A Geography of Heritage

Power, Culture and Economy

Brian Graham, Greg Ashworth, John Tunbridge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317836230
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences physiques
• Subtopic: Géographie

The concept of heritage relates to the ways in which contemporary society uses the past as a social, political or economic resource. However, heritage is open to interpretation and its value may be perceived from differing perspectives - often reflecting divisions in society. Moreover, the schism between the cultural and economic uses of heritage also gives rise to potential conflicts of interest.

Examining these issues in depth, this book is the first sustained attempt to integrate the study of heritage into contemporary human geography. It is structured around three themes: the diversity of use and consumption of heritage as a multi-sold cultural and economic resource; the conflicts and tensions arising from this multiplicity of uses, producers and consumers; and the relationship between heritage and identity at a variety of scales.

PART

I

The Context

1

The uses and abuses of heritage

Introduction

This chapter establishes the context for the debate. It first considers the origins of heritage as defined by using the past as a resource for the present. We show how this way of thinking about the past emerged at the same time as the codification of nationalism into the nation-state. Second, we begin our explanation of the functions and uses of heritage, which can be subdivided between the cultural – or socio-political – and the economic. Finally, in examining the issue of ‘whose heritage?’, we begin to consider the reasons for the contested nature of heritage.

The origins of heritage

Heritage, or a concern for the past, emerged from the raft of ideas and ideologies which loosely constitute what we have come to know as modernity. The ‘modern’ is usually divided into the early modern of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the modern eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the (post)modern twentieth century. The modern era, as traditionally defined, often necessarily reflects a Eurocentric perspective on the world. The European eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are seen as being the apogee of modernism as the secular culture conceived in the Renaissance ultimately evolved into the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the Age of Reason with its belief in an individual’s ability to think and act for oneself. The concept of the European territorial state was shaped within such a mindset, the French Revolution being a defining catalyst in this process. Like the Renaissance before it, we can see the Enlightenment being framed by its particular rendition of the past, one in which the values and traditions of European Christianity were depicted as the principal reactionary forces in European society. In turn, the modern era is defined by the emergence of the ‘one-out-of-many’ meta-narrative of nationalism as ‘the ideology of belongingness’ (Hall 1995, p. 185) and principal force of legitimation in the processes of state formation. For Woolf (1996, pp. 25–6):

National identity is an abstract concept that sums up the collective expression of a subjective, individual sense of belonging to a sociopolitical unit: the nation state. Nationalist rhetoric assumes not only that individuals form part of a nation (through language, blood, choice, residence, or some other criterion), but that they identify with the territorial unit of the nation state.

Hobsbawm (1990), for example, regards nationalism as pre-eminently the product of triumphant bourgeois liberalism in the period ca. 1830–1880, although other commentators place its origins rather earlier. Colley (1992) locates the making of a Britishness vested in recurrent Protestant wars, commercial success and imperial conquest to the eighteenth century, while Hastings (1997) argues for an even earlier medieval origin of both nationalism and nations. Although it is often argued that nationalism received its biggest boost from the French Revolution, its crystallization as the driving social and political force of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe stems from a succession of previous ‘revolutions’ that transformed societies in Europe – and North America – between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. In parts of Europe, the cumulative effect was to replace the medieval power structures of church and nobility with a recognizably capitalist and secular élite. Nevertheless, as Davies (1996, p. 821) argues, irrespective of the precise relationship between nationalism and modernization, ‘it is indisputable that the modernizing process expanded the role of nationalism beyond all previous limits’.

In this conceptualization of a political state that is also the homeland of a single, homogeneous people, heritage is a primary instrument in the ‘discovery’ or creation and subsequent nurturing of a national identity. Nationalism, and a representation of the past designated as ‘national heritage’, developed synchronously as the ‘nation’ was asserted over communities defined by other spatial scales or social relationships. The nation-state required national heritage for a variety of reasons. It supported the consolidation of this national identification, while absorbing or neutralizing potentially competing heritages of social-cultural groups or regions. Again, a national heritage helped combat the claims of other nations upon the nation’s territory or people, while furthering claims upon nationals in territories elsewhere. Small wonder then that the fostering of national heritage has long been a major responsibility of governments and that the provision of many aspects of heritage has become in most countries a near-monopoly of national governments. (We return to these issues in Chapters 3 and 8, which consider the creation and content of national heritage.)

In turn, the Age of Reason spawned its antithesis in a nineteenth-century Romanticism, that emphasized the irrational and the deification of nature. Familiar in literature from the works of a panoply of writers and poets, including Goethe, Shelley and Wordsworth, these ideas informed the work of the ‘prophets of wilderness’ as Schama (1995, p. 7) calls the nineteenth-century founding fathers of modern environmentalism. Among others, Henry David Thoreau, George Perkins Marsh and John Muir were responsible for the representation of the American West as a ‘wilderness … awaiting discovery … an antidote for the poisons of industrial society’. Schama (1995, p. 61) argues, however, that:

[l]andscapes are culture before they are nature; constructs of the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock … But it should also be acknowledged that once a certain idea of landscape, a myth, a vision, establishes itself in an actual place, it has a peculiar way of muddling categories, of making metaphors more real than their referents; of becoming, in fact, part of the scenery.

Indeed, that idea of landscape became institutionalized in the later nineteenth century through the creation of the United States’s national parks. The first, the ‘strange unearthly topography’ of the Yosemite Valley, was established by an Act of Congress in 1864, testimony, as Schama (1995, p. 7) observes, that the ‘wilderness … does not locate itself, does not name itself’. National parks were originally identified with natural environmental heritage and commonly prompted or paralleled the development of a system of national historic parks or sites to conserve places of cultural significance. It became apparent early on, however, that the two realms could not be separated satisfactorily. Thus national park agencies in the wider world of European settlement have been instrumental in the creation of cultural heritage, not least through establishing the hegemony of Eurocentric imagings of place at the expense, for example, of the landscape representations particular to the cultures of the indigenous peoples.

Equally, it is salutary to remember that the desire to preserve large parts of the existing built environment is both recent and historically aberrant. While it is possible to cite odd cases from settlement history of the deliberate preservation of particular buildings – usually for symbolic reasons – these remain exceptions to the general trend that what we now possess has survived through chance, neglect and lack of motive to redevelop, rather than the deliberate act of preservation, an idea that dates only to the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Religious buildings are something of an exception to this generalization as they were commonly continuously maintained, if not actually self-consciously preserved, as we would understand that term. In terms of the cultural past, the Romantic concomitant to wilderness was a renewed fascination with the medieval world, which had been marginalized both by Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers. Although ‘Gothic’ was used in the eighteenth century to denote the barbarous and uncouth, it has since become synonymous with the architecture of Northern Europe’s great medieval cathedrals, which were one of the cardinal enthusiasms of the Romantics who conflated a hatred of industrial civilization with a vision of a rationalist and even ideal Middle Ages. John Ruskin’s minutely detailed descriptions of the cathedrals at Rouen, Amiens and Bourges were among the principal inspirations of Marcel Proust’s rendering of the past recreated through memory in A la Recherche du Temps Perdue. Besides Ruskin, the key figures – largely anti-modernist Romantics – included A. W. N. Pugin and William Morris in Britain, together with the Frenchmen, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc and Prosper Mérimée.

Thus the will to conserve was the obsession of a passionate, educated and generally influential minority and the social, educational and political characteristics of heritage producers have changed little since the nineteenth century. The initiative for the identification and conservation of heritage was by no means always governmental, but was frequently triggered by the concerns of private citizens for the protection of a past legacy perceived to be disappearing under the weight of nineteenth-century urbanization and industrialization. In some major cases the initiative began and remained with voluntary organizations, which succeeded in winning governmental favour and the necessary legislative protection for their activities. Among these, by far the most successful and best known are the British National Trusts, founded in 1895 (England, Wales and Northern Ireland) and 1931 (Scotland), which in conserving natural and cultural heritage have become the biggest private landowners, pillars of national culture in their own right and increasingly potent agents of geographical change (Tunbridge 1981).

Figure 1.1 The restored medieval cité of Carcassonne, Aude, France, which once guarded the routeway separating the Montagne Noire in the north and the Corbières massif to the south

Figure 1.2 Carcassonne’s fortified Porte d’Aude demonstrates Viollet-le-Duc’s style of restoration

In the nineteenth century, the idea that some buildings and even cityscapes should not be replaced when physical or functional obsolescence dictated was thus a novel one. Rather, because they contained transferable values, whether architectural/aesthetic, social or moral, particular buildings and townscapes should be preserved (and even ‘restored’) back to some previous condition (Ashworth 1998). Then as now, the extent of restoration permitted and the definition of ‘true’ values was the subject of bitter debate and controversy. Hewison (1987) defines preservation as the maintenance of an object, building or landscape in a condition defined by its historic context and in such a way that it can be studied with a view to revealing its original meaning. In so far as it is possible to achieve such an aim, which invokes notions of an objective and value-free history, the careful preservation of archaeological sites or monuments provides the best example. The only rebuilding done is that necessary to preserve the stability of the structure – which may well be a ruin. In contrast, conservation may involve preservation but also restoration of the physical fabric. Much European heritage of apparently medieval origin owes its present appearance to nineteenth-century tastes in restoration.

To paraphrase Ruskin, however, every instance of restoration must lie in the sense that authenticity is unattainable, all heritage being created in and by the present. Extensively restored during the nineteenth century, the contemporary appearance of the cité of Carcassonne in south-west France, often described as among Europe’s finest medieval towns, owes more to the energetic Viollet-le-Duc’s imaging of the Middle Ages than to any ‘reality’ grounded in academic study of medieval urbanization (Figures 1.1 and 1.2). As Henry James somewhat pretentiously observed of the cité, while entirely missing the point:

One vivid challenge, at any rate, it flings down before you; it calls upon you to make up your mind on the subject of restoration. For myself, I have no hesitation; I prefer in every case the ruined, however ruined, to the reconstructed, however splendid. What is left is more precious than what is added: the one is history, the other is fiction; and I like the former the better of the two – it is so much more romantic.

(James 1884, p. 144)

None the less, the search for authenticity and spirituality took the artist, Paul Gaugin, for example, first to the margins of Europe at Pont-Aven in Brittany, and then to Tahiti. In his evocation of the West of Ireland, the poet, W.B. Yeats, is perhaps ‘the supreme example of an artist setting out to construct a deliberate, symbolic landscape allegory of identity, impressing himself on a landscape like a “phase of history’” (cited in Duffy 1997, p. 66). The celebration of the romantic was paralleled by the processes through which cultures of non-European people were appropriated:

so called “pre-modern” non-European cultures were both desired and denigrated as “primitive”. European discourses of gender and the “primitive” were intermeshed in complex ways, gender on the one hand, structuring these asymmetrical power relations and imaginative geographies of primitivism, and on the other deployed to reinforce European superiority. European discourses of modern and gendered domesticity were central to the ways in which Europeans defined themselves as “modern” in contrast to the “primitivism” of non-European people, and set the privatised, patriarchal, bourgeois nuclear family and culturally specific concepts of reason, individual freedom, citizenship and the nation state as global registers of modernity, and narratives of “progress” as a universal target of development.

(Nash 1999, p. 22)

In sum, nineteenth-century conceptualizations of heritage emerged in the ethos of a singular and totalized modernity, in which it was assumed that to be modern was to be European, and that to be European or to espouse European values (even in the United States) was to be at the pinnacle of cultural achievement and social evolution. The acquisition of the adjective, ‘modern’, for itself by Europe was an integral part of imperialism and the pinnacle of heritage was to become the European metropolitan cores of the imperial empires.

The functions and uses of heritage

If its origins lie in the tastes and values of a nineteenth-century educated élite, the wider conceptualization of heritage raises many of the same issues that attend the debate on the role of the past and the meaning of place. To reiterate, heritage is that part of the past which we select in the present for contemporary purposes, be they economic, cultural, political or social. The worth attributed to these artefacts rests less in their intrinsic merit than in a complex array of contemporary values, demands and even moralities. As such, heritage can be visualized as a resource but simultaneously, several times so. Clearly, it is an economic resource, one exploited everywhere as a primary component of strategies to promote tourism, economic development and rural and urban regeneration. But heritage also helps define the meanings of culture and power and is a political resource; and it thus possesses a crucial socio-political function. Consequently, it is accompanied by an often bewildering array of identifications and potential conflicts, not least when heritage places and objects are involved in issues of legitimization of power structures.

The social and political uses of heritage

Heritage is a knowledge, a cultural product and a political resource. In Livingstone’s terms (1992), the nature of such knowledge is always negotiated, set as it is within specific social and intellectual circumstances. Thus our concern is partly with questions such as why a particular interpretation of heritage is promoted, whose interests are advanced or retarded, and in what kind of milieu was it conceived and communicated. If heritage knowledge is situated in particular social and intellectual circumstances, it is time-specific and thus its meaning(s) can be altered as texts are re-read in changing times, circumstances and constructs of place and scale. Consequently, it is inevitable that such knowledges are also fields of contestation.

As Lowenthal (1985, 1996) has argued, this suggests that the past in general, and its interpretation as history or heritage in particular, confers social benefits as well as costs. He notes four traits of the past (which can be taken as synonymous with heritage in this respect) as helping make it beneficial to a people. First, its antiquity conveys the respect and status of antecedence, but, more important perhaps, underpins the idea of continuity and its essentially modernist ethos of progressive, evolutionary social development. Second, societies create emblematic landscapes in which certain artefacts acquire cultural status because they fulfil the need to connect the present to the past in an unbroken trajectory. Third, the past provides a sense of termination in the sense that what happened in it has ended, while, finally, it offers a sequence, allowing us to locate our lives in what we see as a continuity of events.

Although Lowenthal’s analysis is couched largely in social terms and pays little attention to the past as an economic resource, it is helpful in identifying the cultural – or more specifically socio-political – functions and uses of heritage. Building on these traits, which can help make the past beneficial to people, Lowenthal sees it as providing familiarity and guidance, enrichment and escape but, more potently perhaps in the context of this book’s discussion, we can concentrate on the functions of validation (or legitimation) and identity. The latter can be visualized as a multi-faceted phenomenon that embraces a range of human attributes, including language, religion, ethnicity, nationalism and shared interpretations of the past (Guibernau 1996)...