An African Journey: On Cultural Heritage and the Popularity of Primitivism (original) (raw)
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Modalities of Place: On Polarisation and Exclusion in Concepts of Place and in Site-Specific Art
Lund University Dissertation, 2003
In this thesis the notion of place is studied by way of investigating the “non-place” which is excluded or opposed, whenever a place is defined. “Non-place” is used here as a meta-concept, covering various recurring types of opposition to “place,” and it therefore represents a profoundly incoherent spectrum of realities and concepts. Hence, a “non-place” may in this investigation appear as “leftover areas in urban planning,” as “passage,” as “site,” as “utopia,” and as “inauthentic architecture.” The study is made in relation to a set of authors and artists chosen for their influence on contemporary aesthetics of place, and for their explicitly stated dichotomies as regards architectural, geographical or social space. These dichotomies (and authors) have been studied in three parts. In Part I: Places of Preference a group of authors and artists are discussed as conveying a negative view of the modern place-forms where “placelessness” replaced a traditional and culturally dense place. In Part II: Other Places the discussion of polarised notions of place is continued, but now with authors who may be regarded as having a view of non-places as useful. Here, deviance from a normal condition is seen as a prominent theme. Finally, in Part III: The Site-Specific, the notion of place is discussed in relation to the recent historical changes of the concepts of site-specificity and regionalism in art and architecture. The overall aim of the thesis is to show that when place is viewed in terms of dichotomies there is a risk of losing the perspective where social interaction, cultural multiplicity and individual activity is regarded. By focusing instead on placial variants, where the dichotomies are discussed in relation to a set of modalities, places may be regarded in their sociospatial and cultural diversity. The “wants,” the “needs,” the “musts,” the “wills,” i.e., the subjective or actantial influence on a spatial negotiation or an architectural realisation is then put into the foreground. To sharpen the modal approach a concentration should be held not on mere modulation of form where a house, a square or a park is given a slightly new shape, but on the significant alteration of a given comprehension, or use, of a place. This means also that several operators, on different actualising and realising levels, have to be considered when a place or a site-specific work is maintained or changed. Here, such place-formative processes have been studied as the modalities that apear in for instance exploitation, privatisation, domination and identification.
Urban Forum, 2009
a review of a collective of museum exhibits that took place in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1988, correlates the European desire to re-investigate exoticaobjects about "exotic" spaces and people created by and for Europeans; and objects brought back from locations "exotic" to Europeansto the then relatively new field of postcolonial criticism. He surmises that the exhibition catalogues deconstructed "the interpretation of exotic themes by Europeans," reiterating the ideas common in critiques of the colonial gaze: "[I]n creating works of art which refer to exotic themes, Europeans are in fact covertly expressing their own aspirations and prejudices," wherein ""people of other races and the achievements of other cultures [exist] primarily as curiosities"" (Koppelkamm quoted in Conner 1988 43). Within the structure of a museum, where European visions of outlandish peoples and alien lands are projected through prints, paintings, sculpture, and "airport art", a visitor might inevitably experience a "certain schizophrenia" as they view these displays: admiration for the beauty and finesse of many of the objects, and disapproval of the same objects, such as "the images of piccaninnies and hugely grinning negros" in lithographs created for marketing exotic lands and products mined from those lands (Conner 1988 44).
Journal of American Folklore, 2019
Historian David Lowenthal (1985) pointed out that the past is often perceived and represented as "a foreign country" in which cultural heritage is implicitly understood to be bound to geographical territories and associated notions of what it implies to have roots, an identity, and a place in which to belong. Understood in this way, heritage, particularly in its vernacular iterations, has often been aligned with older notions of culture that anthropologists and cultural scholars have distanced themselves from since the mid 1980s, as something that a was bounded and linked to particular geographical territories, and groups of people (Gupta & Ferguson 1997). Lowenthal, for his part, was not arguing that heritage was statically anchored or bound to a single place, but like many heritage scholars of the 1990s and thereafter argued, that heritage involved flexible usages of the past for the purposes of the present (see Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998 & 2004; Klein 2006; Lowenthal 1996). However, the metaphorical terminology which he invoked pointed to what remains a dominant vernacular understanding of heritage that buttresses a mode of thinking in terms such as, "This is our heritage. It belongs to those of us who live here and have our roots through time here." This is a powerful, if not problematic mode of thinking, in which it is easy to speak of such things as a Swedish heritage, a regional heritage, a local heritage, and so on. However, we live in a world, which is more than ever before entwined with processes of mobility, and thus facing complex situations where value laden expressions are being contested, altered, changed, ridded of, or retained as effects of such movements. It is a world in which some people move for the sake of work, love, and the dream of a better life, while too many others feel forced to move due to economic crises, poverty, religious conflicts, war, and political persecution. Against this background, heritage, it might be said, is being shaken and stirred by processes of globalization that are increasingly difficult to ignore (Gradén & O'Dell 2017 & 2018). This is a shaking and stirring that calls us to question how cultural heritage might be more vigorously re-framed as more than a foreign country, but even as narrative performances about multiple relationships between, people, objects, and places, that far from being statically anchored anywhere, are highly mobile and on the move. When put in the perspective of migration and mobility, both vernacular and institutional performance play a important role in the emergence of a heritage, as This text is a first draft version of a text that is in the process of being submitted to the Journal of American Folklore.
The Power of Place: Heritage, Archaeological and Sacred
Recreation and Society in Africa Asia and Latin America, 2012
This issue of Recreation and Society in Africa, Asia and Latin America brings together issues of cultural heritage, archeology, and the more intangible characteristics of sacred sites as they relate to tourism. While much has been written on heritage tourism (