Emotional Heritage

Visitor Engagement at Museums and Heritage Sites

Laurajane Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781317497509
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Museum Studies

Emotional Heritage brings the issues of affect and power in the theorisation of heritage to the fore, whilst also highlighting the affective and political consequences of heritage-making.

Drawing on interviews with visitors to museums and heritage sites in the United States, Australia and England, Smith argues that obtaining insights into how visitors use such sites enables us to understand the impact and consequences of professional heritage and museological practices. The concept of registers of engagement is introduced to assess variations in how visitors use museums and sites that address national or dissonant histories and the political consequences of their use. Visitors are revealed as agents in the roles cultural institutions play in maintaining or challenging the political and social status quo. Heritage is, Smith argues, about people and their social situatedness and the meaning they, alongside or in concert with cultural institutions, make and mobilise to help them address social problems and expressions of identity and sense of place in and for the present.

Academics, students and practitioners interested in theories of power and affect in museums and heritage sites will find Emotional Heritage to be an invaluable resource. Helping professionals to understand the potential impact of their practice, the book also provides insights into the role visitors play in the interplay between heritage and politics.

Part I

Heritage, politics and emotion

1
Critical realist heritage studies

Agency, reflexivity and materiality

In Uses of Heritage (2006), I developed two core arguments. The first was that heritage was a discursive and social practice. I argued that heritage was something that was done rather than something that was possessed or ‘saved’, proposing that heritage was better conceptualised as a process, practice or performative activity. Ultimately, I suggested that there was no such ‘thing’ as heritage, but rather a set of practices tied up with the activities of remembering and commemoration that used the past to help make sense of the present. Heritage is a practice, not only in terms of professional practice but also in terms of how non-professionals practice it, which is fundamentally about negotiating the meaning and nature of social and cultural change and mediating social and cultural conflicts. My second argument stressed that heritage practices and performances were framed by particular heritage discourses, some of which were more politically powerful than others. I identified the Authorized Heritage Discourse (AHD), a hegemonic and professional discourse that stresses the nationalising values of material heritage and privileges the role of those possessing expert knowledge as stewards for all that is ‘good’ about the past. It has its roots in European nineteenth- and twentieth-century disciplinary debates and was both embedded in and continually authorised by national heritage agencies in Western European and other Western countries, and was internationally authorised by UNESCO and ICOMOS. I made no claims that this was the only heritage discourse nor that different versions or different authorised or dominant discourses did not exist; the primary utility of identifying this heuristic device was to question and challenge the hegemonic assumptions embedded in heritage management and conservation practices. Specifically, a central concern in identifying the AHD was to recognise other, less powerful and often ignored discourses that framed non-authorised or marginalised practices and understandings of heritage. Indeed, the tensions between subaltern heritage discourses and the AHD were a particular theme of that book. However, the tensions that underlie differing uses and meanings of heritage is developed here focussing on the performative practice of heritage-making that occurs as people visit heritage sites and museums. While the sites chosen for analysis in this book are all in many ways authorised sites, in that they have official and sanctioned status as ‘heritage’, my first aim is to explore the nuances and tensions that nonetheless exist as different people in different contexts ‘use’ such sites. My second related aim is to consider the social and political consequences and effects of these performances and practices.

Drawing on an extensive qualitative database, one of my aims is to expand on the idea that heritage is a performative practice. Two issues, which have been raised in my previous work, require further development and elaboration: affect/emotion and politics. Although Uses of Heritage addressed these issues, I am not satisfied that my analysis was adequately developed, nor am I entirely satisfied with how these concepts are dealt with in the wider heritage and museums literature. I believe that both concepts need to be more centrally positioned in the project of re-theorising heritage. Much is made of the observation in the heritage and museum studies literature that heritage is ‘political’, but what exactly is meant by that, and how can we understand the issues of power that make heritage ‘political’? Additionally, the so-called affective turn in the wider humanities and social sciences has also influenced debates in heritage and museum studies in ways that, overall, I do not find particularly helpful or convincing, and that counterintuitively serves to reinforce the AHD. Thus, my aim in this and the following chapters in Part 1 of this book, is to develop my arguments about the performative nature of heritage by engaging specifically with affect/emotion and politics and, in doing so, identify what further insights they may offer in considering the phenomenon of heritage and in identifying what it is that heritage does.

A fundamental assumption of my work is that people matter. Finding out what people do with heritage, why they do it, and the consequences of their ‘doing’, should be central to critical heritage studies. A further aim in focusing on affect, emotion and politics is to centrally position people rather than things as central to heritage practice and theory. In drawing on a large body of qualitative data, my aim is to draw out what people do and say about the nature of their heritage performances while visiting heritage sites and objects. This can tell us not only about heritage as a social and political phenomenon but the work it does within society. The ‘received knowledge’ of the heritage sector is that ‘visitors’ to heritage sites are defined as learning from or being an ‘audience’ to, the work of heritage experts – such as curators, and those professionals involved in site interpretation and management. Following on from my aim to challenge the authority and underpinnings of the AHD, this book does not dismiss visitors/tourists by privileging material objects and sites as the first point of focus for analysis, but rather, takes visitors and tourists seriously and asks them what meanings are being made as they perform a particular type of heritage-making. Moreover, I also ask what implications particular forms of performances and practices have in wider social and political contexts. Given the importance I place on people and their experiences, it is useful at this stage to assess the heritage studies literature of the last decade and to establish why I have drawn on the particular theoretical and conceptual ideas that I do.

A critical realist heritage studies

My work has been incorrectly characterised as based on social constructivist epistemology (e.g. Albert 2013: 11; Harrison 2015: 27; Wells 2015: 252). This implies a relativist ontology, a characterisation that is, in part, a simple error of reading my work, but in some cases, a dismissive criticism. In the latter case, it tends to be linked to a sense of unease, often from archaeologists, over my attempts to disprivilege materiality (e.g. Pétursdóttir 2012; Harrison 2013, 2015). I find this an interesting critique from researchers who draw on Latour, who himself takes a Churchillian approach to social constructivism – that is, the only thing worse than social constructivism is not adopting social constructivism (Latour 2003). The argument that ‘all heritage is intangible’, in that heritage is a performative practice rather than simply a ‘thing’, has been a focus of critique. I will come back to this criticism ahead; however, it is important to re-emphasise that the ontological philosophical underlabourer of all my work is critical realism (Smith 2004: 60–62, 2006: 13–16). The misreading of my philosophical positioning is not an idle issue of semantics, as acknowledging the position I take is key to understanding not simply my argument but also the ethical imperatives and political agendas that drive the work. As Porpora (2015: 6) notes, critical realism is not a theory that attempts to explain anything, but rather a philosophical position that “establishes the boundaries between good and bad theorising”. Being charged with being a ‘constructivist’ can hide and gloss over any number of suggested ‘sins’. This is because what is meant by this charge is never clearly expressed or defined. The implication seems to be that I take a relativist stance, which assumes I am concerned only with the way social contexts influence the way heritage values and meanings are ‘constructed’, and that thus all readings or constructions are equally valid.

Situating my work within a critical realist ontology, a position associated with the earlier¹ work of Roy Bhaskar (1978, 1989) and more latterly with Margaret Archer (1995, 2000) and Andrew Sayer (2000), means accepting that the natural world, in this case, the material world, exists and that it exists independently of our knowledge of it. Critical realism may be seen as an attempt to bridge the claims of the relativist tendencies of extreme forms of social constructivism and various forms of realism in that it stipulates that the natural or material world may be understood in certain contexts and has implications for that understanding (Bhaskar 1978; see also Archer 1995: 19; Sayer 1992, 2000; Iosifides 2011). Relativism is rejected, and a distinction is made between ontology and epistemology so that, as Fairclough notes, a central concern is avoiding “the ‘epistemic fallacy’ of confusing the nature of reality with our knowledge of reality” (2005: 922). Crucially, as Fairclough goes on to argue, social research abstracts the concrete events of social life and “then ‘forgets’ the concrete”; however, critical realism must make the move back to the concrete (2005: 923). Thus, while critical realists may be concerned with understanding the way the social constructs knowledge and discourses, it does not forget the material or concrete; it understands that human agency has consequences. Moreover, it is understood that certain forms of knowledge and discourse have real causal powers that are continually in tension with the causal powers of social structures and practices (Fairclough, Jessop and Sayer 2002; Fairclough 2005; Elder-Vass 2010).

Critical realism underpins Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), which in turn underpinned my arguments about the AHD (Smith 2006: 15). CDA, as a method, is explicitly concerned with identifying the links between discourse and practice and how particular discourses facilitate social change and/or maintain and legitimise ideologies and power relations (Fairclough 2003; Fairclough et al. 2004; Chouliaraki and Fairclough 2004; Fairclough and Fairclough 2013; Wetherell 2013a). CDA offers a range of techniques for analysing language and practice, and I use its underlying philosophical insights and positions to develop both the arguments about the AHD and the existence of oppositional and excluded discourses. In line with CDA, my concern with identifying the AHD was to challenge both it and the practices and power relations it frames. I have not, as is suggested by the ‘constructivist’ label, been interested in a Foucauldian sense of identifying and abstracting particular discourses or in pursuing solipsistic textual analysis. Rather, I am concerned with identifying and explaining the social and political context of knowledge about heritage and the ways this then sits in tensions with practices and social structures.

A particular issue for my current arguments is that of ‘agency’, and exploring this concept allows me to further unpack the philosophical and analytical utility of critical realism. Margaret Archer (1995, 2000, 2007) has developed important arguments about human agency and critical realist perspectives that I draw on here. In opposition to postmodernists, Archer, as with the proponents of CDA, does not “sever the relationship between language and the world”; discourse is thus never defined as ‘closed’ (2000: 3). Indeed, she argues that it is our interactions with the natural world, including material culture, which shape our individual sense of self and identity. Further, she argues that constructivism “impoverishes humanity” by defining us as nothing beyond what society makes us and neglects our embodied practices, as human agency is attributed only to discourse (2000: 4). This does not imply that the natural or material cultural world has its own innate ‘agency’ or that a sense of self exists that is “prior to, and primitive to, our society” (2000: 7). Nor does it imply that we can know the natural or material world in a value-free or theory-neutral way (Porpora 2015: 16). Rather, it explicitly acknowledges that meaning and self-consciousness is continually derived from embodied practices and interactions with the world. Archer, in reclaiming humanity from postmodern tendencies to render human action into “disembodied textualism” (2000: 2), argues that all human action is context-dependent and that humans are indeed social beings.

Further, she argues that humans “are simultaneously free and constrained” by the nature of social reality and that “we also have some awareness of it” because of human reflexivity (1995: 2, emphasis in original). Behaviour is thus not simply subject to Bourdieu’s theory of habitus, and indeed Archer (2000) is critical of this idea, nor is behaviour simply subject to social structure, but also, and in some circumstances and contexts, attributed to conscious reflection (Elder-Vass 2010: 109–110). Change (what she calls morphogenesis) or stasis (morphostasis) in society and human behaviour is brought about by the interrelations between agency and circumstance – that is, between human actions and the real world (Archer 1995). As Porpora (2015: 118) summarises Archer’s position:

People act from social position related to other social positions and do so, although creatively, through the cultural milieu they inhabit. In the temporal process of acting, actors either reproduce or alter both or either their cultural and structural circumstances that originally bound them.

Structure, agency and culture must be separated ontologically and analytically so that how they interact may be identified (Archer 1995, 2000; Porpora 2015: 119). In disprivileging the idea of the materiality of heritage, I am specifically asking us to pay attention to the role of human agency and to the particular social contexts and material circumstances that may influence particular practices and understandings. That is, my aim both here and in Uses of Heritage is to understand human agency and the consequences of how heritage is used, while not conflating that agency with the material object itself, as tends to be done in the AHD.

Contra to Skrede and Hølleland (2018: 83–84), my disprivileging of heritage objects, sites and places, does not put me at odds with critical realism. I am not ‘disinterested’ in the material at all, as they claim, but concerned to theorise it in a meaningful way. There are two points to make here. First, in attempting to shift the theoretical gaze from the privileging of tangible heritage, I am simply asking us to reconsider how objects have been fetishised to the point that human agency and social relations become obscured within the AHD. The failure to engage explicitly with epistemology in considering how and why heritage matters to people will impede understanding of the material consequences heritage has for them. The second point to stress here is that within heritage studies and archaeology readings of critical realism are predisposed, due to their disciplinary ways of seeing, to equate ‘real’ with concrete materiality. In doing so, they ignore studies of social ontology informed by critical realism (e.g. Lawson 2012; Kaidesoja 2013), which offers, per Lawson (2012: 347): “an account whereby social reality is seen to be distinct from, and yet dependent upon, non-social material”. In other words ‘material’ (objects, sites, places, etc) cannot be treated as ontologically privileged – that is, ‘real’ – in a way that social structures and relations are not. Within critical realism, social structures have always been ontologically ‘real’ and have causal consequences. Heritage performances have material consequences in lived experience, and concern with understanding these consequences, and how they may in turn feed back on heritage performances, is not at odds with critical realism.

A sense of humanism underpins critical realism (Porpora 2015: 131), which actively challenges the reduction or conflation of human action to culture (Archer 2000). To avoid such a conflation, Archer develops the idea of ‘reflexivity’. Archer recognises that humans hold internal conversations with themselves and that this ‘self-talk’ or ‘mulling things over’ is not, and never has been, determined by habitual action (2007: 1–3). Indeed, she defines reflexivity as the ability to hold conscious and internal deliberations as we interact with the social and natural world (2007: 3–4) and sees reflexivity as “the process mediating the effects of our circumstances upon our actions” (2012: 6). She notes that the extent to which reflexivity is practised by social subjects will increase in proportion to the degree structural and cultural change, or morphogenesis, impinge upon those subjects (2012: 7). Conversely, the modality of reflexivity will also change in relation to morphostasis, or the reproduction of social contexts.

There are four points that emerge from explicating the critical realist underpinnings of the research. First, it explains that I am not simply interested in what particular individuals or collectives of people say, think or write about heritage. Rather, I am also explicitly concerned to identify and understand how this influences not only practice and the ways in which particular practices are reproduced or changed but also how it affects lived experiences. I believe that lived experience is central to understanding issues of power and politics and the way heritage is used and understood. Second, it explains my concern with interviewing people and asking them about the way they are thinking and engaging with heritage as they visit museums and heritage sites. As Archer states, “an ontology without a methodology is deaf and dumb; a methodology without an ontology is blind” (1995: 28). Thus, my ontological position drives the questions I ask and the methods I employ to address them. I am concerned with human agency and specifically with the reflexivity of particular users of heritage and the work their reflexivity then does in maintaining or challenging particular social practices and value...