Heritage and Social Media: Understanding Heritage in a Participatory Culture Edited by ElisaGiaccardi. London: Routledge, 2012. 251 pages. Paperback: $44.95 (original) (raw)

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.

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.

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...