Cathy Stanton

Serving Up Culture: Heritage and its Discontents at an Industrial History Site

Arguing that heritage sites offer a particularly porous boundary between anthropologists and the discursive and social worlds of their informants, this article suggests that a public interest approach to research at such sites has the potential to capitalise on that porosity in ways that may be able to address anthropology’s traditional concerns with social inequality. The article uses a case study of a folk‐life demonstration at a US industrial heritage site to show how anthropological analysis might move beyond simply documenting patterns of exclusion and exoticism. By participating more actively in forums already populated by heritage professionals, convening new and more inclusive meeting grounds for discussion of heritage issues, and producing broader ethnographic studies of heritage sites, anthropologists can extend their analyses into more public and activist arenas, ultimately reframing the contemporary anthropological encounter as it occurs within social spaces created by heritage discourse.

Performing the Postindustrial: The Limits of Radical History in Lowell, Massachusetts

In the same time period and for many of the same reasons, Western cultures and places have become more self-consciously performative while the Western historical profession has become more self-consciously public. This essay discusses this double shift, using the former textile city of Lowell, Massachusetts, as a case study to explore what a heightened performativity and visibility have meant for the public presentation of radical histories. In settings where cultural performances of all kinds have become an essential part of the process of the branding and promoting of postindustrial places, even sharply critical views of capitalism are enlisted in the creation of rituals and narratives that support rather than question the growing inequalities and disjunctions that characterize postindustrial economies worldwide.