A Museum Studies Approach to Heritage

Sheila Watson, Amy Jane Barnes, Katy Bunning, Sheila Watson, Amy Jane Barnes, Katy Bunning

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138950931
• eBook ISBN: 9781317361305
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Museum Studies

Heritage's revival as a respected academic subject has, in part, resulted from an increased awareness and understanding of indigenous rights and non-Western philosophies and practices, and a growing respect for the intangible. Heritage has, thus far, focused on management, tourism and the traditionally 'heritage-minded' disciplines, such as archaeology, geography, and social and cultural theory. Widening the scope of international heritage studies, A Museum Studies Approach to Heritage explores heritage through new areas of knowledge, including emotion and affect, the politics of dissent, migration, and intercultural and participatory dimensions of heritage.

Drawing on a range of disciplines and the best from established sources, the book includes writing not typically recognised as 'heritage', but which, nevertheless, makes a valuable contribution to the debate about what heritage is, what it can do, and how it works and for whom. Including heritage perspectives from beyond the professional sphere, the book serves as a reminder that heritage is not just an academic concern, but a deeply felt and keenly valued public and private practice. This blending of traditional topics and emerging trends, established theory and concepts from other disciplines offers readers international views of the past and future of this growing field.

A Museum Studies Approach to Heritage offers a wider, more current and more inclusive overview of issues and practices in heritage and its intersection with museums. As such, the book will be essential reading for postgraduate students of heritage and museum studies. It will also be of great interest to academics, practitioners and anyone else who is interested in how we conceptualise and use the past.

Part I

Heritage contexts, past and present

Introduction to Part I

Amy Jane Barnes

How have understandings of what constitutes heritage and who controls it, shifted over time? In this opening section, we consider contexts of heritage, both past and present. The first half considers conceptions of heritage during a period when Euro-American perspectives came to dominate global discourse on the subject, particularly through the implementation of international conventions in the mid- to late-twentieth century. It explores the conception of heritage, emerging largely from European contexts, and its codification via various national legislation and international conventions.

The part begins with David C. Harvey’s ‘Heritage pasts and heritage presents: temporality, meaning and the scope of heritage studies’, first published at the turn of the millennium. Harvey considers the ‘historical scope’ of heritage as a discipline of scholarly practice. He argues that understandings of heritage are ‘historically contingent and embedded’ and considers ‘heritage as a cultural process’. Understanding heritage in this way sets up ‘debates about the production of identity, power and authority throughout society’, with which the authors represented in the second part of this section engage. Harvey’s chapter considers the long history of how people have thought about and related to the past beyond the narrow confines of disciplinary perspectives and the so-called ‘official heritage’ – in particular, Western-centric conceptions of heritage rooted in modernist discourse, spread around the world via the agency of colonialism, and codified in international heritage legislation, most notably by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) World Heritage Convention (1972) in the second half of the twentieth century (see Harrison 2012; Waterton 2010). By his own admission, Harvey ‘merely scratches the surface’ but prompts us to think about heritage and its practice, in particular, in ways that this volume, similarly, seeks to develop.

In the latter part of the twentieth century, certainly in the UK and North America, an emergent ‘heritage industry’ (first coined by Robert Hewison in 1987) boomed thanks, in part to increased leisure time and mobility, de-industrialisation and urban regeneration (Harrison 2012: 84–85, 227). As Harvey notes in his chapter, some commentators, Hewison among them, have presented this ‘new heritage’ as suspect, for its capitalist associations and perceived consequential inauthenticity. The precarious position of independent museums in the UK, often considered to be a manifestation of this commercialised and commodified understanding of heritage, is considered in a new paper, ‘Museum studies and heritage: independent museums and the “heritage debate” in the UK’, by Anna Woodham. As a discipline, museum studies is often seen as something distinct from and sometimes at odds with heritage studies. There is no better example from which to challenge this artificial disciplinary distinction than an examination of attitudes shown towards independent museums. The subject offers a means by which to reflect instead on what Woodham argues are the ‘entangled’ histories of museum studies and heritage studies.

Continuing the debate around commercialisation and heritage, Alan Bennett describes his ‘unease’ on visiting a National Trust property, in extracts from the introduction to his play People (2012); a sense of dissatisfaction with the experience, that prompted his writing of the play (extracts of which are also reproduced here). Bennett highlights, what he perceives to be, a distasteful ‘level of marketing’ in evidence at many historic homes, which places an emphasis on controversial personalities and prurient stories. In the extract from People, Bennett sends this up:

a series of full chamber pots used by the great and the good of British society, are perceived by Lumsden, the man from the National Trust, as a unique marketing hook for the stately home in which they are housed.

In a provocative chapter, ostensibly about the issues associated with retaining and repatriating human remains, Tiffany Jenkins argues that internalised questioning of the museum as an institution of cultural authority, is leading to an increasingly weakened, destabilised sector. In so doing, Jenkins provides an overview of the key intellectual debates that have influenced the cultural sphere and, by extension, the study and conceptualisation of heritage in post-colonial/post-modern contexts. A critic of the ‘new museology’, which gained intellectual currency from the late 1980s in the UK and beyond, Jenkins argues that the contestation of museums’ cultural authority and efforts to newly justify their value and re-legitimise their societal and cultural role, has largely come from within. And yet, this has failed to influence the ongoing representation of the museum as ‘monolithic and resistant to change’. In short, she argues, museology ‘is prone to interpreting [itself] primarily as a profession still committed to objectivity, reacting to and defying external challenges to its authority’. Through analysis of interviews carried out with museum professionals, Jenkins reveals a tension between the perceived shortcomings of museums and museum staff in the past (too collections-focused, too intent on retaining cultural authority), the expectations of policy-makers and governmental rulings and of self-reflexive contemporary practice.

The first of the following two papers is credited to the ‘Editorial Collective’, a group comprised of ‘activists’ (Taylor 2008) dedicated to the promulgation of non-hegemonic ‘history from below’. In this ‘manifesto’ (Taylor 2008), which appeared in the launch issue of the influential left-leaning History Workshop Journal (1976), the ‘Collective’ makes an impassioned case for ‘bring[ing] the boundaries of history closer to people’s lives’, and for democratising the discipline and working class experience into history. They write of a ‘narrowing of the influence of history in our society, and its progressive withdrawal from the battle of ideas’, presenting the ‘Serious history’ of the mid-1970s, as moribund, regressive and ‘shrinking’. The History Workshop Journal, it is argued, seeks to revitalise the discipline by recognising and loosing itself from the legacy and limitations of so-called ‘Whig history’, with its emphasis on human progression towards enlightenment, by instead, empowering ‘ordinary people’, in other words, those from outside the academy, to engage in historical research, interpretation and criticism, and by advising scholars to strive for ‘clarity and accessibility’ in their own work. The influence of ‘history from below’ on heritage, at least as it is practiced in the UK, is encapsulated in Robertson’s conceptualisation that it is ‘about people, collectivity and individuals, and about their sense of inheritance from the past and the uses to which this inheritance is put. It is about the possibilities that result from that deployment of the past’ (2012: 1).

Among the History Workshop Journal’s founding ‘Editorial Collective’ (and most likely a major contributor to the manifesto considered above), was the prominent Marxist historian, Raphael Samuel. In the next chapter, ‘Hybrids’, first published in 1996, Samuel presents his contention that history is a hybridised narrative contingent on the concerns of the present day and, despite the discipline’s claims to truth and authenticity, always has been so: ‘However faithfully we document a period and steep ourselves in the sources, we cannot rid ourselves of afterthought. However jealously we protect the integrity of our subject matter, we cannot insulate it from ourselves’. This perspective provides us with additional insight into artificial separations between history (as a discipline) and heritage, particularly the perceived differences between so-called ‘national history’ and ‘cultural heritage’ (certainly in dominant Euro-American contexts). He accuses history of ‘fetishising’ documentary evidence. This, he argues, has roots in the political and administrative needs of medieval society to establish ‘fact’ and ‘right’, which gathered influence as ‘scientific history’ during the nineteenth century and was ultimately codified in the mid-twentieth century in the professionalisation of history as a discrete discipline. This, despite the long-standing, if rather shady practice of ‘knowledge-based invention’, was employed in order to establish foundation stories, and establish ‘fact’ after the event. While ‘the language of history’ gives the impression of ‘fixity and definition’, all history is an invention of sorts, only masquerading as factual and authentic. ‘Rival narratives’ – the ever-present legends, fables and stories, the stuff of cultural heritage – challenge this ‘record-based history’.

In a section of their manifesto not reproduced here, the Editorial Collective (1976) emphasise the value of examining ‘historical consciousness’: the ‘variety of influences – often contradictory – which go to make [it] up’ as a component of ‘history from below’. In a new paper, Ceri Jones considers the application of Rüsen’s conceptualisation of historical consciousness to ‘[bridging] the gap between history [the discipline of] and heritage [as an ambiguous and contested concept] to understand both as a way of making sense of the past in the present’. Her analysis and critique of this theoretical approach, considers its usefulness as a ‘starting point for thinking about how [the cognitive and cultural ways in which we conceptualise the past] might shape and influence encounters with heritage sites’. Through a discussion of international examples, Jones explores the impact of Rüsen’s forms of historical consciousness (traditional, exemplary, critical and genetic) on how visitors conceptualise the past, present and future as ‘active meaning-makers’, both cognitively and emotionally.

In ‘Weighing up intangible heritage: a view from Ise’, Simon Richards considers the development, impact and contentious debates surrounding the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003), introduced as a means of mitigating against the Eurocentric bias of established conceptions of ‘heritage’ and recognising other ways of performing and understandings of what that constitutes. Through the lens of the Shinto shrine complex at Ise, Japan, Richards explores notions of authenticity and cultural aesthetics in heritage debates, which neatly leads into the second part of this section, which looks at heritage pasts and presents from alternative, often non-dominant perspectives.

In the current English-language literature on heritage, privilege is often given to European and, more broadly, Western understandings of heritage and related practice, which have frequently been criticised as hegemonic (see, for example, Kreps 2005; Smith 2006; Byrne 1991). The chapters in the remainder of this section look at developments in other contexts, particularly where established (read: Eurocentric) notions of heritage have been translated, perhaps subverted and contested. This is not to pass judgement on the supposed validity of past/present contexts over one or the other but simply to highlight recent developments in the field and to bring English-language readers into contact with other understandings and practices of heritage in post-colonial contexts, beyond the dominant debates with which they may well be most familiar.

Cintia Velázquez Marroni considers the concept of patrimony (patrimonio), which can be loosely translated from Spanish as ‘heritage’ but with an additional sense of ‘kinship’ and ‘inheritance’; a notion strongly tied to the sense of national identity in post-colonial, hybrid, culturally diverse Mexico. She considers its origins and its contemporary adaptations vis-à-vis globalised understandings of heritage, most notably via UNESCO and the private sector. Velázquez Marroni analyses these changing definitions present in the cultural sphere – an increasingly inclusive understanding of the concept that encompasses ‘living’ cultural knowledge, natural landscapes and indigenous culture, as much as it includes monuments, museums and historical sites – but, in contrast with national legislation, which remains focused on archaeological remains and antiquities.

The role of inheritance and kinship in the conceptualisation of heritage is a theme also explored by Guðrún D. Whitehead in the following chapter, in which she looks at constructions and uses of heritage in Iceland, DNA and Viking genealogy. She demonstrates how this ‘racial heritage’ is asserted in both outward-facing tourism and in ways in which Icelanders perceive themselves, individually and nationally, through case studies as diverse as representations of nature and landscape, saga manuscripts, indigenous religion and Gay Pride.

Arleen Pabón considers understandings of heritage in the Caribbean and, specifically, in Pu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Series preface
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I: Heritage contexts, past and present
• PART II: Authenticity and tourism
• PART III: Emotions and materiality
• PART IV: Diversity and identity
• PART V: Participatory heritage
• PART VI: Contested histories and heritage
• Index