Heritage Trekking: Toward an Integrated Heritage Studies Methodology (original) (raw)
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The Heritage Machine. A Heritage Ethnography in Maragatería (Spain)
PhD Dissertation, Universidad de León. Contents, Conclusions and Bibliography only, 2013
1. We can account for power configurations as by-products of specific heritage assemblages and configurations. Conceived this way, it ceases to be a transcendent entity to become an ambiguous but earthly process whose conditions of emergence can be traced and challenged. 2. Heritage is granted an ontological status and is not only considered as an epistemological construct, thus being co-constitutive of reality and inherently political: it builds subjectivities, breaks apart, or reinforces specific states of things. It is slippery and diffuse, and can hardly be accounted for through ideological critique as it is neither bad or good, progressive or reactionary. This will depend on the affects and connections it promotes, the energies it releases or restrains, and the subjectivities and ways of life it constructs. 3. Heritage is as much a physical construct as it is a social or political one – does not intangible heritage comprise bodies? –. To understand heritage as meaning and mere political representation, or contrarily as a thing ruled by ‘natural’ laws of market value, is problematic. With Latour, we can talk about construction, but not only about ‘social construction’ (Latour 2005c). This mechanism will enable us “to produce problematized matters of concern: things rather than objects” (Zaera-Polo 2008: 76). 4. The dichotomy between explanation and interpretation vanishes. Because heritage presents open-ended interpretations and cannot be framed within a closed set of causal relations and laws, we can only provide partial explanations and understandings (Law 2004a). Therefore, we should avoid the reductionist getaway that bestows agency to entities which irradiate meaning and act as primary causes, such as the State (Breglia 2006; Herzfeld 2010), the State and the elites (García Canclini 1999), the professionals and experts (Smith 2006) or Capital (Harvey 2001)) The existence of certain powerful agencies in heritage – which I do not deny – cannot prevent us from looking at processes of social mimicry and contagion, struggles –material and symbolic – around objects, and to acknowledge the ’diffuse’ character of heritage that renders it so slippery. 5. Assemblages are always involved in different lower and higher level assemblages. Therefore, we should abandon the infeasible hard-line scientific task of ‘individuating heritage data’ or striving to define ‘what is heritage’. We must face instability and assume that heritage is diffuse, which does not undermine its ontological status whatsoever. Furthermore, assemblages are boundless and open-ended. Consequently, without relinquishing thorough methodological depth, we must acknowledge that our analyses are fundamentally incomplete. Referring to the issue of analysis, Geertz argues that “the more deeply it goes the less complete it is There are a number of ways of escaping this—turning culture into folklore and collecting it, turning it into traits and counting it, turning it into institutions and classifying it, turning it into structures and toying with it. But they are escapes” (Geertz 1973a: 29). 6. Heritage and spatial planners cannot take heritage value for granted and must be sensitive to the particularities of each context, thus jettisoning universal concepts and empty signifiers such as community or sustainability (Gunder 2006). There are no heritage resources, but rather processes of valorization to be modulated according to planning criteria
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 city of Pensacola, Florida, has been attempting to create a heritage tourism industry for half a century but has never achieved the same level of success of the other notable destinations that they were trying to emulate. This is, in part, due to a significant level of development in the historic district, much of which is now historic as well, combined with an impressively complex history concentrated in a relatively small area. If Pensacola, or any community in a similar situation, is to develop an effective heritage tourism program, then a well-organized plan is needed. This paper presents a model, along with the most basic level of information required, for the development of an interpretive program in downtown Pensacola which aims to provide the best possible results for the community, the tourist, and the archaeological resources.
Methods in Motion: Affecting Heritage Research
Kingdom, where he teaches a range of subjects including cultural and heritage tourism. His research is concerned primarily with the representation and experience of heritage, especially through tourism, and he is active in the development of theory that explores the relationship between representational practices and the performative encounters and engagement of tourists with heritage places. He has explored these issues in Greece, Spain and the United Kingdom, and he has a particular interest in Spanish travel writing. Steve has published numerous journal articles and book chapters on the subject of heritage, including his most recent book, The Semiotics of Heritage Tourism (coauthored with Emma Waterton; 2014, Channel View Publications).
Many Publics, Many Pasts: Archaeological Sites, Identity, and Heritage Tourism
Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, San Francisco, CA, 2008
Participation in a world of meaning associated with historic places creates a relationship to the past that apparently transcends modern categories of shared heritage and identity such as of Anglo, Hispanic, and Indian, with their specific and particular pasts. The meaning that visitors find in ruins also challenges our conception of time, which neither proceeds smoothly from past to present to future, nor cycles through seasons and generations. Many people experience the ruins as both and simultaneously past and present, a place where landscape, buildings, things, and people from all times live in each visitor’s experience, a “collection of pasts” in the here- and-now.
Heritage making through community archaeology and the spatial humanities
Journal of Community Archaeology and Heritage, 2019
The archaeology of postindustrial landscapes is still relatively undeveloped. The impact of economic, social, and urban development efforts on both tangible and intangible heritage complicate our attempts to understand these places. Despite this, integrating heritage practice and promotion into the regeneration of a postindustrial landscape continues to grow in popularity. Within this context, genuine public-expert collaboration is the most effective means towards developing a sustainable compromise between protecting community heritage values and fostering economic development and regeneration. In this paper, we suggest three broad categories of challenges for studying and promoting heritage in postindustrial regionsphysical, social, and politicaland propose a digital data-focused geospatial approach to how community archaeologists and heritage specialists may overcome these challenges. We argue that coupling this data and technology with a robust research agenda and public programming can serve as a crucial two-way link, enabling long-term sustainable heritagepromotion and protection in post-industrial communities.
Museums as narrators: heritage trails in a digital era
Journal of Heritage Tourism, 2019
In today's tourism industry, merely offering tourists a variety of cultural events is not enough. Fully understanding their desire for an experience is the key. The attraction value increases if tourists can become personally involved and be affected by the narratives involved in placemaking. This article examines the connections and cooperation among museums in a region where an important heritage trail is operating. When the old Telemark Canal was active (1892-1990), this enabled important products to be shipped from the upper mountainous areas to the coastal urban region in Telemark County, Norway. Shortly after being closed, the canal was transformed into a heritage trail and tourist attraction through renovation initiatives. Based on a closer examination of two of the attraction clusters along the heritage trail of the canal, we ask whether there is a key narrative that can link the local museums and cultural centres in the canal region. The discussion will consider how the widespread use of the internet has created new options for museums and cultural centres to benefit from neighbouring tourist attractions such as heritage trails.
Heritage-As-Process and its Agency: Perspectives of (Critical) Heritage Studies
2020
The cultural heritage was defined in the 19th century in many European countries and the United States as “objects of cultural value.” In the context of building national states mostly material objects, archaeological sites and historical monuments, were marked as heritage. Further transformation of the concept of heritage took place after the World War II, when not only national and mostly European states, but also new international organizations (United Nations, UNESCO and later European Union) began to re-define and revise cultural heritage. The large-scale transformations in the social sciences and the humanities in the 1960–70s influenced the formation a new research field in the 1980s, heritage studies. Using the approaches taken from public history and cultural, memory, postcolonial and gender studies, heritage studies conceptualize heritage in more broad temporal boundaries and network of agents involved in the process of its formation. Within heritage studies, cultural heri...