- heritage, inheritance from will of a deceased ancestors or bequeathed when dead to descendants
- no longer just an intergenerational exchange
- support for artistic performances is heritage
- the current social behavior of individuals is explained and excused in terms of their group or individual heritage
- poor economic performances of industries, countries, or even whole continents is blamed upon a heritage of capitalist exploitation, slavery, or colonialism
- A growing commercial heritage industry is commodifying pasts into heritage products and experiences for sale as part of a modern consumption of entertainment
- the adjective, 'heritage', is not only being applied to the provision of goods and services that come from or relate to a past in some way but is increasingly being use to convey a feeling of generalized quality, continuity or simple familiarity and well-being
- past, all that has ever happened
- the existence of the past as an objective reality is not a precondition for the creation of heritage
- the attempts of successive presents to relate and explain selected aspects of a past is the concern of the historical disciplines, while the collection, preservation and documentation of the records and physical remains of the past is a task for archivists and antiquarians
- heritage-focus on the ways in which we use the past now, or upon the attempts of a present to project aspects of itself into an imagined future
- heritage is a view from the present
- the present needs of people form the key defining element
- if people in the present are creators of heritage, the present creates the heritage it requires and manages it for a range of contemporary purposes
- culture is essentially concerned with the production and exchange of meaning and their real, practical effects
- like language, culture is one of the mechanisms by which meaning is produced and reproduced
- meaning is marked out by identity, and is produced and exchanged through social interaction in a variety of media; it is also being produced through consumption
- "It is us -- in society, within human culture -- who make things mean, who signify. Meanings, consequently, will always change, from one culture or period to another."
- Heritage fulfills several inherently opposing uses and carries conflicting meanings simultaneously. It is this intrinsic dissonance, or lack of argument as to what constitutes a heritage defined by meaning, which, paradoxically, acts as the cement to this book's arguments
- heritage is inherently a spatial phenomenon
- all heritage occurs somewhere and the relationship between a heritage object, building, association or idea and its place may be important in a number of ways
- sites, points, and locations can contribute to heritage
- heritage can be moved across space
- spatial scales hierarchy. local, regional, national, continental, international
- the sense of place is both an input and an output of the process of heritage creation
- geography is concerned with the ways in which the past is remembered and represented in both formal or official senses and within popular forms, and the implications which these have for the present and for ideas and constructs of belonging
- Interpretations are context bound and power laden
- place and nationalism retain an enduring significance
- economic connotations have often been added later to artefacts first endowed with cultural meaning
- heritage is multi-sold and multi-consumed. Building, art object, landscapes carry an array of conflicting cultural and economic motivations and messages
- heritage has emerged as a primary economic good in tourism
- "Traditional disciplinary allegiances, like traditional political ideologies and economic structures, are collapsing into a more fluid (and potentially liberating) kaleidoscope of reformulations, reconfigurations and deconstructions. In these circumstances, the intellectual necessity of a hybrid disciplinary arena in which spaces, places, environments and landscapes are considered and analyzed historically, not as an exercise in antiquarianism, but as a commentary with direct bearing on the contemporary scene, becomes all the more urgent."(7)
- heritage is about the political and economic structures of the present using the past as a resource, but as that present becomes markedly more diverse and heterogeneous, heritage itself becomes ever more complex and malleable, not so much in its physical extent as in the conflicting meanings which are piled upon it. (7)
- This chapter establishes the context for the debate
- It first considers the origin of heritage as defined by using the past as a resource for the present
- Heritage, or a concern for the past, emerged from the raft of ideas and ideologies which loosely constitute what we have come to know as modernity
- The 'modern' is usually divided into the early modern of the sixteenth and seventeeth centuries, the modern eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the (post)modern twentieth century
- Hobsbawm regards natrionalism as pre-eminently the product of triumphant bourgeois liberalism in the period ca. 1830-1880 although other commentators place its origins rather earlier
- In this conceptualization of a political state that is also the homeland of a single, homogenous people, heritage is a primary instrument in the 'discovery' or creation and subsequent nurturing of a national identity
- In turn, the Age of Reason spawned its antithesis in a nineteenth-century Romanticism, that emphasized the irrational and the deification of nature
- Familiar in literature from the works of a panopoly of writers and poets, including Goethe, Shelley and Wordsworth, these ideas informed the work of the 'prophets of wilderness' as Chama calls the nineteenth century fathers of modern environmentalism
- Among others, Henry David Thoreau, George Perkins Marsh and John Muir were responsible for the representation of the American West as a 'wilderness...awaiting discovery...an antidote for the poisons of industrial society."
- Schama argues that landscapes are culture before they are nature; constructs of the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock... But it should also be acknowledged that once a certain idea of landscape, a myth, a vision, establishes itself in an actual place, it has a particular way of muddling categories, of making metaphors more real that their referents: of becoming, in fact, part of the scenery
- Indeed, that idea of landscape became institutionalized in the later nineteenth century through the creation of the United States' national parks
- The first, the 'strange unearthy topography' of the Yosemite Valley, was established by an Actr of Congress in 1864, testimony, as Schama observes, that the 'wilderness...does not locate itself, does not name itself."
- Equally, it is salutary to remember that the desire to preserve large parts of the existing built environment is both recent and historically aberrant
- In terms of the cultural past, the Romantic concomitant to wilderness was a renewed fascination with the medieval world, which had been marginalized both by Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers
- Although 'Gothic' was used in the eighteenth century to denote the barbarous and uncouth, it has since become synonymous with the architecture of Northern Europe's great medieval cathedrals, which were one of the cardinal enthusiasms of the Romantics who conflated a hatred of industrial civilization with a vision of a rationalist and even ideal Middle Ages
- Thus the will to conserve was the obsession of a passionate, educated and generally influential minority and the social, educational and political characteristics of heritage producers have changed little since the nineteenth century
- The initiative for the identification and conservation of heritage was by no means always governmental, but was frequently triggered by the concerns of private citizens for the protection of a past legacy perceived to be disappearing under the weight of nineteenth-century urbanization and industrialization
- In the nineteenth century, the idea that some buildings and even cityscapes should not be replaced when physical or functional obsolescence dictated was thus a novel one
- Rather, because they contained transferable values, whether architectural/aesthetic, social or moral, particular buildings and townscapes should be preserved (and even 'restored') back to some previous condition
- To paraphrase Ruskin, however, every instance of restoration must lie in the sense that authenticity is unattainable, all heritage being created in and by the present
- None the less, the search for authenticity and spirituality took the artist, Paul Gaugin, for example, first to the margins of Europe at Pont-Aven in Brittany, and then to Tahiti
- In his evocation of the West of Ireland, the poet, W.B. Yeats, is perhaps 'the supreme example of an artist setting out to construct a deliberate, symbolic landscape allegory of identity, impressing himself on a landscape like a "phase of history"
- The celebration of the romantic was paralleled by the processes through which cultures of non-European people were appropriated
- In sum, nineteenth century conceptualizations of heritage emerged in the ethos of a singular and totalized modernity, in which it was assumed that to be modern was to be European, and that to be European or to espouse European values (even in the United States) was to be at the pinnacle of cultural achievement and social evolution
- If its origins lie in the tastes and values of a nineteenth-century educated elite, the wider conceptualization of heritage raises many of the same issues that attend the debate on the role of the past and the meaning of place
- As Lowenthal has argued, this suggests that the past in general, and its interpretation as history or language in particular, confers social benefits as well as costs
- Although Lowenthal's analysis is couched largely in social terms and pays little attention to the past as an economic resource, it is helpful in identifying the cultural -or more specifically socio-political-functions and uses of heritage
- According to Lowenthal, the past validates the present by conveying an idea of timeless values and unbroken lineages and through restoring lost or subverted values
- Implicit within such ideas is the sense of belonging to place that is fundamental to identity, itself a heavily contested concept and a theme pursued here in subsequent chapters
- Inevitably, therefore, the past as rendered through heritage also promotes the burdens of history, the atrocities, errors and crimes of the past which are called upon to legitimate the atrocities of the present
- As Sack states, heritage places are places of consumption and are arranged and managed to encourage consumption; such consumption can create places but is also place altering
- Tourism producers operate both in the public and private sectors
- They may be development agencies charged with regional regeneration and employment creation, or they can be private sector firms concerned almost entirely with their own profit margins
- If heritage is regarded as a resource, sustainability in this context has three basic conditions
- First the rates of use of renewable heritage resources must not exceed their rates of generation: in one sense, all heritage resources are renewable because they can be continuously reinterpreted
- To summarize, therefore, heritage can be visualized as a duality - a resource of economic and cultural capital
- This is less a dialectic than a continuous tension, these broad domains generally being in conflict with each other
- It is quite inevitable given this range of different uses of heritage, and its importance to so many people for such different reasons, that it has emerged as a major arena of conflict and contestation
- As Cosgrove argues, the cultural realm involves all those conscious and unconscious processes whereby people dwell in nature, give meaning to their lives and communicate that meaning to themselves, each other and to outsiders
- The most sustained attempt to conceptualize this contestation of heritage and its repercussions is to be found in Tunbridge and Ashworth's examination of what they call dissonance
- Dissonance refers to a discordance or lack of agreement and consistency as to the meaning of heritage
- The intrinsic dissonance of heritage, accentuated by its expanding meanings and uses and by the fundamentally more complex constructions of identity in the modern world, is the primary cause of its contestation
- In term's of ideology, a useful distinction can be found in Hardy's distinction between heritage as a conservative force that supports and reinforces dominant patterns of power, and a radical force that challenges and attempts to subvert existing structures of power
- Despite the development of multicultural societies, the content of heritage is also likely to reflect dominant ethnicities
- The issues of contestation are addressed at every point throughout the remainder of the book, because they are intrinsic to the uses and abuses of heritage
- This forms part of the socialization process, one mechanism of social reproduction, with all the tensions implied in such a role
- We are all too aware that we have created a complex matrix of potential interaction
- To state that the past is contested and that heritage is the instrument of that contest is simple
- To trace the nature, consequences and management of such conflicts within the socio-political and economic domains, and within spatial entities at various scales, is inevitably complex
Themes
- plurality of use and consumption of heritage, a multi-sold cultural and economic resource
- the conflicts and tensions that arise from this multiple construction of heritage with its connotations of who decides what is heritage?
- the interaction of the production and consumption of heritage with an array of geographical scales and identities, the question here being --whose heritage is it?
