Methods in Motion: Affecting Heritage Research (original) (raw)
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A More-Than-Representational Understanding of Heritage? The ‘Past’ and the Politics of Affect
This review examines debates situated at the intersection between heritage studies and geography, particularly those that revolve around more-than-representational theories. These theories, the review suggests, advance recent developments within the heritage field concerned with those senses of ‘the now’ so often left neglected by conventional understandings of heritage. The intellectual traditions underpinning this contribution draw primarily from the field of cultural geography, especially those that touch upon the tactile, experiential, aural, emotional and sonic. What this lends to the field of heritage studies is a vigorous and distinct way of conceptualising heritage in terms of the body, practice and performativity, together with an insistence that our engagements with it occur through a range of embodied dispositions and interactions. In other words, it insists that we, as heritage researchers, become more attentive to different possibilities for knowing and doing heritage: the ways in which it makes sense or answers back to a fuller range of people (after Thrift 2008).
Curating affect: exploring the historical geography-heritage studies nexus at Sovereign Hill
Curating affect: exploring the historical geography–heritage studies nexus at Sovereign Hill, 2018
This paper explores the nexus of historical geography and heritage studies, using the case study of the Sovereign Hill outdoor museum in Ballarat, Australia. It reports on the application of more-thanrepresentational thinking to spaces of heritage, and advances the argument that Sovereign Hill can be usefully understood as a semiotic landscape animated by the making, knowing and recreation of the past, replete with both designed and incidental affective resonances and emotional affordances. The research upon which the paper is based aimed to capture the essences of encounters, engagements and moments of emergent meaning within a site that speaks to both an historic and newly made heritage. Key to this exploration were the energies, realities and responses of actual bodies as they moved around and interpreted the various ways in which Sovereign Hill presents the past to its visiting audiences. Methodologically, the paper draws from a series of qualitative visitor interviews gathered in 2014.
Heritage and its economies are driven by affective power and consolidated through emotions such as pride, awe, joy and pain. In the humanities and social sciences, there is a widespread acknowledgement of the limits not only of language and subjectivity, but also of visuality and representation. Social scientists, particularly within cultural geography and cultural studies, have recently attempted to define and understand that which is more-than-representational, through the development of theories of affect, assemblage, post-humanism and actor network theory, to name a few. While there have been some recent attempts to draw these lines of thinking more forcefully into the field of heritage studies, this book focuses for the first time on relating heritage with the politics of affect. It argues that our engagements with heritage are almost entirely figured through the politics of affective registers such as pain, loss, joy, nostalgia, pleasure, belonging or anger. It brings together a number of contributions that collectively – and with critical acuity – question how researchers working in the field of heritage might begin to discover and describe affective experiences, especially those that are shaped and expressed in moments and spaces that can be, at times, intensely personal, intimately shared and ultimately social. It explores current theoretical advances that enable heritage to be affected, released from conventional understandings of both “heritage-as-objects” and as “objects-as-representations” by opening it up to a range of new meanings, emergent and formed in moments of encounter. Whilst representational understandings of heritage are by no means made redundant through this agenda, they are destabilized and can thus be judged anew in light of these developments. Each chapter offers a novel and provocative contribution, provided by an interdisciplinary team of researchers who are thinking theoretically about affect through landscapes, practices of commemoration, visitor experience, site interpretation and other heritage work.
An Introduction to Heritage in Action
Academics did not create heritage, but they disciplined it, so to speak, in the late 20 th century. Heritage was already happening in the context of multiculturalism and globalization as " people all over the world … turned to ethnic and cultural identity as a means of mobilizing themselves for the defense of their social and political-economic interests " (Turner, 1993, p. 423). It was also happening via the mechanisms of UNESCO's World Heritage List, which were beginning to operate as early as 1978, and as mass tourism opened up new horizons for that industry. Indeed, cultural heritage was – and is – on the move: heritage is in action. One clear demonstration of this is the " overproduction " of heritage. Whether it is the expansion of the World Heritage List (1,031 inscriptions as of 2015 with no end in sight/sites, if we may be permitted the pun), the proliferation of museums, individual and community heritagizing actions, business sector appropriations of heritage discourse and imagery, the new European Heritage Label, or heritage-justified internal and international ethnic strife—it seems that everything and anything is being declared, contested and/or performed as heritage. Moreover, heritage now travels with a mobile population – temporary, permanent and along a scale between those extremes – and it (re)creates and reconfigures itself in its destinations. Heritage is produced and mobilized by individuals and communities in any number of actions, including remembering, forgetting, generating, adapting and performing. Heritage shapes and reshapes people's sense of place, sense of belonging and cultural identities locally and nationally. Clearly, then, heritage does " work " (Smith, 2006). And as work, cultural heritage is a tool that is deployed broadly in society today. It is at work in indigenous and vernacular communities, in urban development and regeneration schemes, in expressions of community, 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 and the goals of those politics of identification. Thus, heritage is not simply an inert " something " to be looked at, passively experienced or a point of entertainment; rather, it is always bringing the past into the present through historical contingency and strategic appropriations, deployments, redeployments, and the creation of connections and reconnections. It implicates how memory is produced, framed, articulated and inscribed upon spaces in a locale, across regions, nationally and, ultimately, transnationally. It enables us to critically engage with contemporary social and political issues of grand import while also being a familiar prop drawn upon to make sense of more mundane processes of negotiating self, place, home and community.
The Multivocality of Heritage – Moments, Encounters and Mobilities
The notion of ‘superdiversity’ has emerged as a keyword in the writings of, especially, European social scientists and sociolinguists to describe the ‘extraordinary complexity of contemporary social configurations due to post-cold war migration patterns and the digital revolution’ (Blommaert 2015). The term has also been used, albeit in a more contested way, by scholars working in the post-colonies of the global South where ‘extraordinary complexity’ has arguably been a feature for centuries (Deumert 2014, Silverstein 2014, Stroud 2015). The complexities of diversity – whether new or long-standing – have effects on how we, as scholars and lay-people, understand and conceptualize the very notion of heritage. In this chapter I will argue that heritage is not about the possession and presence of material objects or cultural artefacts (including so-called ‘heritage languages’), but should instead be seen as ‘a process of engagement, an act of communication and an act of meaning’ (Smith 2006: 1). In other words, similar to sociolinguists who have argued that it is useful to think of ‘language’ as a verb (languaging), heritage scholars have suggested that heritage too is a process of human action and agency (thus proposing the verb heritaging; Harvey 2001). An understanding of heritage as process, as communication, remembering/memory, performativity and performance (sometimes even spectacle), as lived and experienced, as shot through with dissonance and a multiplicity of voices, stands in opposition to wide-spread governmental, institutionalized and hegemonic views of heritage. This ‘authorized heritage discourse’ (Smith 2006) defines who the legitimate spokespersons for the past are, aims to construct broadly consensual views of heritage, and proceeds from the assumption that heritage can be mapped, managed, preserved and protected (a view which emerged in Europe in the nineteenth century, alongside discourses of nationalism and ideas of ‘trusteeship’ over the past). However, what happens to these traditional, governmental approaches in contexts of persistent or growing diversity: Whose heritage will be protected? Whose voices will be heard? And whose voices will be silenced? Who decides? And how should we deal with the fact that ‘all heritage is uncomfortable to someone’, and thus always and necessarily contested (Smith 2006: 81)? In this chapter I suggest that the idea of ‘moments’ or ‘encounters’, which has been core to sociological work on mobility (and in turn links to the idea of superdiversity), is helpful in conceptualizing heritage as a social practice. That is, our experience and engagement with the past is often fleeting, it ‘slips and slides’ in and out of focus, is ‘here today and gone tomorrow, only to reappear the day after tomorrow’ (Law and Urry 2004: 403), and, consequently, gives rise to forms of ‘minimal conviviality and temporary cohesiveness’ (Blommaert 2015: 23; also Li Wei 2011). This chapter explores heritage-as-doing-remembering-in-the-moment through two South African case studies: (a) the ‘revival’ of Tsotsitaal, a language practice associated with Sophiatown in the 1950s, in online discourses; and (b) the politics of racist nostalgia in online spaces, where heritage is used to silence difference and diversity.
Interpreting heritage essentialisms: Familiarity and felt history
Tourism Management, 2007
This paper addresses both the emergent mobilities and familiarity tourism agendas as essentialisms of nation, Europeanness, and past urban living through the medium of a pre-industrial urban heritage museum, Den Gamle By. The analysis is articulated both through visitors' own voices and through quantitative modelling. The methods are shown as complementary. Consumption is described as both experiential and empathetic. Despite wider agendas of mobilities and integration, consumption is found to reflect visitors' nationalities and affinities. Consumption is successfully modelled by combining nationality with a further dimension of cultural familiarity, heritage consumption. From the qualitative and quantitative analysis, visitors are segmented into two main groups: re-iteratives and make-believers.