What is heritage?

Introduction

This course introduces the concept of heritage and examines its various uses in contemporary society. It then provides a background to the development of critical heritage studies as an area of academic interest, and in particular the way in which heritage studies has developed in response to various critiques of contemporary politics and culture in the context of deindustrialisation, globalisation and transnationalism. Drawing on a case study in the official documentation surrounding the Harry S. Truman Historic Site in Missouri, USA, it describes the concept of authorised heritage discourses (AHD) in so far as they are seen to operate in official, state-sanctioned heritage initiatives.

This OpenLearn course provides a sample of Level 2 study in Arts and Humanities.

Learning outcomes

After studying this course, you should be able to:

• understand the global scope of heritage

• understand the ‘material’ and ‘non-material’ aspects of heritage

• recognise heritage as a ‘process’ as well as a ‘product’ of certain activities in the present

• recognise heritage studies as a specific field of study

• understand the idea of the authorised heritage discourse (AHD).

1 Introducing heritage

This course introduces the concept of heritage and examines its various uses in contemporary society. It then provides a background to the development of critical heritage studies as an area of academic interest, and in particular the way in which heritage studies has developed in response to various critiques of contemporary politics and culture in the context of deindustrialisation, globalisation and transnationalism. Drawing on a case study in the official documentation surrounding the Harry S. Truman Historic Site in Missouri, USA, it describes the concept of authorised heritage discourses (AHD) in so far as they are seen to operate in official, state-sanctioned heritage initiatives. Where the other chapters in the book contain substantial case studies as part of the discussion of the different aspects of the politics of heritage, this course focuses instead on key concepts, definitions and ideas central to understanding what heritage is, and on heritage studies as a field of inquiry. The chapter suggests that critical heritage studies should be concerned with these officially sanctioned heritage discourses and the relationships of power they facilitate on the one hand, and the ways in which heritage operates at the local level in community and identity building on the other.

We will be introducing you to the meaning of ‘heritage’ in global societies. But first, I would like you to think about what the word heritage means to you.

2 Explaining heritage

This course begins with two photographs: a picture of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia (Figure 1) and a picture of the Mir Castle complex in Belarus (Figure 2).

The photographs appear to show very different types of place, in locations that are widely geographically spaced. One of these is a ‘natural’ place, the other is humanly made (a building, albeit a very grand one). In what ways might we characterise the similarities between the two places? What qualities can we find that link them?

Although they are very different, both of these places are considered to be ‘heritage’, indeed ‘World’ heritage, and both are listed on the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage List. This course concentrates on the ways in which these two very different entities, in two very different places, can both be understood as ‘heritage’.

Figure 1 The Great Barrier Reef, Whitsunday Coast, Queensland, Australia. Photographed by Walter Bibikow. Photo: © Jon Arnold Images Ltd/Alamy.

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A bird’s-eye view of the line of the reef stretching diagonally upwards from the lower left corner of the photograph. Above is a vista of pools and sandbanks, with a channel crossing it right to left, stretching into the distance. There is a small cluster of pleasure boats moored by the edge of the reef, and another boat a little further away.

Figure 1 The Great Barrier Reef, Whitsunday Coast, Queensland, Australia. Photographed by Walter Bibikow. Photo: © Jon Arnold Images ...

The Great Barrier Reef is the world’s most extensive stretch of coral reef. The reef system, extending from just south of the Tropic of Capricorn to the coastal waters of Papua New Guinea, comprises some 3400 individual reefs, including 760 fringing reefs, which range in size from under 1 ha to over 10,000 ha and extend for more than 2000 km off the east coast of Australia. The Great Barrier Reef includes a range of marine environments and formations, including approximately 300 coral cays and 618 continental islands which were once part of the mainland. The reef is home to a number of rare and endangered animal and plant species and contains over 1500 species of fish, 400 species of coral, 4000 species of mollusc and 242 species of birds plus a large number of different sponges, anemones, marine worms and crustaceans and other marine invertebrates. The reef includes feeding grounds for dugongs, several species of whales and dolphins, and nesting grounds of green and loggerhead turtles (United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre, 2008).

Figure 2 The Mir Castle complex, Republic of Belarus, 2003. Unknown photographer. Photo: Ullstein Bild – Russian Picture Service.

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A summer day – people are in shirtsleeves – with large crowds around the massive complex of Mir Castle. The castle appears to be residential rather than defensive, built round a square enclosed courtyard, with chunky square bastions at the corners surmounted by octagonal towers topped by squat spires. In the foreground, on the edge of the grass and beside the path, vendors offer pictures and souvenirs for sale.

Figure 2 The Mir Castle complex, Republic of Belarus, 2003. Unknown photographer. Photo: Ullstein Bild – Russian Picture Service....

The Mir Castle complex is situated on the bank of a small lake at the confluence of the river Miryanka and a small tributary in the Grodno Region of what is now known as the Republic of Belarus. The castle was built in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century in a style that architects familiar with the form it took in central Europe would recognise as ‘Gothic’. It was subsequently extended and reconstructed, first in ‘Renaissance’ and then in ‘Baroque’ styles. The castle sustained severe damage during Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 and was abandoned as a ruin. It was subsequently restored at the end of the nineteenth century, at which time the surrounding parkland received extensive landscaping. Mir Castle is considered to be an exceptional example of a central European castle, reflecting in its design and layout successive cultural influences (Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque) as well as the political and cultural conflicts that characterise the history of the region (UNESCO, 2008).

What makes these places ‘heritage’? And what makes them part of the world’s heritage? The process of nominating a place for inclusion on the World Heritage List involves an assessment of the ways in which a place meets a particular set of criteria for inclusion. This argument is developed by a body representing the sovereign state of the territory in which the site exists and is submitted to a committee in charge of assessing the nominations. Although it would be possible to look in detail at the criteria for inclusion, and at the values implicit in the criteria, it is clear that these sites are defined as heritage by the sheer fact that they have been classified as such through inclusion on a heritage register. This process by which an object, place or practice receives formal recognition as heritage and is placed on a heritage register can be termed an ‘official’ heritage process. Once places become statutory entities and are recognised as belonging to heritage by their inclusion on an official heritage list, they are ‘created’ as ‘official heritage’ and subject to a series of assumptions about how they must be treated differently from other places. For example, official heritage places must be actively managed and conserved, and there is an expectation that funding must be allocated to them so that this can occur.

Although both of these places are recognised through their listing as belonging to the world’s heritage, they have a range of different meanings for the local people who interact with them on an everyday basis. For example, the Barrier Reef, which is understood to be World Heritage on the basis of its biodiversity and recreational values, is a source of sustenance, livelihood and spiritual inspiration for the many different groups of Indigenous Australians who live along the Queensland coastline. They would traditionally understand their relationship with the reef as one of custodianship and the right to control access, hunt, fish and gather in its environs. Clearly the reef’s promotion as a World Heritage site implies that it is ‘owned’ (at least culturally) not only by local people but also by the world community. So there is the potential for a range of different ways of relating to, understanding the significance of, and giving meaning to heritage objects, sites and practices. This range of values of heritage may not be well catered for within traditional western models of heritage and official definitions of heritage. In this case, such differences may give rise to conflict over who has the right to determine access and management of different parts of the reef. Indeed, in most cases the official and the local would be thought of as competing forms of heritage. Heritage itself is a dynamic process which involves competition over whose version of the past, and the associated moral and legal rights which flow from this version of the past, will find official representation in the present.

This brief example embodies the two inter-related understandings of heritage that form the central focus of this book: the largely ‘top-down’ approach to the classification and promotion of particular places by the state as an embodiment of regional, national or international values which creates ‘official’ heritage; and the ‘bottom-up’ relationship between people, objects, places and memories which forms the basis for the creation of unofficial forms of heritage (usually) at the local level. Critical heritage studies, in its most basic sense, involves the investigation of these two processes and the relationship between them. Heritage studies is an exciting new interdisciplinary field of inquiry which draws on a range of academic disciplines and skills including history, archaeology, anthropology, sociology, art history, biology, geography, textual analysis and visual discrimination, to name but a few. The aim of this book is to form an introduction to heritage as a global concept, and critical heritage studies as a field of inquiry.

2.1 What is heritage?

The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘heritage’ as ‘property that is or may be inherited; an inheritance’, ‘valued things such as historic buildings that have been passed down from previous generations’, and ‘relating to things of historic or cultural value that are worthy of preservation’. The emphasis on inheritance and conservation is important here, as is the focus on ‘property’, ‘things’ or ‘buildings’. So (according to the Oxford English Dictionary, anyway), heritage is something that can be passed from one generation to the next, something that can be conserved or inherited, and something that has historic or cultural value. Heritage might be understood to be a physical ‘object’: a piece of property, a building or a place that is able to be ‘owned’ and ‘passed on’ to someone else.

In addition to these physical objects and places of heritage there are also various practices of heritage that are conserved or handed down from one generation to the next. Language is an important aspect of who we understand ourselves to be, and it is learned and passed from adult to child, from generation to generation. These invisible or ‘intangible’ practices of heritage, such as language, culture, popular song, literature or dress, are as important in helping us to understand who we are as the physical objects and buildings that we are more used to thinking of as ‘heritage’. Another aspect of these practices of heritage is the ways in which we go about conserving things – the choices we make about what to conserve from the past and what to discard: which memories to keep, and which to forget; which memorials to maintain, and which to allow to be demolished; which buildings to save, and which ones to allow to be built over. Practices of heritage are customs and habits which, although intangible, inform who we are as collectives, and help to create our collective social memory. We use objects of heritage (artefacts, buildings, sites, landscapes) alongside practices of heritage (languages, music, community commemorations, conservation and preservation of objects or memories from the past) to shape our ideas about our past, present and future.

Another way of thinking about this distinction between objects of heritage and practices of heritage is to consider the different perspectives through which heritage is perceived. For every object of heritage there are also heritage practices. However one group of people (say, professional heritage managers) respond to heritage, other people may respond differently. Thus, around an object of heritage, there may be value judgements based on ‘inherent’ qualities (which may indeed play a determining role in designating the object and conserving it), but there may well be other values which drive the use of the object (associations of personal or national identity, associations with history, leisure etc., as in the example of designation of Harry S. Truman’s otherwise humble dwelling as a National Historic Site discussed later in this course). For every object of tangible heritage there is also an intangible heritage that ‘wraps’ around it – the language we use to describe it, for example, or its place in social practice or religion. Objects of heritage are embedded in an experience created by various kinds of users and the people who attempt to manage this experience. An analogous situation exists in the art world in understanding aesthetics. There is no art without the spectator, and what the spectator (and critic) makes of the art work sits alongside what the artist intended and what official culture designates in a discursive and often contested relationship. So in addition to the objects and practices of heritage themselves, we also need to be mindful of varying ‘perspectives’, or subject positions on heritage.

The historian and geographer David Lowenthal has written extensively on the important distinction between heritage and history. For many people, the word ‘heritage’ is probably synonymous with ‘history’. However, historians have criticised the many instances of recreation of the past in the image of the present which occur in museums, historic houses and heritage sites throughout the world, and have sought to distance themselves from what they might characterise as ‘bad’ history. As Lowenthal points out in The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History, heritage is not history at all: ‘it is not an inquiry into the past, but a celebration of it ... a profession of faith in a past tailored to present-day purposes’ (Lowenthal, 1997, p. x). Heritage must be seen as separate from the pursuit of history, as it is concerned with the re-packaging of the past for some purpose in the present. These purposes may be nationalistic ones, or operate at the local level.

‘Heritage’ also has a series of specific and clearly defined technical and legal meanings. For example, the two places discussed earlier in this course are delineated as ‘heritage’ by their inclusion on the World Heritage List. As John Carman (2002, p. 22) notes, heritage is created in a process of categorising. These places have an official position that has a series of obligations, both legal and ‘moral’, arising from their inclusion on this register. As places on the World Heritage List they must be actively conserved, they should have formal documents and policies in place to determine their management, and there is an assumption that they will be able to be visited so that their values to conservation and the world’s heritage can be appreciated.

There are many other forms of official categorisation that can be applied to heritage sites at the national or state level throughout the world. Indeed, heritage as a field of practice seems to be full of lists. The impulse within heritage to categorise is an important aspect of its character. The moment a place receives official recognition as a heritage ‘site’, its relationship with the landscape in which it exists and with the people who use it immediately changes. It somehow becomes a place, object or practice ‘outside’ the everyday. It is special, and set apart from the realm of daily life. Even where places are not officially recognised as heritage, the way in which they are set apart and used in the production of collective memory serves to define them as heritage. For example, although it might not belong on any heritage register, a local sports arena might be the focus for collective understandings of a local community and its past, and a materialisation of local memories, hopes and dreams. At the same time, the process of listing a site as heritage involves a series of value judgements about what is important, and hence worth conserving, and what is not. There is a dialectical relationship between the effect of listing something as heritage, and its perceived significance and importance to society.

Some authors would define heritage (or at least ‘official’ heritage) as those objects, places and practices that can be formally protected using heritage laws and charters. The kinds of heritage we are most accustomed to thinking about in this category are particular kinds of objects, buildings, towns and landscapes. One common way of classifying heritage is to distinguish between ‘cultural’ heritage (those things manufactured by humans), and ‘natural’ heritage (those which have not been manufactured by humans). While this seems like a fairly clear-cut distinction, it immediately throws up a series of problems in distinguishing the ‘social’ values of the natural world. Returning to the example of the Great Barrier Reef discussed earlier in this course, for the Indigenous Australians whose traditional country encompasses the reef and islands, the natural world is created and maintained by ‘cultural’ activities and ceremonies involving some aspects of intangible action such as song and dance, and other more practical activities such as controlled burning of the landscape and sustainable hunting and fishing practices. It would obviously be extremely difficult to characterise these values of the natural landscapes to Indigenous Australians using a system that divides ‘cultural’ and ‘natural’ heritage and sees the values of natural landscapes as being primarily ecological.

Heritage is in fact a very difficult concept to define. Most people will have an idea of what heritage ‘is’, and what kinds of thing could be described using the term heritage. Most people, too, would recognise the existence of an official heritage that could be opposed to their own personal or collective one. For example, many would have visited a national museum in the country in which they live but would recognise that the artefacts contained within it do not describe entirely what they would understand as their own history and heritage. Clearly, any attempt to create an official heritage is necessarily both partial and selective. This gap between, on one hand, what an individual understands to be their heritage and, on the other hand, the official heritage promoted and managed by the state introduces the possibility of multiple ‘heritages’. It has been suggested earlier that heritage could be understood to encompass objects, places and practices that have some significance in the present which relates to the past.

In 2002 during the United Nations year for cultural heritage, UNESCO produced a list of ‘types’ of cultural heritage (UNESCO, n.d.). This is one way of dividing and categorising the many types of object, place and practice to which people attribute heritage value. It should not be considered an exhaustive list, but it gives a sense of the diversity of ‘things’ that might be considered to be official heritage:

• cultural heritage sites (including archaeological sites, ruins, historic buildings)
• historic cities (urban landscapes and their constituent parts as well as ruined cities)
• cultural landscapes (including parks, gardens and other ‘modified’ landscapes such as pastoral lands and farms)
• natural sacred sites (places that people revere or hold important but that have no evidence of human modification, for example sacred mountains)
• underwater cultural heritage (for example shipwrecks)
• museums (including cultural museums, art galleries and house museums)
• movable cultural heritage (objects as diverse as paintings, tractors, stone tools and cameras – this category covers any form of object that is movable and that is outside of an archaeological context)
• handicrafts
• documentary and digital heritage (the archives and objects deposited in libraries, including digital archives)
• cinematographic heritage (movies and the ideas they convey)
• oral traditions (stories, histories and traditions that are not written but passed from generation to generation)
• languages
• festive events (festivals and carnivals and the traditions they embody)
• rites and beliefs (rituals, traditions and religious beliefs)
• music and song
• the performing arts (theatre, drama, dance and music)
• traditional medicine
• literature
• culinary traditions
• traditional sports and games.

Some of the types of heritage are objects and places (‘physical’ or ‘material’ heritage) while others are practices (‘intangible’ heritage). However, many of these categories cross both types of heritage. For example, ritual practices might involve incantations (intangible) as well as ritual objects (physical). So we should be careful of thinking of these categories as clear cut or distinct. In addition, this list only includes ‘cultural’ heritage. Natural heritage is most often thought about in terms of landscapes and ecological systems, but it is comprised of features such as plants, animals, natural landscapes and landforms, oceans and water bodies. Natural heritage is valued for its aesthetic qualities, its contribution to ecological, biological and geological processes and its provision of natural habitats for the conservation of biodiversity. In the same way that we perceive both tangible and intangible aspects of cultural heritage, we could also speak of the tangible aspects of natural heritage (the plants, animals and landforms) alongside the intangible (its aesthetic qualities and its contribution to biodiversity).

Another aspect of heritage is the idea that things tend to be classified as ‘heritage’ only in the light of some risk of losing them. The element of potential or real threat to heritage – of destruction, loss or decay – links heritage historically and politically with the conservation movement. Even where a building or object is under no immediate threat of destruction, its listing on a heritage register is an action which assumes a potential threat at some time in the future, from which it is being protected by legislation or listing. The connection between heritage and threat will become more important in the later part of this course.

Heritage is a term that is also quite often used to describe a set of values, or principles, which relate to the past. So, for example, it is possible for a firm of estate agents to use the term in its name not only to mean that it markets and sells ‘heritage’ properties, but also simultaneously to invoke a series of meanings about traditional values which are seen as desirable in buying and selling properties. We can also think here about the values which are implicit in making decisions about what to conserve and what not to conserve, in the choices we make about what we decide to label ‘heritage’ and what view as simply ‘old’ or ‘outdated’. These values are implicit in cultural heritage management.

2.2 Governments, heritage registers and the ‘canon’

One aspect of understanding heritage is appreciating the enormous influence of governments in managing and selectively promoting as heritage certain aspects of the physical environment and particular intangible practices associated with culture. One way in which governments are involved in heritage is through the maintenance, funding and promotion of certain places as tourist destinations. We are also reminded here, for example, of the many ways in which governments and nations are involved in the preservation of language as a way of preserving heritage and culture. Language is promoted and controlled by governments through official language policies which determine the state language and which often specify certain controls on the use of languages other than the state language. For example, in France, the ‘Toubon’ Law (Law 94-665, which came into force in 1994 and is named for the minister of culture, Jacques Toubon who suggested and passed the law through the French parliament) specifies the use of the French language in all government publications, print advertisements, billboards, workplaces, newspapers, state-funded schools and commercial contracts. We might also think of the suggestion by French president Nicolas Sarkozy (president 2007–) in 2008 that the correct methods for preparing classic items of French cuisine might be considered for protection as part of the UNESCO World Heritage List. At the time of writing, the nomination is still in preparation for presentation to the UNESCO World Heritage Committee.

In addition to such policies which ensure the preservation of intangible aspects of cultural heritage, governments play a major role in the maintenance and promotion of lists or databases of heritage. Most countries have a ‘national’ heritage list of physical places and objects which are thought to embody the values, spirit and history of the nation. In addition, governments may have multi-layered systems of heritage which recognise a hierarchy of heritage places and objects of national, regional and local significance. These lists (and indeed, the World Heritage List discussed earlier) might be thought of as offshoots of the concept of ‘the canon’. The word ‘canon’ derives from the Greek word for a rule or measure, and the term came to mean the standard by which something could be assessed. The idea of a canon of works of art developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to describe a body of artistic works that represent the height of aesthetic and artistic merit – works of art judged by those who are qualified in matters of taste and aesthetics to be ‘great’ works of art. Similarly, a literary canon describes those writers and their works that are deemed to be ‘great literature’. The canon is a slippery concept, as it is not defined specifically, but through a process of positioning – the canon is represented by those works of art that are held in art galleries and museums and discussed in art books, and those works of literature that are cited in literary anthologies.

When we start to think of a list of heritage as a sort of canon it raises a number of questions. Who are the people who determine what is on the list and what is not? What values underlie the judgements that specify which places and objects should be represented? How do we assess which are the great heritage objects and places and which are not? How does creating such a list include and exclude different members of society? It is now widely recognised that the idea of a canon is linked closely with that of nation (Mitchell, 2005), and that canons might be understood to represent ideological tools that circulate the values on which particular visions of nationhood are established. Creation of a class of ‘things’ that are seen to be the greatest expressions of culture promotes, in turn, narratives about the set of values that are seen to be the most worthy in the preservation of a particular form of state society. The heritage list, like the literary or artistic canon, is controlled by putting the power to establish the canon into the hands of experts who are sanctioned by the state.

It is important to point out that heritage is a rather strange kind of canon. It is unlike the canon of modern art as it is usually understood, for example, since the criteria that constitute it are diverse rather than unified. Modern art is defined by current canons of taste and these create separate ‘canons’ for different ideologies, such as a feminist canon, or a social history of art canon. These can co-exist, but each maintains its own consistent identity. The heritage canon, if measured by the World Heritage List (or a national heritage list) finishes up as a single list, but one which is determined by a wide range of considerations.

It is also important to make the point that heritage is fundamentally an economic activity. This is easily overlooked in critical approaches that focus on the role of heritage in the production of state ideologies (Ashworth et al., 2007, p. 40). Much of what motivates the involvement of the state and other organisations in heritage is related to the economic potential of heritage and its connections with tourism. The relationship between heritage and tourism is examined later in this course, but it would be remiss to neglect a mention here of the economic imperative of heritage for governments.

3 ‘There is no such thing as heritage’

The first part of this course presented a range of definitions of heritage that derive from everyday and technical uses of the term. Here a series of approaches to heritage are introduced by way of a particular academic debate about heritage. Given the focus on preservation and conservation, heritage as a professional field has more often been about ‘doing’ than ‘thinking’; it has focused more on technical practices of conservation and processes of heritage management than on critical discussion of the nature of heritage and why we think particular objects, places and practices might be considered more worthy than others of conservation and protection. But more recently scholars have begun to question the value of heritage and its role in contemporary society. Archaeologist Laurajane Smith, who has written extensively in the field of critical heritage studies, writes ‘there is, really, no such thing as heritage’ (2006, p. 11). What could she mean by this statement? How can there be legislation to protect heritage if it does not, in some way, exist!

In making this bold statement, Smith is drawing on a much older debate about heritage that began in the UK during the 1980s. This debate has been very influential in forming the field of critical heritage studies as it exists today, not only in the UK, but throughout the parts of the world in which ‘western’ forms of heritage conservation operate, and in the increasingly large numbers of ‘non-western’ countries who are engaged in a global ‘business’ of heritage through the role of the World Heritage List in promoting places of national importance as tourist destinations. The next section outlines this debate and the ideas that have both fed into and developed from it, as an introduction to critical heritage studies as a field of academic research (this characterisation of the debate is strongly influenced by Boswell, 1999).

3.1 The heritage ‘industry’

In the late 1980s English academic Robert Hewison coined the phrase ‘heritage industry’ to describe what he considered to be the sanitisation and commercialisation of the version of the past produced as heritage in the UK. He suggested that heritage was a structure largely imposed from above to capture a middle-class nostalgia for the past as a golden age in the context of a climate of decline.

Hewison believed that the rise of heritage as a form of popular entertainment distracted its patrons from developing an interest in contemporary art and critical culture, providing them instead with a view of culture that was finished and complete (and firmly in the past). He pointed to the widespread perception of cultural and economic decline that became a feature of Britain’s perception of itself as a nation in the decades following the Second World War:

The context in which Hewison was writing was important in shaping his criticism of heritage as a phenomenon. His book The Heritage Industry is as much a reflection on the changes that occur within a society as a result of deindustrialisation, globalisation and transnationalism (in particular, the impact of rapid and widespread internal migration and immigration on the sense of ‘rootedness’ that people could experience in particular places in the UK in the 1980s, and the nostalgia that he saw as a response to this sense of uprootedness) as it is a criticism of heritage itself. He noted that the postwar period in the UK coincided with a period of growth in the establishment of museums and in a widespread sense of nostalgia, not for the past as it was experienced but for a sanitised version of the past that was re-imagined through the heritage industry as a Utopia, in opposition to the perceived problems of the present:

The academic Patrick Wright had published a book some two years earlier than The Heritage Industry titled On Living in an Old Country (1985). Like Hewison, Wright was concerned with the increasing ‘museumification’ of the UK, and the ways in which heritage might act as a distraction from engaging with the issues of the present. Wright argued that various pieces of heritage legislation that were put forward by the Conservative government could be read as the revival of the patriotism of the Second World War, and connected this Conservative patriotism to the events of the Falklands conflict. Like Hewison, he was also critical of the ‘timelessness’ of the presentation of the past formed as part of the interpretation of heritage sites:

These critiques of heritage in the UK centred on the ways in which heritage distracted people from engaging with their present and future. Both authors employed a ‘bread and circuses’ analogy in arguing that heritage, like the popular media, was a diversion which prevented people from engaging with the problems of the present:

We need to pause to make a distinction between two criticisms of heritage which seem bound together here. There is a criticism of false consciousness of the past – the presentation of the past in an inaccurate manner – which can be corrected or remedied by ‘better’ use of history in heritage interpretation. There is also a criticism of nostalgia and anxiety that may be produced by an accurate understanding of past historical events (world wars, loss of empire and its influence etc.) but that direct attention away from the future. It needs to be kept in mind that nostalgia is separate from false consciousness. No matter how accurately history is represented by heritage, it can always be directed towards particular ends. The problem with official forms of heritage is not so much that it is ‘bogus history’ but that it is often directed towards establishing particular national narratives in reaction to the influence of globalisation on the one hand, and the local on the other. We can see the growth of heritage in the second part of the twentieth century as, at least in part, a reaction to the way in which globalisation, migration and transnationalism had begun to erode the power of the nation-state. In this guise, heritage is primarily about establishing a set of social, religious and political norms that the nation-state requires to control its citizens, through an emphasis on the connection between its contemporary imposition of various state controls and the nation’s past.

3.2 Heritage as popular culture

Hewison’s position was criticised by a series of commentators. The British Marxist historian Raphael Samuel noted in Theatres of Memory (1994) that the scale of popular interest in the past and the role of that interest in processes of social transformation argued against Hewison’s connection of heritage with Conservative interests. He criticised Hewison’s connection of heritage with Conservative political interests, arguing cogently that heritage and ‘the past’ had been successfully lobbied as a catch-cry for a range of political positions and interests; in particular, heritage had served to make the past more democratic, through an emphasis on the lives of ‘ordinary’ people. He also saw the roots of popular interest in the past as stretching back far earlier than the political era of ‘decline’ suggested by Hewison:

Samuel was quick to emphasise heritage not only as a potentially democratic phenomenon, but also to see in the social practices surrounding heritage the possibility for promoting social change. An advocate of the potentially transformative power of history, and of the role of heritage in producing diversity and scaffolding multiculturalism in society, Samuel described heritage as a social process:

It is difficult to argue with Samuel’s point about the popular interest in heritage, as it is with the grass-roots involvement of people and communities in appeals to conserve particular forms of heritage. For example, SAVE Britain’s Heritage, an influential campaigning body which works to conserve British architectural heritage, was formed as a direct result of the public reaction to the exhibition The Destruction of the Country House held at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) of decorative arts and design in 1974. However, it is not really enough to say that it was formed in response to ‘public’ outcry – we need to think about who this public is. In this case, it is probably fair to say that the ‘public’ who attended the exhibition at the V&A were well educated, middle-class people with an interest in architecture. But this phenomenon of the movement of heritage into the public sphere as a form of popular entertainment outside of the museum and into public spaces cautions against seeing heritage as entirely something that is imposed ‘from above’.

3.3 Heritage and tourism

John Urry’s (1990) criticisms of Hewison’s The Heritage Industry took another form, providing a useful corrective to the way in which both Wright and Hewison had criticised heritage as ‘false’ history. Focusing particularly on museums, he suggested that tourists are socially differentiated, so an argument that they are lulled into blind consumption by the ‘heritage industry’, as had been suggested by Hewison, could not hold true. Urry drew an analogy with French philosopher Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘the gaze’ to develop the idea of a ‘tourist gaze’. The tourist gaze is a way of perceiving or relating to places which cuts them off from the ‘real world’ and emphasises the exotic aspects of the tourist experience. It is directed by collections of symbols and signs to fall on places that have been previously imagined as pleasurable by the media surrounding the tourist industry. Photographs, films, books and magazines allow the images of tourism and leisure to be constantly produced and reproduced. The history of the development of the tourist gaze shows that it is not ‘natural’ or to be taken for granted, but developed under specific historical circumstances, in particular the exponential growth of personal travel in the second part of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, it owes its roots to earlier configurations of travel and tourism, such as the ‘Grand Tour’ (the standard itinerary of travel undertaken by upper-class Europeans in the period from the late seventeenth century until the mid-nineteenth century which was intended to educate and act as a right of passage for those who took it), and in Britain, the love affair with the British sea-side resort which had its hey-day in the mid-twentieth century.

Tourism and heritage must be seen to be directly related as part of the fundamentally economic aspect of heritage. At various levels, whether state, regional or local, tourism is required to pay for the promotion and maintenance of heritage, while heritage is required to bring in the tourism that buys services and promotes a state’s, region’s or locality’s ‘brand’. Heritage therefore needs tourism, just as it needs political support, and it is this that creates many of the contradictions that have led to the critiques of the heritage industry relating to issues of authenticity, historical accuracy and access.

The connection between heritage and travel might be seen to have a much deeper history. The fifth-century BCE Greek historian Herodotus made a list of the ‘Seven Wonders of the World’, the great monuments of the Mediterranean Rim, which was reproduced in ancient Hellenic guidebooks. Herodotus’ original list was rediscovered during the Middle Ages when similar lists of ‘wonders’ were being produced. What is different about the World Heritage List is that, as a phenomenon of the later part of the twentieth century reflecting the influence of globalisation, migration and transnationalism, it spread a particular, western ‘ideal’ of heritage. This image of heritage, and particularly World Heritage as a canon of heritage places, began to circulate freely and to become widely available for the consumption of people throughout the world. Another important difference is the acceleration in transforming places into heritage – what Hewison and Wright referred to as ‘museumification’ – which involves the almost fetishistic creation of dozens of different lists of types of heritage. Hewison connected this growth in heritage and its commodification with the experience of postmodernity and the constant rate of change in the later part of the twentieth century.

The growth in heritage as an industry can be documented at a broad level by graphing the number of cultural heritage policy documents developed by the major international organisations involved in the management of heritage in the western world. These organisations include the Council of Europe, the International Council of Museums (ICOM), the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), the International Committee on Archaeological Heritage Management (ICAHM, a committee of ICOMOS), the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), the Organization of World Heritage Cities (OWHC), the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the World Monuments Fund (WMF). The graph of numbers of policy documents over the course of the twentieth century, as the organisations came into being, shows a major period of growth after the 1960s and 1970s (see Figure 3).

Figure 3 Cultural heritage policy documents by decade, 1870–000, adapted from Getty Conservation Institute (2008) (see full list in the Appendix)

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A block graph demonstrating the increasing volume of cultural heritage policy documents from the 1870s to the 1990s. One is recorded in the first decade; none in the 1880s and 1890s; one in the first decade of the twentieth century (1900–1909); no more until the 1930s when four policy documents are noted; none in the 1940s; in the fifties a return to the level of the thirties; and a steady rise to 7 in the sixties, 12 in the seventies, 13 in the eighties; then a huge rise to 34 in the nineties.

Figure 3 Cultural heritage policy documents by decade, 1870–000, adapted from Getty Conservation Institute (2008) (see full list in the ...

Urry was interested in explaining the power of the consumer to transform the social role of the museum. He suggested that the consumer has a major role in selecting what ‘works’ and what does not in heritage. It is not possible to set up a museum just anywhere – consumers are interested in authenticity and in other things that dictate their choices, and they are not blindly led by a top–down ‘creation’ of heritage by the state:

The outcome of Urry’s discussion of heritage was to shift the balance of the critique of heritage away from whether or not heritage was ‘good’ history to the realisation that heritage was to a large extent co-created by its consumers.

The popular appeal of heritage can be demonstrated by ‘blockbuster’ exhibitions of artefacts and archaeological finds, such as the Treasures of Tutankhamun tour, a worldwide travelling exhibition of artefacts recovered from the tomb of the eighteenth dynasty Egyptian pharaoh which ran from 1972 to 1979. This exhibition was first shown in London at the British Museum in 1972, when it was visited by more than 1.6 million visitors. Over 8 million visited the exhibition in the USA. A follow-up touring exhibition called Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs ran during the period 2005–8. Interestingly, instead of being shown in London at the British Museum, this exhibition was displayed in a commercial entertainment space, the O₂ Dome in south-east London, which contains concert venues and cinemas (see Figures 4 and 5). Such an approach to the display of archaeological artefacts shows the way in which the formal presentation of heritage has moved outside the traditional arenas in which it would be presented, to be viewed almost exclusively as a ‘popular’ form of entertainment.

Figure 4 Interior of the Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs gift shop at the O₂ Dome, London, 2008. Photographed by Rodney Harrison. Photo: © Rodney Harrison. Items for sale are lit and displayed in the same way as the artefacts from the exhibition. The gift shop is strategically placed at the exit so that people must walk through it to leave the exhibition. Such gift shops have become a ubiquitous part of the experience of heritage for the museum-going public.

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The brightly lit interior of the Tutankhamun Exhibition shop. The sales counter is on the left, while visitors examine displays on the right. Replicas of objects are displayed in glass cases beside the sales point. Less costly items are to the right and against the wall, some (for example an umbrella) only marginally related to the Golden Age of the Pharaohs.

Figure 4 Interior of the Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs gift shop at the O₂ Dome, London, 2008. Photographed by Rodney ...

Figure 5 Entrance to the Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs exhibition at the O₂ Dome, London, 2008. Photographed by Rodney Harrison. Photo: © Rodney Harrison. Note that the exhibition poster has been made to resemble a movie poster.

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The lofty space within the Dome at the entrance to the Tutankhamun Exhibition. The shop exit occupies the lower third of the image. Above it a huge poster (the width of the shop) displays an image of Tutankhamun’s face and the dates of the exhibition. A glimpse of the structure of the Dome is visible to the right.

Figure 5 Entrance to the Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs exhibition at the O₂ Dome, London, 2008. Photographed by Rodney ...

Ironically, it was to this same commercialisation of heritage and the past that archaeologist Kevin Walsh (1992) turned in support of the ideas put forward by Hewison in The Heritage Industry. Walsh argued in his book The Representation of the Past that the boom in heritage and museums has led to an increasing commercialisation of heritage which distances people from their own heritage. He suggested that the distancing from economic processes – a symptom of global mass markets that has been occurring since the Enlightenment – has contributed to a loss of ‘sense of place’, and that the heritage industry (and its role in producing forms of desire relating to nostalgia) feeds off this. Loss of a sense of place creates a need to develop and consume heritage products that bridge what people perceive to be an ever increasing gap between past and present. Walsh used an argument similar to one employed by David Lowenthal in The Past is a Foreign Country (1985) and later in The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (1997). Lowenthal suggested that paradoxically the more people attempt to know the past, the further they distance themselves from it as they replace the reality of the past with an idealised version that looks more like their own reality.

3.4 Heritage is not inherent

I want to return to Smith’s contention that ‘there is no such thing as heritage’. In arguing that there are only opinions and debates about heritage and that heritage is not something that is self-defining, Smith is challenging a model that sees heritage as an intrinsic value of an object, place or practice. An intrinsic value is one that is ‘built-in’ to an object, practice or place; it belongs to the basic and essential features that make something what it is. Under such a model of heritage, heritage objects, places and practices are attributed particular values by the professionals who are involved in assessing and managing heritage, such as architects, archaeologists, anthropologists, engineers and historians. With time, these values become reasonably fixed and unquestioned. This ‘knowledge’, as well as the weight of authority given to heritage professionals, gives the impression that the process of assessing heritage value is simply one of ‘uncovering’ the heritage values that already exist in an object, place or practice. We might think of such a model of heritage as taxonomic: it assumes that there is a pre-existing ordered hierarchy of heritage objects, places and practices in the world.

The idea that heritage is inherent and that its significance is intrinsic to it leads to a focus on the physical fabric of heritage. If value is inherent, it follows that ‘heritage’ must be contained within the physical fabric of a building or object, or in the material things associated with heritage practices.

The implication of this taxonomic viewpoint which holds that heritage is intrinsic to an object, place or practice is that a definitive list of heritage can be created. This idea is closely linked to the idea of an artistic or literary canon as previously discussed. Most practitioners would now recognise that heritage value is not intrinsic; value is something that is attributed to an object, place or practice by particular people at a particular time for particular reasons. Smith is challenging a process that attaches permanent legal conditions to certain places or things. She is arguing that all ‘objects of heritage’ need to be constantly re-evaluated and tested by social practices, needs and desires. Her argument is essentially that heritage is culturally ascribed, rather than intrinsic to things. While this might at first glance appear to be a rather academic point, it is a linchpin of critical heritage studies.

Throughout the second part of the twentieth century the increased recognition of cultural diversity and the contribution of multiculturalism to western societies created a conundrum. How could the old ideas about a fixed canon of heritage, which was established to represent nations with closed borders, come to stand for increasing numbers of diasporic communities of different ethnic origin who were forced, or who elected, to relocate to areas away from their settled territories and who now made such a contribution to the character and make-up of nation-states in western societies? (See, for example, Anderson, 2006.) This challenge, coupled with a recognition that heritage values could not be seen as intrinsic, led to the development of the concept of representativeness, and a shift away from the idea of a single canon of heritage.

Representativeness in heritage recognises that those in positions of power cannot always anticipate the places that the diverse range of members of society will find important. However, through conserving a representative sample of the diverse range of places, objects and practices that could reasonably by called ‘heritage’, we safeguard the protection of a sample of places and things which may be recognised as heritage now or in the future. A representative heritage place or object derives its values from the extent to which it can act as an exemplar of a class of place or type of object. However, it needs to be understood that this was not a total shift in ideals, and that both of these ways of understanding heritage are still taxonomic in nature and still involve the production of lists of heritage.

A more fundamental challenge, which will be taken up in subsequent chapters of this book, is that of non-western cultures which emphasise the intangible aspects of heritage. This has led to a model of managing and assessing values, rather than lists of heritage items. The recognition that it is impossible to conserve an example of every ‘thing’ generates a shift towards a thresholds-based heritage system, where things must be assessed against a series of criteria to qualify for heritage status. The influences of these changing systems of heritage will become clear as you work your way through the chapters of this book.

4 What does heritage do?

4.1 Case study: Harry S. Truman National Historic Site, Missouri, USA

Harry S. Truman National Historic Site was gazetted (listed on the register of historic properties) on 23 May 1983 and opened to the public as a house museum on 15 May 1984 after Mrs Bess Truman (nee Wallace) donated the home to the US nation in her will. Bess Truman’s grandfather, George Porterfield Gates, built the fourteen-room, two-and-a-half storey ‘Queen Anne’ style house over the period 1867–95. It was the house in which the thirty-third US president Harry S. Truman lived during the period from his marriage to Bess Wallace on 28 June 1919 until his death on 26 December 1972. The historic site originally included just the ‘Truman Home’, however a series of other properties known as the Truman Farm, the Noland Home and the two Wallace Homes associated with the life of Truman were added to the site in the years that followed (see Figures 6–8).

The heritage values of this site are expressed by the US Department of the Interior National Park Service, the owners and managers of the site, in this way:

The Harry S Truman Historic Site ... contains tangible evidence of his life at home before, during, and after his presidency – places where forces molded and nurtured him.

Figure 6 The Harry S. Truman Home, 219 N. Delaware Street, Independence, Missouri. Unknown photographer. Photo: © David R. Frazier Photolibrary, Inc./Alamy.

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A substantial three-storey clapboard house, irregular in plan, with verandas, a projecting bay on the right, and tall, narrow sash windows. The entrance is under the front veranda up a flight of four broad steps. The house is surrounded by lawns and shrubs, with a lamp-post in the left foreground.

Figure 6 The Harry S. Truman Home, 219 N. Delaware Street, Independence, Missouri. Unknown photographer. Photo: © David R. Frazier ...

This place might be understood as a class of heritage place known as a ‘house museum’– a site maintained ‘as it was’ to give the public an insight into the life of a person or persons perceived to have been historically important. And, indeed, the statement of significance reproduced in part above certainly makes it clear that the significance of the property lies entirely in its ability to ‘give the visitor insight into Harry Truman as president of the United States’. The statement of significance gives the impression that the significance of the site is embodied within the physical material of the place and its contents: it contains ‘tangible evidence’ of the president and his life, and this material evidence has the ability to provide an insight into his ideas and the events of his presidency. This focus on the tangible and material, along with the rather pleasing setting of the home and its contents, seems consistent with Smith’s contention that the dominant western discourse of heritage is focused on material things rather than intangible practices.

Figure 7 The sitting room of the Truman Home, as interpreted to the site visitor. Photographed by Jack E. Boucher, Historic American Buildings Survey. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, HABS MO, 48 INDEP, 3.

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A large, comfortable sitting room with projecting bay windows at the far end, furnished with armchairs, a settee, smaller chairs, occasional tables and a patterned rug. A long-case clock stands in the corner of the room. The furniture is traditional in style with some antique pieces. Lighting is by wall-mounted lights and table lamps.

Figure 7 The sitting room of the Truman Home, as interpreted to the site visitor. Photographed by Jack E. Boucher, Historic American ...

Figure 8 Grandview Farm, Missouri, c.1906–9. Unknown photographer. Photo: © Corbis. Left to right: Martha Ellen Truman, her mother Harriet Louisa Young, and Harry Truman.

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A two-storey clapboard house of three bays, rectangular in plan, with a veranda shading the front door and two ground-floor windows. Mrs Young is seated in a rocking chair on the grass below the veranda, with her daughter standing on her right and Harry Truman behind her and to her left.

Figure 8 Grandview Farm, Missouri, c.1906–9. Unknown photographer. Photo: © Corbis. Left to right: Martha Ellen Truman, her mother ...

While Truman himself did not belong to the upper classes, he can be seen as belonging to the ‘elite’ classes through his very powerful role as the president of the USA. As you will see from the photographs in Figures 6 and 7, the Truman Home is a rather humble dwelling for a president. Nonetheless, the Truman Home does demonstrate the features that Smith outlines, as even though the structure itself is reasonably humble, it gains its significance through its association with power and celebrity. It derives its status as a heritage site through its association with the ‘biggest and best’–important historical figures and great events. The home and its contents are presented in a manner that is both aesthetically pleasing and familiar to visitors as a ‘house museum’.

Another way in which the Truman Home conforms to Smith’s model is through the notion that there is some inherent virtue to this place that shaped Truman’s character and that can now be ‘read’ by the visitor. The association of the home with a ‘great historical figure’ is consistent with the concept of the AHD. But another key point which emerges from a close reading of the text is that the word ‘associated’ signifies ‘intangible’ heritage. It would be impossible to read this building as Truman’s home without the interpretive texts that tell us about the connection between Truman and the house. So there is a rather subtle interplay between the tangible and intangible aspects of heritage that are displayed in the text. The AHD balances the idea of the inherent significance of the fabric of the building against association, in this case, with Truman as president and what his relatively modest origins mean for current notions of US democracy.

The US Department of the Interior National Park Service General Management Plan (1999) specifies a series of further studies to be carried out to assist with the understanding and management of the Harry S. Truman Historic Site. These include an archaeological overview and assessment, cultural landscape reports, historic resources studies, long-term interpretive plan, and wildlife and vegetation surveys. These reports would be prepared, in this order, by an archaeologist, a cultural geographer or landscape architect, a historian, an interpretation specialist, and a zoologist and botanist. In specifying the form of planning documents required, the management plan establishes the expertise of particular professionals in assessing and documenting the heritage significance of the site. In this way, the general management plan excludes the views of the general public. It gives preference to the work of particular academic disciplines over members of the public or other (non-heritage) specialists who might form an opinion of the significance of the site; and this is despite the fact that the site is being conserved for the general public who ‘need to know as much about their leaders as possible; the type of people we elect to the presidency tells us a great deal about ourselves’ (1999, p. 7). Again, it is possible to see here the exclusion of the general public and the emphasis on heritage as the realm of professionals that Smith suggests are features of the AHD.

These ideas about heritage at the Truman Home do not exist in isolation, but flow down from various other documents which circulate particular ideas about heritage that make up what Smith refers to as the AHD. The National Historic Preservation Act 1966, as amended (NHPA), is the key piece of Federal legislation influencing the way in which heritage is managed and listed in the USA. Although the property was actually listed under the Historic Sites Act 1935, the NHPA is the legislative tool that governs the National Register of Historic Places on which the building sits alongside over 76,000 other heritage places or objects.

The NHPA defines the register as ‘composed of districts, sites, buildings, structures, and objects significant in US history, architecture, archaeology, engineering, and culture’ (Section 101 (a) (1) (A)). This definition immediately defines heritage as material, and the value of heritage as inherent in a ‘district, site, building, structure’ or ‘object’. In this sense, the Act can be seen as fulfilling the first of Smith’s characteristics of the AHD, that heritage is seen as contained within material things. The first section of the NHPA, which sets out its purpose, does more to realise many of the official ideas about heritage that Smith describes as comprising the AHD:

• (b)The Congress finds and declares that –

The NHPA declares the integral relationship between heritage and the nation, and the inherent ‘correctness’ of conserving heritage, which is seen to have a series of benefits to the well-being of the American people. It also introduces the idea that heritage is being lost ‘with increasing frequency’, which not only gives the act of conservation a sense of urgency in the light of this threat, but suggests a complete list of heritage (or a canon of heritage) that is being eroded by this loss. The Act specifies a range of heritage professionals as the experts on determining the values of heritage and the past through its explicit reference to ‘history, architecture, archaeology, (and) engineering’. It also places the ultimate responsibility for the categorisation and management of heritage in the hands of the Federal government, which further excludes the general public from decisions about determining the significance of heritage. The term ‘historic property’ itself seems to presuppose not only that heritage is physical but that it will be a bounded entity such as a building or place, rather than a practice or a series of characteristics contained within a broader landscape.

The criteria for entry on to the National Register are standards against which places nominated for inclusion on the register are assessed. These criteria are laid out in Part 60 of the National Register Federal Program Regulations.

The emphasis in these criteria is on the archaeological, architectural or design values of a historic property. Clearly, a determination of what constitutes high archaeological value can only be carried out by an archaeologist. Similarly, architects and engineers would be involved in determining the values of the design and technical accomplishment in so far as these issues relate to historic properties. The use of complex threshold criteria also establishes the need for professionals to act as experts in undertaking a heritage assessment to determine whether or not a historic property meets the threshold.

The National Historic Preservation Act 1966 was passed two years after the Venice Charter. Although the USA had significant historic heritage legislation as early as 1906 with the Antiquities Act 1906, which protected historic or prehistoric remains on sites of scientific value on federal lands and made unauthorised destruction or removal of these remains illegal, the 1964 Venice Charter had a major influence on the way in which heritage was conceived and presented in the 1966 Act.

4.2 Reflecting on the case study

It is possible to represent this flow of ideas about heritage at the Truman Home schematically, as in Figure 9. This whole system represents Smith’s AHD. Ideas about what heritage is, and who should be involved in determining which aspects of heritage to conserve and in what way, are implicit at all levels of documentation guiding the management of the Truman Home. It is in this way that Smith’s AHD can be understood as a ‘total’ system that constantly reinforces its own philosophies and ideals.

Figure 9 Schematic diagram showing the statutory and documentary influence of charters, laws and documents on the interpretation and management of the Truman Home as heritage

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A series of boxes, linked by arrows, illustrating the legal and documentary influences on the management and interpretation of the Truman House. In direct sequence, running top to bottom of the diagram: first, the Venice Charter; second, the National Historic Preservation Act; third, the National Register of Historic Places Evaluation Criteria, and, feeding into this item from the left of the diagram, the input from heritage professionals and organisations; fourth, the General Management Plan; and finally the Truman Home.

Figure 9 Schematic diagram showing the statutory and documentary influence of charters, laws and documents on the interpretation and ...

4.3 Heritage and the production of culture

Another way of thinking about heritage is to view it not simply in terms of physical things but as a form of social and cultural action. Most anthropologists now agree that cultures are not simply an accumulation of things and people but are better understood in terms of a series of processes by which new and old practices are adapted and adopted within a cultural system. These processes can be thought of as forms of ‘work’ which help to produce a culture. In these terms, culture (and by extension, heritage) can never be thought of as being lost, because culture is always produced in the present to deal with the circumstances of everyday life. Drawing on the work of anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (1996, [2001] 2008), archaeologist Denis Byrne (2008) discusses the ways in which communities use heritage as a part of the ‘work’ which maintains their connection to particular places and to each other. Appadurai calls this work the ‘production of locality’.

An example of a heritage practice that is concerned with the production of locality and community from a contemporary developed nation is the ‘traditional’ tug of war that is held between the Bull Hotel and the Feathers Hotel each year in Ludlow town centre (England) on Boxing Day (Figure 10). Here, hundreds of locals gather to eat and drink in the streets while cheering on the teams representing these two pubs located on opposite sides of the main street. The focus on this particular place and on communal eating and drinking demonstrates clearly the ways in which such discrete heritage practices can help individuals express a sense of connection between people and place. The fabric of the buildings and the street are irrelevant to this heritage practice, which demonstrates the active role that heritage can take in a community by bringing people together to emphasise shared values.

Figure 10 Locals gather to cheer on the two teams during the Boxing Day tug of war in Ludlow town centre. Unknown photographer. Photo: courtesy of the Shropshire Star.

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Outside the Bull Hotel, a dense throng of people surrounding youngsters engaged in a tug of war, with much laughter and good humour in evidence. The rope runs diagonally out of the picture at the left-hand corner.

Figure 10 Locals gather to cheer on the two teams during the Boxing Day tug of war in Ludlow town centre. Unknown photographer. Photo: ...

Being able to connect one’s self to the past, and to the collective past of others via the recollection or recreation of specific memories and histories, is a form of cultural capital that relates to heritage. For example, if an individual can make a connection between their past and the heritage that is promoted as an aspect of their community’s past, it gives them a connection they can use to ‘purchase’ privilege in social interactions. In Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘cultural capital’ (see, for example, Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990) the skills and knowledge that people accumulate in the course of their lives can be employed culturally in a way that is similar to economic capital. Cultural capital might be understood to be similar to prestige or ‘know-how’: the ability to ‘get along’ and acquire more influence and status. Education is the key means of acquiring distinction through cultural capital. In this model, heritage is not something imposed from above, but something that people create and use actively to maintain the connections between themselves and other places and things. This model of heritage as social action is far better at accommodating the intangible aspects of heritage such as song, language and tradition – those forms of heritage described earlier in this course as heritage practices.

If heritage can be a form of cultural capital and a way of connecting people with each other and with the environment that surrounds them, the promotion of heritage or involvement in heritage can be considered to be a form of social action. By drawing on the past and creating a new significance for its traces and memories, people can transform and refigure the ways in which their societies operate. Such a model of heritage does not necessarily criticise heritage for creating alternative versions of history, but sees the role of this creation of collective memories as both the production and the transformation of society and culture.

5 Themes in heritage studies

Now watch ‘Themes in heritage studies’ (duration 5 minutes). It raises a series of open questions about the nature of heritage and heritage studies as an academic discipline, and points to the broad themes that we will attempt to address.

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Transcript: Themes in heritage studies

Darcus Howe

This is part of the Caribbean history in England.

David Clarke

In one sense, of course, the displays are a commentary on Scottish identity, but their very existence now is a factor in the development of future identity, because what they’ve brought to people will change their perceptions about what they think about Scotland.

Man (vox pop)

We’ve really rediscovered our national identity, and there’s a feeling that, you know, the best is still to come.

Susan Denyer

It’s not enough to say, ‘well, this is a place associated with some strong ideas that have had worldwide influence’. In terms of World Heritage what one has to be able to demonstrate is how the site manifests those ideas, why it’s important, why it has outstanding universal value.

Newsreader (Huw Edwards)

At least 38 people dead, hundreds injured as terrorists attack central London. At the height of the rush hour they hit the transport system with four massive bombs.

Julie Nicholson

I think what everyone wanted was something that represented the 52 individuals but also expressed something about the collective nature, and that it would be something that stood as … as a thing of beauty, a work of art.

Christopher Wilk

We don’t regard ourselves as the sole source of authority. It used to be that curators would say, ‘right, I know my collection, I know the history, I will tell the public what they have to know’. We now know that the most important thing that happens in the museum visiting experience is what the visitor brings with them.

Sarah Medlam

People must feel they that they can use a gallery as they wish, and that they don’t have to follow some pre-determined route or take it in in a linear fashion if they don’t choose to.

Chris Mullard

There is a tendency, I think, for us all to look at heritage in a way that is defined by one specific interest group, you know. And it tends to be white, it tends to be male, and it tends to be upper class.

It isn’t just people dressing up and dancing on the streets, this is about community action.

Darcus Howe

The people came and made it an event, and if you don’t understand that, you do not understand carnival at all.

Chris Mullard

At the heart of carnival lies community. At the heart of community lies the individual, and individual freedoms and individual rights. And carnival has always been about the expression of all that within a collective form.

Jim Blackender

The choice is: do we want to live on a high-density housing estate, or do we want to keep a vital part of history and continue into the future the way we’re living now? And we all want to continue with what we’ve got.

Nicholas Bullock

The grounds for listing make it difficult to bring in the play of local sentiment as a rationale for preservation. Essentially it’s framed in terms of architectural and planning history, rather than in terms of social history.

Eddie Benn

That is our heritage. It may not be in the form of a lovely Grade II listed building, but it is heritage, so how can you ignore that?

End transcript: Themes in heritage studies

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Themes in heritage studies

6 Conclusion

This course has explored ideas about what constitutes heritage – from a canonical list of places and objects to community practices and social action. In the introduction to this course it was suggested that heritage studies as an academic discipline was concerned with the study of two processes and the relationship between them. The first of these processes concerns the ways in which ideas about official heritage, or AHD, are involved in the production of a ‘heritage industry’ which grants the power to control heritage and, by extension, its messages, to ‘experts’ and the state. Critics have disapproved of aspects of the heritage industry for producing sanitised and unrealistic reconstructions of the past, as well as for distracting people from the contemporary and creative aspects of culture that could transform it. The AHD model presents heritage as complete, untouchable and ‘in the past’, and embodied within tangible things such as buildings and artefacts. Such a model of heritage is based on the idea that the values of heritage are inherent and unchanging.

On the other hand, scholars have pointed to alternative aspects of heritage that involve the production of identity and community, that relate to official and unofficial practices of heritage, and that have the potential to transform society. The relationship between local action and global networks has been highlighted as important to this process. This model of heritage as social action could also be characterised as a ‘bottom-up’ approach, in opposition to the way in which heritage as an ‘industry’ operates from a ‘top-down’ position. Heritage as social action is more concerned with practices or with the intangible aspects of heritage than with objects of heritage or tangible heritage. It is involved in the production of both collective and individual memory and performs ‘social work’ which helps to build community and identity.

In this course the focus moves from what heritage ‘is’ to what it ‘does’. This is what distinguishes ‘critical’ heritage studies from heritage in practice. Critical heritage studies is concerned with thinking about the function of heritage within society and how it works, rather than how you do it (for example, by protecting a site).

I hope that this course and its associated study materials have introduced you to the rich diversity of global heritage and its academic study. I also hope that it has broadened your perception of what heritage ‘is’.

Glossary

aesthetic

concerned with sensory (primarily visual) judgements of beauty, taste and value

conservation

in the UK, the processes of maintenance and protection from destruction or change, usually with some legal sanctions. In the USA, the term ‘preservation’ is used

discourse

lit. speech or discussion; often used in a more theoretical context to describe a form of communication which requires specialised (‘inside’) knowledge

indigenous

ethnic group who occupied a geographic area prior to the arrival and subsequent occupation of migrant settlers. The term may be used in some circumstances to include groups who may not have been part of the ‘original’ occupation of an area, but who were part of an early historical period of occupation prior to the most recent colonisation, annexation or formation of a new nation-state

inherent

the idea that the values of a heritage object, place or practice are inseparable from its physical qualities

intangible

something considered to be a part of heritage that is not a physical object or place, such as a memory, a tradition or a cultural practice, as opposed to tangible heritage

intrinsic

see inherent

locality

the location and particular qualities of a place

‘official’ heritage

state-sponsored or controlled processes of heritage listing and management. The term is often used in opposition to the term ‘unofficial’ heritage

oral history

the transmission of history by verbal means. Often a feature of non-literate cultures

oral tradition

see oral history

subaltern

subordinate or overlooked. A person or group of low social status and their cultural expression which is excluded from common representations of the nation

values

in heritage parlance, the reason that explains the definition of an object, place or practice as heritage

Venice Charter

The International Charter for the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Sites, which was drafted at the Second International Congress of Architects and Technicians of Historic Monuments in Venice in 1964 and adopted by ICOMOS in 1965

World Heritage Convention

The Convention Concerning the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage, adopted by the General Conference of UNESCO on 16 November 1972, which established the World Heritage List and the process for listing World Heritage sites

World Heritage sites

Places listed on the World Heritage List

References

Acknowledgements

This course was written by Dr Rodney Harrison

This free course is an adapted extract from the course AD218 Understanding global heritage, which is currently out of presentation

Course image: Paul Stevenson in Flickr made available under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Licence.

Figure 1: The Great Barrier Reef, Whitsunday Coast, Queensland, Australia. Photographed by Walter Bibikow. Photo: © Jon Arnold Images Ltd/Alamy.

Figure 2: The Mir Castle complex, Republic of Belarus, 2003. Unknown photographer. Photo: Ullstein Bild – Russian Picture Service.

Figure 3: http://www.getty.edu/conservation/research_resources/ charters.html. ‘Cultural Heritage Policy Document List’. The Getty website. Copyright © J. Paul Getty Trust.

Figure 4: Interior of the Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs gift shop at the O2 Dome, London, 2008. Photographed by Rodney Harrison. Photo: © Rodney Harrison.

Figure 5: Entrance to the Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs exhibition at the O₂ Dome, London, 2008. Photographed by Rodney Harrison. Photo: © Rodney Harrison.

Figure 6: The Harry S. Truman Home, 219 N. Delaware Street, Independence, Missouri. Unknown photographer. Photo: © David R. Frazier Photolibrary, Inc./Alamy.

Figure 7: The sitting room of the Truman Home, as interpreted to the site visitor. Photographed by Jack E. Boucher, Historic American Buildings Survey. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, HABS MO, 48 INDEP, 3.

Figure 8: Grandview Farm, Missouri, c.1906–9. Unknown photographer. Photo: © Corbis.

Figure 10: Locals gather to cheer on the two teams during the Boxing Day tug of war in Ludlow town centre. Unknown photographer. Photo: courtesy of the Shropshire Star.

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