Heritage Values in Contemporary Society

George S Smith, Phyllis Mauch Messenger, Hilary A Soderland, George S Smith, Phyllis Mauch Messenger, Hilary A Soderland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781315427478
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

What do we value about the past? In formulating policies about heritage preservation, that is the inevitable question, and deals not only with economic value but also the intangible value to individuals, communities and society as a whole. This interdisciplinary group of scholars—anthropologists, archaeologists, architects, educators, lawyers, heritage administrators, policy analysts, and consultants—make the first attempt to define and assess heritage values on a local, national and global level. Chapters range from the theoretical to policy frameworks to case studies of heritage practice, written by scholars from eight countries.

27PART I

Defining Heritage Values

Section 1

Heritage Values and Meaning in Social Context28

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HERITAGES, IDENTITIES, AND ROOTS: A CRITIQUE OF ARBORESCENT MODELS OF HERITAGE AND IDENTITY

Ian Russell

Introduction

Heritage is often understood as an exchange relationship (see the chapters by Holtorf; Okamura; Silberman; and Altschul in this volume). Most definitions of heritage elaborate on its quality as a thing (or those things) that are passed on to future generations. The difficulty in quantifying these exchange relationships is that they are negotiated and mediated, often imperceptibly, over long periods of time.

A series of institutional charters, policy documents, legislative documents, and national constitutions have developed a body of terms, policies, and social behavioral precedents for the management of the costs and benefits of the heritage exchange relationship (see the chapters by Fleming; Morgan et al; Bruning; and Soderland in this volume). Indeed, UNESCO has been taking steps toward the recognition of heritage as an inalienable human birthright (particularly in the case of genetic heritage and copyright law) relating to the dignity, identity, and integrity of the person and the group within which the individual participates (Kwak 2005). Although these steps should be applauded, some have also voiced concern over the “boom” in heritage law, stating that we are living in an “age of heritage,” with ever more conservationist values creating an inexorable burden on those to whom we wish to bequeath our heritage (Cooke 2007). Simply put, it is a question of sustainability.

Heritage is, however, not a de facto somatic phenomenon or social behavior. It is constituted by willful acts of choice (ICOMOS 2007:1). The maintenance of heritage as a choice points toward beliefs in an image of time that has passed, that enriches and inspires a time that has yet to 30pass. Therein a value can be ascribed to the heritage relationship. This value can be best expressed as a constellation of negotiated and mediated sentiments—hopes, dreams, desires, and beliefs.

A sentiment is a complex mixture of intellectual and emotional perceptions. Thus, heritage can be described not simply as a series of things to be managed, but also as a capricious coalescence of intellectual thought and emotional responses to the negotiation of our material and temporally understood experiences. The importance of this reorientation in heritage studies was articulated recently at the Capturing the Public Value of Heritage conference in London. Deborah Mattison (2006:97) noted, “experts ‘think’ and ‘know,’ whereas people ‘feel’ and ‘believe.’”

Although Mattison’s comment creates a false dichotomy between an unfeeling expert culture and an emotionally motivated public, the rhetorical call to highlight the significance of emotive responses for determining and articulating value in heritage is critical. Heritage does not simply exist. It is something we have to care about and simultaneously care for. Unfortunately, the vast majority of heritage studies literature does not engage critically with how or why people “care” from an emotional, psychological, or intellectual standpoint. That we “care” or “should care” is assumed. This assumption is often founded in the conflation of the concepts of heritage and identity.

Heritage and Identity

When it comes to defining heritage, the vast majority of people in Wicklow, Ireland (71 percent) equate protecting Wicklow’s heritage with “protecting our identity” and this is closely associated with “protecting our roots,” with almost eight out of every ten people expressing pride in their heritage. Wicklow Heritage Awareness Survey. (Wicklow County Council 2005)

In articulating the value of heritage in contemporary life, public surveys, such as the one quoted above from Co. Wicklow in Ireland, often stress the importance of heritage for “protecting our identity.” In its 2007 educational initiatives about world heritage, UNESCO (2007) also affirmed this conflation, saying, “Understanding World Heritage can help us become more aware of our own roots, and of our cultural and social identity.” Students and young people have arrived at the same conclusion:

Cultural and natural sites form the environment on which human beings depend psychologically, religiously, educationally and economically. 31Their destruction or even deterioration could be harmful to the survival of our identity, our nations and our planet. We have the responsibility to preserve these sites for future generations. (World Heritage Pledge, World Heritage Youth Forum, Bergen, Norway [UNESCO 2007])

These views are not limited to public opinions or institutional policies. Conflations between heritage and identity are also enshrined in legislation and national constitutions such as in the Bunreacht na hÉireann (Constitution of the Ireland) (1937):

It is the entitlement and birthright of every person born in the island of Ireland, which includes its islands and seas, to be part of the Irish Nation. ... Furthermore, the Irish nation cherishes its special affinity with people of Irish ancestry living abroad who share its cultural identity and heritage. Article 2, Bunreacht na hÉireann (1937)

Such a conceptual basis for asserting the value of heritage is advantageous to the heritage sector as it defends the sector’s role as caretaker for an inalienable human right—identity. Operating within the structures of the state, the sanctity of individual and group identity creates both a civic responsibility and social entitlement to recognition of group identities. The vast majority of legislation and policy relating to heritage and identity is the result of discourses of national identity manifestation. Although nation-states provide a strong ideological defense of the heritage sector, their ideological foundation can also reduce the complexity of choices in the manifestation of heritage to “either/or” decisions relative to national consciousness and identity.

For example, in Ireland where immigration and economic development has dramatically changed the demographics of the state in recent years, debates over competing values between heritage and development concerns are often couched in reductive, romantic, and essentialist language (Russell 2007). A recent example of this has been the debate over the construction of the M3 motorway in the so-called Tara-Skryne valley in Co. Meath. In an article entitled “Is nothing sacred?” by Eileen Battersby in The Irish Times, the sacred, national qualities of the site of Tara and its landscapes were appealed to in order to support a preservationist position as a “national obligation”: If Ireland has a heart, it beats here at Tara and throughout the dramatic hinterland that surrounds the complex, with its monuments, earthworks, and cohesive record of settlement (Battersby 2007).

Such a perspective is not limited to nationalist ideologies. International opinion regarding the Tara debate has also highlighted the fundamentalist 32positions which the heritage sector can sometimes espouse. Prof. Dennis Harding (2004:16) of the University of Edinburgh stated in relation to the then-proposed M3 motorway that, “Carving a motorway through such a landscape is an act of cultural vandalism as flagrant as ripping a knife through a Rembrandt painting.”

Pat Cooke, Director of the MA course in Arts Management and Cultural Policy at University College Dublin, has argued that this vein of debate in the heritage sector has much to do with the historicity of the sector itself which sees itself as a universal given. In suggesting some points for critical reflection on heritage in Ireland, Cooke (2008:5) suggested that, “A place to begin might be to develop some sense of the historical nature of this heritage argument. One of the ironies of heritage is that its advocates fail to see the historicity of the thing itself; where history’s stock is relativity, heritage deals in absolutes.”

Adherence to a reductive, essentialist interpretation of heritage which is based on ethnic or national structures can result in an Orwellian struggle. A heritage sector based on intractable absolutes may lead more toward the fragmentation and ghettoization of the heritage sector, with multiple identities competing for limited resources relying on arguments for de facto authenticity.

With increasing concern over civic apathy, heritage, when phrased as intrinsically linked to group identity, allows for the statutory recognition of a personal ideological stake in the manifestation of governance. This stake has dangerous potential as has been witnessed in the ethnonationalist heritage and archaeological programs of European nation-states in the early 20th century (Galaty and Watkinson 2004; Kohl and Fawcett 1995). The Orwellian overtones of the state affirming civic stake through the sentiments of heritage and identity are well rehearsed (Díaz-Andreu and Champion 1996). Focusing solely on the politics of ethno-cultural entitlement to heritage such as citizenship based upon genetic inheritance (e.g., jure sanguinis in the Republic of Italy) can cause heritage to play an exclusive rather and inclusive role in the manifestation of civic co-presence and cooperation in the constitution of a state or community.

Rather than ownership, the language of trusteeship and stewardship should be preserved (Blaug et al. 2006). Heritage as civic cooperation and participation should be maintained as a forum for mediation, negotiation, and comprise over competing values in the spirit of equal civic partnerships (ICOMOS 2007:1). Perhaps what we are experiencing today is a convenient appropriation of heritage as an unquestionable ideology for the dictates of modern reactionary identity politics. Considering this, there is an opportunity for critical reflection on some of the fundamental conceptions of what heritage is.

33Heritage and Group Identity

The link between heritage and identity has been expressed psychoanalytically by Vamik Volkan (2001, 2003) as “transgenerational transmission.” Through the passing on of shared identifications with stories, objects, symbols, performances, and other aspects of heritage, one generation of a group can instill the values of the group’s identity in the subsequent members of a group. Younger members can then remediate and carry on the emotional responses through both positive and traumatic commemorations. For example, an “apology” issued by the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, (June 1, 1997) to Ireland for the “Great Famine” and the subsequent reactions in Irish society illustrated that such chosen narratives have residual potency in both Irish and British society as a result of transgenerational transmission (Holland 1997). In his statement, Blair noted:

[That] one million people should have died in what was then part of the richest, most powerful nation in the world is something that still causes pain as we reflect on it today. ... Those who governed in London at the time failed their people through standing by while a crop failure turned into a massive human tragedy. We must not forget such a dreadful event. It is also right that we should pay tribute to the ways in which the Irish people have triumphed in the face of this catastrophe. (Irish Times Reporter 1997)

The transgenerational transmission of the trauma of the “Great Famine” is today commemorated worldwide not only as an aspect of heritage in Ireland but as world heritage, with farm cottages from rural Co. Mayo being transported as far as New York City as monuments (New York State Education Department 2002).

The power of the transgenerational transmission of experiences is that it can provide a historical lineage for the declaration of authentic identities. A conflation between authentic heritage and authentic identity can be used to create a stake for those who profess a specific identity and steward a specific heritage within a social power structure. Heritage and identity are not, however, things that simply exist as resources for the cohesion of communities. Founding heritage on such a psychological process can serve to exclude other manifestations of heritage through spontaneous interpersonal creation or discover (e.g., archaeology).

Heritage and identity are not essences within any single person. They are manifested and performed through interpersonal relationships and behavior. They are phenomena that we actively and continually must choose to constitute (ICOMOS 2007:1). Their constitution is in the 34form of agencies, perceptions, conceptions, mediations, performances, and materializations. UNESCO classifies the phenomena of heritage into two types, tangible and intangible. Though there is a perceptual difference between the two categories (i.e., perception of permanence and tangibility), tangible things (i.e., buildings and sites) are only materialized as heritage through human agency, choice, and will (Russell 2006). Thus, the underlying quality of heritage is as a set of interpersonal relationships.

Considering the above argument, justifying either heritage or identity through the deployment of the other is a tautology. Both are mutually-enmeshed phenomena of human interpersonal and group psychological dynamics. Neither is a priori. It is through the shared willful act and choice of humans to participate in negotiation and mediation of shared self and group images and in compromising over competing valuations of roles and terms of encountering the world that the co-creation of both heritage and identity as phenomena can be constituted. To abbreviate, both heritage and identity are the constellation of sentiments within the becoming of modern groups.

Undercutting the Roots of Heritage and Identity: Trees, Rhizomes, and Mycelia

Heritage is traditionally understood as a linear exchange relationship between two parties where there is a passing on of the role of trustee. Although the growing global market of heritage has increased the complexity of this web of networked relationships, the core concept is of preservation and sustainability of lineages—paths upon which things are passed to future generations. Fixing identity as a main determiner of heritage authenticity and value is part of a modernist Western arborescent paradigm (Deleuze and Guattari 1980). The arborescent paradigm pictures knowledge in the structure of a tree, where there is linear growth and progress (e.g., time), binary relations (e.g., inside and outside), and dualistic modes of thought (e.g., self and other).

Picturing arborescent heritage, the roots ground the structure of the relationships in the matter, ideas and images of the past, and the structure grows upward into complex hierarchies of social relation deriving their inheritance from the roots. Hierarchies of both temporal age and social position allow for power dynamics and competitions over authenticity of agency. Although the rationale of pluralism might lead us to plant many different trees, this would only effect a proliferation of rationalized hierarchical systems of control, entitlement, and power that reify the Western linear temporal paradigm. Despite the pragmatic usefulness 35of linear and arborescent models for power hierarchies in governance, the recent theoretical pressure to move away from modern bifurcations of self and other (us/them) suggests that new models for understanding the sentiment of heritage should be considered.

An alternative to the arborescent model was described by Carl Jung and further developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1980)—the rhizome.

Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above the ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away—an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost the sense of something that lives and endures beneath the eternal flux. What we see is blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains (Jung 1962: Prologue).

In Jung’s metaphor, the rhizome (e.g., ginger root) is a capricious, undulating coalescence of existe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. Defining Heritage Values
• Part II. Applying Heritage Values
• Appendix
• Index
• About the Editors and Contributors