Uses of Heritage

 INTRODUCTION DRAFT EXTRACT – please see published version: Smith, L. 2006 Uses of Heritage, Routledge, ISBN 9780415318310 What has sitting on the banks of the Gregory River in far northern Queensland fishing to do with heritage? I was watching a group of senior Aboriginal women from the Waanyi Community fish as I tried to get my twelve-week-old daughter to sleep. We were about five hours drive from the nearest major town, on a field trip with two of my colleagues, to record sites of heritage importance to Waanyi women in the Boodjamulla National Park and Riversleigh World Heritage area. Most of the women we were working with had travelled great distances to get here, some having flown in by light aircraft, and all had been eager to come and do some ‘heritage work’. Although we had done some recordings of archaeological sites and oral histories, fishing quickly became the order of our days in the region. Fishing was a leisure activity that filled the time between periods in which my colleagues and I pestered people with maps, site recording forms and tape recorders. But as my colleagues and I began to realize, fishing was a multi-layered activity. It was a leisure activity and a chance to catch dinner, it was also an activity to get away from us annoying archaeologists and heritage managers, and it was an opportunity that the women were using to savour simply being in a place that was important to them. It was in fact ‘heritage work’, being in place, renewing memories and associations, sharing experiences with kinswomen to cement present and future social and familial relationships. Heritage wasn’t only about the past – though it was that too – it also wasn’t just about material things – though it was that as well – heritage was a process of engagement, an act of communication and an act of making meaning in and for the present. Listening to the senior women telling stories to younger women about the place we were in, or events that were associated with that place, I thought of the stories that members of my own family had told me, and that I would now pass onto my own children. I realized too that the meanings I drew out of those stories, and the uses I had made of them, would of course be different to the meanings, and uses, the generations both before and after me had and would construct. These family stories, shared memories, could sometimes be attached to material objects or family heirlooms, and while these ‘things’ were useful for making those stories tangible – they were not in and of themselves ‘heritage’. For instance, I would still tell the stories associated with my grandmother’s necklace, should I be unfortunate enough to lose it before I passed it on to my daughter. The real sense of heritage, the real moment of heritage when our emotions and sense of self are truly engaged, is not so much in the possession of the necklace, but in the act of passing on and receiving memories and knowledge. It also occurs in the way that we then use, reshape and recreate those memories and knowledge to help us make sense of and understand not only who we ‘are’, but also who we want to be. This is not to say that I would not be distressed if the necklace was lost or destroyed. However, I would grieve not for the loss of any monetary or inherent value it may have, but for the loss of the opportunity to pass it on, and the role it plays as both prop and prompt in the stories about my mother’s family. Can these observations about fishing and intimate moments of family memories tell us anything about why people visit World Heritage sites, national monuments, local and regional heritage sites and museums, or other places of heritage? Can they offer any insight into the sort of cultural and identity work that people do at these sites? Is heritage visiting simply a middle class leisure or touristic pursuit, as some sections of the heritage literature assert, or are there more varied and nuanced social and cultural processes at work? The idea of heritage as an act of communication and meaning making – indeed as an experience – is not something however, that finds much synergy with the professional or expert view of heritage. My colleagues and I were required to map sites and places, to put dots on maps, identify conservation and management needs and so forth. How do you map, conserve and manage an experience? But then, of course, that is what we do as heritage managers, in managing and conserving places identified as ‘heritage’, we are also engaged in the management and conservation, or as I have argued elsewhere (2004) the ‘governing’, of the cultural and social values, meanings and associations they have. In effect, we are managing and defining peoples’ ‘heritage experiences’ through the management and conservation process. By going fishing the Waanyi women were taking themselves out of the technical processes of site recording and management, and both recreating and redefining their own sense of being in place and experiencing the moment of ‘heritage’. This book explores the idea of heritage not so much as a ‘thing’, but as a cultural and social process, which engages with acts of remembering that work to create ways to understand and engage with the present. In doing so I draw on a range of ideas about the nature of heritage that have begun to emerge in the diverse interdisciplinary field of ‘Heritage Studies’. Within this relatively new area of academic study a range of disciplines have come together to use the idea of ‘heritage’ to ask some interesting questions about modern practices of conservation, tourism and museums and site visitation. This book, while making no claims to offer a fully rounded or synthetic statement, is an attempt to bring together disparate strands of thought and stimulate debate about the nature and use of heritage. For the purposes of structuring this book, I have developed themes of intangibility, identity, memory and remembering, performance, place, and dissonance, and used these ideas in various combinations to explore different aspects of the uses of heritage. Indeed the work starts from the premise that all heritage is intangible. In stressing the intangibility of heritage, however, I am not dismissing the tangible or pre-discursive, but simply deprivileging and denaturalizing it as the self-evident form and essence of heritage. While places, sites, objects and localities may exist as identifiable sites of heritage – we may for instance, be able to point to such things as Stonehenge, the Sydney Opera House, Colonial Williamsburg, the Roman Coliseum, Angkor Watt, Robben Island, and so forth – these places are not inherently valuable, nor do they carry a freight of innate meaning. Stonehenge, for instance, is basically a collection of rocks in a field. What makes these things valuable and meaningful – what makes them ‘heritage’, or what makes the collection of rocks in a field ‘Stonehenge’ – are the present day cultural processes and activities that are undertaken at and around them, and of which they become a part. It is these processes that identify them as physically symbolic of particular cultural and social events, and thus give them value and meaning. The traditional Western account of ‘heritage’ tends to emphasise the material basis of heritage, and attributes an inherent cultural value or significance to these things. Furthermore, the sense of gravitas given to these values is also often directly linked to the age, monumentality and/or aesthetics of a place. The physicality of the Western idea of heritage means that ‘heritage’ can be mapped, studied, managed, preserved and/or conserved, and its protection may be the subject of national legislation and international agreements, Conventions and Charters. However, heritage is heritage because it is subjected to the management and preservation/conservation process, not because it simply ‘is’. This process does not just ‘find’ sites and places to manage and protect. It is itself a constitutive cultural process, that identifies those things and places that can be given meaning and value as ‘heritage’, reflecting contemporary cultural and social values, debates and aspirations. In short, this book is about how the idea of heritage is used to construct, reconstruct and negotiate a range of identities and social and cultural values and meanings in the present. Heritage is a multilayered performance – be this a performance of visiting, managing, interpretation or conservation – that embodies acts of remembrance and commemoration while negotiating and constructing a sense of place, belonging and understanding in the present. Simultaneously the heritage performance will also constitute and validate the very idea of ‘heritage’ that frames and defines these performances in the first place. Although often self-regulating and self-referential, heritage is also inherently dissonant and contested. However, the traditional and authorised conceptions of heritage ensure that all conflict is reduced to case specific issues, and the cultural process of identity formation that is basic to heritage is obscured. At one level heritage 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. Heritage is not necessarily about the stasis of cultural values and meanings, but may equally be about cultural change. It may, for instance, be about reworking the meanings of the past as the cultural, social and political needs of the present change and develop, or it may be about challenging the ways in which groups and communities are perceived and classified by others. Heritage is about negotiation – about using the past, and collective or individual memories, to negotiate new ways of being and expressing identity. In this process heritage objects, sites, places or institutions like museums become cultural tools or props to facilitate this process – but do not themselves stand in for this process or act. Heritage is also a discourse. The idea of discourse does not simply refer to the use of words or language, but rather the idea of discourse used in this work refers to a form of social practice. Social meanings, forms of knowledge and expertise, power relations and ideologies are embedded and reproduced via language. The discourses through which we frame certain concepts, issues or debates have an affect in so far as they constitute, construct, mediate and regulate understanding and debate. Discourse not only organizes the way concepts like heritage are understood, but the way we act, the social and technical practices we act out, and the way knowledge is constructed and reproduced. One of the arguments developed in this book is that there is a dominant Western discourse about heritage which I term the ‘authorized heritage discourse’, that works to naturalize a range of assumptions about the nature and meaning of heritage. Although this discourse is inevitably changing and developing, and varies in different cultural contexts and overtime, there is nonetheless a particular focus and emphasis – primarily the attention it gives to ‘things’. This often self-referential discourse simultaneously draws on and naturalizes certain narratives and cultural and social experiences – often linked to ideas of nation and nationhood. Embedded in this discourse are a range of assumptions about the innate and immutable cultural values of heritage that are linked to and defined by the concepts of monumentality and aesthetics. The authorized discourse is also a professional discourse that privileges expert values and knowledge about the past and its material manifestations, and dominates and regulates professional heritage practices. However, alongside this professional and authorized discourse is also a range of popular discourses and practices. Some of these may take their cue from or be influenced by the professional discourse, but they will not necessarily be reducible to it (Purvis and Hunt 1993). Some discourses may also challenge, either actively or simply through their existence, the dominant discourse. This book also charts the work that the various discourses about heritage ‘do’, and the way they structure and frame different heritage experiences and acts of remembering and commemoration. From this, the book develops the argument that heritage may also be understood as a discourse concerned with the negotiation and regulation of social meanings and practices associated with the creation and recreation of ‘identity’. Heritage is shown to have become a highly active discourse in the latter part of the twentieth century, having been raised as a particular environmental and social concern during the 1960s and 1970s, a period that also witnessed the consolidation of national and international technical process of management and conservation. The reworking of the discourse of heritage at this time marks the development of an explicit and active way of negotiating cultural and social change. This is not to say that heritage as a process did not exist prior to this – certainly as Harvey (2001) notes, the processes that we today define as heritage are an integral part of human culture (see also Diaz-Andreu in press). However, the development of quite explicit professional discourses, and the burgeoning array of popular and community discourses on heritage that have developed over the last few decades, marks an explicit and sometimes self-conscious way of negotiating social and cultural identity, value and meaning. The debates and arguments explored in this book draw on, and attempt to contribute to, the rise in ethnographic approaches that aim to understand the nature of heritage and how the past is constituted and utilized in the present. Since the 1990s there has been increasing multidisciplinary interest in the way diverse communities forge, maintain and negotiate their identities. Alongside this, a range of communities, defined either geographically or by cultural, social, ethnic, economic and/or other experiences, have increasingly asserted the legitimacy of their collective identities and social, political and cultural experiences. Consensual heritage narratives about the nation and national identity were challenged by the diversity of community experience and identity claims. Consequently, heritage debate and practice began to recognize and critically engage with issues of dissonance and the use of memory in the formation of heritage and identity. Increasing sophistication in writing about tourism has also lead to the realization that heritage tourists and other heritage visitors are far more active and critical – or ‘mindful’ – than they have previously been portrayed. Tourism may have more deeply layered or nuanced cultural and social meaning and consequence than its characterization as a leisure activity and economic industry often allows. These events have also coincided with increasing Indigenous and non-Western questioning of dominant Western perceptions of heritage, and the consequences that the dominance of these perceptions have had to the expression of their own identities. This critique has drawn attention to the issue of intangibility, and challenged the emphasis placed on the idea of material authenticity, and the preservationist desire to freeze the moment of heritage and to conserve heritage as an unchanging monument to the past. Arising out of the confluence of all these issues and moments is a new interdisciplinary subfield that offers the opportunity to redefine the idea of ‘heritage’ through an analysis of the consequence this idea has in people’s lives. The first section of this book outlines its theoretical basis. Informed by concepts of discourse analysis, the first chapter identifies and examines the orders of discourse that surround heritage, and considers how and when they developed, and who engages in this dialogue. An ‘authorised heritage discourse’ is identified, which works, it is argued, to construct a sense of what heritage is – and is not. How the discourse works to naturalize certain ideas about the immutable and inherent nature of the value and meaning of heritage within the practices of heritage conservation, preservation and management is also explored. Drawing on a range of interdisciplinary theoretical innovations, in particular ideas of place, remembering, and performance, chapter 2 offers an alternative way of conceiving heritage that will be explored throughout the rest of the book. More specifically, it is argued that what heritage does is intersect with a range social and cultural debates about the legitimacy of a range of values and identities, and subsequently plays a part in their validation, negotiation and regulation. By recognising that the management of heritage has consequences beyond the preservation of historic fabric it will be possible to explore the uses that heritage is put to outside of the management and conservation field. The following two sections of the book examine a range of themes, all of which draw on original research work in England, Australia and the United States. Part II of the book (chapters 3-5) examines the consequences of ‘authorised’ heritage, and explores how authorized discourses of heritage influence expert and professional heritage practices and are themselves perpetuated (chapter 3), how such discourses influence the construction and expression of certain social and cultural identities (chapters 4, 5), and how it is used to regulate and arbitrate dissonance (chapter 5). Chapter 3 offers a critical examination of the discourse of ICOMOS and UNESCO charters and the practices these documents influence. Chapters 4 and 5, respectively, are based on the results of survey and interview work with visitors to English Country Houses and with a range of stakeholders concerned with the use and management of Australia’s Riversleigh World Heritage palaeontological site. In this section of the book it is argued that practices of management and conservation are themselves constitutive performances of heritage, and that the authenticity of heritage lies ultimately in the meanings people construct for it in their daily lives. Chapters 4 and 5 illustrates the ways in which the performative experience of heritage engages with the creation, recreation and legitimization of social and cultural bonds and identity in the present. In particular, they illustrate the way heritage may be used to regulate, legitimize and justify the maintenance of national narratives and social hierarchies. While heritage is shown to be an affirmation of identity and a sense of belonging, that identity may also nonetheless be one that is governed or regulated by wider social forces and narratives. Part III (chapters 6-8) examines subaltern uses of heritage, and explores the various ways authorised and received notions of heritage and the values they represents are contested. Chapter 6 explores the role of remembering and commemoration in the construction of social and family identities, and is based on survey and interview work undertaken with visitors to industrial museums in England. Chapter 7 is based on ethnographic, interview and survey work with residents of the town of Castleford, located in the coalfield of West Yorkshire, England. In this chapter heritage is shown as a process that is actively and critically used to negotiate and facilitate social and cultural change within the community. Commemoration and remembrance are used as platforms from which the community is continually redefining and remaking both itself and the social networks that bind the people of the community together. Chapter 8 explores the ways in which Indigenous peoples, drawing on work in the United States and Australia, use heritage as a political and cultural resource. All three chapters demonstrate why control is an important issue in heritage. Ultimately the process or moment of heritage is shown to be potentially critically active and self-conscious, through which people can negotiate identity and the values and meanings that underlie that, but through which they also challenge and attempt to redefine their position or ‘place’ in the world around them. Heritage is not only a social and cultural resource or process, but also a political one through which a range of struggles are negotiated. The implications and consequences of the theorisation of heritage as a cultural practice concerned with negotiating the tensions between received and contested identity has consequences for both academic analysis and heritage practice and policy.