Steve Watson

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.

Community-based Heritage Management: a case study and agenda for research

Heritage sites regarded as important are safely managed by the state, voluntary or private sectors but the majority of sites, despite statutory protection, remain unrecognised and without a role in their host communities. New schemes such as the Local Heritage Initiative in the UK aim to encourage communities to recognise their heritage assets and in managing them effectively to contribute to their preservation. With reference to the case of Nether Poppleton near York (UK), the present study explores the factors and conditions for effective community management displayed in one locality by groups who are successfully conserving and managing a diverse set of local heritage sites. Interviews and joint tasks enabled an analysis of the complex range of factors and conditions that can lead to a successful community-based initiative. Future research will determine the extent to which these factors, if applied to other sites, might produce the same results. The importance of this agenda is underscored by the increasing reliance on community-based heritage management in the UK and elsewhere.

Heritage as a Focus of Research: Past, Present and New Directions

Heritage is a version of the past received through objects and display, representations and engagements, spectacular locations and events, memories and commemorations, and the preparation of places for cultural purposes and consumption. Collectively, these ‘things’ and practices have played a central role in structuring and defining the way heritage is understood within academic debate, public policy and, subsequently, how it has been formalized as a focus of research over the last 30 years or so. Across this timeframe, the emphasis has undoubtedly changed from a concern with objects themselves — their classification, conservation and interpretation — to the ways in which they are consumed and expressed as notions of culture, identity and politics. More recently, heritage scholars have also started to concern themselves with processes of engagement and the construction of meaning, so that a post-post-structural, or more-than-representational, labyrinth of individuated, affective, experiential and embodied themes has started to emerge. As a consequence of these theoretical developments, the relatively long period of conceptual stability surrounding even critical notions of heritage is now starting to slip and disintegrate, with debates that we might have thought were finished now being revivified. ‘Authenticity’, ‘memory’, ‘place’, ‘representation’, ‘dissonance’ and ‘identity’, examples of the sorts of concepts that have been challenged or refreshed as new modes of thinking, drawn and applied from the wider social sciences, have started to stimulate new theoretical speculation.

A WAR LONG FORGOTTEN

Abstract Battlefields have a particular hold on the imagination, inviting those who visit them to make conscious links between physical places and what is known to have happened there. People may align themselves with one or other of the protagonists and celebrate or regret a victory or defeat. Beyond the partisan, however, there is also the human response; reflections, perhaps, on the horror of war and its futility, the harm done to civilians, the affront to civilized values and the betrayal of non-violent ways to resolve conflict. Beneath or alongside these reactions sits the possibility for moments of affect, responses that are not immediately expressible but which are deeply felt, physical, visceral. The Battle of Towton took place on 29 March 1461, during the Wars of the Roses. This was a typical late medieval battle, fought mainly hand-to-hand, and has the unpleasant distinction of being widely believed to be the bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil. But what does it mean to people now? Employing concepts from recent “more-than-human” thinking and Kathleen Stewarts articulation of ordinary affects, this paper offers insights into the ways in which a battlefield can continue to elicit affective responses in its visitors, despite the passage of over half a millennium.

The Ontological Politics of Heritage; or How Research Can Spoil a Good Story

Criminologists, perhaps more than other social scientists, are much exercised by the extent of what they do not know. Theirs is a field dominated by the efforts of the controlling state and its law enforcement apparatus to record criminal behaviour in all its myriad forms, gleaning information that is then used as a basis for policy-making and the allocation of resources to further that end. Important stuff, of course; but it does mean that the study of crime has become more than usually obsessed with the dichotomy of ‘presence’ and ‘absence’ in its thought world. It is well known, for example, that recorded crime is the tip of an iceberg, the remainder of which is made up of a bulky and submerged ‘dark figure’ of unknown and unknowable criminal enterprise, as set out in the well-cited paper ‘On Exploring the Dark Figure of Crime’ by Biderman and Reiss (1967). And then there is the issue of what constitutes crime in the first place, a phenomenon that appears to be bounded more by legal codes than any deeper ontology, and which therefore begets attempts on the part of criminologists to find a better way of describing … what? Law-breaking? And how does that make us judge the law itself? Or is it about deviance, lawful or otherwise?

Who needs experts

of Palestinians, Lebanese, and Syrians based on an understanding of the pre-nation state is particularly problematic, as it easily obscures contemporary differences in identity, understandings of nationhood, and migration patterns. In the concluding chapter, the book points to future avenues for research that include a further analysis of Bourdieu’s concepts of practice and habitus as they relate to diaspora studies, deeper research into diaspora and new media, and investigations into the notion of diaspora itself. Linked to this is a missed recognition in the book that ‘living between cultures’ does not always mean a single movement from one place to another: a proposition which future research in the same contexts must address. The collection is a welcome addition to the study of migrants from the Levant in Australia and Latin America, though its wide scope sees it posing more questions than it is able to answer.

Ethics and Heritage Tourism

Tourism has been seen, characteristically, as a business sector that brings considerable benefits to those places that are developed as attractions and destinations, to the extent that it has successfully replaced declining industries in the developed world and provided opportunities for rapid economic development elsewhere. The disadvantages of tourism, however, have also become apparent over the last few decades, and much attention has been focused on the environmental problems associated with rapid urbanisation, transport infrastructures and the physical damage done to objects, places and landscapes as a result of unmanaged tourism development. Calls for more sustainable approaches have thus ensued, and now it is expected that strategies and plans to encourage tourism pay at least some attention to the need for sustainable principles to be applied and integrated with the development process. For heritage tourism, the issues are even more sharply defined. The objects and places concerned are often fragile and have deep and long-held meanings for host communities. There may be issues of identity and contestation, ownership and expropriation and commercial imperatives and authenticity, each of which has an important and unavoidable political dimension. For this reason, the chapter advances an approach to ethics that makes it central, rather than peripheral, to heritage tourism developments. Ethics should also be made an explicit part of the way heritage tourism is critically examined, if we accept that ethics are implicated in debates about what it is and how it operates. The question of what good heritage tourism does is thus foregrounded in the context of a debate about the politics and power relations that surround it. The value of engaging with ethics in this way is that it provides an analytical sidelight that not only reveals things about the way that heritage tourism works but proposes that its ethics should be politically grounded and its politics ethically informed.

Themes, Thoughts, Reflections

To arrive at some concluding thoughts for a volume that is so large, so varied and so complex seemed both foolhardy and essential — not a good combination. Yet not to have done so would have been to draw attention to the inherent weakness of such collections, which is that they are rarely able to arrive at cogent conclusions. But, if we put ‘cogent’ on one side and leave that to the reader to decide, we can at least make a stab at concluding this colossus with some thoughts worth taking away. With this in mind, we would like to focus on what we see as the key themes of the very large amount of work dedicated to this book by its many contributors. Thus, we have alighted on three ‘closing aspects’ that are designed to achieve the essential tasks of summarizing where heritage research is now and where it might go in the future. These aspects are: an anxious celebration of eclecticism and diversity; an urge towards the critical; and, finally, a degree of contemplative frustration at the continued lack of any particular theoretical momentum at the heart of our field. While we acknowledge that few readers will have read this book from cover to cover and arrived here exhausted but hopefully fulfilled, we do intend that these closing aspects will at least provide, as any good book should, both a moment of reflection and a call to further action.

An Introduction to Heritage in Action

Cultural heritage is a process, a discourse, a political reality, an economic opportunity, and a social arena as well as sites, objects, and performances. As such heritage “does work.” And as work cultural heritage is a cultural tool that is deployed broadly in society today. Heritage is at work in indigenous and vernacular communities, in urban development and regeneration schemes, in acts of memorialization and counteracts of forgetting, in museums and other spaces of representation, in tourism, in the offices of those making public policy, and all too frequently in conflicts over identity. Thus, heritage is not an inert something to be looked at. Rather, heritage is always in action, bringing the past into the present through historical contingency and manifold strategic appropriations and deployments. This volume emphasizes the active nature of heritage-making, hence heritage in action.