Emma Waterton

The recognition and misrecognition of community heritage.

This paper revisits the notion of ‘community’ within the field of heritage, examining the varied ways in which tensions between different groups and their aspirations arise and are mediated. Our focus is a close examination of the conceptual disjunction that exists between a range of popular, political and academic attempts to define and negotiate memory, place, identity and cultural expression. To do so, the paper places emphasis on those expressions of community that have been taken up within dominant political and academic practice. Such expressions, we argue, are embedded with restrictive assumptions concerned with nostalgia, consensus and homogeneity, all of which help to facilitate the extent to which systemic issues tied up with social justice, recognition and subordinate status are ignored or go unidentified. This, inevitably, has serious and far‐reaching consequences for community groups seeking to assert alternative understandings of heritage. Indeed, the net result has seen the virtual disappearance of dissonance and more nuanced ways of understanding heritage. Adopting an argument underpinned by Nancy Frasers notion of a ‘politics of recognition’, this paper proposes a more critical practice of community engagement.

The Utility of Discourse Analysis to Heritage Studies: The Burra Charter and Social Inclusion

This paper reviews the methodological utility of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) in heritage studies. Using the Burra Charter as a case study we argue that the way we talk, write and otherwise represent heritage both constitutes and is constituted by the operation of a dominant discourse. In identifying the discursive construction of heritage, the paper argues we may reveal competing and conflicting discourses and the power relations that underpin the power/knowledge relations between expertise and community interests. This identification presents an opportunity for the resolution of conflicts and ambiguities in the pursuit of equitable dialogues and social inclusion.

Whose Sense of Place? Reconciling Archaeological Perspectives with Community Values: Cultural Landscapes in England

Like other forms of heritage, landscape provides a vital repository of cultural meaning in relation to identity, belonging and sense of place. Despite this, the process of heritage management tends to obscure these links between landscapes and communities, and is thus neglectful of the experiences, perspectives and recollections that both individuals and groups bring to their engagement with heritage. This paper draws on the Hareshaw Linn community project to illustrate the diverse ways in which communities construct relationships with landscape. This case study serves as a reminder that the heritage management process cannot usefully be reduced to the technical and scientific practice it is often assumed to be, as it is often both emotional and conflict ridden. In light of this, it is essential to question why landscape is underplayed in legislation and public policy, and this necessarily entails the exploration of issues such as ownership, power, knowledge and ‘public’ heritage.

Framing theory: towards a critical imagination in heritage studies

Heritage theory has developed piecemeal over the last 30 years, with little progress made in fully understanding the way the subject can or should be theorised. This paper identifies some of the main sources of theory in heritage, as well as the approaches and perspectives that have been formulated as a result. These are framed on the basis of their disciplinary origins and can be viewed as theories in, theories of and theories for heritage. As frames through which heritage can currently be examined they are still employed in relative isolation from each other and we suggest, therefore, a way by which they might be considered as complementary, rather than competing approaches in order to provide impetus for the development of a critical imagination in heritage studies.

Heritage and Community Engagement

This chapter surveys the term ‘community’ in relation to heritage management practices. It begins by offering an historical overview of the term before turning to assess methods of engagement. The chapter concludes by offering an exploration of the wider ethical implications tangled up with community engagement projects within the field of heritage studies. Overall, it aims to advance theoretical, methodological and political reflections upon community engagement, placing such considerations within the wider turn towards conceiving of critical heritage studies.

The museum as assemblage: bringing forth affect at the Australian War Memorial

This article takes as its focus the Australian War Memorial, including its collections, the physical infrastructure of the site, its staff and the range of people who encounter it as tourists, researchers or military personnel and their families. In taking up this interest, our intention is not to diminish, ignore or bypass the role of narrative and representation in their spaces. Rather, we aim to contribute to a more-than-representational appreciation of museums. This sort of approach redirects attention to a range of elements including lighting, sound and movement. These are typically seen as ‘background noise’ but in reality do greatly productive work in terms of engineering atmospheres and subject positions for those within its spaces. This article interrogates the way in which these elements are utilized in four areas of the museum, all of which are explored through ethnographic reflections referencing ideas of more-than-human agency, affect and the haunting virtual.

Sights of sites: picturing heritage, power and exclusion

This paper explores the visual representations used to illustrate, promote and communicate a particular idea of heritage in the tourism literature, which provides an instance within which to examine the material consequences of a dominant discourse. This examination takes place within the context of current New Labour policy initiatives, which have put forward a new role for heritage, both in terms of the touristic experiences it can provide and as an instrumental tool for social inclusion and civic engagement. It is argued in this paper that these consciously designed objectives have also opened up a conceptual space within which images of heritage are drawn upon to undertake a course of ideological work that affectively reaffirms and legitimizes the cultural symbols of an elite social group as a consensual representation of national heritage.

Examining the Olympics: heritage, identity and performance

Sport is undoubtedly a central part of culture. As MacGregor (2006, p. ix) states, ‘it is impossible to know a people until you know the game they play. To understand America, you need to know football. To understand Brazil, soccer’. It would therefore be quite tempting to encapsulate the entirety of a people in terms of a sport: rugby union is an essential aspect of New Zealand culture, just as ice hockey is in Canada, and cricket in India. As we know, however, American, Brazilian, New Zealand, Canadian and Indian cultures are far more complex than their sports alone; thus, it would seem foolish to exclude other cultural practices from an understanding of these nations and their societies. This, for us, presents a clear rationale for considering the nexus between sport, identity and performance, which, we suggest, can be viewed through the lenses offered by a range of heritage and cultural practices. Indeed, it strikes us as odd that, until recently, few discussions of heritage and its relationships to sport could be found within academic circles. Perhaps, though, this should not come as too great a surprise, given that sport seemingly sits so uncomfortably within wider heritage concerns. Indeed, as Moore (2008) points out, in places such as the UK, sport is not readily accepted within the ‘heritage-scape’, in large part due to the tensions that continue to swirl around and between popular culture and the ‘high culture’ of traditional heritage sites like museums. This is a conclusion shared by Gammon (2007, p. 3), who has argued that ‘there may well be an air of triviality connected to sports and indeed a perception of its apparent ubiquity that renders it unworthy of protection and consideration’. The heritage field is by no means alone in this assumption. Historians, too, have often taken umbrage with sport heritage, arguing that public representations are primarily concerned with celebration, veneration and nostalgia, rather than a critical examination of complex sporting pasts (Kidd 1996). Perhaps this discomfort stems from the fact that sport heritage is ‘recent’ and thus falls victim to a broader propensity to eschew and ignore contemporary pasts in traditional heritage circles. Or, perhaps, it is because sport is susceptible to what Snyder (1991) calls ‘flashbulb memories’, the saturation of sports’ coverage in line with our willingness, desire even, to ‘re-live’, memorialise and nostalgise sporting pasts that reside outside of personal living memories.

Commentary : the advent of digital technologies and the idea of community

As far as debates go, there are few so salient in the field of heritage studies as those surrounding the idea of ‘community’. This concept has enjoyed a long career within the wider social sciences, and is certainly one that seems sure to be transformed with the advent of new digital technologies and recent opportunities for online social networking. In this Commentary, I want to argue for why an overarching rethink of the term ‘community’ in connection with the Internet is important. This, in part, has been triggered by the 2003 adoption of the Charter on the Preservation of the Digital Heritage at the 32nd General Conference of UNESCO, which marks the significant development of national and international interest around issues of ‘digital’ or ‘virtual’ heritage. My interest, however, has been piqued by more than these emerging policy interests; entire processes of cultural production and consumption are mediated more and more often by online technologies (Featherstone 2000). As such, clear links among community formation, identity and heritage are becoming increasingly visible, particularly with the advent of Web 2.0 interactivity, and the Internet is therefore something that could well play a central and dynamic role in popular and academic arenas. Yet, despite the seemingly omnipresent nature of the Internet in contemporary society, its adoption and reflection within heritage and museological methodologies remain partial and limited. Nor is it something that seems to be winning any ground. As such, while we have an emerging cultural space for new types of community formation, along with the use of digital technology in archives, the emergence of virtual museums and art galleries, and digitised collections by heritage institutions (Champion and Dave 2007; Karp 2004; Parry 2005), there is still a noticeable hesitancy in the heritage literature to actively incorporate the Internet into its remit.

Heritage protection for the 21st century

This paper assesses the recent Heritage Protection Review (HPR) process, which culminated in the publication of the Heritage White Paper “Heritage protection for the 21st century” (DCMS, 2007). It argues that although the White Paper makes laudable and useful attempts at streamlining and clarifying the management and protection process, many of its proposed changes operate at the rhetorical level only. Indeed, it does little to challenge the dominant and elitist understandings of “heritage” and attendant cultural values and meanings, and thus fails to adequately address social inclusion/exclusion issues in the cultural sector.