Engaging with the future of ‘critical heritage studies’: looking back in order to look forward (original) (raw)
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From the preservation of cultural heritage to critical heritage studies
Fernweh. Crossing Borders and Connecting People in Archaeological Heritage Management. Essays in Honour of prof. Willem J. H. Willems, edited by Monique H. van den Dries, Sjoerd J. van der Linde & Amy Strecker Fernweh
Heritage has become a selective, re-assembled past, a global domain for political struggles over national and local identities and lifestyle ideologies. This ‘heritage from below’ is met with the authorized ‘heritage from above’, and ‘Critical Heritage Studies’ represents a multi-disciplinary, global academic answer to these new encounters. Heritage – as elaborations of artefacts, practices and ideas of the past – constitutes a part of, and is used in, on-going political, economic, social and cultural processes traversing local, national and global scales. Heritage is reassembled in numerous new ways in the present to define new futures.
Making Sense of the Present: heritage is political – it belongs to us
I am interested in the power of things and ideas to bring people together and develop our thinking about contemporary issues. As an archaeologist, landscape and social historian I find that people engage with the human past to make sense of the present, and therefore the quality of that engagement is significant. Evidence suggests that 'heritage' can be an important tool for social empowerment, and in my practice I work with a range of people and organisations to encourage wider participation, enabling alternative perspectives, the creation of new and different knowledge, and multiple narratives. In this paper I offer a critique of i) the narrow interpretations often provided by presenters of 'Heritage' as part of our UK and European tourism/visitor agenda, and ii) how much of it, including our archaeology, historic landscapes and museum collections, can be difficult to engage with in meaningful ways – partly because of the interpretations offered, partly because of perceived academic/professional barriers and partly because they may literally be difficult to access. I provide a few examples of public engagement which attempt to get round these obstacles and illustrate the value of working in partnership with museums, writers, artists, musicians, film-makers and scientists, to enable community groups to explore aspects of our past to help find our present voices.
Journal of Social Archaeology, 2018
Uses of Heritage (2006) has been an important contribution to the development of Heritage Studies. Resting on a thorough ‘re-read’ of this modern classic, the article analyses the text applying some central concepts from Critical Discourse Analysis and Critical Realism in order to review the arguments put forward. One of the linguistic features from Critical Discourse Analysis we draw on is ‘nominalization’, which refers to replacing verb processes with a noun construction. Re-reading Uses of Heritage and other succeeding publications, it is apparent that the phrase ‘Authorized Heritage Discourse’ is nominalized and reified into an entity obscuring who does what to whom, thereby making the ‘Authorized Heritage Discourse’ a self-evident unit of explanation. Furthermore, the insistence on viewing heritage as a cultural process rather than as ‘things’ is not readably compatible with Critical Realism’s non-reductionist stance. Wrapping up, we nonetheless argue that really taking Critical Discourse Analysis and Critical Realism on board could provide a rule of conduct for the future developments of Heritage Studies, where multifarious conceptions of heritage can co-exist.
Clarifying the critical in critical heritage studies
"This paper considers the term critical in the unfolding formulation of critical heritage studies. It argues for a shift in emphasis from the subject of our effort to the object of attention, in other words focusing primarily on the critical issues that face the world today, the larger issues that bear upon and extend outwards from heritage. To that end, the paper presents two key directions. It suggests much is to be gained from tackling the uneasy relationship that currently exists between social science and humanities-based approaches to heritage and the professional conservation sector oriented by a scientistic materialism. Second, there is a need for heritage studies to account for its relationship to today’s regional and global transformations by developing post-western understandings of culture, history and heritage and the socio-political forces that actualise them. Keywords: critical heritage theory; conservation; heritage studies; material culture; post western"
Whose Heritage? Deconstructing and reconstructing counter-narratives in heritage
Routledge eBooks, 2023
Presented in this chapter are two essays, 'Blurring Field-Box Boundaries: Documenting through Community Participation' (Malik, 2021) and an excerpt from 'The Transatlantic Slavery Connections of English Heritage Properties: Knowledge Transfer and Country House Reinterpretation, Osborne House' (Edem-Jordjie, 2021). If the political events of recent history have taught us anything about heritage, it is that the answer to the question of the heritage of Britain differs radically depending on who you ask. Malik, born in Lahore, Pakistan, is concerned with connecting to a deeper, more aware self. The value of interaction with other artists to build community is what brings her back to her practice. Edem-Jordjie holds an MA in anthropology and museum practice from Goldsmiths, University of London. The essays critically challenge the heritage sector and their imperial epistemologies that remain deeply problematic to the process and practice of decolonisation. Presented is an interrogation and disruption that actively addresses the historic repression of silenced voices in our collections and across sites of heritage. Interrogating the ideas and thinking of Stuart Hall's critique on a 'national story' (Hall, 1999), their essays offer new possibilities to inform strategies. Both essays call for a change in the hierarchies of power governing collections management, the categorisation of cultural heritage, interpretation, and representation. This call reflects my own practice with Museum X CIC and the Black British Museum Project-a direct provocation in response to the ideas expressed by Hall and a continuum of ideas of cultural identification: 'Black' and 'British'. Indeed, creating a new museum has been an opportunity to rethink, redesign, and reimagine what a decolonised museum can be in the constantly evolving narratives on cultural and nationalistic forms of identity. These essays, from the Whose Heritage? Research Residency Programme run by the Black organisation Culture&, are themselves a resistance to authority and the authoritative point of view that Hall uses as a persistent provocation in his work. It is vital to my praxis with the work I do to support emerging researchers who interrogate our own sense of self in the work that we do. The question 'why?' is crucial in the process and practice of decolonisation, the
Critical Heritage Studies and the Legacies of the Late-Twentieth Century Heritage Canon
International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2019
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in International Journal of Heritage Studies on 2 Feb 2019, available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2019.1570964\. Off print available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/VDBDZKJASRJBW2IJBVG3/full?target=10.1080/13527258.2019.1570964 In recent years an interest in ‘critical heritage studies’ (CHS) has grown significantly – its differentiation from ‘heritage studies’ rests on its emphasis of cultural heritage as a political, cultural, and social phenomenon. But how original or radical are the concepts and aims of CHS, and why has it apparently become useful or meaningful to talk about critical heritage studies as opposed to simply ‘heritage studies’? Focusing on the canon of the 1980s and 1990s heritage scholarship – and in particular the work of the ‘father of heritage studies’, David Lowenthal – this article offers a historiographical analysis of traditional understandings and approaches to heritage, and the various explanations behind the post-WWII rise of heritage in western culture. By placing this analysing within the wider frames of post-war historical studies and the growth of scholarly interest in memory, the article seeks to highlight the limitations and bias of the much of the traditional heritage canon, and in turn frame the rationale for the critical turn in heritage studies.
When we wrote the manifesto of the ACHS we were keen to promote a strong sense of critical engagement with social justice issues, and to encourage people to draw on the wider social sciences to study museums and heritage. We are heartened that so many people have embraced the ACHS, and that the ACHS conferences have been such a success, and intellectually and socially happy and exciting places to be. Having said that, we also have some reservations about some of the theoretical sources that are being drawn on as CHS develops, the way they are being taken up, and the consequences this may be having for developing a critical approach to the issues of social justice we hope to promote. What we are going to do in this paper is to outline the problems we have with these theoretical borrowings from what has loosely been termed the New Materialism or Post-Humanism. In some ways our discussion is impressionistic, but we would like to look at the 'local' influences these borrowings have, and the flavour they may impart to the work we do. We would also like to ask some questions about what sort of questions and themes might be foreclosed, and what that might mean for 'being critical'.