Laurajane Smith

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.

Community-driven Research in Cultural Heritage Management: the Waanyi Women's History Project

Community involvement in heritage management is an issue that is increasingly being debated within heritage studies and management agencies. This paper examines a case study from Queensland, Australia, of a community-initiated and controlled heritage project. The paper outlines and discusses the implications that this project has to an understanding of the nature of heritage, the processes of its management and the role of expertise within management. It argues that the development of a management process that is meaningfully inclusive at a community level must overthrow the ways in which heritage is defined and understood. Not only must concepts of intangible heritage be developed, but also concepts of heritage must usefully incorporate an understanding of the nature of intangible experiences and values that are associated with the physical aspects of heritage. Moreover, it is important to understand that these experiences and values are themselves open to management and regulation. Subsequently, an inclusive management process requires a self-conscious evaluation of the role of heritage managers in the process and a conscious decision to support, or otherwise, local community aspirations.

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.

‘Nostalgia for the future’: memory, nostalgia and the politics of class

Abstract Nostalgia for some is pointless and sentimental, for others reactionary and futile. Where does that leave those of us interested in labour history and heritage – is it all just ‘smokestack nostalgia’? Using interviews with visitors, volunteers and staff at sites and museums of industrial and working class heritage in England, the United States and Australia, we argue that a useful distinction can be made between ‘reactionary nostalgia’ and ‘progressive nostalgia’, and that a ‘nostalgia for the future’ can emerge from memories and memorialisations. Drawing on the past can help mould the sentiments and nurture the emotional commitment to social justice issues the Left so desperately needs.

Forgetting to heal : remembering the abolition act of 1807

This article investigates the cultural memory of the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade in Britain. It examines official government responses and considers how these were replicated in popular culture, drawing on the film Amazing Grace. The study highlights the rhetoric employed to distance the past of the transatlantic slave trade from the present, thereby contributing to a process of historical erasure rather than tackling the lingering social and political affects of a traumatic past.

Nostalgia and heritage: potentials, mobilisations and effects

This Special Issue arises out of another project of the editors, the book Emotion, affective practices and the past in the present. There were numerous responses to the call for papers for this edited volume, and a sub-theme emerged around ‘nostalgia’ which we thought was worth treating separately. A number of the abstracts submitted addressed nostalgia as a complex and nuanced emotion, and we felt that they deserved to see the light of day together. Affect and emotion have recently been explored within heritage and museum studies, and a growing analytical space has been given over to consideration of the emotional and affective nature of heritage and memory. Although critical engagement with affect/emotion appears relatively recently in the field, the issue of nostalgia has in many ways been a persistent and even notorious issue within the field of heritage studies from its very inception. Nostalgia, classically defined as a malaise of longing and melancholy for the unobtainable, has often been denounced for facilitating a reactionary heritage politics, or for providing the emotive encouragement for what some critics have defined as ‘bogus’ or ‘fake’ history. It was linked in particular to the Thatcherite political project in the UK (Hewison 1987; Lowenthal 1989, 2015). Nostalgia has been traditionally regarded as problematic, both inaccurate when curated as a portrayal of the past and unhelpful and sentimental as an emotion. Consequently, it has been avoided as a subject of research, and seen as an invalid framing for heritage sites. Indeed, heritage and museum professionals have traditionally avoided invoking or engaging with ‘nostalgic’ emotions. However, rather than focussing on the rather tired approaches to nostalgia that are all too common in the field, we wanted to explore four interlinked themes in this special issue. The first of these investigates nostalgia as an important motivating emotion/affect, a way of being moved, rather than as a ‘wrong’ way of thinking about and relating to the past. Second, we want to treat nostalgia as an ‘active’ affective practice, where sentiments and feelings are recruited and mobilised in the present to do ‘work’ for personal, social, cultural and political reasons. Third, we wish to move beyond dubious claims that emotion/affect are pre-cognitive and pre-discursive, to examine, via empirically grounded research, the complex, contingent and above all social ways emotion becomes part of the varied embodied semiotics produced when dealing with ‘the past’. Finally, it is important to stress that social science investigations of how people actually use nostalgia make it possible to focus on felt forms of authenticity, people’s feelings of genuineness and sincerity, in contrast to, for instance, more literary framings such as Boym’s (2001) recommendation to treat nostalgia as ironic. In short, we are concerned with what nostalgia does, and the variety of ways in which it is used in everyday life by individuals and groups. The aim therefore of this special issue is to illustrate that nostalgic responses come in many forms, often surprising and unexpected, with an array of political and social consequences, and are

Labour’s heritage

The interdisciplinary nature of heritage studies, as the pages of this journal attest, is significantly broad. Research work on the phenomena of ‘heritage’ draws not only from a range of disciplines, but also from specific fields of study and debates within the broader humanities and social sciences, engaging, for instance, with debates on memory, identity and sense of place. One of the highlights of this special issue is the contribution that ‘new working class studies’ with its ‘focus on the lived experiences and voices of working-class people’ (Russo and Linkon 2005, p. 14), and a consideration of class more generally, can offer to debates within heritage studies. We take both the political and research position that class matters, and that an understanding of the social experiences and politics of class will have implications for the relevance that heritage practices and research has in social and public policy debates (see Smith et al. 2011 for a fuller discussion). The heritage of working class people has been significantly neglected within heritage research and practice. The sites, places and intangible heritage of working class people are often underrepresented in national and international heritage lists and registers. Moreover, when the sites of labour are present on such lists, they tend to be celebrated for technical or industrial innovations and often have little to say about the people whose labour underwrote those industries and their achievements. This is not an idle observation, as the dominant or traditional way that the nature and value of heritage is defined not only constructs and gives legitimacy to these lists, but also has consequences for the political and discursive ‘work’ that heritage does in society. Traditional accounts of heritage are framed by the authorised heritage discourse or AHD (Smith 2006). This professional discourse, heavily influenced by Western European understandings of heritage and by the cultural and class experiences of heritage professionals and cultural elites, defines heritage as material, grand, ‘good’, aesthetically pleasing and monumental (see Smith 2006, Smith and Waterton 2009, Waterton 2010 for further discussion). Not only does this tend to ignore dissonant and subaltern heritage, or to relegate it to a ‘special’ category – something separate from ‘normal’ heritage – but it also works to deny the cultural and historical legitimacy and agency of those groups, including working class people, whose cultural, social and historical experiences fall outside the conceptual frameworks validated by the AHD.

Cultural heritage management and feminist expression in Australian archaeology

Equity and workplace issues within cultural heritage management have influenced the development of feminist archaeology in Australia. This has resulted in an explicit recognition in Australian feminist debates that practice and theoretical expression are linked. Although this link has been recognized, it remains abstracted, and little has yet been published that explores or theorizes such links. This paper examines the development of feminist debate in Australia, and identifies some of the areas that need to be explored in theorizing the links between practice and theory. The Australian context indicates that the institutionalization of archaeological practice within cultural heritage management has helped to reinforce and institutionalize power relations in the archaeological discipline, which in turn has consequences for theory development.

Explorations in Banality: Prison Tourism at the Old Melbourne Gaol

If, as Mercer (: 1) argues, “feeling is believing,” then the emotional states and experiences engendered by heritage and heritage tourism will significantly influence the meanings, values and messages individuals will construct or have reinforced as they engage with heritage places. There is now an extensive literature that argues emotions are central not only to cognition but also equally importantly to the social and political judgements individuals make (Marcus; Marcus et al.; Sayer; Wetherell. Indifference is an emotional state, sometimes involving an active choice of refusing to exercise empathy and compassion, and sometimes denoting blithe, but socially meaningful, lack of awareness.