountering Mundane Heritage Spaces in Hull, England This ﬁnal section explores how some of the notions outlined above are inﬂected by the fabric of a modern city. The brief case-study is the port city of Hull in northern England. Like other post-industrial cities, Hull hopes to mobilize its various heritages to render it a distinctive tourist destination, a desirable residential choice and a place to ‘do business’. As an historic port, it makes much of its maritime heritage. Some of the tensions thrown up by the production and contestation of this maritime heritage-identity for the city are explored, and particularly the elision of inconvenient memories like the ﬁshing industry. The emergence of a mundane, kitsch heritage aesthetic in waterfront districts is also discussed; this is found to be acceptable in some areas, but not in others. Together, these examples explore what can happen when the wider circulations of social memory erupt within mundane, quotidian landscapes.

Remembering the Maritime and Hull’s Maritime Kitsch Landscapes Hull has a rich and complex maritime past. As Britain’s leading east-coast port since the thirteenth century, it imported timber and other commodities from the Low Countries, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, and exported coal, wool and the manufactured goods of Yorkshire and the East Midlands. Whaling and deepwater Arctic ﬁshing were developed from the seventeenth century (Credland, 1995; Lazenby and Starkey, 2000), and nineteenth-century Hull was also a major node for passenger shipping and international trans-migrants from Eastern Europe and the Baltic (Evans, 2001). Despite all this history, only limited elements of the maritime were selected by the civic image-makers for their ‘pioneering city’ strategy. A sizeable constituency was agitated by this partial narrative and dissonant voices complained about the neglect of certain pasts. Where, in these narratives, is the story of Hull’s whaling industry? Alternatively, how should we remember the trans-migrants who travelled through Hull to new lives in the Americas? What stories should be told about the wartime Blitz and the loss of lives, livelihoods and whole quarters of the city? More controversially, how should the city remember its ﬁshing industry – particularly the estimated 8,000 men who were lost at sea and le grieving communities ashore (Lazenby and Starkey, 2000)? Further, because the trawling ﬂeets collapsed in the late twentieth century, there are still plenty of people around who are angry at the city’s aempts to airbrush associations with a ‘dirty’, 389

T A R C

H I ‘smelly’ industry from Hull’s business-like, ‘pioneering’ proﬁle. Controversy ﬂares repeatedly. In the late 1990s (as outlined below), it was sparked by plans to gentrify the former ﬁshing dock into a residential development with ‘a maritime theme’, but with a memorial to the dead trawlermen that was deemed insuﬃcient by surviving relatives (Atkinson, Cooke and Spooner, 2002). Most recently, it was over the management of a retired trawler, the Arctic Corsair, that was subsumed into the city’s Museum Quarter but is staﬀed by volunteer ex-trawlermen. They tell their tales of the Arctic ﬁshing grounds to keep the stories alive, but they resent the council’s control over this symbol of their dead industry. But then again, if the trawlermen get aention, where is the commemoration of the dead of other industries like the dockers, chemical workers or the railway workers? Furthermore, do the new dockland developments that replaced these dying or relocating industries have any duty or responsibility to connect to these histories? And if so, which pasts should they invoke, and how should they represent them? Complicating these interwoven stories still further, Hull’s dockside landscapes are currently in the grip of a generic, international heritage style which I have elsewhere called Maritime Kitsch (Atkinson, 2007). The extent to which this connects to local heritage is addressed in the next few paragraphs.

A Second Dockside Example: Maritime Kitsch The global trend to forge ‘historic waterfronts’ from former docklands can be traced to 1970s North America where planners transformed these relic landscapes into new leisure spaces of housing and retail, and accommodation for ‘clean’ service industries (Hoyle, Pinder and Hussain, 1988). Although contested by some (Goss, 1996), this ‘waterfront Renaissance’ model proved enormously successful in aracting developers, gentrifying professionals and higher-end leisure spending. It also spread around the world relentlessly. In Britain alone, 233 major waterfront development projects were undertaken or proposed in the 1980s (Jones, 1998). Although each development claims to be distinctive, they are oen characterized by a surprisingly uniform maritime aesthetic of formulaic motifs that emphasize ‘historic character’ via ‘original features’ like wharves, cranes or ships’ anchors. These are sanitized docklands, designed to appeal for their sentimental, nostalgic vision of a maritime past rather than representing the multicultural, ﬂuid, edgy, sometimes dangerous places that docklands usually were. For many critics, these are ubiquitous sites of mundane spectacle and consumption. Their aesthetic is ﬂat, un-variegated and globalizing; its invocations of the maritime past are kitsch and unimaginative. For Edensor, they are nothing but ‘chic dockside restaurants [in a] post-industrial, re-invented city [of] wine-bars, ﬂats and oﬃces’ (Edensor, 2005, 154); for Graham, they represent ‘… a global cliché as restaurants, cra shops and leisure spaces [replace] working harbours’ (Graham, 2002, 1009). Yet in Hull, this ‘maritime kitsch’ style has been contested: it was deemed unacceptable in some districts, but was celebrated in others.

390

T H M P Maritime Kitsch at St. Andrew’s Dock, Hull In 1997, the property development arm of Associated British Ports put forward proposals for the redevelopment of St Andrew’s Dock in West Hull. This had been the home of the Hull deep-water ﬁshing ﬂeet – the largest in the world for much of the twentieth century. However, the ﬂeet was decimated by decreasing ﬁshing quotas and their exclusion from Icelandic waters in the early 1970s. By 1975 the rump of the trawling ﬂeet was relocated to another dock and St Andrew’s Dock was closed (although designated as a Conservation Area in 1990). The 1997 proposal was for a mixed-use leisure, retail and oﬃce development based upon a maritime theme; the architecture would be based on a ‘modern maritime informed aesthetic’ (Atkinson, Cooke and Spooner, 2002). Perhaps anticipating opposition, the plans also included a ﬁshing-heritage centre and a memorial garden for lost trawlermen. Yet for the city council and local ﬁshing commemoration groups, this was not enough. Although the derelict dock was an eyesore on the main route into Hull and was a key area for redevelopment, aer a heated local debate, the city council felt unable to approve the plans. They were rejected due to their insuﬃcient sensitivity to Hull’s ﬁshing heritage and to the dock’s central place in this memory. Interestingly, a local councillor central to the opposition damned the proposed development as ‘anonymous and featureless’ (Atkinson, Cooke and Spooner, 2002). This case demonstrates how issues of heritage and commemoration became a maer of public interest and intervention, but it also exposes how in this instance, the homogenous, international style of maritime kitsch was deemed unsatisfactory.

Maritime Kitsch at Victoria Dock, Hull By contrast, in East Hull, on the former site of Victoria Dock, maritime kitsch aesthetics were celebrated and preserved. Here, the former timber dock was redeveloped in the 1990s as an elite, residential ‘urban village’ of 2,500 homes. The area was designed with suﬃcient ‘historic’ maritime kitsch motifs to make it saleable to its middle-class residents, and references to the area’s sea-faring heritage were inscribed into the landscape at key points. Although academic voices might rail against its uniform, faux-nostalgic aesthetic, this has proved popular with the Dock’s residents. Drawing upon recent re-theorizations of the kitsch as a comforting aesthetic system, I have argued that, although one-dimensional, this maritime kitsch is valued primarily because residents ﬁnd a simple, ready comfort in this aesthetic (Atkinson, 2007). Maritime iconography inscribes the site with simple heritage referents and makes the residents feel that they are living in an historic place. Indeed, when the appearance of the development was threatened by planning proposals, residents defended this aesthetic vehemently. Maritime kitsch was celebrated here. Equally, residents are also busy creating a heritage centre and heritage trail (with Loery money) to texture this brownﬁeld development with a further layer of memory. This, they believe, will connect the area’s new population to their place; de Certeau would agree. He thought it was ‘[t]hrough stories about places, they 391

T A R C

H I become inhabitable’ (de Certeau, 1998, 142). Victoria Dock, therefore, is a ﬁne example of an everyday place where locals invest their landscape with heritage meanings and help memory to spring forth. This example also reinforces those who argue for memory as a ﬂuid phenomenon that produces memory in all kinds of unexpected places.

Conclusions: Re-focusing on Mundane Heritage Places The Rough Guide’s sneers about heritage obsession misses the point that this interest reﬂects a society now engaging with the past in all kinds of interesting new and plural ways. Memory has escaped the strictures of its former arbiters and has moved beyond museum and memorial. Many more of us are now investing in heritage in many more ways and, increasingly, we do this in the sometimes ordinary spaces where we live. Thankfully, academic aention now mirrors popular interests in the ﬁeld and new theories of heritage and memory are becoming more competent at capturing these wider developments. This is all timely; these emergent mundane heritage spaces demand more serious, critical aention – particularly as they are likely to continue growing in number. Equally, without a suﬃcient focus on quotidian spaces, how can we hope for more comprehensive understandings of the complex social memories that paern our contemporary world?

References Anderson, B. (2004), ‘Recorded Music and Practices of Remembering’, Social and Cultural Geography 5, 3–20. Atkinson, D. (2005), ‘Heritage’, in D. Atkinson, P. Jackson, D. Sibley and N. Washbourne (eds), Cultural Geography: A Critical Dictionary of Key Concepts (London: IB Tauris), 141–50. Atkinson, D. (2007), ‘Kitsch Geographies and the Everyday Spaces of Social Memory’, Environment and Planning A 39, 421–40. Atkinson, D., Cooke, S. and Spooner, D. (2002), ‘Tales From the Riverbank: Place Marketing and Maritime Heritage’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 8:1, 25–40. Atkinson, D., Jackson, P., Sibley, D. and Washbourne, N. (eds) (2005), Cultural Geography: A Critical Dictionary of Key Concepts (London: IB Tauris). Atkinson, D. and Laurier, E. (1998), ‘A Sanitised City? Social Exclusion at Bristol’s 1996 International Festival of the Sea’, Geoforum 29, 199–206. Benne, T. and Watson, D. (eds) (2002), Understanding Everyday Life (Oxford: Blackwell). Binnie, J., Holloway, J., Millington, S. and Young, C. (2007), ‘Mundane Geographies: Alienation, Potentialities, and Practice’, Environment and Planning A 39:3, 515–20.

392

T H M P Blunt, A. (2003), ‘Collective Memory and Productive Nostalgia: Anglo-Indian Homemaking at McCluskieganj’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 21, 717–38. Bodnar, J. (1993), Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Boyarin, J. (1994), Remapping Memory: The Politics of Timespace (London: University of Minnesota Press). Boym, S. (2001), The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books). Bruno, G. (2003), ‘Havana: Memoirs of Material Culture’, Journal of Visual Culture 2:3, 303–24. Butler, T. (2006), ‘A Walk of Art: The Potential of the Sound Walk as Practice in Cultural Geography’, Social and Cultural Geography 7, 889–908. Champion, J. (2003), ‘Seeing the Past: Simon Schama’s A History of Britain and Public History’, History Workshop Journal 56:1, 153–74. Chivallon, C. (2001), ‘Bristol and the Eruption of Memory: Making the Slave-trading Past Visible’, Social and Cultural Geography 2, 347–63. Corner, J. (2006), ‘Backward Looks: Mediating the Past’, Media, Culture and Society 28:3, 466–72. Crang, M. (2000), ‘Relics, Places and Unwrien Geographies in the Work of Michel de Certeau (1925–1986)’, in M. Crang and N. Thri (eds), Thinking Space (London: Routledge), 136–53. Crang, M. and Thri, N. (eds) (2000), Thinking Space (London: Routledge). Crang, M. and Travlou, P. (2001), ‘The City and Textures of Memory’, Environment and Planning D: Space and Society 19:2, 161–77. Credland, A. (1995), The Hull Whaling Trade: An Arctic Enterprise (Beverley: Huon). Crouch, D. (2003), ‘Spacing, Performing, and Becoming: Tangles in the Mundane’, Environment and Planning A 35:11, 1945–60. de Certeau, M. (1984), The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press). de Certeau, M. (1998), ‘Ghosts in the City’, in M. de Certeau, L. Giard and P. Mayol (eds), The Practice of Everyday Life, Volume 2: Living and Cooking (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 133–43. de Certeau, M., Giard, L. and Mayol, P. (eds) (1998), The Practice of Everyday Life, Volume 2: Living and Cooking (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Dresser, M. (2001), Slavery Obscured: The Social History of the Slave Trade in An English Provincial Port (London: Continuum). Edensor, T. (2005), Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality (Oxford: Berg). Evans, N. (2001), ‘Indirect Passage from Europe: Transmigration via the UK, 1836– 1914’, Journal for Maritime Research, June. Franklin, A. and Crang, M. (2001), ‘The Trouble with Tourism and Travel Theory?’, Tourist Studies 1:1, 5—22. Gold, J. and Ward, S. (eds) (1994), Place Promotion: The Use of Publicity and Marketing to Sell Towns and Regions (Chichester: Wiley).

393

T A R C

H I Goss, J. (1996), ‘Disquiet on the Waterfront: Reﬂections, Nostalgia and Utopia in the Urban Archetypes of Festival Marketplaces’, Urban Geography 17:3, 221–47. Graham, B. (2002), ‘Heritage as Knowledge: Capital or Culture?’, Urban Studies 39, 1003–17. Graham, B., Ashworth, G.J. and Tunbridge, J.E. (2000), A Geography of Heritage: Power, Culture and Economy (London: Arnold). Graham, B. and Nash, C. (eds) (2000), Modern Historical Geographies (London: Pearson). Gross, D. (2000), Lost Time: On Remembering and Forgeing in Late Modern Culture (Amherst: University of Massachuses Press). Hebbert, M. (2005), ‘The Street as Locus of Collective Memory’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23:4, 581–96. Hewison, R. (1987), The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline (London: Methuen). Hoyle, B., Pinder, D. and Hussain, M. (eds) (1988), Revitalising the Waterfront: International Dimensions of Dockland Redevelopment (London: Belhaven). Jenkins, K. (ed.) (1997), The Postmodern History Reader (London: Routledge). Jones, A. (1998), ‘Issues in Waterfront Regeneration: More Sobering Thoughts – A UK Perspective’, Planning Practice and Research 13:4, 433–42. Katz, L. (2006), ‘New Guide Gives Britain a Rough Ride’, The Guardian, 20 June 2006. Keiller, P. (1999), Robinson in Space (London: Reaktion). Landzelius, M. (2003), ‘Commemorative Dis(re)membering: Erasing Heritage, Spatializing Disinheritance’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 21:2, 195—221. Laurier, E. (1998), ‘Replication and Restoration: Ways of Making Maritime Heritage’, Journal of Material Culture 3:1, 21–50. Lazenby, C. and Starkey, D. (2000), ‘Altered Images: Representing the Trawling in the Late Twentieth Century’, in D. Starkey, C. Reid and N. Ashcro (eds), England’s Sea Fisheries: The Commercial Sea Fisheries of England and Wales since 1300 (London: Chatham), 123–36. Legg, S. (2004), ‘Memory and Nostalgia’, Cultural Geographies 11:1, 99–107. Legg, S. (2005), ‘Contesting and Surviving Memory: Space, Nation and Nostalgia in Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23:4, 481–504. Lorimer, H. (2005), ‘Cultural Geography: The Busyness of Being “More-thanrepresentational”: Some Recent Work in Cultural Geography’, Progress in Human Geography 29:1, 83–94. Lowenthal, D. (1998), The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Maspero, F. (1994), Roissy Express: A Journey through the Paris Suburbs (London: Verso) (originally published in French in 1990). Massey, D., Allen, J. and Sarre, P. (eds) (1999), Human Geography Today (Cambridge: Polity). Moran, J. (2004), ‘History, Memory and the Everyday’, Rethinking History 8:1, 51–68.

394

T H M P Nash, C. (2000), ‘Historical Geographies of Modernity’, in B. Graham and C. Nash (eds), Modern Historical Geographies (London: Pearson), 13–40. Nash, C. (2002), ‘Genealogical Identities’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20:1, 27–52. Nora, P. (1984–92), Les Lieux de Mémoire (3 vols) (Paris: Gallimard). Nora, P. (1989), ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations 26, 7–24. Pearce, S. (1992), Museums, Objects and Collection: A Cultural Study (London: Prentice-Hall). Pile, S. (2002), ‘Memory and the City’, in J. Campbell and J. Harbord (eds), Temporalities, Autobiography and Everyday Life (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 111–27. Pinder, D. (2005), ‘Arts of Urban Exploration’, Cultural Geographies 12:4, 383–411. Radstone, S. and Hodgkin, K. (eds) (2003), Regimes of Memory (London: Routledge). Samuel, R. (1994), Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London: Verso). Sinclair, I. (2003), London Orbital (London: Penguin). Starkey, D., Reid, C. and Ashcro, N. (eds) (2000), England’s Sea Fisheries: The Commercial Sea Fisheries of England and Wales since 1300 (London: Chatham). Terdiman, R. (2003), ‘Given Memory: On Mnemonic Coercion, Reproduction and Invention’, in S. Radstone and K. Hodgkin (eds), Regimes of Memory (London: Routledge), 186–201. Thri, N. (1999), ‘Steps to an Ecology of Place’, in D. Massey, J. Allen and P. Sarre (eds), Human Geography Today (Cambridge: Polity), 295–322. Thri, N. (2004), ‘Performance and …’, Environment and Planning A 35:11, 2019–24. Till, K. (2005), The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press). Tolia-Kelly, D. (2004), ‘Locating Processes of Identiﬁcation: Studying the Precipitates of Re-memory Through Artifacts in the British Asian Home’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 29:3, 314–29. Tunbridge, J. and Ashworth, G. (1996), Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conﬂict (Chichester: Wiley). Urry, J. (1990), The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage). Winter, J. (1996), ‘Public History and Historical Scholarship’, History Workshop Journal 42, 169–72. Wright, P. (1985), On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain (London: Verso).

395

This page intentionally left blank

22

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

New Museologies and the Ecomuseum Peter Davis

Community museology emerged in the early 1970s as a response to concerns that museums were failing to interact with, represent, develop and sustain local communities. This chapter explores the ways in which these radical ideas – which were ultimately embraced within the postmodern umbrella of new museology – were implemented using the ecomuseum model. A brief history of the ecomuseum is given, as are some useful deﬁnitions and models that enable an understanding of the concept. Three ecomuseums – from China, Mexico and Italy – are described and analysed to illustrate the varied ways in which the ecomuseum model has been adapted to suit local circumstances and meet diﬀerent strategic objectives.

Community Museology and ‘the Integrated Museum’ The 1960s witnessed a re-evaluation of societal goals, with renewed calls for world peace, ethnic harmony, civil rights and nuclear disarmament. As society in general began to examine its values, so too did the museum world, and the ‘second museum revolution’ (Van Mensch, 1995, 134) began in earnest. Underlying the reevaluation was the need to question the roles of museums in society. Museums had constantly changed their working practices, and the advances that were made in conservation, interpretation and education in museums in the laer years of the nineteenth century and the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century – the ﬁrst museum revolution – are undeniable. However, it is the extent of reﬂection, self-criticism and the considerable speed of change which is immediately identiﬁable during and following the 1960s. There was a radical re-assessment of both theoretical and practical aspects of museums with imaginative ideas permeating all museum functions. One key element of that reformation took place in response to the environmental movement with the acceptance and promotion of the conservation ethic by museums (Davis, 1996). The other main aspect of change was the museum response to the needs of society, an exploration of how museums might assist local communities and

T A R C

H I their development. Concerns began to be voiced at the General Assemblies of the International Council of Museums (ICOM), ﬁrst being discussed at Munich in August 1968, when a resolution stated that ‘museums be recognized as major institutions in the service of development’ because of the contribution they make to cultural, social and economic life (ICOM, 1968, 1). Resolutions from the meeting in Grenoble (ICOM, 1971) went further, urging museums to ‘undertake a continuous and complete assessment of the needs of the public which they serve’ and suggesting that ‘the traditional concept of the museum which perpetuates values concerned with the preservation of man’s cultural and natural heritage, not as a manifestation of all that is signiﬁcant in man’s development, but merely as the possession of objects, is questionable’. It was further suggested that ‘museums have not taken advantage of the wide range of expertise and knowledge which exists in other sections of the community’ – posing a signiﬁcant challenge to the professional curatorial voice by demanding community consultation and inclusion. These views that contested long-established values held by museum professionals formed the basis for debate at the UNESCO-ICOM ‘round-table’ meeting which took place in Santiago de Chile in May 1972. Here, museum professionals and other specialists discussed the role of museums in relation to the social and economic needs of modern-day society in Latin America. Key themes reﬂecting the diﬃcult situation faced by poor rural and urban communities in South and Central America emerged, including the roles that museums might play in rural development and how they might assist more generally with social and cultural issues, including promoting education in disadvantaged areas. Teruggi (1973), reﬂecting on the meeting, suggested that museum involvement with the community was essential in order to inspire local people, to reﬂect and protect the local environment, and promote economic beneﬁts for local communities. The perception of such needs – clearly linked to promoting self-esteem, identity, belonging and development – led to the Santiago delegates proposing the idea of the ‘integrated museum’ – integrated with society and with the environment, but also integrated to other organizations that served local people. Guido (1973, 21) stated that, ‘Dr. Mario Teruggi suggested the creation of a new type of museum in which man would be shown in conjunction with his environment’. Here the term ‘environment’ refers to the social, cultural and natural environments shared by communities; the ‘eco’ in ecomuseum also embraces this wide deﬁnition. This philosophy was the cornerstone of the resolutions agreed in Santiago and published by UNESCO in the journal Museum in 1973. The view that museums have a signiﬁcant role to play in communities and their development was made forcibly: The museum is an institution in the service of society of which it forms an inseparable part and, of its very nature, contains the elements which enable it to help in moulding the consciousness of the communities it serves, through which it can stimulate those communities to action by projecting forward its historical activities so that they culminate in the presentation of contemporary problems; … The transformation in museological activities 398

N M E calls for a gradual change in the outlook of curators and administrators … The new type of museum, by its speciﬁc features, seems the most suited to function as a regional museum or as a museum for small and medium-sized population centres. Although these radical ideas were initially ignored, passing largely unnoticed by the English-speaking museum world at the time, the Santiago meeting can be identiﬁed as one of the turning points in museological thought and the place where community museology, a museology that recognized the need to aid development in disadvantaged communities, was born. Some of the ﬁrst experiments took place in Mexico and in some South American countries (Hauenschild, 1988), and consequently it is not surprising that when today’s museologists in Portugueseand Spanish-speaking countries use the term ‘new museology’, it is this original community-centred deﬁnition that is implied. The recognition by UNESCO that new practices are best implemented at a deﬁned local level was also important, indicating a link to concepts of place, local distinctiveness and belonging. Deﬁning place, or territory, also became integral to the development of ecomuseums, one of the manifestations of community museological practice that promoted sustainable development using heritage resources.

Postmodern New Museology Van Mensch (1995, 138) suggests that the term ‘new museology’ have been introduced on at least three occasions into the museological literature, in diﬀerent places, and with diﬀerent meanings. In the 1950s it was used in the USA in an aempt to revitalize the educational role of museums, while in the late 1980s, its appearance in the UK marked a growing interest in more radical approaches to museum communication. However, the third use of the term can be traced to André Desvallées’ contribution to the Encyclopedia Universalis in 1980. Van Mensch (quoted in Davis, 1999) suggests that the term ‘new’ was used as a preﬁx simply because this essay was updating an earlier entry on museology, but there was no intention on Desvallées’ part to coin a new word or a new school of thought. Despite this, his summary was greeted with enthusiasm by a group of young curators desperate to change the rigid structures of French museums, and new museology as a movement was born. Vergo (1991, 3) is therefore correct in deﬁning new museology as a ‘state of widespread dissatisfaction with the old museology, both within and outside the museum profession … the old museology … is too much about museum methods and too lile about the purposes of museums’. However, the collected essays published in his edited volume, The New Museology (1991), focus almost exclusively on the presentation of museum objects, with the implication that the primary concern of new museology is the development of new theories, critical approaches and techniques to enable museums to communicate more eﬀectively with their visitors. This is a very English view of new museology, and the majority of authors (for example, Ross, 2004; Witcombe, 2003) have largely ignored all that has been 399

T A R C

H I wrien about the nature and purpose of museums in countries where English is not the ﬁrst language, with the result that community museology – the original new museology, with its emphasis on sustainable community development – has been largely forgoen, or subsumed into an all-embracing shorthand for a complex set of postmodern approaches to museum practice – the rhetoric of the second museum revolution. Postmodern new museology, therefore, encompasses museological approaches to gender, colonialism, sexuality, ethnicity or class, the willingness for museums to be controversial, to be agents for change, to promote varied or alternative points of view, to use new and diﬀerent interpretive approaches and to reach new audiences. It is an aempt to make museums less elitist, and encourages the use of humour, cynicism, sarcasm and provocation in museum activities. To some extent it represents the gradual decline of the primacy of the object and, as Rivard (1984) has suggested, a move to a museum which is open to inter-disciplinarity, to the public, to society and to criticism. Stam (quoted in Van Mensch, 1995) suggests simply that: ‘The new museology speciﬁcally questions traditional museum approaches to issues of value, meaning, control, interpretation, authority and authenticity.’ Museological literature frequently confuses community and new museology, paying lile heed to their origins. Community museology was originally deﬁned by its purpose to engage with communities (oen those that are disadvantaged, isolated or composed of indigenous minorities) in order to improve their social and economic conditions. Hence there is a strong bond to ecomuseums and other forms of community museums, and to the ideas of the ‘integrated museum’ ﬁrst proposed in Santiago. However, in the English-speaking world, community museology is now regarded as just one element in new museology, an umbrella term for a range of radical departures from ‘standard’ museum philosophy and practice. It should of course now be questioned if new museology or community museology are still novel ideas; many of the demands identiﬁed in the early 1970s have been met, traditional barriers have been broken, and new working practices instituted in museums worldwide.

Ecomuseums Many people (for example, Heron, 1991) regard the rise of the ecomuseum ideal as tangible evidence of the existence of new museology, and the early history of the two concepts is closely linked. However, de Varine (1988, 64) makes a clear distinction between new museology as a movement and ecomuseums: ‘we should not mix the word ecomuseum … with the basic principles of new museology’. In his view the ecomuseum should be perceived as a process that museum and heritage professionals could adopt in order to work with local communities to respond to their developmental needs. By 1972, the year of the Santiago meeting, the term ‘ecomuseum’ had already been coined as a more glamorous term for a ‘developmental’ museum. The word ecomusée was suggested by de Varine to the then French Minister for the Environment, 400

N M E Robert Poujade, who used it at an international museums meeting in Dĳon on 3 September 1971. A year later, in September 1972, Poujade took the opportunity to use the term once more, this time at the ICOM conference (Musées et Environnement) held at Lourmarin, Istres and Bordeaux (de Varine, 1992; Wasserman, 1989). Thus the word ‘ecomuseum’ came into being at a time when environmentalism was achieving great prominence and words such as ecology and ecosystem had come into popular usage. The term ‘ecomuseum’ is therefore symptomatic of the impact of the green movement throughout society, but it is also clear that it was chosen as a term of convenience, driven by political expediency. The ‘eco’ preﬁx continues to cause confusion because of its associations with the natural environment; despite this, ‘ecomuseum’ remains useful shorthand for a community-based heritage or museum project that aids sustainable development. Hugues de Varine and his colleague Georges Henri Rivière (1897–1985) were central to the development of the ecomuseum. Rivière, steeped in the traditions of French ethnography, was anxious to interpret human history, and the objects and artefacts associated with that history, in an environmental context (Hudson, 1992; Rivière, 1973). De Varine, deeply commied to the democratization of museums, wished to promote the community role of museums within an economic and political framework. It is this combination of the need to reﬂect and conserve the history and distinctive nature of places, and a democratic approach that aids sustainable development, which remains the basis for ecomuseum practice. The ways in which the ecomuseum concept was developed by its initial protagonists are described in detail by Davis (1999), but a brief account is provided below, focusing on the ways in which the ecomuseum has been deﬁned. Rivière reworked and reﬁned his deﬁnition of the ecomuseum as his experimental work continued. The three major variations of the deﬁnition (giving dates and places of minor changes for each) are given in Rivière (1992), and provide a fascinating view of the evolution of a concept that was moulded by his experiences. The early deﬁnitions (Rivière, 1973) have a bias towards ecology and the environment, whilst those of 1978, although stressing the experimental nature of the ecomuseum and its evolution within France’s regional natural parks, makes the case for the role of the local community. The ﬁnal version of 22 January 1980, published in Museum in 1985, is the one usually cited and includes many of the key concepts – local identity, territory, landscape, a sense of history and continuity – that are important in creating a sense of belonging.1 Perhaps the most important features of Rivière’s deﬁnition are 1

‘… an instrument conceived, fashioned, and operated jointly by a public authority, and its local population. The public authority’s involvement is through the experts, facilities and resources it provides; the local population’s involvement depends on its aspirations, knowledge and individual approach. It is a mirror in which the local population views itself to discover its own image, in which it seeks an explanation of the territory to which it is aached and of the populations which have preceded it, seen either as circumscribed in time or in terms of the continuity of generations. It is a mirror that the local population holds up to its visitors so that it may be beer understood and so that its industry, customs and identity may command respect. It is an expression of man and nature. It situates man in his natural environment. It portrays 401

T A R C

H I the repetition of the word ‘population’ (the emphasis on community) and the idea of the ecomuseum having ‘limitless diversity’, a suggestion that the ecomuseum is a ﬂexible concept. Time has borne out this idea; in 2007 the 350-plus ecomuseums that have been established worldwide show extraordinary diversity and conserve a wide range of cultural and natural sites and intangible resources (see <www.ecomuseums. eu>). Many adopt a ‘fragmented’ approach which conserves and interprets linked, dispersed heritage sites situated within a deﬁned cultural landscape. Hamrin (1996) has suggested this working practice should be termed the ‘Scandinavian ecomuseum model’; it is, however, an interpretive policy that has been adopted in many countries, including Canada, France, Portugal and Japan. One of the most interesting features of Rivière’s lengthy deﬁnition is the comment that ‘it is an interpretation of space – of special places in which to stop and stroll’. It is evident that the ecomuseum is not limited to a building or even a museum site, but it encompasses everything within the region it refers to as its territory. Here key heritage sites have special meaning and are integrated into the museum. Heritage is not deﬁned by Rivière, but it is more than just cultural and natural heritage, encompassing memories, folklore, music and song, local skills, behaviour paerns, social structure and traditions. Intangible heritage is as much a part of the ecomuseum as the tangible evidence of landscapes, geology, wildlife, vernacular buildings or material culture. There have been many aempts to update Rivière’s deﬁnition and state more succinctly what an ecomuseum is and how it might be distinguished from the ‘traditional’ museum. Desvallées (1987) suggests that if we accept Rivière’s deﬁnition, then the ecomuseum must be a museum of identity (the notions of time, space and the mirror) and a museum of territory. Rivard (1988) provided a useful deﬁnition by comparing the traditional museum (= building + collections + experts + public) to the ecomuseum (= territory + heritage + memory + population). Mayrand (1982, quoted in Rivard, 1988, 124) emphasized that ecomuseums are as nature in its wilderness, but also as adapted by traditional and industrial society in their own image. It is an expression of time, when the explanations it oﬀers reach back before the appearance of man, ascend the course of the prehistoric and historical times in which he lived and arrive ﬁnally at man’s present. It also oﬀers a vista of the future, while having no pretensions to decision-making, its function being rather to inform and critically analyse. It is an interpretation of space – of special places in which to stop and stroll. It is a laboratory, insofar as it contributes to the study of the past and present of the population concerned and of its total environment and promotes the training of specialists in these ﬁelds, in co-operation with outside research bodies. It is a conservation centre, insofar as it helps to preserve and develop the natural and cultural heritage of the population. It is a school, insofar as it involves the population in its work of study and protection and encourages it to have a clearer grasp of its own future. This laboratory, conservation centre and school are based on common principles. The culture is the name in which they exist and is to be understood in its broadest sense, and they are concerned to foster awareness of its dignity and artistic manifestations, from whatever stratum of the population they derive. Its diversity is limitless, so greatly do its elements vary from one specimen to another. This triad is not self-enclosed; it gives and it receives’ (Rivière, 1985, 182–3). 402

N M E much concerned with an inclusive process as with product: ‘[it] is a collective, … [it] is not an end to itself, it is deﬁned as an objective to be met’; and later (Mayrand, 1994; 1998) shows the ecomuseum process in terms of a ‘creativity triangle’ and placed it within a theoretical ‘three-year cycle’; the implication is that within three years it is possible to move from idea to foundation, from apathy to empathy, and to move through various transitional stages of museology. A detailed analysis of these models is provided by Davis (1999; 2005). If ecomuseums seek to capture the distinctiveness of place, and it would appear that this is one feature that makes them diﬀerent from traditional museums, then how might this be best expressed? The models described above fail adequately to capture the diversity of ecomuseums. In addition, the concept originated as a very special way of working, a mechanism that would enable the conservation of cultural and natural heritage and the maintenance of local cultural identity, the democratization of the museum and the empowerment of local people. It might be argued that the ecomuseum is best thought of in this way, as a process that provides a means for local people to identify, conserve and celebrate their heritage. A variety of beneﬁts can accrue from these ecomuseum projects, including the gain of forms of social and cultural capital by the participants (Corsane et al., 2007b).

Figure 22.1 The ‘necklace’ model for the ecomuseum 403

T A R C

H I Identifying the ecomuseum as a mechanism or process prompted Davis (1999) to develop the ‘necklace’ model (Figure 22.1). The ecomuseum is regarded as the thread of a necklace, the mechanism that holds together the varied elements (the pearls, or heritage sites) that make individual places special. Alternatively we can think of the ecomuseum thread as a means of holding together not the individual sites but rather the various elements (of, for example, landscape, nature, sites, song, traditions, collective memories and architecture) that comprise the special nature of places. A subtle yet vital addition to the original necklace model of the ecomuseum is the clasp – in eﬀect as vital a part of the mechanism as the thread. Ecomuseums are based in their communities, and the clasp could represent local people, but in reality it probably represents the activists who manage and direct the ecomuseum, who together develop its vision, strategies and operational practices. Despite the variations that are demonstrated by ecomuseums, Davis (1999) suggests that the following list of aributes can be applied to most of them: • • • • •

The adoption of a territory that is not necessarily deﬁned by conventional boundaries; The adoption of a ‘fragmented site’ policy that is linked to in-situ conservation and interpretation; Conventional views of site ownership are abandoned; conservation and interpretation of sites is carried out via liaison, co-operation and the development of partnerships; The empowerment of local communities; the involvement of local people in ecomuseum activities and in the creation of their cultural identity; The potential for inter-discipliniarity and for holistic interpretation is usually seized.

This list, and that proposed by Corsane and Holleman (1993), has recently been further developed and utilized to assess how far ecomuseums reach the tenets of the philosophy (Corsane et al., 2007a). So have ecomuseums achieved their potential, and do they act in a more democratic manner to aid sustainable development? The following section discusses some recent examples from China, Mexico and Italy.

Ecomuseum Practice China: The Lihu Ecomuseum The development of ecomuseums in China has recently been the subject of considerable academic debate (for example, Davis et al., 2006; Su et al., 2006). There are currently (2007) seven ecomuseums, all being dedicated to the conservation of ethnic minority cultures (Davis, 2007). The example described here is the Lihu ecomuseum of the Yao, based in the village of Huaili in a remote mountainous area of Nandan County, Guangxi Province. It was opened in November 2004, the ﬁrst to be created in Guangxi. It was developed with the professional assistance of 404

N M E

Figure 22.2 Traditional drumming, Lihu Ecomuseum, Guangxi, China museologists from the Guangxi Ethnography Museum, and all participants received training from the Chinese Society of Museums. Ecomuseum experience was also provided by specialists from neighbouring Guizhou Province; this assistance has meant that the Yao ecomuseum resembles closely those established there. Financial support was provided by business sponsors from regional electronics, engineering and telecommunications companies, with some international aid being made available to support the provision of water and sanitation in the village. Local government funding was dedicated to developing the tourist infrastructure, in particular the construction of a road into the mountains (Rong, 2006). The Yao are so called because the village men always wear white trousers. However, the women’s ceremonial clothing is much more colourful, and is a feature of the exhibition in the ecomuseum’s Information Centre, representing the weaving, printing and embroidery skills of the village women. Intangible heritage in the community is again very strong, notable features being performances on large bronze drums that provide a rhythmical and hypnotic accompaniment to ritual dances and antiphonal songs (Figure 22.2). The village features specially constructed elevated barns that store the subsistence crops grown there, and visitors can explore ancient tombs, old roadways and wells that are scaered throughout the surrounding forest. Su (2005, 101) suggests that: ‘The village has almost escaped 405

T A R C

H I from the impacts of mainstream modern civilization as its natural environment and social structure remain intact and its people adhere to their ancestors’ lifestyle and religion.’ Ritual ceremonies, especially those associated with funerals, or the naming of a new bronze drum, are a feature of Yao culture. In a similar manner to the Soga Ecomuseum in Guizhou, the ﬁrst to be created in China, the ecomuseum is seen as a means of capturing these rich community memories, the Information Centre being a base for this documentation; specialist ethnologists from the Ethnography Museum in Nanning have used the ecomuseum as a base to carry out their research. The development of this ecomuseum in a remote rural area of China has clearly had major tangible beneﬁts for the indigenous cultural minority. They have achieved beer living conditions as a result of the restoration of local houses, the provision of essential utilities such as water and electricity, and the building of new facilities including schools and roads. There have been improvements in educational standards and medical care. Every eﬀort has been made to make interventions in a sympathetic manner, with respect for local people, their customs and beliefs, making eﬀective use of the Liuzhi principles (see Davis, 2007 for further details). The conservation of the distinctiveness of local culture is central to this project, with resources being devoted to the documentation of local memories, customs and material culture. Rong (2006) suggests that developing ecomuseums in Guangxi Province has had other signiﬁcant beneﬁts, noting in particular the increased pride expressed by local ethnic minority groups in their culture, and growing interest in those cultures from researchers and academics. He also points to the promotion of cultural exchanges to and from the Province, and the gradual rise in interest in tourist visits to the ecomuseums, which are beginning to have some economic beneﬁt for local people. An and Gjestrum (1999, 68), referring to their Chinese experiences, state that ‘people should not be separated from their cultural heritage but … they should have the opportunity to create their future based on it’. The implication here is that ethnic minority peoples can use their cultural assets to aid sustainable development via cultural tourism. This process is not without risk. The focus on ethnic minorities in China’s ecomuseums is fraught with potential problems, in particular the danger of transforming living cultures into mere exhibitions. There is a real threat of the loss of authenticity and the change to the social fabric and values of these isolated communities as the ‘outside world’ impinges on their lives. It could, however, be argued that the ecomuseum might provide a means of eﬀectively managing tourism at a local level, as China strives to become the world’s major tourism destination (Davis, 2007).

Mexico: The Community Museums of Oaxaca Other than China, countries to adopt ecomuseological practices to sustain and represent indigenous minorities include Mexico (Camarena and Morales, 1997; 2005; Peña Tenorio, 2000) and Sweden (Davis, 1999, 120–21). In Mexico, a series of experiments in the 1970s that were a direct response to the resolutions of the Santiago conference (Hauenschild, 1988) eventually led to the creation of

406

N M E the Community Museums National Programme by the Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia (INAH) in 1983 (Departamento de Museos Comunitarios de INAH, 1990). There is now widespread acceptance of community museology practice in the country (Erikson, 1996; Rico Mansard, 2004, Simpson, 2001). Peña Tenorio (2000) suggests that in the whole of Mexico, there are some 269 community museums, with 67 (24 per cent) based in indigenous communities of 24 diﬀerent ethnic groups. The terms ‘community museum’ and ‘ecomuseum’ are both used in Mexico,2 seemingly interchangeably; in all such museums the essential feature of community action to aid development within a deﬁned territory is present. Mario Vásquez, then Director of the Mexican National Museum of Ethnography, was responsible for developing the ‘Casa del Museo’ and the ‘Museos Escolares’ projects in 1972 as the ﬁrst experiments in community museology in Mexico. Despite the success of the laer (some 400 school museums had been established by 1975), the project ended in 1976, while the Casa del Museo project continued until 1981. However, the Community Museums National Programme learned from these ﬁrst ventures, going on to deﬁne a community museum as: one in which, through the active participation of the population, the function of community service is performed … it promotes the recognition of the creative and decision-making capacity of the community to resolve its needs and to recover the past common history in order to understand the current reality (quoted in Hauenschild, 1988, section 3.2.2.2). Clear objectives were set, stating the need to involve communities in the rescue and protection of their cultural heritage, to aﬃrm that heritage in relation to local cultural identity and to utilize community museum projects as alternative forms of educational activity. A broad deﬁnition of heritage was adopted, including nature and culture, and with an emphasis on traditions and local wisdom (DMC-INAH, 1990). Oaxaca is a state in southeast Mexico, with a signiﬁcant (32 per cent) indigenous population belonging to some 15 ethnic groups; it therefore has the widest cultural diversity and the highest indigenous population in Mexico (Fernández, Garcia and Ávila, 2001). This region has seen signiﬁcant eﬀorts to utilize community museology to support local indigenous groups, including the creation of the Union de Museos Comunitarios de Oaxaca (UMCO) in 1991, which includes 19 indigenous and mestizo communities that have created museums (Camarena and Morales, 2004). The association acts as a network to facilitate training and provide support, and also generates collective projects. It has also created a separate co-operative that enables cultural tourism in the region utilizing the resources of the community museum projects, so aiding economic development. This tourism co-operative has brought together hoteliers, tour operators, local guides and crasmen, all of whom are beneﬁting from an increase in tourist numbers (Camarena and Morales, 2

This is evident in the actions of the Unión Nacional de Museos Comunitarios y Ecomuseos de México (Camarena and Morales, 2004). 407

T A R C

H I 2004). Arguably the greatest beneﬁt of UMCO has been to create autonomy for the community museum projects, making them less responsive to the demands of the state and INAH, seemingly one of the greatest causes of tension when seing up new community-based heritage projects in Oaxaca (Cohen, 2001). Social conditions in Oaxaca, and in particular the social organization utilized in indigenous and mestizo communities, named ‘communality’ by Rendón Monzón (2003), has done much to facilitate community museology. According to this social scheme, every individual is expected to do volunteer work for the community. This obligation, along with the concepts of equal rights, a communal territory and shared political power, has been fundamental to the success of community museum projects in many of Oaxaca’s isolated and independent small towns (Barrera Bassols and Vera Herrera, 1996), one of which is Santa Ana del Valle. The Santa Ana Museum was the ﬁrst community museum to be created in Oaxaca, in 1984, and is regarded as a model of good practice (Barrera Bassols and Vera Herrera, 1996; Camarena and Morales, 2004; Erikson, 1996). The rural town of Santa Ana del Valle is in the central valley region, with the local economy based on corn and textiles. The town is largely Zapotec with 90 per cent of the population utilizing the native language (INEGI, 2003); in Zapotec the museum is called ShanDany, meaning ‘at the foot of the hill’ (Burke, 2006). Camarena and Morales (2005) suggest that all the Oaxaca community museums are linked to developmental needs, and Cohen (2001) notes that the local people in Santa Ana saw the museum as a means of reaching a larger market for their woollen textiles, even though the initial idea for the museum was a result of the discovery of a pre-Hispanic burial in the town’s main square. INAH had been involved in the archaeological excavation, but was supportive of the ﬁnds remaining in the town and utilizing them as a basis for community action. The initial idea of this community museum did not then come from the Oaxacan people, but from a state authority eager to create local museums that would serve their communities across Mexico, but following strict guidelines with an emphasis on safeguarding heritage rather than supporting development. Since 1984 the museum, managed by a small commiee of local people, has expanded its original archaeological remit through oral history projects, and via UMCO promotes local arts and cras and is playing a role in local cultural tourism. Its exhibitions now feature the pre-Hispanic archaeology of the area, the Mexican Revolution, local textiles and the Oaxacan ‘Feather Dance’. Burke (2006) notes that the language employed in these exhibition areas is far too technical for the majority of local people, and appears to serve a tourist audience, and may have been dictated by INAH. He contrasts Shan-Dany with the Natividad Museum (founded 2000), which is much more community-centred, received advice from UMCO and as a consequence has more accessible labels. Despite these deﬁciencies, Shan-Dany is well managed, ﬁnancially sustainable and has aided social and economic development through its workshops and courses, with signiﬁcant emphasis being placed on children’s education (Camarena and Morales, 2005; Cohen, 2001). Taken as a whole, the community museum projects in Oaxaca act as an important source of local pride and inspiration. 408

N M E

Figure 22.3 Trappa di Sordevolo, Ecomuseo della Valle Elvo e Serra, Italy

Italy: Ecomuseo della Valle Elvo e Serra This ecomuseum in northern Piedmont evolved from a project relating to local people’s conceptions of ‘sense of place’, and a perceived need to conserve those features of the local cultural landscape that most interested them. The project began in 1997, with the advantage of being able to call upon several existing local associations that had interests in the valley’s heritage, and ultimately identiﬁed several potential heritage conservation and interpretation projects, including gold mining sites, buildings connected to the former iron industry, and chapels. As a result, an Association for the Ecomuseum of the Elvo and Serra Valley was inaugurated in 1998; there are now some 150 members of the Ecomuseum Association, with each heritage site having its own group of volunteers. With so many diﬀerent projects and diﬀerent actors, achieving a sensible balance of projects has become an issue; the original aims and objectives for the valley’s ecomuseum were very varied and indeed were never prescribed (Corsane et al., 2007a). Despite these problems, a number of diﬀerent sites have been established, each with its own associazione. The focus of ecomuseum activity is the Trappa di Sordevolo, originally built in the eighteenth century by the Ambrosei family, which between 1796 and 1802 became a Trappist monastery. It has become a focal point for local people, a place for meetings and discussions, and is identiﬁed as the 409

T A R C

H I most important cultural element in the valley (Figure 22.3). The ecomuseum is now part of the Provincial (Biellese) Ecomuseum network, and obtains funding from the Piemonte Regional Government. However, the links with municipal and regional agencies create some problems, imposing limits on freedom of action. Being part of the municipal network means that seing overall and long-term strategies for the individual heritage sites of the ecomuseum, as well as the ecomuseum as a whole, is diﬃcult. A major problem seems to be how to develop a more holistic and integrated vision for the ecomuseum, rather than it being managed as a collective of individual sites. A community-mapping project to revive and capture collective memory began in 2002 and has involved about 400 local people. Rather than create a traditional pictorial map (for example, Leslie, 2001), the project has used oral and video recording as the methodology to capture the heritage and life of the community. Interviews with local craspeople and peasant farmers were eventually shown to schools in the valley, with the featured crasmen making personal appearances and answering questions. The schools went on to develop their own investigations, leading to their own illustrated ‘maps’ of the region and drama projects, aided by workshops run by actors and musicians. Ecomuseum staﬀ felt that the project ‘had helped people develop a sense of what might be possible in the future by building on the past’ (quoted in Corsane et al., 2007a, 109). Although the collection phase of this project was completed by March 2006, the material collected is still used to stage events, using diﬀerent media – especially drama – to communicate with local inhabitants, oen aracting large audiences to very remote locations. The ecomuseum has become a centre for sustained pieces of research on the area and its people, being responsible for producing academic works on local vernacular architecture (Manfredi and Pidello, 2000), and on emigration from the valley (Debernardi, 2004). There have also been social and tourism beneﬁts, with some circumstantial evidence of an increase in tourist numbers. The Elvo and Serra Valley ecomuseum is a complex organization, with the individual sites nesting into the ‘parent’ ecomuseum and then into the overarching grouping of Biella ecomuseums. However, research at this site (Corsane et al., 2007a; 2007b) suggested that this system of connections worked well, ensuring professional support, ﬁnancial aid and a search for sustainable solutions. The key features of this ecomuseum are the successful renovation and conservation of a wide variety of heritage resources, the academic outputs and the emphasis placed on the documentation of cra skills and intangible heritage. Of particular note are the large number of local people involved at the various sites, the links into local schools and communities and (due to the emphasis on its remit to serve local communities) the lack of interest in actively promoting tourism.

Conclusions The three examples described above can only paint a very superﬁcial view of the diversity of ecomuseum practice. However, each of the sites shows strong links 410

N M E to the conservation and celebration of the distinctiveness of place, local heritage and local identity. They have all, to some degree, aided development through lowlevel tourism and given a sense of pride to local people. The principal concern for these sites – and arguably all community-based heritage projects – is the issue of sustainability, with changes in personnel, political regimes and ﬁnancial support always being unpredictable.

References An, L. and Gjestrum, J.A. (1999), ‘The Ecomuseum in Theory and Practice: The First Chinese Ecomuseum Established’, Nordisk Museologi 2: 65–86. Barrera Basols, M. and Vera Herrera, R. (1996), ‘Todo Rincón es un Centro: Hacia una Expansión de la Idea del Museo’, Cuicuilco 3:7, 105–40. [INAH, México D.F.] Burke, J.L. (2006), The People’s Museums: Community Museums of Oaxaca, Mexico, unpublished MA thesis, Museion, Göteborg University, Sweden. Camarena, C. and Morales, T. (1997), ‘Los Museos Comunitarios y la Organización Indigena en Oaxaca’, in Gaceta de Museos, Coordinación Nacional de Museos y Exposiciones, INAH, No. 6, June, 14–18. Camarena, C. and Morales, T. (2004), ‘La Unión de Museos Comunitarios de Oaxaca A.C.’, , accessed January 2007. Camarena, C. and Morales, T. (2005), ‘Memoria Comunal Para Combatir el Olvido: Los Museos Comunitarios de Oaxaca’, Arqueologia Mexicana XII:72, 72–7. Cohen, J.H. (2001), ‘The Shan-Dany Museum: Community, Economics and Cultural Traditions in a Rural Mexican Village’, Human Organisation 60:3, Fall, , accessed January 2007. Corsane, G. (ed.) (2005), Heritage, Museums and Galleries: An Introductory Reader (London and New York: Routledge). Corsane, G., Davis, P., Ellio, S., Maggi, M., Murtas, D. and Rogers, S. (2007a), ‘Ecomuseum Evaluation: Experiences in Piemonte and Liguria, Italy’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 13:2, 101–16, in press. Corsane, G., Davis, P., Ellio, S., Maggi, M., Murtas, D. and Rogers, S. (2007b), ‘Ecomuseum Performance in Piemonte and Liguria, Italy: The Signiﬁcance of Capital’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 13:3, 223–39, in press. Corsane, G. and Holleman, W. (1993), ‘Ecomuseums: A Brief Evaluation’, in R. de Jong (ed.), Museums and the Environment (Pretoria: South African Museums Association), 111–25. Davis, P. (1996), Museums and the Natural Environment: The Role of Natural History Museums in Biological Conservation (London and New York: Leicester University Press/Cassells Academic). Davis, P. (1999), Ecomuseums: A Sense of Place (London and New York: Leicester University Press/Continuum).

411

T A R C

H I Davis, P. (2005), ‘Places, “Cultural Touchstones” and the Ecomuseum’, in G. Corsane (ed.), Heritage, Museums and Galleries: An Introductory Reader (London and New York: Routledge), 365–76. Davis, P. (2007), ‘Ecomuseums and Sustainability in Italy, Japan and China: Adaptation Through Implementation’, in S.J. Knell, S. MacLeod and S.E.R Watson (eds), Museum Revolutions: How Museums Change and are Changed (London and New York: Routledge), in press. Davis, P., Maggi, M., Su, D., Varine, H. de and Zhang, J. (eds) (2006), Communication and Exploration, Guiyang, China – 2005 (Trento, Italy: Provincia Autonoma di Trento). Debernardi, M. (ed.) (2004), Storia di Emigrazione dalla Valle Elvo e Serra, two volumes (Torino: Provincia di Biella and Regione Piemonte: Tipograﬁa Gianoi). Departamento de Museos Comunitarios de INAH (1990), ‘El Museo Comunitario: Un Espacio Alternative de Rescate y Preservación del Patrimonio Cultural’, Antropologica, Boletin Oﬁcial del INAH, October–December, México D.F., 1–28. Desvallées, A. (1987), ‘L’esprit et la Lere de L’écomusée’, in Écomusées en France, (Premières rencontres nationales des écomusées, L’Isle d’Abeau, 13/14 Novembre, 1986), published by Agence Régional d’Ethnologie Rhône-Alpes and Écomusée Nord-Dauphiné, 51–5. Desvallées, A. (ed.) (1992), Vagues – une Anthologie de la Nouvelle Muséologie 1 (Macon/Savigny-Le-Temple: W/MNES). Erikson, P.P. (1996), ‘“So my Children can Stay in the Pueblo”: Indigenous Community Museums and Self-determination in Oaxaca, Mexico’, Museum Anthropology 20:1, 37–46. Fernández, P., Garcia, J.E. and Ávila, M. (2001), Estimaciones de la Población Indigena de México, Consejo Nacional de Población, México D.F., , accessed January 2007. Gjestrum, J.A. and Maure, M. (eds) (1988), Okomuseumsboka – Identitet, Okologi, Deltakelse (Tromso: ICOM Norway). Guido, H.F. (1973), UNESCO Regional Seminar: Round Table on the Development and the Role of Museums in the Contemporary World, Santiago de Chile, Chile, 20-31 May 1972 (Paris: UNESCO) (SHC-72/Conf.28/4; Typescript, 39pp.). Hamrin, O. (1996), ‘Ekomuseum Bergslagen – Från idé till Verklighet’, Nordisk Museologi 2, 27–43. Hauenschild, A. (1988), ‘Claims and Realities of New Museology: Case Studies in Canada, the United States and Mexico’, , accessed January 2007. Heron, P. (1991), ‘Ecomuseums – a New Museology?’, Alberta Museums Review 17:2, 8–11. Hudson, K. (1992), ‘The Dream and the Reality’, Museums Journal 92:4, 27. ICOM (1968), Resolutions adopted by ICOM’s General Assembly, 1968, , accessed January 2007. ICOM (1971), Resolutions adopted by ICOM’s General Assembly, 1971, , accessed January 2007. INEGI (Instituto Nacional de Estadistica, Geograﬁa e Informatica) (2003), Anuario Estadistico 2003, Oaxaca, two volumes (INEGI: State Government of Oaxaca). 412

N M E de Jong, R. (ed.) (1993), Museums and the Environment (Pretoria: South African Museums Association). Knell, S.J., MacLeod, S. and Watson, S.E.R. (eds) (2007), Museum Revolutions: How Museums Change and are Changed (London and New York: Routledge) in press. Leslie, K. (ed.) (2001), Mapping the Millennium: The West Sussex Millennium Parish Maps Project (West Sussex County Council: Selsey Press). Manfredi, E. and Pidello, G. (2000), Architeura Rurale in Alta Valle Elvo (Biella, Italy: CAUA, Provincia di Biella). Mayrand, P. (1994), ‘La Reconciliation Possible de Deux Langages’, Les Cahiers de Développement Local 3:2, 3–5. Mayrand, P. (1998), L’exposition à L’heure Juste du Développement Local: Cycle Théoretique de Trois Ans, unpublished MSS, Reinwardt Academy, Amsterdam. Peña Tenorio, B. (2000), ‘Los Museos Comunitarios en México’, in Dimensión Antropológica-INAH, , accessed January 2007. Rendón Monzón, J.J. (2003), La Comunalidad: Modo de Vida en los Pueblos Indios, Volume 1 (Conaculta, México: DF). Rico Mansard, F. (2004), ‘Museos Mexicanos, Usos y Desusos’, Correa del Maestro 93, February, , accessed January 2007. Rivard, R. (1984), ‘Opening up the Museum, or Towards a New Museology: Ecomuseums and Open Museums’, typescript, 114pp., Quebec City. (Copy held at the Documentation Centre, Direction des Musées de France, Paris.) Rivard, R. (1988), ‘Museums and Ecomuseums – Questions and Answers’, in J.A. Gjestrum and M. Maure (eds), Okomuseumsboka – Identitet, Okologi, Deltakelse (Tromso: ICOM Norway), 123–8. Rivière, G.H. (1973), ‘Role of Museums of Art and of Human and Social Sciences’, Museum 25:1/2, 26–44. Rivière, G.H. (1985), ‘The Ecomuseum: An Evolutive Deﬁnition’, Museum 37:4, 182–3. Rivière, G.H. (1992), ‘L’Écomusée, Un Modèle Évolutif’, in A. Desvallées (ed.), Vagues – une Anthologie de la Nouvelle Muséologie 1 (Macon/Savigny-Le-Temple: W/MNES), 440–45 Rong, X. (2006), ‘Ecomuseums in Guangxi: Establishment, Exploration and Expectations’, in P. Davis, M. Maggi, D. Su, H. de Varine and J. Zhang, (eds), Communication and Exploration, Guiyang, China – 2005 (Trento, Italy: Provincia Autonoma di Trento), 19–21. Ross, M. (2004), ‘Interpreting the New Museology’, Museum and Society 2:2, 84–103. Schärer, M. (ed.) (1991), ‘Museum and Community’, ICOFOM Study Series 25. Simpson, M.G. (2001), Making Representations: Museums in the Post-colonial Era (London: Routledge). Su, D. (ed.) (2005), China Ecomuseums (Beĳing: Forbidden City Publishing House). Su, D., Davis, P., Maggi, M. and Zhang, J. (eds) (2006), Communication and Exploration: Papers of the International Ecomuseum Forum, Guizhou, China (Beĳing: Chinese Society of Museums). 413

T A R C

H I Teruggi, M.E. (1973), ‘The Round Table of Santiago (Chile)’, Museum XXV:3, 129. Van Mensch, P. (1995), ‘Magpies on Mount Helicon’, in M. Schärer (ed.), ‘Museum and Community’, ICOFOM Study Series 25, 133–8. Varine, H. de (1988), ‘New Museology and the Renewal of the Museum Institution’, in J.A. Gjestrum and M. Maure (eds), Okomuseumsboka – Identitet, Okologi, Deltakelse (Tromso: ICOM Norway), 62–5. Varine, H. de (1992), ‘L’Écomusée’, in A. Desvallées (ed.), Vagues – une Anthologie de la Nouvelle Muséologie 1 (Macon/Savigny-Le-Temple: W/MNES), 446–87. (Originally published in La Gazee (Association des Musees Canadiens) (1978) 11, 28–40.) Vergo, P. (ed.) (1991), The New Museology (London: Reaktion). Wasserman, F. (1989), ‘Les Écomusées, ou Comment une Population Reconnait, Protège, Met en Valeur les Richesses Naturelles et Culturelles de son Territoire’, Musées et Collections Publiques de France 182/3, 53–5. Witcombe, A. (2003), Re-imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum (London and New York: Routledge).

414

23

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

An Exploration of the Connections among Museums, Community and Heritage Elizabeth Crooke

Community heritage is something that is oen referred to but rarely deﬁned. Indeed, depending on one’s relationship with the notion, deﬁnition is unnecessary and maybe even unhelpful. Instead, it is more useful to have a ﬂuid and ﬂexible idea of what community heritage might be, so that it can be moulded to diﬀerent situations as they arise. This chapter considers the relationships among community, museums and heritage. On the one hand this can be approached from the perspective of the museum which has created community-based exhibitions and collections, and on the other from that of the community group, which has developed a heritage dimension. Either perspective demonstrates that community and heritage projects are quite natural bedfellows, one lending creditability to the other. In doing so, community heritage is thought to be a means for social and economic development, local regeneration and political change. When considered, it is clear that community heritage initiatives, despite their appearance of being local and grassroots activities, will oen reﬂect agendas that extend well beyond the community group. These might be the agendas of government, who have initiated the community initiatives, or that of social or political movements inﬂuencing the group. The chapter explores the idea of community, emphasizing that the concept can be whatever is needed or desired at the time and, even when formed, will adapt to the situation. The positive associations with community are what is harnessed by policy makers both within government and the museum sector, believing that ‘community’ is a means to develop connections. Interest in community is a concern with relevance, proving value and winning public support. For the community group heritage has a similar role. Through emphasizing the heritage dimension, a community can expect to raise its proﬁle, legitimize its existence and enhance its longevity. It is such agendas that underpin community heritage projects and must be explored to truly understand the connections.

T A R C

H I Understanding Community Community has become a frequent way of thinking about groups of people; references are made to ‘the mining community’, ‘the Asian community’ or ‘the gay community’. Such communities are identiﬁed either according to locality, common experiences, or shared characteristics, such as ethnicity, language or religion. These features become the cultural markers that are the symbolic basis of community. The rituals and characteristics of particular groups become cultural codes, the meanings of which are understood by the members and recognized by others as belonging to a particular community. The nature of these characteristics can vary. Delanty, who has wrien on the popularity of the notion, emphasizes that there is no formula for community; instead it will vary according to the place, time and need. On some occasions community will be locally based, and on others globally; communities can be aﬃrmative and subversive; traditional or modern. Community may be derived from ‘thick aachments’ based upon a number of characteristics, shared over long time; or ‘thin aachments’, such as a recent shared experience (Delanty, 2003). It is also the case that the symbolic markers used to deﬁne a community will lie silent – only to be called upon when it is relevant to do so. This might be in time of need when a group of people feel at risk or share some form of distress. In such cases community becomes a resource that might diminish the threat or resolve the diﬃculty. In County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, a group of women have come together to form a community group based on shared experiences of migration. Known as ‘Women of the World’, the members have links with Europe, Asia, Africa and South America, and the religions represented include Christian, Muslim, Hindu and Bah’ai. Supported by the Community Relations Council as well as the Northern Ireland Council for Ethnic Minorities, the group provides support for its members and hosts events to share their cultures with the people who have lived in the area for generations. For instance, the group has participated in local museum initiatives; they provided costumes for a museum display on local identities, and workshops on aspects of their culture as part of an exhibition on cultural diversity. The members of this community do not have a long association with a common place; most have been relatively recent arrivals to the county. They do not share country of origin, language or religion. Although individual languages and ethnicities are valued, they are not uniting factors. For the ‘Women of the World’, these traditional characteristics of community do not provide the bonds. Instead, community is formed on the basis of a shared experience (migration), the desire for fellowship, and need for guidance while seling into a new place. In another situation, amongst a diﬀerent group of people, the same mix of languages and ethnicities could be a cause for division within that group. In this case the mix is the reason for union. For this group their diversity is the uniting factor; diﬀerence is bringing them together. It is all the more poignant that this is happening in Northern Ireland, where such diﬀerences usually divide. In this case the experience of diﬀerence is shared, marking this group as apart from others in Northern Ireland, and the formation of

416

C

M, C H this community allows the group the chance to celebrate and value their diﬀerence, as well as feel more conﬁdence in their host community. That the same type of characteristics can on some occasions be used to unite a community and on others to divide shows that community is a ﬂuid concept, altered according to diﬀerent needs. The symbolic markers used to form community will vary, and it is the social situation that determines which factors are relevant and what their impact will be. Oen, community is formed in opposition to others, perhaps resulting from a sense of insecurity or threat and as a means for selfdefence (Bauman, 2001). When a threat is perceived, a group of people will deﬁne characteristics and use experiences as a means to draw themselves closer together in opposition to others. This can take a fairly innocuous form, as in the case of the example above; however, the formation of bonds can become the means for social and political resistance, as well as a justiﬁcation of conﬂict. Which it should be is determined by the agendas of community leaders and their ability to mobilize groups of people to follow their wishes.

Museums, Community and Social Policy For many, the appeal of community lies in the belief that it forms a sense of belonging, unity and harmony. ‘A good sense of community’ is thought to be of beneﬁt by building positive relations between people and useful networks that lead to social and economic advantage. Civic initiatives that are derived from the community are thought to be beer connected and have greater appeal and relevance. Connecting with community has become one of the most talked about tools of governments worldwide and has been declared as a means to develop more relevant, acceptable and successful policies. In public policy, community is an ideal that should be strived for and the retrieval of community is thought to be good for social cohesion, sustainability and positive social change. Reference to the value of community has been one of the building blocks of recent government initiatives in the UK, Australia and Canada. Many such policies follow the ethos of social capital, as popularized by Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone (2001). For Putnam, social capital is a measure of horizontal networks amongst people and vertical bonds between people and government. He argues for greater community participation, civic engagement and voluntarism as a means to develop social capital, trust and solidarity. This, he believes, will result in improved educational outcomes, greater happiness, beer health and economic prosperity. In this context community is promoted as a panacea for countless diﬃculties; national governments are nurturing community as a means to reduce deprivation, lessen unemployment and improve health. In the UK, policies relating to fostering sustainable communities and developing social cohesion have turned to culture as one of the means to develop such networks. Numerous government reports, such as Building Cohesive Communities (2001), published by the Home Oﬃce, and later Sustainable Communities (2005), published by the Oﬃce of the Deputy Prime Minister, refer to community as the means to develop a successful society, and culture as one of the vehicles to bring this about. 417

T A R C

H I In the cultural sector, increased interest in the community dimension has not only changed museum practice but has also challenged perceptions of what a museum is, the type of work it should engage in, and how a museum should relate to its visitors. Many of the established, state-run and oﬃcial museums are willingly involved in community activity, be it community consultation or working with communities on exhibitions, or they may take seriously the impact they may have on their community. Consideration of community has caused many museums to rethink their collecting, exhibition and staﬃng practices. More oen we ﬁnd museums with community galleries, community-based collecting policies, and appointments with ‘community’ in their title. Museum visitors are now being thought of as ‘interpretive communities’, social and cultural units that shape learning, experiences and relationships (Hooper-Greenhill, 2000). These diverse communities form ‘communities of practice’ that the museum can respond to and use, to shape exhibitions, collecting and learning within the museum. Museums Australia, for instance, advocates the formation of ‘community collections’, informed by ‘the keepers of community knowledge’, the purpose of this being to increase the diversity of museum collections (Museums Australia Incorporated, 2000). Also in Australia, many museums now have dedicated community galleries, in which local groups can mount their own exhibitions. In both instances, museums are aempting to beer connect with local people and to broaden the nature of the collections they exhibit and the stories they tell. Increasingly museums are being asked to reconsider their core purposes, and this move has been led by government policy and has ﬁltered down into the cultural sector. More so than ever those working in museums and heritage are embracing government agendas and are eager to emphasize their relevance to contemporary concerns. In the UK, the heritage sector has demonstrated its contribution to the promotion of inclusion, cohesion and enhancing sustainability – maers that were traditionally thought to be the concern of social services and the domain of community development. The New Directions in Social Policy, issued in 2004 by the Museums Libraries and Archives Council (MLA), the UK’s national development agency for the sector, places this at the heart of museum work. Here, regeneration and sustainable communities, social inclusion, neighbourhood renewal and community agendas were each deﬁned as key themes of relevance to the sector, and as national policy issues that must be addressed (Linley, 2004). This is further endorsed by the National Museums Directors’ Conference (NMDC), a body comprising the directors of the UK’s national museums and galleries. Their publication, Museums and Galleries: Creative Engagement (2004), conﬁdently describes how the sector has gone through a ‘sea-change’ with respect to its social role (Burde, 2004, 43). Creative Engagement identiﬁes numerous projects that are examples of innovative practice in museums, which are outside the usual view of what museums and galleries do. The National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford, for instance, is praised for working with youths who previously had been regarded as a threat to the museum and its collections. Through workshops, designed speciﬁcally for the youths, the relationship between the museum and young people improved. Later the museum workshops were used as part of a surveillance programme for those 418

C

M, C H who had been arrested, and later released, for their involvement in local riots. The project was praised for improving networks between the youths and other agencies, bringing about a reduction of vandalism in the museum, and for the fact that two former ‘troublemakers’ became formally involved in the museum as youth mentors (Burde, 2004, 20). Creative Engagement provides accounts of how museums have taken a proactive approach to working with local communities and how these new links have beneﬁted both the museum and society. Museums are described as places that ‘create social capital, educating and empowering individuals and groups alike, creating networks and stimulating dialogue’ (Burde, 2004, 2). Such examples present museums as places which are making connections with young people, initiating public debate on controversial issues, and transforming their collections through new partnerships. Since the mid-1990s, a number of museums in Northern Ireland have hosted exhibitions that have claimed a community relations dimension and have developed programmes speciﬁcally with this area in mind. The Education Department at the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum (UFTM), for instance, oﬀers a community relations programme that is used by approximately 30,000 young people annually. In the current climate, the UFTM Education Department aims to contribute to providing children with the skills to ‘live in a multicultural society and use history as a way of learning from the past to live in the future’.1 The programmes range from a ‘First Contact’ session, based on interactive games promoting links between students from diﬀerent backgrounds, to those that encourage students to think about the diﬀerent aspects of stories or events. The UFTM uses sessions to encourage participants to discuss the formation of identity and the construction of culture, to compare and contrast the use of symbols, as well as to explore the concept of prejudice and resolving conﬂict amongst peers. Museum staﬀ believe they make a positive contribution to encouraging young people to rethink aitudes, and have been encouraged by pupil feedback which has included statements such as: ‘It makes me think diﬀerent’; ‘I hope that everybody understands each other, we will have no ﬁghting’.2 Although it is easy to ﬁnd examples of government policy that favour community, what is less apparent in such circles is the debate concerning the idea of community and one that encourages us to think more deeply about its value. Butcher, for instance, believes that a lack of exploration has resulted in the term simply becoming a ‘hoorah word that seems to encourage warm and positive feelings at the expense of precise and meaningful analysis’ (Butcher, 1993, 3). Rather than the oen-cited ‘cosy and comfortable place’ of our imagination, community has the potential to have less pleasant connotations. The cultural codes that are at the basis of establishing belonging to a particular community will also deﬁne those who do not belong and form boundaries between members and non-members. In such cases

1 2

Madeline McGreevy, Community Relations Oﬃcer, UFTM, personal communication via email, 11 August 2006. Community Relations Evaluation, UFTM Education Department, various dates in 2006 (courtesy of Madeline McGreevy, August 2006). 419

T A R C

H I community is as much about exclusion and division as it is about unity. Perhaps incomers to a particular area will be made unwelcome because they are not part of the traditional community. Or as people within that community change, and ﬁnd they do not identify with the usual markers, a lack of belonging may cause despair. For some, community is something to be thought of fondly and, when experienced, forges a positive sense of identity and place. Its more malevolent characteristics are those that can be deﬁant, exclusionary or coercive. It is important, therefore, to ask why a community has formed or to unpick the motivations of those who are calling for the creation or re-creation of community. The same questions can be asked of the construction of community heritage and the creation of communitybased museums. They too can be an exercise in resistance and used as a means to deﬁne or declare community members, isolate those who do not belong, and forge a sense of identity that will endorse this view. Within the museum sector, response to the community-change agenda of national governments, and how museums and culture have been drawn in, has been mixed. For the most part, community within the museum as a means to beer understand the museum visitor, forge links, and develop more relevant exhibitions, has been welcome. It would seem churlish to criticize the creation of the ‘community gallery’, community-based collecting and the appointment of the community outreach oﬃcer. But, as of the government policy, we need to ask whether the title of ‘community’ is being used simply because of its ‘aptitude for creating a positive regard for the organizations, policies or programmes to which it is applied’ (Mowbray, 2005, 257). Community in the museum might only be a means to popularize the subject rather than a fundamental reorganization of the power structures, which the more radical communitarians might prefer. As museums work with communities, is it relevant for the museum to question the nature, membership and purpose of that community group? Could the museum, by endorsing the community group, contribute to the creation of stereotypes, the isolation of non-members, and justify diﬀerence? Furthermore, as museums become a vehicle for state policies, should those in the sector be wary of how their work is inﬂuenced by the social and political agendas of government (Brighton, 2003)? For some commentators, many of whose views are recorded in the pages of Spiked, the answer is a resounding yes.3 In Spiked, museums are being asked to resist governments’ inﬂuences, which, by aempting to make museums their agent, will lessen their worth.

Constructing a Community Museum: the Museum of Free Derry, Northern Ireland Community heritage or museum initiatives that stem from grassroots initiatives, rather than those that are developed by the professional sector, will oen diﬀer

3

<www.spikedonline.com>. 420

C

M, C H greatly in their nature. Those that take their origin from within the community are inspired by the community’s perceptions of what they need and how this can best be achieved. The heritage ‘product’ is sometimes transient, oen personalityled, and frequently only best used and known amongst the community from which it emerged. These initiatives are oen highly independent and subject to the scrutiny of the community itself. Therefore, community initiatives will develop reﬂecting the community, as deﬁned by its leaders, incorporating its strengths as well as weaknesses. The less aractive characteristics of ‘community’, including its exclusiveness and bounded territoriality may be self-evident. Some of this will be related to why community interests itself in heritage. Rarely will a community group participate in heritage without reason; there are oen distinct motivations behind such activity which reﬂect the needs and aspirations of the community. Collecting oral histories, the creation of exhibitions and the formation of local history groups will oen be drawn into the pursuit of other goals that can be social, economic or political. An example of a museum initiative with its local community at its core comes from the contested city of Derry/Londonderry in Northern Ireland. The Museum of Free Derry, which followed a number of popular temporary displays, opened in January 1997. The museum has the subtitle of ‘The National Civil Rights Archive’ and takes as its basis the events of 20 January 1969, when a civil rights march in the city ended in a clash with the security forces and the death of 14 civilians. The day has since become known as Bloody Sunday and has been the subject of two investigations and tribunals, the latest of which – the Saville Inquiry – was announced in 1998 and, by mid-2007, had yet to produce its ﬁnal report.4 The Bloody Sunday Trust, which is the body that has established the museum, was formed in 1997 with the objective of supporting the families and acting as an information point for interested people. The Trust describes itself as a community-based education and history organization that examines issues relating to human rights. It aims to explore the troubled history of the city ‘as a means of enhancing respect and understanding for Human Rights, and promoting mutual understanding through the honest examination of our past’.5 Using a large archive of artefacts and oral histories, the museum website declares the purpose of the Museum of Free Derry as being to invite people to uncover a history that, until now, the community feels has been hidden. The museum is hoping to use this history to express local identity and as an educational tool. The museum also hopes to preserve the history of the area, and contribute to the local economy. Finally, rather than only being a collection of artefacts and documents, the museum is to be ‘an active part of the local community’.6 The Saville Inquiry held its hearings in Derry, and in a nearby building, on one of the city’s main streets, the Bloody Sunday Trust created a venue where families and visitors could gather, and provided an exhibition on the events of January 1969.

4 5 6

<www.bloody-sunday-inquiry.org.uk>. Ibid., accessed 26 September 2006. Ibid., accessed 26 September 2006. 421

T A R C

H I Due to the success of this ﬁrst exhibition, and because they were already receiving donations, the Trust began to consider a permanent museum. In 2006 the Trust opened a temporary exhibition in buildings in the Bogside that retain bullet marks made on Bloody Sunday. This was mainly a photographic exhibition enhanced by biographies of the deceased, a small number of objects, and a short documentary of the events. In the nine months that this exhibition was open, the organizers state it had 10,000 visitors. The permanent exhibition opened in January 2007, marking the 25th anniversary. The exhibition has Bloody Sunday as its centrepiece and places this in the context of the civil rights era and political events in Northern Ireland. The perspective oﬀered on the museum by some of those who have been most closely involved in its creation provides insights into its value. Community is crucial to the museum. Development Oﬃcer Adrian Kerr7 describes the museum as beginning with the local community, remaining rooted in the community and answerable to that community. He believes that the people who have donated objects to the museum do not feel that they have given away their collections. Instead, since the museum belongs to the community, they feel that the collections are still in their possession. This connection with community brings with it a sense of loyalty and accountability to the community, which is demonstrated by the museum’s relationship with its story. Kerr believes that the people of the area are proud of their story and wish to see it told, and it is the responsibility of those in the museum to tell it well. The website claims that the museum provides ‘the community’s story told from the community’s perspective’. The narrative in the museum is also a response to how the events of Bloody Sunday have been told in the past – the website declares that the story will not be the ‘distorted version parroted by the government and the media over the years’. Kerr emphasizes that the very telling of the story, from the perspective of the local people, is of immense value. For him, the story will not be compromised – it will not, for instance, be told from other perspectives; rather, the experience and viewpoints of the Free Derry community will be paramount. This is a highly politicized situation, which is creating a particular form of community and is emphasizing the contested nature of heritage and heritage construction. The events of Bloody Sunday have been claimed by this group and are told only from their own perspective. The story has been isolated as the key event to represent the people of the city and is told by a group with a certain political agenda. This example also reinforces the idea of community heritage as a forum for alternative histories, voices and experiences. The idea of community is harnessed because it is a grassroots unit that has independence from state structures and is a more appropriate form of identiﬁcation. Belonging to this community is deﬁned by the events of Bloody Sunday. This singles out the members of this community within Northern Ireland and amongst others who also have had ﬁrst-hand experiences of the Troubles. The proﬁle of the museum provides the families of the Bloody Sunday victims with greater deﬁnition and recognition, not only locally and nationally but also internationally. By publicly remembering and honouring 7

Interview, December 2006. 422

C

M, C H the deceased and their families, the events become part of the heritage landscape of the city. The Bogside perspective on Bloody Sunday is exhibited unchallenged and given authority by being told within a museum. The Free Derry Museum, although located in the heart of its community and telling a very local story, is inﬂuenced by the wider context of the social and political situation in Northern Ireland. It is a partial story of a community told in a highly volatile political context. The issues of how community is being interpreted, whose heritage is being represented by whom and for what purpose are paramount.

Conclusion: the Value of the Heritage–Community Alliance This chapter has explored the connections between museums and community from two perspectives: ﬁrstly, that of the professional museum sector using community as a means to change their museum practice; and, secondly, that of the community sector that has turned to museums and heritage as a means of communicating their own messages and/or aiding the deﬁnition and construction of community identity. In both cases the connections develop the goals of each constituency. Museums and their governing bodies are increasing their relevance by connecting with community, and the community sector is developing recognition through heritage. The characteristics of community are important when we consider how and why community is associated with the idea of heritage. Heritage is constructed on the basis of shared experiences, a common past and valued traditions. A sense of place, belonging and unity are frequently considered essential to the recognition and formation of heritage. Studies have demonstrated that heritage is a construct that is invented and manipulated according to social and political situations. Rather than being ﬁxed, heritage alters with changing circumstances, reinvented to beer suit the needs of a new situation. These characteristics of heritage are also core to the idea of community. The ideas of community and heritage share vital characteristics: both have multiple deﬁnitions; are constructed for contemporary needs; and will selectively draw on narratives of place, history and belonging. Both community and heritage are formed when required and will be discarded when the need declines. Both ideas draw upon positive connotations – both are ‘hoorah words’ that are oen promoted as natural, shared and non-threatening. Heritage and community are both thought of as alternatives to state, elitist or national versions of history or means of thinking about governance and relationships between people. When brought together, community and heritage reinforce one another. ‘Community heritage’ is a grassroots ideal – an activity that should be valued, and is challenged at one’s peril. Community heritage can become a means to express the needs of the local people and their concerns about preserving local identities. It can also be a means to express reaction to external processes or threats. At times this may not be an entirely planned action; instead, the artefacts, by being integrated within the community, become part of the community experience. For others, the very development of a heritage dimension to their work can be a conscious reaction and a deliberate 423

T A R C

H I means to communicate a message. In these cases it is not the heritage that is of value; instead, it is what heritage can say about the community group that is of greatest importance. The examples tell us something of the signiﬁcance of telling the experience of a community group and why the construction of collections, their display and exhibition is of value. It is important for groups to place their objects that maer on public display, and this point gives us insights into the construction of community and the value of heritage. Each of these areas of concern contributes to our understanding of how the notion of a shared heritage is constructed and used, to forge a group identity, deﬁne belonging and build community capacity. Heritage is an active tool and, in whatever context, whether that is a national museum or local community initiative, the heritage on display will be there with purpose.

References Bauman, Z. (2001), Community Seeking Safety in an Insecure World (London: Polity Press). Brighton, A. (2003), ‘Save Our Souls’, Museum Journal, July, 18–19. Burde, R. (2004), Museums and Galleries: Creative Engagement (National Museums Directors’ Conference). Butcher, H. (1993), ‘Introduction: Some Examples and Deﬁnitions’, in H. Butcher, H. Glen, P. Henderson and J. Smith (eds), Community and Public Policy (London: Pluto Press), 3–21. Butcher, H., Glen, H., Henderson, P. and Smith, J. (eds) (1993), Community and Public Policy (London: Pluto Press). Delanty, G. (2003), Community (London: Routledge). Home Oﬃce, UK (2001), Building Cohesive Communities (London: Home Oﬃce). Hooper-Greenhill, E. (2000), Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture (London: Routledge). Linley, R. (2004), New Directions in Social Policy: Communities and Inclusion Policy for Museums, Libraries and Archives (Museums Libraries and Archives Council). Mowbray, M. (2005), ‘Community Capacity Building or State Opportunism?’, Community Development Journal 40:3, 255–64. Museums Australia Incorporated (2000), Cultural Diversity Policy, <www. museumsaustralia.org.au/dbdoc/culturaldiv.pdf>. Oﬃce of the Deputy Prime Minister (2005), Sustainable Communities: People, Places and Prosperity, Report Presented to Parliament by the Deputy Prime Minster and First Secretary of State, Cm 6425. Putnam, R.D. (2001), Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (London: Touchstone).

424

24

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

European Landscapes: Heritage, Participation and Local Communities Werner Krauss

In the summer of 2005, a one-year-old bear sallied forth from his home in the Italian Alps and crossed the border to the tourist region of Bavaria, where he killed sheep and plundered chicken coops. Bear trappers specially summoned from Norway failed to capture him. Bruno, as the bear became known, became a national media event in Germany and a local nuisance. Hunters, scientists, columnists, shepherds, politicians, a dairymaid, farmers, bear hunters, animal rights activists, zoologists, mayors and tourists had their say. A local hunter, who for his own safety remained anonymous, at last shot Bruno. An excited debate sprang up about how much natural heritage local communities can really bear. Only a few years before, the protests of the local population brought the Bavarian Forest National Park into the news; bark-beetles had wreaked extensive damage on the forest, protected by conservationists who calmly let nature take its course and trusted, in retrospect rightly, in the regenerative power of the forest. How much global protection can a landscape bear that is so signiﬁcantly linked to the identity of its inhabitants? Yet it is not only the natural heritage that stirs potential conﬂict; in the summer of 2006, UNESCO threatened to revoke the World Heritage status of the Elbe river meadows near Dresden because the city planned to build a very long bridge over the landscape. How many changes can a cultural landscape bear if it is still to be regarded as heritage? The same question was posed in Cologne, where a planned high-rise development threatened to mar the view of the city’s Cathedral and so likewise endangered its World Heritage status. As Lowenthal (1998) amply demonstrates, heritage always brings conﬂict with it. It invokes inclusion and exclusion, a division into ‘us and them’; heritage is elitist and splits the world into above and below, into global and local. This is of course also true of protected landscapes, as Bender (1998) has so impressively shown in the example of Stonehenge; landscapes are never passive – they are inseparably bound up with the identity of the people that inhabit, shape and administer them.

T A R C

H I Landscapes are fundamental to identity at the local, national and, increasingly, transnational levels (Bender, 1998, 25). For UNESCO, landscapes are a heritage of mankind, and for the EU, landscapes are a means of constructing a European identity through ‘unity in diversity’, beyond merely national interests (McDonald, 1996). The subtitle of Bender’s book on Stonehenge is Making Space; landscapes are spaces that are produced in each case under new conditions stamped today by concepts like environment, sustainability and biodiversity. In contrast, the idea of landscape as a production space for foodstuﬀs plays an ever slighter role. Landscapes have become an end in themselves. As the then European Commissioner for Agriculture expressed in 1998, in what has now become a legendary dictum: ‘We have to produce more landscapes.’1 The implementation of this slogan has led to a new kind of conﬂict, in which local communities are at the centre. The European response to such conﬂicts is included in the Council of Europe’s Landscape Convention2 which places the participation of local communities at its core and includes diversity of perception in its deﬁnition of landscapes. Landscapes are what the people who live in them perceive them to be, which very much represents a new element in the approaches to the planning and management of sustainable landscapes. The Council of Europe’s Landscape Convention provides a good opportunity to take another look at the diverse conﬂicts that are bound up with the production of landscapes, focusing particularly on the role of local communities and the concept of participation. In recent years, research has concentrated increasingly on the inherent element of power in environmental and heritage policies. A multitude of studies have deconstructed concepts such as authenticity, origin, natural and cultural heritage, and demonstrated the omnipresence of power relationships therein. Environmental politics has long lost its innocence and disclosed itself to be, like all politics, power politics. Nevertheless environmental politics, as many environmental protectionists could eloquently and rightly demonstrate, are more necessary than ever. It is, therefore, important to examine the nature of the conﬂicts, the production of protected landscapes, and the actual practices of participation by local communities. The questions that can be posed today are: how is heritage constructed? How do relations change between people, and between people and things or non-human beings when a landscape is placed under protection? How can heritage be conceived as a process, and what can be learned from this about the participation of local communities? In this chapter, I pursue these questions using two case studies. The ﬁrst is concerned with the conﬂicts about a nature park in the Alentejo region of southern Portugal, while the second addresses the contestation surrounding the Wadden Sea national park in northern Germany. Ethnographic examples have the advantage of tracing processes instead of instructing the actors. The object is to produce the most exact possible descriptions of heritage and the concepts of ‘participation’ and ‘local community’ under diverse political, economic, ecological and social conditions – of 1 2

Cited in Die Zeit, 5 February 1998. This may be found at: . 426

H, P

L C real people in real places. I refer to the productive elements in each conﬂict, and do so against the background of a few of the newer theoretical approaches that aim at understanding the politics of nature in a globalized world.

Politics of Nature: New Approaches Aer a long period when the environment was widely regarded as the victim of modernity, with concerned scientists and scholars contributing to keep the subject in the foreground, much has recently changed. Common concepts such as heritage, authenticity, nature and culture have been increasingly deconstructed, and politics that treat such concepts as absolutes are suspicious. But deconstruction does not imply destruction, but relativity, and a diversity of perspectives (see, for example, Descola and Pálsson, 1996). What remains are individual bricks which can be rebuilt by incorporating all the actors. Landscapes, therefore, are not ‘simply there’ but are poly-semantic, processual and relational. The need for the researcher is to trace these relationships that make up a landscape. In a series of studies Latour has pointed out that the question today no longer concerns the alternative of constructed or non-constructed, but rather whether a construction is well or badly made (Krauss, 2006; Latour, 2005a). In order to make this distinction, exact ethnographic observation is required as to how protected or sustainable landscapes today are actually made – that is, designed, administered and also inhabited. It is not a question of abstract concepts such as nature or culture, but rather of concrete things, of, as Latour (2004) calls it, a realistic politics of nature or, in a broader sense, a ‘politics of things’ (Latour, 2005b, 15). What exactly are the conﬂicts about, what is their object? What new events, things or actors come into play, and how do these new states of aﬀairs change the established networks of those actors who shape and name a landscape or region? How do the existing assemblies change, what new assemblies emerge? These are major questions in view of the European Landscape Convention; how will it change the complicated arrangement between local communities, regions, the state and the continent? How can global environmental discourse and local concerns be conceived together, and where and how can their linking take place? Latour has extended the concept of actors to include ‘non-human actors’. He adduces innumerable examples of how newly arising actors like bacteria, animals or polluted water, which are made ‘explicit’ and suddenly play a role, change existing networks. Even more, these things or non-human actors become themselves a component of the networks through what are called ‘spokespersons’, or representatives who speak up for them. Networks in turn cannot be imagined simply as connections between individual points, between actor A and actor B. It is rather a maer of making explicit the whole complexity of such individual connections, to ‘thicken’ them through exact narrative description. Only then can we take into account how the oen surprising strategies of individual actors really take eﬀect; a mayor who suddenly makes a volte-face, a conservationist who suddenly makes common cause with his former opponents; or, again, migratory 427

T A R C

H I birds that seek new resting areas in view of climate change; and a rising water level that requires the enactment of new measures. The circle of those who join the debate under a regime of participation is thus extended to non-human actors. Actors shed their one-dimensionality and become recognizable in their complexity; they can unite diﬀerent and even opposing perspectives in one and the same person. If it is hardly possible to introduce a new language, it is possible to reﬂect on generic rhetoric and re-think the relation of heritage, participation and local communities on these premises. For example, the social anthropologist Kim Fortun clariﬁes this idea with the example of the now ubiquitous concept of ‘stakeholder’. In an administrative-technocratic context, talk of all stakeholders having to sit around the table has become a commonplace. Yet what is a stakeholder? Does he/she really represent only a single interest, a single concern, a single goal? Fortun (2001, 11–14) has shown impressively that so-called stakeholders are oen commied to several, not infrequently opposing, interests. She applies the concept of the ‘double-bind’ to the situation of most stakeholders. The double-bind is not the exception, but the rule. Thus in my research, mayors invariably played an important role, as later described in detail. They are almost always in an intermediate position in which they enter into contracts with external parties (mostly with ‘those on top’) for whom they must serve as a spokesman to ‘those below’ in their local community. The same is true of NGOs like Greenpeace that champion the prevention of pollution in the North Sea and the protection of wild geese, but set aside this position when it is a maer of advocating oﬀshore wind-power stations. Fortun prefers, therefore, to call such actors ‘enunciatory groups’ rather than stakeholders. Enunciatory groups most oen represent positions towards diﬀerent entities, oen enter into connections without sharing the goals of their coalition partners, while their own goals are oen contradictory and temporary. This concept takes actual reality into account much more than the static one of stakeholders. Such an approach can oﬀer a new means of discussing heritage and environmental conﬂicts, and especially the ‘frictions’ between an environmental discourse that has long become global and its many contradictions in local practice. The concept of ‘friction’ was introduced by Tsing (2005, 5–6) in order to link and describe global connections and local conﬂicts. She uses the word in its quite literal sense of a ‘rubbing together’ that oen brings about a necessary slowing down of processes and change. As I will show, the changes to which local communities are exposed in times of climate change, environmental destruction, neo-liberalism and the establishment of ecological regimes are so immense that they need to be harnessed to a process of adaptation. The conﬂict of local communities with heritage measures will thus appear in a new light, and participation will be seen as a complex and oen contradictory practice. As the case studies below demonstrate, the justiﬁcation for heritage lies not in the latest scientiﬁc certainties, but rather in its participatory construction, which ought, of course, to include the sciences as spokespersons. Heritage is about something real; real actors who aempt to address urgent concerns.

428

H, P

L C Case Study 1: the Alentejo, Portugal3 At the beginning of the 1990s I began to study the social and cultural dimensions of environmental degradation in the Alentejo and found there quite another environmental conﬂict than the one expected. In the south-western part of the region, a nature park had been created to protect the coast against the booming tourist industry and intensive farming. A graﬃto emblazoned on an old ﬁsherman’s hut became the title of my dissertation on environmental conﬂicts, ecological discourse and sustainable development (Krauss, 2001) – ‘Hang the Greens!’ In recording the actions of the actors, it became obvious that the environmental conﬂict between the local population and the environmental administration of this coastal landscape pointed to the ambiguous nature of understandings of environment and nature. The Alentejo is a landscape that underwent many changes of signiﬁcance during the twentieth century. Under the regime of the dictator Salazar, the region was supposed to be transformed into the granary of the nation; the inhabitants served as cheap labour on the large estates of the great landowners. Aer the 1974 Carnation Revolution, the Alentejo became the scene of agricultural reform; the mainly landless migrant workers took possession of the land of their masters and built up hundreds of cooperatives. ‘A terra a quem a trabalha’4 was the rallying cry, and the concept of ‘terra’ bears within it the entire range of meaning of ‘land’, from the land that is worked to the land in which identity is rooted. This process came to a rather abrupt end with Portugal’s entry into the EU in 1986 and the advent of a neo-liberal economy under the then Prime Minister, Cavaco Silva. The cooperatives were dissolved, a terra was ready to be sold, and the members of the cooperatives found themselves again in the free market. At the same time, in this corner of Europe forgoen by progress, a new regime established itself in order to save the coast from speculation and destruction – with the agreement of the local communities, a nature park was created in several stages, with the goal of achieving sustainable development for the region. The strip of coast was now managed and deﬁned according to ecological criteria. But what became of the terra in which the identity of the people of the region was rooted, and which was a major catchword in the rhetoric of local politicians? The powerful president of the large administrative district of Odemira had agreed to the founding of the nature park, but, for all that, subsequently became one of the most powerful opponents of its administration, itself located in Odemira. Global ecological discourse and its conventions, upon which the nature park was largely founded, and a local politics that rested on its connection to a nossa terra, led to ‘frictions’ in Tsing’s sense of the word. When a tanker disaster occurred in the neighbouring harbour at Sines and an oil slick covered the coast of Odemira, the administration of the nature park spoke of an unpleasant, but ﬁnally unimportant, event. The long-term ecological harm was slight, and the responsibility for dealing 3 4

The following remarks draw on my work on the Alentejo, based on my research there in the 1990s and 2005. See Krauss (2001) and Krauss (2006). ‘The land to those who work it!’ 429

T A R C

H I with it was that of other ministries and administrations. The district president of Odemira, however, saw in the accident not the administrative dimension, but instead seized upon the horror felt by the local inhabitants at the pollution. Subsequently, he had a monument erected in a coastal village to mark the involvement of the inhabitants and to the marines who rushed to their help. Each year, the Dia do Mar Limpo, the ‘Day of the Clean Sea’, is commemorated with a demonstration on the beach. In a procession redolent of Catholic liturgical practices, and with a rhetoric evoking the will of the people and their bonds with their homeland, the coast is incorporated into the local discourse and made practically tangible as a nossa terra – not without a sideswipe at the inactivity of the nature park administration during the commemorated aﬀair. This local discourse was further reinforced by the enterprises of foreign agricultural entrepreneurs, who invested in the intensive cultivation of fruit and vegetables in the middle of the nature park. They were a thorn in the side of the park administration, but had been tolerated because of, as it was politely formulated, ‘higher-ranking interests’. For the under-staﬀed and newly created park administration and its director, a Lisbon architect, this was a very disagreeable situation in which they saw themselves at the mercy of traditionally more powerful ministries and interests. Portugal, the new EU member, saw these capital investments as contributing to urgently required economic regeneration. At the same time, the director saw himself confronted by a local community that had identiﬁed his administration as the (negative) object in the construction of a local identity. How could it be that the nature park administration allowed foreign investors to build over large areas when it refused indigenous small farmers permission even to build new barns? The conservationists were, almost without exception, educated city people, members of elites who lived here in the provinces as if in exile. The law was on the side of the nature park, but the language and culture of the local communities remained strange and inaccessible to the conservationists. The NGOs, which worked closely together with the administration, had in the formative phase of the young Portuguese democracy decided against partisan action and in favour of ‘the system’, as it was called in the language of the old Cold War. In this way they could make use of legislative resources and international connections for their concerns, while local politicians used (post-) communist rhetoric to draw aention to their neglect by the central government. It was not only the director of the nature park who found himself in a doublebind. The agricultural enterprises also constituted a complex challenge for the district president. The conﬂict came to a head with one of these enterprises, that of the French investor Thierry Roussel, a world-famous playboy, once married to Christina Onassis, the daughter of the Greek shipping magnate, and now the trustee of the fortune of the richest child in the world – their daughter. His business, bearing the locally coloured name, Odefruta, had the long-term goal of the industrial production of strawberries and other foodstuﬀs for the European market and, at the same time, of creating as many as 600 urgently needed local jobs. This was an oﬀer that the president of an impoverished district naturally greeted warmly, 430

H, P

L C even if he had been an advocate of the nature park. The balancing act between these irreconcilable positions was struck when Roussel proposed operating his production in the form of ecological farming, with a view to a future EU ecological label (which today, many years later, actually exists), and so to practise sustainable development within the nature park. In the meantime, the media drew aention to the constant (and probably real) environmental degradation being wreaked by chemical agents, land utilization, greenhouses, and so on. The district president now found himself again in a highly complex situation: branded by the conservationists and the media as a traitor, and suspected by his Communist Party comrades as a neo-liberal revisionist, he staked everything on the Odefruta card and the business’s bright ecological future. The story became an international media event and ended a few years later with Roussel, who had obviously miscalculated in his speculations, ﬂeeing the country under cover of night and never being seen again. He le behind an ecological disaster and several hundred workers with unpaid wages. What remained were other, evidently beerrun, agricultural businesses, and the feeling among the local population that there was not much substance to the oen-invoked idea of sustainable development. Such iridescent personalities are not alone in determining the fate of this now protected landscape; there are also new and inﬂuential actors, especially environmental activists. The oer population of the south-western Portuguese coast played a pivotal role in another and, from the point of view of conservationists, much greater threat – the greedy appetite of the tourist industry and its investors. Since the founding of the nature sanctuary on this still largely undeveloped coast, plans for a tourist complex, with swimming pools and golf courses for several thousand guests, had been shelved. Needless to say, however, investors discovered nature conservation and integrated it into their proposals. Why not bundle hordes of tourists into centres with luxury apartments amidst the unspoiled nature of this ‘still virgin coast’ and sell the whole thing as eco-tourism? The native oers are an ecological rarity because they inhabit both fresh and salt water, and are protected under the Bern Convention. In order to use this resource in the ﬁght against tourism, the conservationists initiated a study to prove the presence of these nocturnal and shy animals in the development area. For this purpose they implanted radar transmiers in a few animals, and mobilized the national media to report the study and about the potential danger to the coast. Access for the local population, on the other hand, remained barred, leading to misunderstandings and misconceptions. With some vehemence, one conservationist reported that the locals not only hunted the oers, but also even ate them. Fishermen, for their part, wondered what was conservationist about implanting technological devices in oers. There were oers everywhere – on the oﬃcial negotiating table, in the grand projects, in the media, in cafés, and even sometimes on the beach; the oer had become a resource in the rhetorical struggle over identity and membership (see Krauss, 2006). The absurdity into which such communications could dri is no exception, but rather a consistent feature of the politics of nature. There are irresolvable conﬂicts between economic and ecological interests; there is an oen unbridgeable social 431

T A R C

H I and cultural gap between conservationists and locals; and all the actors ﬁght simultaneously on various fronts. Local politicians, conservationists (of coast, animals and plants), farmers, investors, national politicians and EU representatives all sit at the same negotiating table. How, in this context, can the landscape be protected and sustainable development introduced when the only real economic factors are, now as before, the drain of the rural population and speculative grand projects? How can identity be developed when the landscape in which one lives is no longer recognizable in the words of those who administer it? How can a politics of nature be conducted when big investors in Portugal have been corrupt? How do other agencies work together with a population that traditionally draws its identity from oppression and discrimination? How are local concerns made intelligible to an elitist conservationism? All actors use the discursive and legal resources available to them; they respond contradictorily, tactically, and adjust their rhetoric to the given situation. Again and again, individual actors have pressed ahead and changed the history of this landscape, changed the existing networks and created new ones. Through these frictions nature has become a constant variable in this landscape. The politics of nature have produced new arrangements of relations and assemblies that are more or less democratic and act towards an uncertain future. These politics do not take place beyond this world but in a young democracy in which, as in many places, environmental politics has assumed (or can assume) a pioneering position as far as the compliance with laws, rules and participation is concerned. Everyone is working for the same goal, even if everyone oen understands it quite diﬀerently. It is oen under the most diﬃcult conditions, here at the edge of Europe, that the problems of the global village have to be solved. The south-western coast of Portugal has thus become a maer of concern, if one that is constantly in danger of being neglected.

Case Study 2: Wadden Sea5 The concept of constructivism is one of contention in academia. My second example concerns a landscape that has been constructed through and through. It is the stretch of the German North Sea coast whose seaward half is commonly called ‘Wadden Sea’ and is marked by a coastal landscape that has come into being through the interplay of human agency and nature. The ﬂat coastal shelf of the Wadden Sea is the result of devastating storm tides that, with the exception of an island chain and individual ‘holms’ (Halligen), made the mainland into sea. At the same time, the coastal landscape is the product of a centuries-old tradition of dyking and the reclamation of land. No one can say where the boundary here runs between nature and culture. In this environment an embiered conﬂict has raged for decades about what nature really is.

5

The following remarks are based on my ﬁeldwork in North Friesland between 2001 and 2004. See Krauss (2002; 2003; 2005a; 2005b). 432

H, P

L C The Wadden Sea has been a national park for over two decades, the goal being the protection of unspoiled natural development. The declaration that made the Wadden Sea protected nature was equivalent to a radical reinterpretation of this landscape; hitherto, the emphasis with respect to the coast had been on reclamation and ever more dyking for coastal protection. For centuries, coastal inhabitants had seled behind newly erected dykes, drained and farmed the land, maintained the dykes and waited until enough sediment had gathered in front of them to reclaim yet more new land. The struggle against natural forces and the sea, and its signiﬁcance for the identity of the coastal inhabitants, was expressed in a poster protesting against the national park that today still stands before the entrance to a small coastal town: ‘Eco-dictatorship, no thanks! God made the sea and the Frisians the coast’. It is not only the sediment of the sea ﬂoor that washes up before the dykes; so too do ‘sedimented pasts’ (Bender, 1998, 25). In the conﬂict with the national park and the conservationists, the image arose of a unitary and purportedly continuous identity of the coastal inhabitants that goes back to the Frisian migration, even though, in reality, Frisians are only a minority in this region. Since the founding of the national park, the line of conﬂict has run parallel to the debate about nature and nature conservation, in the course of which debate the participating actors have re-positioned themselves. Yet this description of the conﬂict over the nature of the Wadden Sea and the coastal landscape does not tell the whole story. The confrontations are at the same time an example from which we can learn much about heritage, participation and local community. The oen vociferous debates, conducted in the presence of the media, can easily deceive us about their productive contributions. The politics of nature, which play an ever-growing role on the north German coast, and the related ending of dyke building, demanded a redirection of the existing networks that shape and administer the region. In the following are presented a few tactics, strategies and practices with respect to heritage, participation and local communities that show the creativity of the participating actors.

Participation 1 The establishment of the national park followed the hitherto biggest eco-research project in Germany, which, in its concluding report, represented the coast as a unique and conservation-worthy system from the biological, chemical, geological, physical and, to a certain degree, social points of view, and at the same time proposed potential protected zones, ranked according to various grades. This ecosystem report was presented to the public in the form of hundreds of hearings before district and community councils, hunters and ﬁshermen, and interested citizens. Angry protests characterized these meetings; sometimes they ended in tumult. Demonstrations were organized, and when the then minister-president of the state of Schleswig-Holstein appeared, a scarecrow was burned, tomatoes and eggs hurled, and the police controlled the situation only with diﬃculty.

433

T A R C

H I Resistance was ignited on various points – in general the monopolization of the landscape by conservationists, the restrictions on access to and availability of the Wadden Sea, and the unrecognizability of the landscape once it had been transformed into the language of science. In the course of these protests, strong opposition groups were formed, particularly among hunters and ﬁshermen. These made use of the ‘sedimented pasts’ and invoked the image of an unbroken, centuries-old tradition of Frisian culture so as to re-deﬁne the solidarity of the local community by drawing on ancient resources. As for the conservationists, they travelled for months from one hearing to the next, and many were happy when they came away from these confrontations with damage only to their psyches and car tyres. Their solidarity grew through their common experience as ‘guerrilla ﬁghters’ in enemy country. Oﬃcially employees of an administration, bureaucrats, they re-discovered themselves as ﬁghters for justice, for nature.

Participation 2 The zoning proposed by the eco-system report was long negotiated at oﬃcial political levels and eventually partly adopted in a toned-down form (Stock and Kiehl, 1996). Yet the administration of the national park responded to the resentment of the population, and its oﬃcials travelled to every single community that bordered directly on the park in order to negotiate the local use of the Wadden Sea with the mayors and citizens. Special regulations were decided for each of the local communities within a distance of 1 km of the park. These negotiations between mayors and national park oﬃcials were far more successful than the previous debates. Above all, local mayors could appear before their mistrustful communities with their heads held high and announce successes. In special cases working parties were formed that acted as regular meeting places for interest groups like NGOs, community representatives, users, mayors, residents and other persons concerned to discuss problems and ﬁnd common solutions.6 The gatherings always began with coﬀee and cake; resolutions were adopted only unanimously on principle; and stress was laid on polite conduct towards each other. Here people met who had stood opposite each other in bier and oen hate-ﬁlled confrontations, and together sought compromises and solutions. When they found them, they raised local, federal and national park ﬂags at oﬃcial celebrations.

Participation 3 One consequence of the confrontations was the formation of what was known as the Board of Trustees of the National Park, which was aached to the park administration in an advisory capacity. Represented on the Board were interest groups ranging from mayors to representatives of the ﬁshermen, the hunters, science, the NGOs (for example, the World Wildlife Fund) and others; it was headed by the district administrators of the relevant areas. The Board was to agree upon 6

The work-group in which I participated as an observer met at a traditional house on a holm. 434

H, P

L C general guidelines and developments, and make suggestions; it also had a vote in directorial aﬀairs. Here too embiered opponents met at the same table, but now the national park oﬃcials were in the minority. In oen drawn-out debates, and at every opportunity, fundamental questions were again discussed and maers that had already been decided were re-opened. Coalitions formed according to regions; the Board served representatives of particular interests and, oen enough, was a forum for populists. More than once the director of the national park would complain that this advisory body behaved as an anti-national park commiee. At the same time, the forum provided the possibility of speaking out before a public of decision-makers – not only about decisions on the agenda but also to represent general positions: we ‘island inhabitants’; ‘coastal dwellers’; ‘ﬁshermen’; ‘hunters’; ‘from political party x’. At the end of such a meeting, I noted down the following typical exchange: under the rubric ‘Miscellaneous’, the national park director reported that a sign for the national park had been set up in a town along the dyke. The mayor of the community called out: ‘Signs everywhere; wherever you look, you see nothing but signs for the national park. Is that really necessary?’ General laughter and agreement followed. The national park director took an acerbic tone: ‘Mr Mayor, I am obliged to point out to you that this is not a point of discussion; I am reporting on the execution of a legal directive.’ The mayor leaned back in his chair with a satisﬁed air: ‘I only wanted to hear that.’ Local identity is created in opposition to the state, which is here represented in its long arm of the national park. Conversely, in many of my interviews, the deprecatory aitude of the conservationists towards the locals, describing them as uneducated, coarse and unteachable, became plain. The conservationists also formed their identity in opposition, namely to the coastal inhabitants. As these rather marginal examples show, the Board of Trustees of the National Park fulﬁlled, in addition to its actual advisory function, a quite diﬀerent purpose of a symbolic nature. In this public space, actors who have fought many ﬁghts with and against each other meet together at regular intervals, and both keep alive the memory of those bales and keep open the possibility of reviving old coalitions or entering into new ones.

Of Mayors and National Park Officials The coastal districts are divided into a multitude of small communities, each of which has a mayor. The mayors ﬁll the always necessary and complicated role of the mediator between the communities and the higher-ranking powers upon whom the welfare of the communities depends. ‘Mayor’ is an honorary position and, at the same time, a full-time job. One of the people interviewed was simultaneously a member of: the dyke society; the coastal protection agency; a hunters’ club; the district council; a commission; the Board of Trustees of the National Park; an initiative for more coastal protection; a work-group of the national park; and more. Mayors can speak in various ‘languages’: that of the people at celebrations, of geography and physics when the subject is sedimentary deposits, of coastal protection when

435

T A R C

H I it is a maer of dyke security, of the populist in electoral campaigns, of the law or of economics. Files are piled high on their night tables, and at the same time they must keep the respect of their voters by managing successfully their farms or ﬁrms. Mayors stand in a constant tension between negotiations with external powers like the national park, where they obtain compromises, and their communities, where they must sell the compromises. This frequently requires a balancing act between conﬂicting interests. Mayors have continually to produce an inner unity, which can oen be represented only as a common outward front; they and their communities are dependent upon the outside world and must position themselves with respect to it. Mayors also well understand the constraints on the director of the national park who must, prior to making an agreement with a community, ﬁrst obtain approval from the Department of the Environment. National park administrations are woven into a dense, hierarchical net, with long chains of command, mountains of ﬁles and intrigues. Mayors also know how to play this scale. They are oen hard and diﬃcult negotiators, whom no one gets past easily in a democratic society, not even the state with its long tentacles, and no less national park directors. Both oppose one another oen enough: ‘We’ve oen enough faced one another with drawn swords,’ said one district administrator to a national park oﬃcial at his parting, ‘but we’ve never aacked the other from behind.’ That too is a kind of participation.

Participation, Conflict and New Challenges The construction of the North German coastal landscape will never be concluded; change is the only constant. The resistance of a large part of the population to the national park was followed aer 2003 by the outcry against the designation of the landward side of the coast as an area subject to the Flora-Fauna-Habitat-Directive, in consequence of the implementation of the Natura 2000 Convention. In addition, the inscription of the Wadden Sea on the UNESCO World Heritage list has been under discussion for years now, but this status can be granted, according to the express declaration of UNESCO, only with the agreement of the population. The district of North Friesland, where this ﬁeldwork was conducted, has refused its assent to this day. Currently a fairly dramatic change is taking place on this coast; the coastal landscape is becoming an ‘energy landscape’, which has confronted nature and environmental protectionists, and others, with ideological and practical challenges. In the course of promoting wind power, the landward side of the coast has been transformed into a gigantic wind park, and the ﬁrst oﬀshore wind parks have already been approved and provoked new conﬂicts. The networks and conﬂict culture of this region appear to be capable, as my previous examples show, of meeting new circumstances and challenges. Dynamic relations demand a participation that is redeﬁned in each case according to the power arrangements of the network. All the actors are in movement, the human and the non-human, and from this movement emerge local communities and sustainable landscapes – as long as the actors can come to an agreement about them.

436

H, P

L C Conclusion Both the Alentejo nature park and the Wadden Sea national park are examples of the ‘Europe of regions’ envisioned under the banner of sustainability. They are also examples of the complex and tense relations between heritage, participation and local communities. The construction of sustainable landscapes, as is demanded by the European Landscape Convention, does not take place in a vacuum; the space must always ﬁrst be created in a world where everything already belongs to someone, where discourses and practices have already been established. These have all been shaped by their respective histories and have also always been changeable. In centralistic Portugal, formal and informal practices of power are diﬀerent from those of federally organized Germany; in both countries participatory networks already cover the two regions discussed. Neither can exist without a close linkage with the outside – whether that be the state, the EU or global connections. Participation with respect to heritage means that networks are being altered even more in favour of a local perspective. Yet this local perspective also emerges only amidst the multiple frictions of the interplay of inner and outer forces; it is formed through ‘enunciatory communities’ that oen join forces for quite diﬀerent reasons and only temporarily. This path is oen diﬃcult, yet it is also perhaps a guarantee that compromises will be found for dynamic landscapes, at least until the next actor appears and a diﬀerent conﬁguration of participating forces has to renegotiate a fresh set of compromises.

References Bender, B. (1998), Stonehenge: Making Space (Oxford, New York: Berg). Benzing, B. and Herrmann, B. (eds) (2003), Exploitation and Overexploitation in Societies Past and Present (Berlin, Hamburg, London: Lit Verlag). Descola, P. and Pálsson, G. (eds) (1996), Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives (London: Routledge). Die Zeit (1998), ‘Wir müssen mehr Landscha produzieren’ – Interview with EU Minister of Agriculture Fischler, 5 February. Fortun, K. (2001), Advocacy aer Bhopal. Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press). Krauss, W. (2001), ‘Haengt die Gruenen!’ Umweltkonﬂikte, nachhaltige Entwicklung und oekologischer Diskurs (Berlin: Reimer Verlag). Krauss, W. (2002), ‘Towards Sustainable Development: The Cultural Dynamics of the Wadden Sea’, Wadden Sea Newsleer 26:1, 9–12. Krauss, W. (2003), ‘The Culture of Nature: Protected Landscapes as Sites of Conﬂict’, in B. Benzing and B. Herrmann (eds), Exploitation and Overexploitation in Societies Past and Present (Berlin, Hamburg, London: Lit Verlag), 339–46. Krauss, W. (2005a), ‘Coastal Environment Made Public: Notes from the Field’, in B. Latour and P. Weibel (eds), Making Things Public – Atmospheres of Democracy (Karlsruhe: ZMK and Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press), 398–403. 437

T A R C

H I Krauss, W. (2005b), ‘The Natural and Cultural Landscape Heritage in Northern Friesland’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 11:1, 39–52. Krauss, W. (2006), ‘Of Oers and Humans: An Approach to the Politics of Nature in Terms of Rhetoric’, Conservation and Society 3:2, 354–70. Latour, B. (2004), The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). Latour, B. (2005a), Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Latour, B. (2005b), ‘From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik or How to Make Things Public’, in B. Latour and P. Weibel (eds), Making Things Public – Atmospheres of Democracy (Karlsruhe: ZMK and Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press), 14–43. Latour, B. and Weibel, P. (eds) (2005), Making Things Public – Atmospheres of Democracy (Karlsruhe: ZMK and Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press). Lowenthal, D. (1998), The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). McDonald, M. (1996), ‘Unity in Diversity: Some Tensions in the Construction of Europe’, Social Anthropology 4, 47–60. Stock, M. and Kiehl, K. (1996), ‘Ökosystemforschung Waenmeer – Synthesebericht: Grundlagen für einen Nationalparkplan’, Schrienreihe des Nationalparks Schleswig-Holsteinisches Waenmeer, Volume 8. Tsing, L.A. (2005), Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press).

438

25

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

Cultural Diversity, Heritage and Human Rights William S. Logan

Cultural heritage protection was commonly seen in the past by heritage industry professionals as simply a technical maer – of applying the best or latest scientiﬁc solution to preserve or restore an artefact, monument or site. With the focus shiing towards intangible forms of heritage – ‘living heritage embodied in people’ – the paradigm has shied. At the global level, UNESCO is the leading organization engaged in shaping aitudes to, forming statements of principle about, and engaging with its member states in, projects aimed at protecting cultural heritage and cultural diversity. Since at least its ‘Linking Universal and Local Values’ conference in Amsterdam in 2003, UNESCO has promoted the view that heritage protection does not depend alone on top-down interventions by governments or the expert actions of heritage industry professionals, but must involve local communities. UNESCO now argues that it is imperative that the values and practices of local communities, together with traditional management systems, are fully understood, respected, encouraged and accommodated in management plans if the heritage resources are to be sustained into the future (UNESCO, 2004, 9). Local communities need to have a sense of ‘ownership’ of their heritage; this reaﬃrms their worth as a community, their ways of going about things, their ‘culture’. Having a say in determining one’s own life circumstances, including one’s cultural and physical environment, is now commonly seen as a fundamental human right. Indeed, it is essential to see cultural heritage (especially intangible cultural heritage) within a human rights context and as part of people’s eﬀorts to maintain their own identity and, through this, the cultural diversity of the world. Further, failure to do so will lead to the inappropriate use of cultural heritage conservation principles and practice. The linkage between the goals of maintaining cultural diversity, protecting cultural heritage and enforcing human rights is still not clearly recognized by cultural heritage practitioners in many countries or even by human rights workers, despite the abundance of opportunities around the world to witness people struggling to assert their cultural rights in order to protect their heritage and identity (Carnegie Council, 2004; Logan, 2007a).

T A R C

H I Such linkages are problematic and there are many theoretical and practical dilemmas that need to be resolved. These include the apparent disjuncture between human rights, as universal and all-encompassing, and cultural diversity and cultural heritages, which are by deﬁnition culturally and temporally speciﬁc. This contradiction allows some societies to take up a cultural relativist or cultural ‘exceptionalist’ position, arguing that, because their culture is unique, they do not have to abide by universal standards of behaviour, including in the area of human rights. A further problem lies in the residual nature of cultural considerations in the various human rights instruments. At the practical level, commodiﬁcation of ethnic minority cultures through cultural tourism can bring communities a short-term beneﬁt in terms of revenue generation, but at the risk of the transformation and loss of cultural distinctiveness. It has to be recognized that some local communities prefer to achieve higher standards of living by modernizing and rejecting tradition, and, since it is their heritage at stake, they have a right to be heard. The emergence of a global heritage system, however, means that local heritages can also have world signiﬁcance, and the international community may have a claim to some level of inﬂuence in decision-making processes about local heritage management (Watkins, 2005; Leask and Fyall, 2006). Another claim is made by powerful actors, both domestic and external, who seek to use cultural heritage protection as a way of obtaining political goals that are essentially unrelated to conservation. The chapter explores these diﬃculties, drawing on the relevant research literature in the humanities, social sciences and international law. It focuses on the evolution of the human rights strand in UNESCO’s thinking, from the organization’s establishment in 1946 to its recent conventions relating to the protection of intangible cultural heritage (2003) and cultural expressions (2005). The chapter concludes that heritage conservation in such circumstances can only be understood as a form of cultural politics and that geographers, heritage educators and practitioners who work in this context, particularly those from more developed countries, need to be mindful of the unintended impacts of their actions. The focus here is on UNESCO; space does not allow a more complete coverage of statements and reports emanating from other agencies in the United Nations system, such as the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples or the International Coalition of Cities against Racism and World Forum on Human Rights, both of which are linked to UNESCO. Similarly, lile aention is given here to the inﬂuential work of non-government organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the COHRE Global Forced Evictions Program, or regional bodies such as the Carnegie Council, publisher of the important Human Rights Dialogue, or, for Asia, the New Delhi-based Asian Centre for Human Rights or the Asian Human Rights Commission headquartered in Hong Kong. Further research projects are needed to investigate these agencies in the detail they deserve, as well as new case studies to explore how the various dilemmas discussed in the chapter are played out under diﬀerent political regimes around the world.

440

C D, H H R Previous Studies It is now 60 years since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) was adopted by the United Nations as a key instrument in its programme to reduce conﬂicts between peoples of diﬀerent cultures. Despite this, human rights issues feature lile in the literature of the inter-disciplinary ﬁeld of cultural heritage studies. This is no doubt part of a more general problem referred to by the Smithsonian Institute (2005) as the ﬁeld’s under-theorized state. Conferences, workshops and their associated reports and proceedings sometimes see the need to protect minority cultures as part of a more inclusive, even democratic, approach to heritage conservation, but do not refer directly to the link with cultural rights or human rights, even where such events ﬂag cultural diversity as a key component of their overall theme (for example, Japan National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, 2002). Although the interrelationship between humans and their environment has been central to my own ﬁeld, of geography, since the discipline emerged in universities in the late nineteenth century, the link with human rights has been neglected. The growing international interest in intangible cultural heritage has, in fact, seen the spatial element pushed aside (Logan, 2007b). This is not to say that individual geographers have not been advocates of human rights, developing teaching programmes and undertaking research related to the issue. There are some signs of change, however, with the development of critical heritage studies programmes in universities in a number of countries. In the sub-ﬁeld of museum studies, Galla (1997) and Kreps (2003) call similarly for greater cross-cultural consciousness among curators in collection policies and exhibition content. But if we are to canvass the human rights literature more fully, we need essentially to look to the ﬁelds of archaeology, anthropology, politics, development studies and, above all, international law. It is in the cognate ﬁeld of archaeology that much of the new critical cultural heritage literature has been appearing. Among the most stimulating scholars in archaeology, Laurajane Smith (2006, 42) challenges the ‘authorized discourse’ as reﬂecting the ‘grand narratives of nation and aesthetics’ and ‘bolstering and privileging expert and professional judgments and stewardship over “the past”’, but she does not frame this in terms of human rights and the right to maintain cultural diversity. In another work, Smith (2004) sees archaeological practice as entwined with the apparatus of state power and control, leading to bier conﬂicts with indigenous communities. Here human rights are raised only in relation to one example – the inclusion of American Indian values in the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act 1990. This bears out O’Keefe’s (1999, 181) comment that many archaeologists still wondered what relevance human rights have to professional work, despite their obvious concern over issues such as site protection, the conduct of excavation, treatment of human remains and return of burial goods to indigenous peoples, all of which are in fact founded on human rights. In Australia, where archaeologists have been unable to avoid involvement with indigenous cultural heritage, the lateness in coming to human rights is surprising, 441

T A R C

H I even shocking, especially given the eloquent statement over some 15 years of the case for greater openness to non-Western management approaches in archaeology by Denis Byrne (see Byrne, 1991). While still not focusing on human rights speciﬁcally, a more critical view of Western dominance of the archaeological profession is seen in the works of Lydon and Ireland (2005), Claire Smith, including in her work with American archaeologist, Hans Martin Wobst (Smith and Wobst, 2005), and Lilley (2007). In the United States, where there are similar First Nations issues, archaeological publications continue to show lile direct concern for human rights, possibly reﬂecting the US position on internationalism, international charters and international human rights. The collection edited by Mathers, Darvill and Lile (2005) perhaps marks a change in direction for archaeological research in that country, and papers by Pyburn and others presented to the April 2006 ‘Cultural Heritage and Human Rights’ workshop at the University of Illinois reinforce the hope. In the development ﬁeld, a number of development agencies, including the World Bank, have, since the mid-1990s, come to recognize the essential linkage between maintenance of culture and a society’s ability to articulate and implement strategies of sustainable development. Cultural values determine: how people perceive themselves, their lives and their environment; how they accept or reject the actions of the state and its agencies; how they realize the need for change; how they resolve conﬂicts between each other over changes, whether that is in terms of resource allocation or environmental change (Logan, 2006). The UN requested its member states to develop the notion more fully in discussion papers, a case in point being the Culture and Development in Vietnam report (United Nations, 2003). Nevertheless, a number of scholars in anthropology, sociology and political science, as well as development studies, have seen globalization as a homogenizing process that is undermining the world’s rich cultural diversity. They see it as threatening to visit the various cultural ills of the West on other cultures, including fragile and vulnerable cultures of peripheral Third World nations; that is, as part of a wider paern of domination and maintenance of post-colonial relations of economic and cultural dependency (Tomlinson, 1999, 23). This is in stark contrast to the happy assimilation of cultural groups in Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992), now seen to be a totally misjudged rendering of the contemporary world scene. Other scholars see globalization leading to reactions such as the reinforcement of cultural traditions (Kahn, 1995; Berger and Huntingdon, 2002), the emergence of hybrid cultural forms (Hall, 1992; Pieterse, 2004) or the development of an ability to operate according to two modes of behaviour – local and global – concurrently (what Roland Robertson (1995) called ‘glocalization’). Nic Craith (2002; 2003), for instance, explores the politics of cultural traditions in Northern Ireland, identiﬁes a complex cultural plurality and hybridization, and argues for a re-conceptualization of Northern Ireland’s culture along lines that avoid binary oppositions. Like Stevenson (2003) and Isin and Turner (2006), Nic Craith goes further to identify links between cultural identity, cultural rights and citizenship. In her work on heritage activism in Penang, Malaysia, Nagata (2001) identiﬁes a research avenue not taken up by anthropologists at the time. By contrast, large amounts have been wrien by social scientists on whether religions other than Judaism and Christianity can 442

C D, H H R accommodate or support human rights (on Islam, see Baderin, 2003; Khan 2003; Shah 2006; on Chinese Confucianism, see Chan, 1999; Angle, 2002; on Buddhism, see Caney and Jones, 2001). Ignatieﬀ (2001a; 2001b) recognizes that the excessive individualism in Western human rights doctrine has led to criticism by the Islamic world, East Asia, and some within the West itself (cultural relativists). But he concludes that human rights advocates need not apologize since human rights are popular and necessary worldwide precisely because they protect individuals against group authority. It is in the ﬁeld of law that the literature focuses most directly on human rights and cultural rights issues, although by no means all legal scholars make the links between global justice, human rights and cultural heritage. The index to Geoﬀrey Robertson’s 750-page Crimes Against Humanity (3rd edition, 2006), for instance, refers to cultural rights only once, and heritage not at all. Culture seems to be taken for granted as permeating all, but he does not tease out the many key dilemmas relating to the concepts of cultural rights, cultural diversity and cultural heritage. Nevertheless, as the following discussion demonstrates, the international discourse on human rights now represents a body of work upon which scholars in other ﬁelds can and should draw.

UNESCO The protection of cultural heritage and cultural diversity has been a principal objective of UNESCO’s programme from the outset, its Constitution referring to the preservation of the ‘integrity and fruitful diversity of the cultures’ of the member states. During the period of rapid post-war decolonization, UNESCO’s General Conference adopted in 1966 a Declaration on the Principles of International Cultural Cooperation, Article 1 of which states that: ‘Each culture has a dignity and value which must be respected and preserved’, that ‘every people has the right and duty to develop its culture’. UNESCO’s role is in large part to inspire – to encourage its member states to embrace peace and development, to engage in intercultural dialogue and to maintain their cultures. Its vision is essentially optimistic and universalist – in short, modernist, as beﬁing a key Breon Woods institution (Logan, 2002; Chen, 2006). Adding the concept of ‘cultural rights’ to its agenda from the 1960s strengthened UNESCO’s global and globalizing position, since the doctrine of human rights is necessarily a universalist doctrine (Jones, 2001, 27). The promotion of human rights being fundamental to UNESCO’s mission, it might have been expected that human rights would have had great importance in the heritage-place conservation system created under the World Heritage Convention (1972). Yet this has proved to be very diﬃcult to achieve. Certainly South Africa’s Robben Island has been inscribed, largely on the basis of its connections with Nelson Mandela and the anti-apartheid movement, but why are places associated with the pro-democracy struggles of ethnic groups elsewhere not considered? Certain of the African slavery-related sites from several centuries ago, such as Senegal’s Gorée Island, are listed, but what about other sites that mark the end of colonialism, such 443

T A R C

H I as Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam? Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Hiroshima Dome are inscribed, but what about other genocides and massacres? Much of the diﬃculty lies in the character of UNESCO as an international government organization. How can diﬃcult sites be listed if this is likely to oﬀend a member state? Perhaps the potential conﬂict can be diﬀused by considering thematically derived sets of sites as transnational serial site nominations. Following the 1982 World Conference on Cultural Policies in Mexico, UNESCO made an important conceptual shi in the way it considered culture in its work, replacing its earlier ‘arts and literature’ deﬁnition of culture with a more anthropological deﬁnition that included also: ‘modes of life, the fundamental rights of the human being, value systems, traditions and beliefs’ (UNESCO, 1982). This deﬁnition became part of the intellectual foundation underlying the UNESCO diversity protection programme that emerged during the 1990s, in large part due to fears that globalization is working against the survival of cultural diversity (Yusuf, 2005). The UN had already declared the years 1988 to 1997 as a ‘Decade for Cultural Development’, with ‘cultural diversity’ as a key theme, and the World Commission on Culture and Development presented its ﬁnal report in 1995 under the title Our Creative Diversity (de Cuéllar, 1995). Concerned that cultural diversity represented in intangible forms of heritage was not well covered by existing legal instruments, the new Japanese Director-General of UNESCO, Koïchiro Matsuura, established a scheme in 2000, called ‘Proclamation of Master Pieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity’. The Proclamation was followed in 2001 by the Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, which maintains that cultural diversity is ‘a source of exchange, innovation and creativity’, and ‘as necessary for humankind as biodiversity is for nature’. In 2003 UNESCO’s General Conference approved the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Heritage. The Convention, focusing on ‘practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills’, came into force in April 2006 and now sits alongside the 1972 World Heritage Convention that deals with heritage places. It remains, at the time of writing, still in an early development phase (Logan, forthcoming a). However, both the 2001 Declaration on Cultural Diversity and the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Heritage bring human rights to the foreground. Article 4 of the 2001 Declaration deals speciﬁcally with human rights as the guarantor of cultural diversity, and limits the application of the instrument to those aspects of cultural heritage that do not infringe human rights. The preamble of the Intangible Heritage Convention also starts by referring to existing international human rights instruments, and Article 2 includes the statement that: ‘For the purposes of this Convention, consideration will be given solely to such intangible cultural heritage as is compatible with existing human rights instruments, as well as with the requirements of mutual respect among communities, groups and individuals, and of sustainable development.’ Meanwhile, within UN circles the perception that cultural diversity was threatened by globalization led to further initiatives and ultimately to another convention – the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, which was adopted by UNESCO’s General Conference 444

C D, H H R in October 2005. This has been taken up quickly by the international community and entered into force in March 2007, following its ratiﬁcation by the required 30 states in December 2006. The rapid speed is an indication of fears of new forms of colonization that would hold some nations and peoples in a dependent and exploited position – fears that are connected with, among other things, the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) encouragement of a process of trade liberalization that many countries think will undermine their right to determine their own national policies. Some development theorists, advocates of core-periphery theory, see the policies of the WTO reinforcing rather than dispersing existing concentrations of wealth and power (Berend, 2004). Certainly there is a growing literature on the tension between state sovereignty and external intervention by the WTO and other global agencies (Lilley, 2007). The Convention appears to run counter to the United States’ national interests and, as one might expect, it does not have US support at this time. The US rejoined UNESCO in 2003, under the Bush Administration, aer quiing the organization in 1984, and it has surprised some UNESCO oﬃcials in that it has moved rapidly to aack what it sees as anti-globalization initiatives. It argues that culture looks aer itself and does not require artiﬁcial protection by Ministries of Culture, which it sees as largely propaganda agencies. This is, of course, easily said when the forces of commercial entertainment and domination of much of the print and electronic media eﬀectively disseminate American culture. It should be noted that the fear of cultural globalization – by which is meant ‘Americanization’ in many quarters – does not merely aﬀect the poorer developing states but also First World countries whose culture is vulnerable to inﬁltration. This is a real fear in Canada, for instance, because of geographical proximity, but felt, too, even in distant Australia, where the recently signed Free Trade Agreement with the US seems to threaten local content in television, cinemas and theatres. Of all the Western countries in this position, however, France has probably been most outspoken, arguing that its cultural goods are unlike other goods and must be protected. It promotes an international organization of French-speaking countries and governments known as Francophonie to try to bolster its linguistic position in the world.

Dilemmas Many dilemmas – contradictions in the application of principles and lacunae in the discourse – result from the fact that cultural rights were recognized relatively late (Logan, forthcoming a). Within the human rights statements, cultural rights are largely treated as a ‘residual category’ (Stavenhagen, 1998, 1; Symonides, 1998; Eide, 2001, 289); when they are included, they come at the end, almost as an aer-thought. Furthermore, in many of the human rights instruments, as well as in much of the human rights discourse about them, the principal concern is with the individual rather than the group, community or society, although there has been a shi towards the collective dimension in recent times. What happens when collective rights come into conﬂict with individual human rights or individual 445

T A R C

H I perceptions of human rights? The UNESCO conventions and the 2001 Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity come down on the side of the collectivity – here, the world community. But the very notions of cultural diversity and of cultural heritage as a reﬂection of that diversity represent an obvious challenge to the idea of universal human rights. Moreover, the 2001 Declaration implies that conservation should be directed at all cultural heritages equally. While this reﬂects the need for UNESCO to act diplomatically and treat all member states equally, it also responds to a postmodern world view that acknowledges cultural diversity and emphasizes the importance of regional, even local, ways of doing things, instead of the more universal approaches espoused in the modernist period during which UNESCO was established. The breadth of the anthropological deﬁnition of culture adds further diﬃculties as almost all aspects of human behaviour can be claimed as part of one’s ‘culture’. There are some cultural forms held to be important by communities and groups within various countries that clearly contravene international human rights norms. The concept of ‘heritage’ is, as we know, subjective and ﬂuid; what we value and want to protect today is inevitably diﬀerent from what previous generations thought and future generations will think. Some past cultural practices have been eradicated, including social forms such as Chinese foot-binding, and economic forms such as ‘New World’ slavery (although this has been replaced by other global ‘slave’ trades – see Quirk, 2006). Thus, it is not enough simply to refer back to existing human rights instruments, as the conventions require; nor do limiting statements such as Ayton-Shenker’s: ‘No right can be used at the expense or destruction of another’ (Ayton-Shenker, 2003) deal satisfactorily with conﬂicting claims to cultural rights. Furthermore, human rights principles and limiting statements such as this are being ignored by governments all over the world. An appeal is oen made – from the United States to the poorest of nations – to cultural relativism and cultural exceptionalism (Franck, 2001). The problem is not helped by the contradiction between key concepts themselves; that is, of human rights, as universal and all-encompassing, and of cultural diversity and cultural heritage, which are by deﬁnition culturally and temporally speciﬁc (Academy of European Law, 2005). The relativist argument leads inevitably into the culture-based challenges to the notion of human rights as being a Western and essentially imperializing construct (Pahuja, 2004). While accepting that the history of human rights largely lies in actions by Western powers, especially France, Great Britain and the United States, other scholars (Donnelly, 1999; Du, 2002; Chen, 2006) argue that the extension of human rights remains critical to the non-Western world, where people’s rights are oen inadequately respected by the regimes in power. Gammelto and Hernø (2000, 160), in a paper on the human rights situation in Vietnam, acknowledge that the relativist position makes it diﬃcult to set universal rights standards, and argue instead that it is the diﬀerences within cultures that make it essential to set universal standards if the least powerful members of society are to be protected from actions by the state or dominant elite. Dembour (2001, 56–60) notes deﬁciencies with both the universalist and relativist approaches – the former being arrogant, the laer indiﬀerent. 446

C D, H H R Eriksen (2001, 142) is highly critical of UNESCO’s concept of culture and cultural rights, which he argues should be seen primarily as individual rights rather than collective rights. UNESCO, he asserts, has been side-tracked into focusing on the issue of cultural authenticity. All that is necessary is to be ‘sensitive to the fact that local realities are always locally constructed, whether one works in inner-city Chicago or in the Kenyan countryside’. Moreover, he claims, ‘it is perfectly possible to support local arts, rural newspapers and the preservation of historic buildings without using mystifying language about “a people’s culture”’. His conclusion is that the clash between universalism and cultural relativism is avoided and the case for a global ethics is much stronger if the ‘mystifying and ideologically charged culture concept’ is replaced by local sensitivity.

Practice The UNESCO Declaration and conventions have produced a variety of responses from member states. For some countries this is because of these instruments’ political implications, both for suppressed minority cultural groups, who see the instruments as providing international support for their cause, and for dominant ethnic groups, who feel their power is under threat. Thus the editors of a recent issue of Human Rights Dialogue focusing on ‘cultural rights’, Albro and Bauer (2005, 31), note that while cultural rights claims are being recognized as an ‘important means for the recuperation of identity and as an essential basis for advancing social justice, there is still weak political commitment to cultural rights by national governments’. One measure of a government’s commitment is, of course, its decision whether or not to ratify the UNESCO conventions. McGregor (2005, 206) sees this uneven commitment as being due to the ‘highly spatialised’ application of human rights discourses across the world. There is, he says, a ‘distinct geography to human rights shaped by geographic imaginaries, place-based identities, organisational structures and global geopolitical narratives’. Consequently, as Cassel (2004) points out, ‘The rights revolution has yet to triumph on the ground’. There are still too many abuses of fundamental human rights taking place around the world – and this is far from being limited to the non-Western ‘developing’ countries. Fields (2003, 1) sees the tendency to resort to human rights as the way out of ambiguous or complex situations as based on the false presumption that human rights are themselves ‘simple and selfevident’, which is far from the case. Nevertheless, despite the complexities and contradictions in human rights practice, many of which result from the deliberate strategic machinations and policy decisions of self-serving nation-states – or beer, their political leaders – the ‘legitimacy of human rights has become unquestioned, or even unquestionable, in the contemporary world’ (Donnelly, 1998, 20). Human rights principles and standards have become a ‘principal moral criterion for the evaluation of a government’s legitimacy to rule’; they remain the international community’s best eﬀort to deﬁne the social and political parameters of our common humanity (Donnelly, 1999, 87). 447

T A R C

H I The task facing practitioners, be they scholars, educators or professionals working in the ﬁeld, is to explore the complexities and clarify the contradictions that hinder practice. Examples of such dilemmas in relation to the protection of cultural diversity and heritage as a component of human rights include the following: •

•

• • •

•

Should human rights be restricted to individuals, or can groups or collectivities be rights-holders? If groups are to be rights-holders, how are they to be recognized and represented institutionally in oﬃcial organizational arrangements and legislation regarding the protection of cultural diversity and cultural heritage? How are the cultural rights of ethnic minority groups best protected? Is the commodiﬁcation of their cultures through cultural tourism a problem that requires a policy response? How do we deal with situations where local communities prefer to achieve higher standards of living by rejecting tradition and modernizing their cultures? How do we deal in practice with situations where cultural heritage is used by powerful actors, both domestic and external, to obtain political goals that are essentially unrelated to heritage conservation? How do we respond as professionals to instances where various claims to cultural practices based on human rights are in conﬂict with each other? By what process of decision making could we legitimately decide that a particular cultural practice is acceptable or unacceptable, suitable for protection or more appropriately abandoned or even outlawed (see Anaya, 2004, 133)? What does understanding heritage conservation as a form of cultural politics mean for the work of heritage practitioners? The centrality of the concept of ‘contestation’ is now well recognized in the literature (see elsewhere in this book), but how is it to be dealt with by the profession?

These issues are pertinent in all countries and societies, and heritage professionals have been developing responses appropriate to the particular context in which they are working. In my own working context, the Asia-Paciﬁc region, situations exist in which the heritage is ‘shared’ between various racial, ethnic and socioeconomic groups; that is, various groups lay claim to the same places, artefacts and sometimes even embodied skills as part of their heritage. This situation is experienced universally to one degree or another. In Australia, another diﬃculty lies in the identiﬁcation of the ‘oﬃcial’ heritage, where the views of one group oen override those of other groups in the community (see Logan, 2007b). Indeed, Lydon and Ireland (2005, 15) make the point that: ‘For Aboriginal people, representing hundreds of small linguistic and cultural entities across the continent, and excluded from citizenship until 1967, no allegiance to a national framework can be assumed.’ They see an Aboriginal ‘strategy of refusal’ that fractures consensual narratives of the nation (Lydon and Ireland, 2005, 17). Such working contexts present cultural heritage practitioners with interesting philosophical and practical challenges that may perhaps be best addressed by adopting approaches aimed at strengthening cross-cultural sensitivity and a 448

C D, H H R philosophy of reconciliation between oppositional groups. Rather than cultural heritage being used to reinforce divisions in society and between societies, more inclusive understandings of cultural heritage are required that seek to include elements meeting common acceptance or that are important to each of the components within the overall society. However, while it is easier to reach inclusive deﬁnitions of the heritage in more homogeneous societies, it may remain extremely diﬃcult, if not impossible, in societies marked by sharp internal divisions along racial, ethnic or class lines. Sometimes it may be necessary to accept that sharing is not possible at present and may have to be something achieved in the future. An alternative that may be more immediately applicable is the recognition of ‘parallel stories’ told by currently irreconcilable voices.

Conclusion To return to the point with which this chapter commenced, many conﬂict situations facing professionals can be avoided or minimized where the local community is engaged in the decision-making processes from the outset. The response of the World Heritage Commiee has been to argue for greater involvement of local communities in the processes of identiﬁcation, inscription and management of World Heritage Sites. But this applies to the identiﬁcation and management of all forms and levels of heritage. In responding to the question of how to declare for one cultural rights claim and against another, Anaya argues that the internal decisionmaking dynamics are themselves part of cultural group identity and should be taken as a starting point; that is: In any assessment of whether a particular cultural practice is prohibited rather than protected, the cultural group concerned should be accorded a certain margin of deference for its own interpretive and decision-making processes for the application of universal human rights norms, just as states are accorded such deference (Anaya, 2004, 133). Such involvement helps to give people greater control over the decisions that aﬀect their living environment, and is part of ‘cultural rights’ as deﬁned in the instruments discussed in this chapter, an essential part of ‘human rights’.

References Academy of European Law (2005), Cultural Rights as Human Rights, , accessed 13 December 2005. Albro, R. and Bauer, J. (2005), ‘Introduction’, Human Rights Dialogue: An International Forum for Debating Human Rights (series 2) 12, 2–3.

449

T A R C

H I Anaya, S.J. (2004), Indigenous Peoples in International Law, 2nd edition (New York: Oxford University Press). Angle, S.C. (2002), Human Rights in Chinese Thought: A Cross-Cultural Inquiry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Ayton-Shenker, D. (2003), The Challenge of Human Rights and Cultural Diversity, United Nations Background Note, 49th Commonwealth Parliamentary Association Conference, 4–12 October 2003, Bangladesh, , accessed 27 February 2007. Baderin, M.A. (2003), International Human Rights and Islamic Law (New York: Oxford University Press). Bauer, J.R. and Bell, D.A. (eds) (1999), The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Berend, I.T. (2004), Globalization and its Impact on Core-Periphery Relations (Los Angeles: UCLA Center for European and Eurasian Studies), , accessed 19 February 2007. Berger, P.L. and Huntingdon, S.P. (eds) (2002), Many Globalizations: Cultural Diversity in the Contemporary World (New York: Oxford University Press). Byrne, D. (1991), ‘Western Hegemony in Archaeological Heritage Management’, History and Anthropology 5, 269–76. Caney, S. and Jones, P. (eds) (2001), Human Rights and Global Diversity (London: Frank Cass). Carnegie Council on Ethics in International Aﬀairs (2004), 2004–2005 Carnegie Council Program Series on The Ethics of Preserving Cultural and Natural Heritages, , accessed 3 March 2006. Cassel, D. (2004), ‘The Globalization of Human Rights: Consciousness, Law and Reality’, Northwestern University Journal of International Human Rights 2, , accessed 17 February 2007. Chan, J. (1999), ‘A Confucian Perspective on Human Rights in Contemporary China’, in J.R. Bauer and D.A. Bell (eds), The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 212–40. Chen, A.H.Y. (2006), ‘Conclusion: Comparative Reﬂections on Human Rights in Asia’, in R. Peerenboom, C.J. Petersen and A.H.Y. Chen (eds), Human Rights in Asia: A Comparative Legal Study of Twelve Asian Jurisdictions, France and the USA (London: Routledge), 487–516. Cowan, J.K., Dembour, M-B. and Wilson, R.A. (eds) (2001), Culture and Rights: Anthropological Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). de Cuéllar, J.P. (1995), Our Creative Diversity: Report of the World Commission on Culture and Development (Paris: UNESCO Publishing). Dembour, M-B. (2001), ‘Following the Movement of a Pendulum: Between Universalism and Relativism’, in J.K. Cowan, M-B. Dembour and R.A. Wilson (eds), Culture and Rights: Anthropological Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 56–79. Donnelly, J. (1998), International Human Rights, 2nd edition (Boulder, CO: Westview Press).

450

C D, H H R Donnelly, J. (1999), ‘Human Rights and Asian Values: A Defence of “Western” Universalism’, in J.R. Bauer and D.A. Bell (eds), The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 59–86. Du, S. (2002), UNESCO and a Just World Order (New York: Nova Science). Edson, G. (ed.) (1997), Museum Ethics (London: Routledge). Eide, A. (2001), ‘Cultural Rights as Individual Human Rights’, in A. Eide, C. Krause and A. Rosas (eds), Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: A Textbook (Dordrecht: Martinus Nĳhoﬀ), 289–301. Eide, A., Krause, C. and Rosas, A. (eds) (2001), Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: A Textbook (Dordrecht: Martinus Nĳhoﬀ). Eriksen, T.H. (2001), ‘A Critique of UNESCO’s Concept of Culture’, in J.K. Cowan, M-B. Dembour and R.A. Wilson (eds), Culture and Rights: Anthropological Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 127–48. Fairchild, D.R. and Silverman, H. (eds) (forthcoming), Cultural Heritage and Human Rights (New York: Springer). Featherstone, M., Lash, S. and Robertson, R. (eds) (1995), Global Modernities (London: Sage). Fields, A.B. (2003), Rethinking Human Rights for the New Millennium (New York: Palgrave Macmillan). Franck, T.M. (2001), ‘Are Human Rights Universal?’, Foreign Aﬀairs 80:1, 191–204. Fukuyama, F. (1992), The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press). Galla, A. (1997), ‘Indigenous Peoples, Museums and Ethics’, in G. Edson (ed.), Museum Ethics (London: Routledge), 147–55. Gammelto, T. and Hernø, R. (2000), ‘Human Rights in Vietnam: Exploring Tensions and Ambiguities’, in M. Jacobsen and O. Bruun (eds), Human Rights and Asian Values: Contesting National Identities and Cultural Representation in Asia (Richmond: NIAS-Curzon), 159–77. Hall, S. (1992), ‘The Question of Cultural Identity’, in S. Hall, D. Held and T. McGrew (eds), Modernity and its Future (Cambridge: Polity/Open University), 273–326. Hall, S., Held, D. and McGrew, T. (eds) (1992), Modernity and its Future (Cambridge: Polity/Open University). Ho, K.C. (ed.) (forthcoming), Capital Cities in the Asia Paciﬁc: Primacy and Diversity (Taipei: Center for Asia Paciﬁc Area Studies, Academia Sinica). Ignatieﬀ, M. (2001a), Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Ignatieﬀ, M. (2001b), ‘The Aack on Human Rights’, Foreign Aﬀairs 80:6, 102–16. Isin, E.F. and Turner, B.S. (2006), Reclaiming Citizenship: The Contradictions between Citizenship and Human Rights, paper presented to Centre for Citizenship and Human Rights, Deakin University, 6 November. Jacobsen, M. and Bruun, O. (eds) (2000), Human Rights and Asian Values: Contesting National Identities and Cultural Representation in Asia (Richmond: NIASCurzon). Japan National Research Institute for Cultural Properties (2002), Cultural Diversity and Heritage. Symposium Report (Tokyo: NRICP).

451

T A R C

H I Jones, D. (ed.) (2002), 20th Century Heritage – Our Recent Cultural Legacy. Proceedings of the Australia ICOMOS National Conference 2001 (Adelaide and Melbourne: University of Adelaide, Australia ICOMOS). Jones, P. (2001), ‘Human Rights and Diverse Cultures: Continuity or Discontinuity?’, in S. Caney and P. Jones (eds), Human Rights and Global Diversity (London: Frank Cass), 27–50. Jones, R. and Shaw, B.J. (eds) (2007), Geographies of Australian Heritages: Loving a Sunburnt Country? (Aldershot: Ashgate). Kahn, J. (1995), Culture, Multiculture, Postculture (London: Sage). Khan, M.A. (2003), Human Rights in the Muslim World: Fundamentalism, Constitutionalism and International Politics (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press). Kreps, C.F. (2003), Liberating Culture: Cross-cultural Perspectives on Museums, Curation and Heritage Preservation, London: Routledge. Leask, A. and Fyall, A. (2006), Managing World Heritage Sites (Amsterdam: Elsevier). Lilley, I. (2007), Strangers and Brothers? Heritage, Human Rights and a Cosmopolitan Archaeology, paper presented to the Stanford Archaeological Center, Stanford University, 6 February. Logan, W.S. (2002), ‘Globalizing Heritage: World Heritage as a Manifestation of Modernism and Challenges from the Periphery’, in D. Jones (ed.), 20th Century Heritage – Our Recent Cultural Legacy. Proceedings of the Australia ICOMOS National Conference 2001 (Adelaide and Melbourne: University of Adelaide, Australia ICOMOS), 21–35. Logan, W.S. (2006), ‘The Cultural Role of Capital Cities: Hanoi and Hue, Vietnam’, in K.C. Ho and H-H.M. Hsaio (eds), Capital Cities in Asia Paciﬁc: Primacy and Diversity (Taipei: Center for Asia Paciﬁc Area Studies, Academia Sinica), 49–67. Logan, W.S. (2007a), ‘Closing Pandora’s Box: Human Rights Conundrums in Cultural Heritage Protection’, in D.R. Fairchild and H. Silverman (eds) Cultural Heritage and Human Rights (New York: Springer), 33–52. Logan, W.S. (2007b), ‘Reshaping the “Sunburned Country”: Heritage and Cultural Politics in Contemporary Australia’, in R. Jones and B.J. Shaw (eds), Geographies of Australian Heritages: Loving a Sunburnt Country? (Aldershot: Ashgate),207–24. Lydon, J. and Ireland, T. (eds) (2005), Object Lessons: Archaeology and Heritage in Australia (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Press). Mathers, C., Darvill, T. and Lile, B.J. (eds) (2005), Heritage of Value, Archaeology of Renown (Gainsville: University Press of Florida). McGregor, A. (2005), ‘Geopolitics and Human Rights: Unpacking Australia’s Burma’, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 26, 191–211. Nagata, J. (2001), Heritage as a Human Right: A New Style and Language of Civil and Community Activism in Penang, Malaysia, paper presented to the Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Chicago, March. Nic Craith, M. (2002), Plural Identities, Singular Narratives: The Case of Northern Ireland (New York: Berghahn).

452

C D, H H R Nic Craith, M. (2003), Culture and Identity Politics in Northern Ireland (London: Palgrave Macmillan). Niec, H. (ed.) (1998), Cultural Rights and Wrongs (Paris: UNESCO Publishing). Nugent, D. and Vincent, J. (eds) (2004), A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics (Oxford: Blackwell). O’Keefe, P.J. (1999), ‘Archaeology and Human Rights’, Public Archaeology 1, 181– 94. Pahuja, S. (2004), ‘This is the World: Have Faith’, European Journal of International Law 15, 381–93. Peerenboom, R., Petersen, C.J. and Chen, A.H.Y. (eds) (2006), Human Rights in Asia: A Comparative Legal Study of Twelve Asian Jurisdictions, France and the USA (London: Routledge). Pieterse, J.N. (2004), Globalization and Culture: Global Mélange (Lanham: Rowman & Lileﬁeld). Pyburn, A. (2006), Wagging the Dog: Archaeology as a Positive Political Force in Kyrgyzstan, Central Asia, paper presented to the ‘Cultural Heritage and Human Rights’ international workshop, Cultural Heritage and Museum Practices Unit, University of Illinois, 10–11 March. Quirk, J. (2006), ‘The Anti-Slavery Project: Linking the Historical and the Contemporary’, Human Rights Quarterly 28, 565–98. Robertson, G. (2006), Crimes Against Humanity: The Struggle for Global Justice, 3rd edition (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin). Robertson, R. (1995), ‘Glocalisation: Time-space and Homogeneity-heterogeneity’, in M. Featherstone, S. Lash and R. Robertson (eds), Global Modernities (London: Sage), 24–44. Shah, N.A. (2006), ‘Women’s Human Rights in the Koran: An Interpretive Approach’, Human Rights Quarterly 28:4, 868–903. Skelton, T. and Allen, T. (eds) (1999), Culture and Global Change (London: Routledge). Smith, C. and Wobst, H.M. (eds) (2005), Indigenous Archaeologies: Decolonizing Theory and Practice (London: Routledge). Smith, L. (2004), Archaeological Theory and the Politics of Cultural Heritage (London: Routledge). Smith, L. (2006), Uses of Heritage (London: Routledge). Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage (2005), Theorizing Cultural Heritage, , accessed 20 December 2005. Stavenhagen, R. (1998), ‘Cultural Rights: A Social Science Perspective’, in H. Niec (ed.), Cultural Rights and Wrongs (Paris: UNESCO Publishing), 62–75. Stevenson, N. (ed.) (2001), Culture and Citizenship (London: Sage). Stevenson, N. (2003), Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitan Questions (Milton Keynes: Open University Press). Symonides, J. (1998), ‘Cultural Rights: A Neglected Category of Human Rights’, International Social Science Journal 158, 559–72.

453

T A R C

H I Tomlinson, J. (1999), ‘Globalised Culture: The Triumph of the West?’, in T. Skelton and T. Allen (eds), Culture and Global Change (London: Routledge), 22–9. UNESCO (1982), Mexico Declaration on Cultural Policies. UNESCO (2004), Linking Universal and Local Values: Managing a Sustainable Future for World Heritage, World Heritage Papers No. 13 (Paris: UNESCO). UNESCO (2005), Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. United Nations (2003), Culture and Development in Vietnam, Discussion Paper No. 4 (Hanoi: United Nations Vietnam Country Team). Watkins, J. (2005), ‘Cultural Nationalists, Internationalists and “Intra-nationalists”: Who’s Right and Whose Right?’, International Journal of Cultural Property 12, 78–94. Yusuf, A.A. (2005), Towards a Convention on Cultural Diversity: Background and Evolution, Presentation to the Third Forum on Human Development, Paris, 17 January.

454

ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

Index

Aberfan 235 Aboriginals 96, 135, 149, 172, 369–80, 448 Actors 2, 8, 105, 196, 270, 328, 409, 428–38 Aegina 253–4 Afghanistan 115, 131, 136, 278 Africa 303, 347–63 African–American 195–9, 203–6, 273–4 Afrikaner 306–7 Albania 106, 116 Alentejo 429–35 Algiers 350 Alor 134 Amritsar 235 Amsterdam Charter 252 Angola 349, 354 Anthropology 9, 134, 254, 268, 441, 446 ANZAC 61, 223, 369 Archaeology 9, 21–6, 163, 246, 268, 271, 408, 441 Architecture 23, 44, 126, 162, 183, 233, 245–65, 317, 323, 338, 391, 410 Armenia 129, 240 Art 152–6 172, 224, 251, 334, 385 Artefacts 2, 9, 30, 64, 105, 111–9, 145, 167, 287–96, 388, 439, 448 Arts Council 95 Athens 255 Athens Charter 250 Atlas of Spatial Identity 190 Aubrey, John 24, 59 Auschwitz 43–4, 444 Australia 9, 12, 61, 96, 135, 149–50, 173, 223, 303, 365–80 417–8, 445, 448 Authorized Heritage Discourse 2, 19, 145, 149, 162–78, 441 Austria 316–7

Avebury 23–32, 59 Ayodhya 132 Baha’i Gardens 135 Bali 131 Bamako 360–1 Bamiya 131, 136, 278 Barcelona 260 Bardejov 324 Baleﬁelds 115, 185, 215–29, 222, 233, 237, 271, 307 Beamish 170 Bedford NY 199–200 Belarus 317 Belgium 41, 187, 235, 303, 348 Belvedere memorandum 190 Berlin 222, 240, 260, 302, 319, 335 Bern Convention 431 Bethlehem 129 Birmingham 93, 187 Bloody Sunday 422 Bodh Gaya 132 Boito, Camillo 249 Borgloon 187 Borobudur 130 Bosnia 115, 133, 233 Botswana 310 Bourdieu, Pierre 199, 351 Bradford 418 Brandi, Cesare 250 Bratislava 317, 331 Bristol 384 Britain 10, 20–36, 84–6, 91, 94, 108, 111, 119, 143, 165, 186, 218, 240, 302, 306, 366, 375, 381–92, 446 British Museum 27 Browne, Henry 26

T A R C

H I Brussels 250 Bucharest 337 Budapest 319, 329, 331, 335–7 Buddhism 127, 130–1 Burra Charter 135 Butrint Foundation 184

Dardanelles 223 Davis, Jeﬀerson 206 De Certeau, Michel 385, 387, 390 De Varine, Hugues 400–1 Denkmalschutz 183 Denmark 79, 107–21, 113, 184 Derry 420–4 Devon 20, 235 Diaspora 111, 115, 120, 291, 388 Dien Bien Phu 444 Discourse 2, 5, 90–100, 105, 143, 160–74, 182, 189, 269, 287, 317, 430, 443, 446 Dissonance 3, 21, 127, 155, 171, 195, 239, 305, 316, 333, 384 Dorset 171 Dresden 319, 425 Dunblane 235 Durban 308 Durham 146

Cadbury World 93 Caen 243 Calcua, Black Hole of 235 Cambodia 233 Canada 189, 215, 303–12, 366, 402, 414, 445 Canberra 369 Capetown 306–7 Cape Verde 115 Carbonara, Giovanni 259 Carcassonne 247 Caribbean 274 Cathedral 23, 117, 245–6, 258, 425 Catholicism 22, 44, 133, 315, 430 Cenotaph 218–9 Central Europe 9, 315–41 Champaner Pavagarh 133 Charleroi 235 Chichen Itza 269, 277 China 114, 134, 135, 309, 372 404–6, 446 Christianity 128, 135, 303, 370 Churchill, Winston 215 Clark, TX 200 Climate change 375, 428 Cologne 246, 250, 425 Colonies, colonialism 12, 90, 96, 196, 274, 289, 293, 303, 306, 307–12, 349–61, 369–77, 400, 443–5 Columbine High School 235 Common Ground 145, 148–50 Community 24, 37, 46, 106, 148–9, 167, 201, 268, 277, 359, 384, 400–11, 415–24, 425–37, 439 Confederacy 206 Convicts 371 Country houses 165, 331, 383 Croatia 112 Cultural landscape 37–50, 82, 94, 127, 133, 195–208, 204, 328, 340, 409 Custer, Gen. George 236 Cyprus 184, 310 Czech 316–8, 340

Eastern Europe 9, 12, 315–41 Ecomuseum 397–411 Eliot, T.S. 221 England 55, 84, 165, 219, 235 English Heritage 32, 165, 182 Enlightenment 1, 77, 90, 91, 96, 245–6, 284 ‘Enola Gay’ 61, 277–8, Estonia 3, 48–9, 319, 322 Ethnicity 2, 6, 49, 60, 64, 73, 90–100, 110, 160, 197, 205, 208, 284, 289, 299, 305, 309, 312, 315, 331, 353, 367, 400, 404, 416, 440, 447 Etruscans 84, 106 Europa Nostra 183–4 Europe 8, 245–63, 315–46, 340, 349, 425–38, European Landscape Convention 426–8, 437 European Union (EU) 429 EU Prize for Cultural heritage 184 Experts 19, 30, 61, 149, 162, 173, 182, 186, 188, 191, 268, 382, 401fn, 432–5, 439, 441 Family history 61 Film 61, 185–6, 233, 237 Finland 45, 184 Fishing 389–92 Flanders 187, 220 Florida 206 Fountains Abbey 255 France, French 41, 108, 145, 221, 225, 240, 245, 247–8, 348, 401–4, 445–6

Dachau 242 Dallas 222 456

I $ Frank, Anne 235 Frederiksvaerk 107, 108–10, 113, 120

Iberia 259 ICOM 252, 398–9, 401 ICOMOS 135, 182, 252, 272, 278 Illicit trade 356 Imperial War Museum 243 India 130, 132–5, 136, 242, 309 Indonesia 130–1, 134, 310 Industrial heritage 30, 108–13, 333–6, 383, 388 Intangible heritage 4–6, 98, 126, 135, 136, 159, 245, 321, 331, 402–14, 439, 441, 444 Interpretation 1, 9, 29, 39, 112, 127, 158, 166, 172, 185, 195, 237, 283, 288, 307, 339, 385, 397, 400, 402–14 Internet 33, 226 Inuit 304 Iran 272 Ireland, Irish 109, 184, 372 Islam 8, 128–30, 132–5, 223, 303, 304, 308, 367, 372, 377 Israel 48, 128–30, 135, 196, 239, 271 Italy, Italian 23, 66, 119, 249, 373, 409–10

Gaelic 293 Gandhi 307 Gdansk 324, 335 Gender 11, 46, 159–74, 284, 382, 387, 400 Gent 187 Genealogy 3, 90, 195, 268, 374, 383, 386 Germany. German 108, 113–15, 184–5, 196, 218, 224, 240, 316–41, 333, 348, 354, 372, 425–8, 432–8 Geysburg 216, 222–4 Ghana 274, 303, 352–63 Giavonnoni, Gustavo 250 Glasgow 286 Gloucester 235 Glyndebourne 96 Gramsci, A. 146, 182 Great Exhibition 27 Great Zimbabwe 359 Greece 23, 83, 184, 373 Greenville, NC 207 caption Guatemala 46, 133 Guizhou 134 Guyana 310

Japan, Japanese 240, 245, 402 Jerusalem 128–30, 275 Jews, Jewishness 107, 114, 128, 302, 316, 329, 330–2 Jones, Inigo 84

Hägerstrand, Thorsten 75 Hague Convention 135 Haifa 135 Halbwachs, Maurice 112, 144, 222 Hamburg 114, 120, 225 Hanoi 4 Harare 354 Harburg Monument 225 Haslingden, Lancs 216 ‘Heimat’ 113 Heritage Loery Fund 31 Hewison, Robert 30, 143, 284, 383 Highland Clearances 150 Hill, Octavia 27, 30 Hinduism 131–7 Hiroshima 61, 222, 277, 444 Hobart 371 Holocaust 39, 40, 128, 222, 234, 288, 302, 316, 331, 335 Home 110–23, 121, 170, 274 Homer 85 Hull 382, 389–92 Human Rights 4, 99, 304, 421, 439 Hungary 114, 184, 316–41

Kabul 136 Ka a, Franz 118 Kassel Dokumenta 255 Katyn 321 Keiller, Alexander 29, 32 Kelvingrove Museum 289, 293 Kenya 350, 353 King, Martin Luther 47, 206–7 Kingsley, Charles 28 Kinshasa 348 Kitchener-Waterloo 305 Kongenshus Memorialpark 107–10 Korea 44 Kosovo 133 Krakow 329, 331, 334–5 Krakow Charter 252 Kurds 301 Kwai, River 243 Kwazulu Natal 307, 358 Lagerlöf, Selma 76–80, 82 Lancaster 55–9

457

T A R C

H I Landscape 2, 7, 10, 27, 38–40, 75, 114–5, 126, 134, 144–6, 153, 196, 223, 245, 323, 329, 347, 356, 374, 402, 425–38 Language 5, 8, 22, 126, 301, 369, 416 Laocoon 252 Las Vegas 201 Latin America 9, 100, 274, 398 Latvia 48–9, 322–3 Leon 246 Lewis 143, 148–56 Liberia 303 Lille 260 Lithuania 317, 337 Lile Big Horn 236 Liverpool 262, 311 Localness 57, 76, 126, 134, 14356, 276, 288, 311, 324, 357, 398–414, 416, 418, 425–37, 439, 448 Local Heritage Initiative 148 Łódź 334 London 64, 119, 120, 187, 215, 218, 225, 258, 260, 299, 302, 311 Londonderry 421 Los Angeles 172, 262 Lowenthal, David 5, 21, 42, 116, 143, 162, 383, 425 Lynmouth 235

Middle East 9 Migrants, migration 8, 57, 82, 92, 94, 105, 108–23, 112, 310, 348, 367, 372, 376, 410, 416, 429 Milan 250 Montreal 305 Monuments 41, 43, 45, 106, 115, 121, 152–8, 189, 216–26, 248–50, 318–9, 337, 349, 352–60, 383, 387, 439 Morris, William 21, 27, 30, 162, 249 Multiculturalism 93–103, 299–312, 377, 419–20 Munich 250, 258 Museums, Libraries and Archives Council 418 Museum of London 62, 63, 94 Museum Varusschlacht-Kalkriese 184 Museums, museology 31, 61, 91–5, 164, 169, 237, 271, 283–94, 333, 335, 356, 387, 397–411, 415–24 Myanmar 127 Nairobi 350, 353 Names, naming 9, 40, 195–213, 322–8, 349–52, 372, 382 Namibia 348–9, 354–5, 357 Nanning 406 Naples 250 Nara Convention 252 Nation, national heritage 7, 19, 23, 24, 31, 40, 48, 73, 107–8, 126, 144, 219, 246, 270, 285, 316–8, 354–63, 368 National Coal Mining Museum 168 National Memorial Arboretum 219 National Parks 81, 82, 304, 433 National Trust 28, 29, 30, 32, 182, 184 Native Americans 80, 82, 201, 293, 304, 441 Natura 2000 436 Nature 10, 31, 73–86, 107, 402f, 425–7, 429 Nazareth 129 Nazi, nazism 114, 185, 222, 240, 335 Ncome 358 Nepal 130, 272 Netherlands, Dutch 187, 188, 301–2, 310 Newfoundland 305 New Orleans 206, 237 New York 97, 233, 279 New Zealand 223, 303, 366 Nigeria 303 Nora, Pierre 386

Madrid 256, 258, 260 ‘Maids and Mistresses’ 165–8 Malaysia 307, 442 Mali 245, 360 Malopolska 326 Manassas 233 Manchester 187–8 Mandela, Nelson 307–7, 443 Maps 40, 75, 77, 410 Maritime heritage 60, 66, 382, 385, 389–95 Masada 271 Maseﬁeld, John 221 Mayors 435–6 Media 40, 59, 93, 136, 182, 236–7, 259, 310, 385, 431, 445 Memorials 44, 56, 107–25, 144–58, 216–29, 232, Memory 7, 21, 23, 37–53, 60, 106, 113, 167, 222–6, 318, 347, 360, 381–2, 387–95, 406 Memory-work 111, 387 Mérimée, Prosper 247 Mexico 80, 277, 399, 406–8, 444

458

I $ Normandy 222 North Korea 354 Northern Ireland 4, 6, 48, 235, 242, 416–24, 442 Norway 46, 77, 80, 184 Nowa Huta 337 Nunavut 189

Quebec 304–6 Race 89–100, 284, 352–9 Rapanui 272 Religion 10, 26, 125–37, 160, 288, 315, 374, 416 Reconstruction 29, 251 Reenactment 31, 388 Restitution/repatriation 9, 284, 292–4, 348, 441 Restoration 186–8 Restoration 245–63, 339 Riegl, Alois 217, 254 Riga 49, 319, 335 Ritual 23, 120, 130, 219, 356, 388, 406, 416 Riviere, Georges 401 Robben Island 4, 306–7, 443 Rock-art 352, 360 Romania 184, 196 Romanticism 3, 374 Rome 23, 66, 83–5, 248, 258–9, 262 Ruskin, John 19, 27, 30, 162, 182, 249 Russia 45, 114, 115, 196, 316–20 Rwanda 233, 310

Oaxaca 406–8 Oklahoma 37 Old Swan Brewery 135, 149–50, 371 Omagh 235 Oradour 222 Oral history 31, 60, 134, 386, 408, 421 Orwell, George 32 ‘Ostalgia’ 336 Otherness 5, 113, 155, 352, 417 Oawa 304–6 Pakistan 109, 132 Palestine 128, 272 Paris 253, 260, 386 Parma 260 Parthenon 255, 269 Participant observation 269 Participation 26, 47, 127, 133, 149, 218, 226, 407, 417, 425–38 Peronne 225 Perth 135, 149–50, 371–3 Piedmont 409–10 Pierrefonds 248 Pietermaritzburg 307–8 Pilgrims 129, 131, 135, 221–4, 276 Place 38, 62, 109, 114, 148, 159, 181–92, 195, 215, 267, 312, 374, 386–95, 399, 401–9, 411, 423, 448 Plantation 203 Pluralism 3, 146, 183, 299–312, 383 Poland 44, 114, 186, 316–41 Pollok 289 Port Elizabeth 308 Portugal 402, 429–32 Post colonial 10, 12, 92, 196, 292, 299, 310, 347–61, 382, 442 Postmodern 10, 145, 255, 260, 300, 323, 399, 446 Prague 328, 331, 334–6 Pretoria 307, 350 Protestant 25, 218, 315 Public history 55–67, 146–58 Pugin, Augustus 27, 30, 182

Sabarimalai 135 Sacred places 3, 113, 125–37, 135, 149, 323, 355, 360, 374 Sagunto 256 St Mungo Museum 286–7 Salemi 255 Sami 79, 81, 302 Samuel, Raphael 145–6, 383, 387 San Francisco 187 Sandwell 165 Santiago de Chile 398 Sauer, Carl 198 Scandinavia 9, 302, 402 Scania 76, 78 Scotland 84, 143, 235, 284 Museum of Scotland 290 Sco, George Gilbert 27 Sco, Walter 27, 28 Sentamu, John 95 September 11, 2001 41, 226, 279 Serbia 106, 110, 116, 239 Shakespeare 28 Shihab-a-Din 129 Sicily 255 Siena 258 Sierra Leone 303 459

T A R C

H I Sikh 137, 305 Singapore 127, 206, 275, 303, 307–9, 368 Skye 150 Slave, slavery 31, 55–8, 93, 96, 195, 204, 234, 240, 242, 273–4, 288, 385, 443, 446 Slovakia 316, 321, 333, 340 Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) 27, 249 Social inclusion/exclusion 31, 92, 98, 165, 232, 284, 286, 388, 420 Soﬁa 321, 337 Somme 218–20 South Africa 4, 9, 12, 234, 239, 301–3, 306–8, 347–50, 357, 443 South Asia 126–30, 136 South East Asia 100, 237, 373 South Moluccas 310 Souvenirs 113, 327, 331 Soviet Union 318, 335 Soweto 4, 39 Spain 6, 184, 246–9, 256–7 Sri Lanka 46, 48, 310 Stewart. George 197 Stonehenge 269, 275–6, 425–6 Stourhead 85 Stowe 85 Stukeley, William 25 Sudan 355 Sufragees 62 Sulawezi 134 Swayambhu 130 Sweden 10, 75–9, 105–6, 112, 406 Sydney 369, 371, 373

Toulouse 247, 260 Tourism 3, 8, 11, 126–7, 131, 134–5, 223, 233, 242, 259, 267–81, 305, 308, 309, 319, 327, 348, 355, 358, 384, 389, 405, 429, 440 Trabant 337 Třebič 325, 331 Trinidad 310 Turkey, Turks 114, 115, 223–6, 240, 301, 310 Tyne & Wear 28 Uganda 310 Ukraine 316, 333, 340 Ulster Folk and Transport Museum 419 UNESCO 4, 12, 24, 26, 31, 98, 130, 136, 251, 255, 272, 278, 360, 398–9, 425, 436, 443–9 United Kingdom 184, 283, 417 United States (USA) 9, 11, 37, 44, 47, 74, 79, 80, 82–3, 172, 196–213, 206, 240, 272–7, 301, 366, 442, 445, 446 Valle Elvo e Serra 409–11 Vancouver 305 Varanasi 132 Venice Charter 252 Verdun 222, 243 Vezelay 247 Victim 6, 46, 54, 58, 234–44 Victoria & Albert Museum 85, 258 Victoria Baths 186, 188 Vienna 254 Vierhuizen 188 Vietnam 4, 369, 444, 446 Vietnam Veterans Memorial 217 Vilnius 317, 319, 331 Viollet le Duc 182, 247, 256 Violence 11, 41, 67, 204, 231–44, 310, 357 Virgil 83 Viticulture 327 Voltaire 43 Volunteering 31, 324, 417

Taj Mahal 133 Taliban 131 Tallinn 3, 329, 334–5 Tamil 46 Tanzania 360 Tate Galleries 260 Temple Mount 129 Teutoburgerwald 184 Texas 235 Thiepval 220 Thorwaldsen 253–4 Tiree 150 Tolpuddle Martyrs 171 Tombuctu 245 Toronto 305, 310

Waanyi Womens History 172 Waco 235 Wadden Sea 432–5 Wales 84, 235 Walsall 92 War 11, 41, 106, 116, 128, 131, 134, 136, 145, 215–26, 232, 240, 250, 304, 309, 316–8, 369 460

I $ Warsaw 136, 250, 324, 331, 334–5 Washington DC 47, 83, 233, 278 Washington, George 206 Waterfronts 308, 390 Waterloo 223, 233 Wellesbourne 187 Wilderness 82 Williamsburg 272–4 Wiltshire 23–36, 276 Windhoek 354 Winterville, NC 201 Women in Heritage 164–7 World Bank 442 World Heritage 7, 23, 130, 132–3, 134, 136, 191, 245, 252, 255, 272, 307, 325, 329, 359, 425, 436, 443

Wright, Patrick 284, 383 Yao 404–6 Yellowstone 82, 272 Yorkshire 165, 168 Yosemite 82 Ypres 215, 219, 225 Yugoslavia 6, 106, 109, 112, 116, 196, 310 Zambia 357 Zanzibar 355 Zapotec 408 Zimbabwe 351, 354, 360

461