The Ashgate Research Companion to Heritage and Identity

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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.

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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 Li
ler

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

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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

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  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

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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

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203 207 248 256 257 261 271

273 276

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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

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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.

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 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 Li
ler 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

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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

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 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

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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

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 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

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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

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 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

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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

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 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

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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

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 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

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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

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 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.

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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).

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 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.

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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), , accessed 22 December 2005.

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ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

PART I THE CONTEXT OF HERITAGE AND IDENTITY

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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 a
ributes 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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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 li
le 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

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 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 (Le
er 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

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 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 co
ages which extended right up to the Cove, the Red Lion garage which stood on the corner opposite Perry’s shop, and the old Turnpike Co
age. … Several more buildings, including the Manse and the farm buildings behind it are ear-marked to come down as soon as they become vacant (Le
er 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

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 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 Se
lements (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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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 a
empt 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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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.

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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 Forge
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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.

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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

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 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 ( 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

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 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 ( ‘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

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   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

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 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

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   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

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 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).

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Figure 3.4

Calling all Women, newsle
er of the Suffrage
e 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

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 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

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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

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 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

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   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’ ( 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.

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 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 Ba
le 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

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   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 accessed 30 November 2006. 24 February 2005, ‘News: pedal back through History’, accessed 30 November 2006. , ‘STAMP unveils memorial “Captured Africans” 23 September 2005’, accessed 30 November 2006.

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ASHGATE

RESEARCH

COMPANION

PART II MARKERS OF HERITAGE AND IDENTITY

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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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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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.

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 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!

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 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.

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 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

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 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

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 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.

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 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 li
le 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

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 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

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 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.

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 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.

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 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).

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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

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 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

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 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

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 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.

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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,

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 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).

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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

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 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

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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

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 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).

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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).

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 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.

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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.

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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

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 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

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 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

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 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 li
le 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:

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‘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 li
le 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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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.

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 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.

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 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).

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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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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,

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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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 forge
ing (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’

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 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

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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

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 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

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 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

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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

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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 forge
ing 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 commi
ee 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

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

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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

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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

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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

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 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 Forge
ing (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).

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 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).

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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.

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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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

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 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

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 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.

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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

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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

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PART III PRACTICES OF HERITAGE AND IDENTITY

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

Heritage as Communication Modernity a
empted to fix space through the creation of rigidly territorial nation-states, promulgating ideologies which a
empted 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

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 H   I  as legitimation, cultural capital and sheer monetary value, but the common purpose is to make some people feel be
er, 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

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 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

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 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 . , ‘Europäischer kulturpreis für Kalkriese’, accessed 14 March 2007. 184

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 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

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 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 Janespo
ing 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

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 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

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 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. . 188

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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

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 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

, accessed 14 March 2007. 190

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 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

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 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).

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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

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 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), Le
ere 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

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 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), Janespo
ing and Beyond: British Heritage Retrovisions Since the Mid-1990s (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag).

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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.

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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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

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 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

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 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 co
on 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).

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 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

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 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

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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

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 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.

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on 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

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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

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 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 Gaze
e, 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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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).

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 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.

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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 Ba
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e, 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

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 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 Forge
ing (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

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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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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).

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 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).

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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

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 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

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 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

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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

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 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

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 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

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 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 commi
ing 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).

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 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

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 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’ Manha
an 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

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 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

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 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

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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

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 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

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 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 regre
able 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 a
ention or not. It is equally true that, if a dealer thinks a painting would look be
er and fetch more on the market by being spruced up and titivated a li
le, it 258

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 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

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 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

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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

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 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

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 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 a
itude 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 Archite
ura, 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’archite
o 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).

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 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), Le
res 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 Newsle
er 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 Newsle
er 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

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 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 Archite
ura. 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’, Proge
o & 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.

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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

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 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

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   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

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 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

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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

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 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

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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

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 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

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   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

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 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

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   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

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 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

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   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.

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 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.

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   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).

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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

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 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

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 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 wri
en 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

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 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

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 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 ma
er. 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

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 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

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 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:

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 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

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 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

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 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 a
empt 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

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 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

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 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.

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 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?’, Sco
ish 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

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 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.

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

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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

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 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

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 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.

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 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

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 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

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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

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 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

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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.

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 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.

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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

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 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.

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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.

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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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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

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 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

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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

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 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’.

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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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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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

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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

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

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 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

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 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.’

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 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

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 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

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 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

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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

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 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 a
itudes 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

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 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 () 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.

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 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

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 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

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 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

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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

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 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

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 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 le
re. 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

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 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).

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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

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 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).

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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 (Marsch