- We begin our investigation of the political and social uses of heritage and their role in the construction, elaboration and reproduction of identities
- The key and universal question that underpins the debate is: whose heritage? There are two facets to this issue: what is identified as heritage, and how is it interpreted? In either case, selection is involved and, consequently, dissonance will occur
- As that selection and its accompanying discord will reflect wider power relationships in society, the chapter begins with a discussion of two analogies to heritage, landscape and museology, both of which help underline the ways in which social phenomena are mediated through a mesh of conflicting and contested identities
- Although heritage is largely symbolic in its representation of identity and landscape, that in itself does not deny the politics of representation that underlies any formation of heritage, no matter how apparently benign this may be
- To geographers, 'landscape' has meant different things at different times in different places
- Contemporary cultural geographers, however, regard landscapes less as places shaped by lived experience than as largely symbolic entities
- It has already been observed that other commentators see landscape somewhat differently as a polyvocal text, rewritten as it is read, albeit more commonplace as something to be viewed
- As the 'places [in] which the processes of modernization...symbolized the idea of 'modernity', modernist museums reproduced ideas of order and progress, 'with their roots firmly placed in industrialization and urbanization'
- McLean argues, however, that many museums were founded for precisely the opposite purpose of conveying a sense of national pride to a country's citizens, a function which they still retain, for the advent of the postmodern does not in itself deny the continuing importance of a national dimension to identity
Implications for heritage
- both are characterized by a complexity of images and a polyvocality of interpretation reflective of a wide array of social differences
- none the less, the images portrayed are selected by someone, thereby raising issues of privileging or suppressing particular viewpoints;
- however, a single landscape or museum display can be viewed simultaneously in a variety of ways, which means that ostensibly hegemonic interpretations are open to subversion
Heritage, power and collective memory
- The notion of a privileged interpretation of heritage suggests its appropriation as the recognized inheritance of a particular social group
- This act of empowerment inevitably carries the corollary that all heritage necessitates disinheritance of some sort for some people in some circumstances
- An interesting variant of these processes is deliberate self-inheritance, whereby, to varying degrees, a population challenges or denies its own heritage as changing circumstances destroy its relevance or utility
- These linked ideas of appropriation and disinheritance emphasize that the nature and shaping of heritage is intimately related to the exercise of power, heritage being part of the process of defining criteria of social inclusion --and by extension --social exclusion
- The embodiment of public memory in landscape provides an apparently robust example of the ways in which representations of place are intimately related to the creation and reinforcement of official constructions of identity
- Following Pierre Nora, Johnson suggests that real environments of memory have been replaced by sites or places of memory in these discourses of inheritance
- We can illustrate this point through the varying attitudes in Ireland to landscapes of remembrance of the dead of the World Wars
- Heffernan argues that the war memorials and cemetaries of World War I's Western Front in north-east France --muted, serene, peaceful and intensely moving -convey no real sense of sacrifice to the nation state
- The carnage of the Somme and the other battlegrounds of the Western Front can also be read, however, as a memory of shared loss, the sacrifice of the 'sons of Ulster' matched, for example, by that of the mainly Catholic 16th (Irish) Division around Messines in the several Battles of Ypres
- Both the Irish monuments at Messines and Thiepval are essentially unofficial heritage in that although the state recognized, they are administered by private organizations -respectively the Journey of Reconciliation Trust and the Somme Association
- We explore this fragmentation of meaning of memory and heritage further in Chapter 4, but return here to the import of Johnson's conclusions that heritage privileges and empowers an elitist narrative of place
- Dominant ideologies create specific place identities, which reinforce support for particular state structures and related political ideologies
- It is, however, the fragmented and inconsistent nature of the interrelationship between memory and heritage, and the dichotomy between official and unofficial representations and even forms, which substantially undermines the notion that heritage does provide the state with legitimacy, even though, somewhat paradoxically, this clearly remains one of its continuing sociopolitical functions
- This desire to capture the fragmented in the antithesis of the ordered world of historical continuity vested in the nexus of modernity and the nation-state
- Alongside this complex role is the validation of power structures, heritage is also deeply implicated in the construction and legitimation of collective constructs of identity, such as class, gender, ethnicity, and nationalism
- While Lowenthal sees the past and its reconstruction as heritage providing familiarity, guidance, enrichment and escape, the traits which he identifies also fulfill the function of validating and legitimating a people's present sense of sameness
- The benefits of the past and heritage are, moreover, counter-balanced by its costs, largely derived from the privileging of one social group's viewpoint at the expense of those of other groups and peoples
- Despite these qualifications, the notion of Otherness is fundamental to representations of identity, which are constructed in counter-distinction to them
- Human society has always tended to internal division, even where superficially homogenous in cultural characteristics
- Heritage is largely consumed by the middle classes
- The initial widening of the range of heritage representations beyond the artefacts of past and present elites was largely driven by commercialization
- Nevertheless, the growth of the heritage industry did provide economic opportunities to many depressed industrial areas
- The recognition of industrial heritage has diffused globally
- By comparison with the ubiquity of class in the heritage debate, other axes of social differentiation, most notably gender, still appear as more marginal and tentative dimensions
- Modernity was dependent on the construction of the inferiority and difference of women, other races and the working classes, all defined as pre-modern, primitive and still located in the immanent world of nature
- Whichever, the key point is that both viewpoints are gendered constructions, which privilege masculine authority
- None the less, there is some evidence that Lowenthal's claim that heritage 'is traditionally a man's world', 'men having... monopolized the transmission of history; is now less appropriate as women challenge the patriarchal and unrepresentative nature of so many representations of culture
- Homosexuality and disability have also acquired distinct profiles in recent heritage recognition
- Ethnicity is arguably the most fundamental basis of perceived distinction between human groups
- The power of attachment to ethnic identity underlies the importance of ethnic heritage, as the vehicle of transmission and legitimization of that identity through time
- Thus, despite its questionable and sometimes unsavoury resonances, indeed in part because of them, ethnicity is of cardinal importance as a basis for social conflict
- The linguic demarcation of ethnic and indeed national identity is particularly characteristic of Europe, language being the principal delineating factor in the creation of nation states
- None the less, twentieth-century Europe has seen far more strident appeals to linguistic identity
- Language-based identity, and its fragmentation both between and within states, is by no means confined to Europe
- Heritage is, of course, central too the transmission of these identities, language becoming ingrained in the very built environment
- Although such linguistic population/heritage mislocations around the world can sponsor irrendentist claims to lost territory, they can also be resolved by gradual, undramatic unravellings and reweavings from past to present
- Globally, religion, either alone or in association with language, frequently forms the basis of ethnic identity and influences the way in which this spills into nationalism
- Religion can constitute the most powerful foundation to the social and political uses of heritage
- Paralleling the relationship between heritage and language, religious heritage can also be mislocated
- Although they are often difficult to separate, ethnicity and 'race' are distinct social phenomena and should not be conflated
- Hobsbawm and Ranger argue that most European national identities are the products of the nineteenth century
- Although the traditional genetic definition of 'race', defined above all by skin color and physiogamy, remains among the most important contributions to 'visible minority' status, 'race' has received little attention in the heritage debate
- It is readily apparent that the fragmented, inchoate nature of identity militates against any straightforward interpretation of the construction of heritage
