Heritage and Identity

Engagement and Demission in the Contemporary World

Marta Anico, Elsa Peralta, Marta Anico, Elsa Peralta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415453356
• eBook ISBN: 9781134053377
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Heritage and Identity explores the complex ways in which heritage actively contributes to the construction and representation of identities in contemporary societies, providing a comprehensive account of the diverse conceptions of heritage and identity across different continents and cultures.

This collection of thought-provoking articles from experts in the field captures the richness and diversity of the interlinked themes of heritage and identity. Heritage is more than a simple legacy from the past, and incorporates all elements, past and present, that have the ability to represent particular identities in the public sphere.

The editors introduce and discuss a wide range of interconnected topics, including multiculturalism and globalization, local and regional identity, urban heritage, difficult memories, conceptions of history, ethnic representations, repatriation, ownership, controversy, contestation, and ethics and social responsibility.

The volume places empirical data within a theoretical and analytical framework and presents an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the representation of the past, invaluable for anyone interested in heritage and museum studies.

Part I
Place and identity

1
What role can digital heritage play in the re-imagining of national identities?: England and its icons

Rhiannon Mason and Zelda Baveystock

So let me be equally blunt in my challenge to the heritage sector: if you are not part of the solution to this crisis of Britishness, you are part of the problem.

(Lammy 2005)

Heritage is not an artifact or site. It is a process that uses objects and sites as vehicles for the transmission of ideas in order to satisfy various contemporary needs. It is a medium of communication, a means of transmission of ideas and values and a knowledge that includes the material, the intangible and the virtual. Heritage is a product of the present yet drawing upon an assumed imaginary past and an equally assumed imaginary future.

(Ashworth 2007: 2)

‘Heritage’ is increasingly invoked in Britain by politicians and policy-makers as one means of repositioning British national identity to foster social cohesion. The first quotation, for example, is drawn from a speech in 2005 by David Lammy, MP, who was at that time Minister for Culture in the British Government’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). The speech, entitled ‘Where now for Britain's shared heritage?’, was delivered in an event hosted by the Heritage Lottery Fund at the British Museum. This chapter will explore how heritage is being defined within such contexts, and being deployed as a resource for reframing relationships between identities and nations. We will discuss both ‘Britain’ and ‘England’ in recognition of their continual conflation and interdependence. The study will also explore Ashworth’s argument that heritage can be understood as a ‘medium of communication’ which draws upon not only the material and intangible but also the virtual ‘in order to satisfy various contemporary needs’ (2007: 2).

This study is premised on the idea that ‘national heritage’ is enlisted as part of the process of ‘governmentality’ and the first section examines this in the current British context. The second section outlines recent research findings which suggest changes in perceptions of national identities in Britain and the relevance of this for heritage. The final section considers the ‘ICONS of England’ online project and what it reveals about the way that governmental discourses intersect with the wider heritage sector and populist discourses.

By examining a selection of so-called icons of Englishness from the site, we argue that this example of contemporary digital heritage illustrates some of the conflicting responses invoked by the process of defining Englishness and how these definitions continually refer back to ideas of Britishness. The process of redefining Englishness is, we argue, an essential step in the diversification of public notions of national heritage and of collective identity. This process is as important as the inclusion of previously marginalized groups and identities into the ‘national historical narrative’. We conclude that this website offers an alternative forum in which the central suppositions underpinning England’s and Britain’s national heritage can be problematized and unpicked. At the same time, we identify certain problems relating to the medium and its ability to generate an effective dialogue about national heritage.

Before looking at the case study, it is useful to revisit some pertinent themes in recent literature. Heritage can be defined in numerous ways (Graham and Howard 2008). At its simplest, it ‘can be defined as properties and artifacts of cultural importance handed down from the past’ (United Kingdom’s DCMS website). At its broadest, Lord Charteris of Amisfield, as Chair of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, stated that ‘heritage is anything you want’ (quoted in Hewison 1987: 32). Laurajane Smith has argued that ‘there is, really, no such thing as heritage’ (2006: 11). Smith’s point is that nothing is inherently ‘heritage’; ‘there is rather a hegemonic discourse about heritage, which acts to constitute the way we think, talk and write about heritage’ (2006: 11). As Smith argues, the process of identifying, recognizing and managing heritage is always political, partial and contested. Ashworth and Graham use the term ‘dissonant heritage’ to refer ‘to the discordance of lack of agreement and consistency as to the meaning of heritage’ (2005: 5).

Heritage is dissonant because it is always held in tension between the competing pull of the universal and the particular, the collective and the individual (Ashworth and Graham 2005). While much attention focuses on the official and institutional aspect of heritage, its personal appeal is equally powerful. Bella Dicks attributes the popularity of what she terms ‘vernacular heritage’ to its personal dimension and its ability to enable individuals to situate their sense of identity and past within a collective memory. Heritage ‘provides a means of appreciating the intersection between individual biographies and wider social and cultural changes’ (2003: 126). Dicks sees this as symptomatic of a broader shift towards the ‘diffusion of an identity-centered relationship with the past’ (2003: 125). This understanding of heritage as a process and a mechanism for negotiating change is shared by Smith (2006: 308).

Although interest in heritage can be seen as a reaction to change, gaining acceptance of alternative definitions of heritage is often contested. This is especially so where they conflict with what Smith calls the ‘authorized heritage discourse’: the official and publicly sanctioned – hegemonic – discourses of heritage. Like Smith, Stuart Hall has long drawn attention to the operation of hegemony in relation to what he terms ‘The Heritage’ particularly around the lack of representation of race and empire in Britain’s ‘national story’ (2005).

National heritage, in this sense, is part of what Bennett has termed the ‘public cultural and historical sphere’ (quoted in Karp et al. 2006: 9). As part of the public cultural and historical sphere, national heritage is enlisted as part of the process not just of government but of ‘governmentality’. Hall describes this as ‘how the state indirectly and at a distance induces and solicits appropriate attitudes and forms of conduct from its citizens’ (2005: 24). It is in this sense that we can read Ashworth and Graham’s observation that ‘heritage is simultaneously knowledge, a cultural product and a political resource’ (2005: 8).

Although national heritage can be seen as both constituted and enlisted by processes of governmentality, like the idea of ‘the nation’, it is equally ‘flagged’ and materialized through ‘banal’ everyday, unofficial practices, customs, and habits (Billig 1995; Palmer 1998). For example, it is notable that people’s use of the English flag at sporting events has increased in recent years alongside calls for the official promotion of St George’s day as a day of national celebration. The point here is that heritage is constructed at an individual, personal and everyday level and is as much to do with immediate social groups and family context as with larger national frameworks and public, institutional practices. Indeed, Ashworth and Graham caution against overstating the hegemonic dominance of ‘official heritage’ particularly in relation to ideas of identity and sense of place. They argue that ‘the peoples, the identities, the images and the purposes are just all too plural to be reduced simplistically in this way’ (2005: 4).

National heritage in the British context

Many of these issues can be seen in debates about Britain’s and England’s national heritage and identity particularly in recent years. The creation since 1999 of separate, semi-autonomous, devolved political bodies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland has brought about many changes in the areas of politics, media, education and health, and the cultural and heritage sectors in the various countries of the United Kingdom (Mason 2007). In particular, it has problematized the position of England in the United Kingdom’s parliamentary system and is testing the bonds of the Union especially in relation to the independence movement in Scotland. In 2007, Gordon Brown, a Scottish MP, became Prime Minister and head of the UK Government in Westminster. The year 2007 also marked the three hundredth anniversary of the Act of Union which joined the Kingdoms of Scotland and England into the United Kingdom of Great Britain.

Brown is a strong advocate of the Union and has given many speeches promoting the concept of Britishness and outlining what he sees to be British values. He has defined these as ‘British tolerance, the British belief in liberty and the British sense of fair play’ (speech at the Commonwealth Club, 27 February 2007) and ‘hard work, doing your duty and always trying to do the right thing’ (Labour Party Conference, 24 September 2007). In January 2006, Brown proposed the idea of a national British day to mark ‘shared common values’ and to be ‘a celebration of who we are and what we stand for’ (speech at the Fabian Society Conference, 14 January 2006).

National identity is also currently high on the political agenda because of concerns over domestic security and social cohesion, particularly following the bombings by home-grown terrorists in London in July 2005 and the attack on Glasgow airport in 2007. Although recent events have heightened concerns, multiculturalism has been a topical issue for some time; for example, since riots broke out in 2001 in the northern English towns of Oldham, Burnley and Bradford. In September 2005, the chair of the Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, triggered public debate by claiming that Britain was ‘sleepwalking our way to segregation’ (Phillips 2005). Phillips argued that policy had overemphasized differences between ethnic groups at the expense of their commonalities, although this is disputed by others (Modood 2005). Debates have been further underscored by changing patterns of immigration to Britain since the expansion of the EU membership in 2004 and 2007 to include 12 additional nations, principally in Eastern Europe (Vertovec 2006).

Shifting loyalties

A raft of studies by policy bodies and think-tanks suggest that Britishness generally may be in decline or in transition, with growing differentiation between people’s sense of national identity in the United Kingdom’s constituent nations and amongst different ethnic groups (ETHNOS 2005; NatCen 2007; Stone and Muir 2007). The reports suggest a growing identification with Englishness and Stone and Muir warned that this was frequently defined in a narrow, ethnic way rather than a more civic, inclusive fashion, albeit identification varied according to class, generation and educational background. A report on diversity and citizenship in relation to the English school curriculum found much confusion and negativity surrounding ideas of British and English national identity and heritage; it identified this as a central barrier to the promotion of diversity and citizenship (DfES 2007: 30).

Stone and Muir’s report further argued that there had been an increase in people’s sense of identification at the most local level – their locality or town (56 per cent) – as opposed to the national (25 per cent) across all generations (2007: 13). It reported a shift towards defining Britishness in terms of values such as free speech, justice and tolerance and less with state public figures and traditional institutions, with the exception of the BBC and the National Health Service.

This discursive shift correlates with Brown’s attempt to redefine and promote Britishness as a set of values. Despite this, the overall findings suggest that those wishing to reinvigorate public enthusiasm for Britishness ‘will have to reverse a current trend and that their endeavors will not be equally well received in different parts of the UK’ (Stone and Muir 2007: 10). A study into constitutional change and identity, which examined attitudes held by Scottish and English people living in Scotland, concurred that ‘[t]here remains substantial evidence that British nationals, let alone newcomers, do not have much shared understanding of the term’ (Bechhofer et al. 2006).

Most of these reports focused on Britishness but all inevitably discussed Englishness because national identity can only be understood relationally. This is particularly acute in the case of England because the distinction between Britishness and Englishness is less clearly articulated than with Scottishness or Welshness and Britishness. By contrast, some historians have cautioned against overstating this apparent ‘identity-crisis’ by pointing to a long precedent of complex and multiple identities within Britain’s constituent nations (Kenny et al. 2008). Notwithstanding this, the evidence above suggests a convergence of factors which is currently intensifying public and political concern about national identity and national heritage in the United Kingdom.

National heritage and social cohesion

Against this backdrop, David Lammy’s challenge to the heritage sector that ‘if you are not part of the solution to this crisis of Britishness, you are part of the problem’ assumes its full resonance (2005). During his time as Minister for Culture (2005–2007), Lammy spoke widely about Britishness, empire, race, slavery, black and minority heritage and social cohesion. His speeches often draw on his own experiences as British-born, growing up in Tottenham, London, with parents who were 1950s’ migrants from the former British colony of Guyana. He also speaks about his experiences of talking to different ethnic groups within Britain about their own sense of heritage and is explicit about the link between heritage and national identity.

Heritage comes from the same root as inheritance. It's about what we want to pass on to future generations. Our responsibility for heritage extends not just to the preservation of ancient bricks and mortar but to the custodianship of a legacy of ideas about Britain and Britishness.

(Lammy 2005)

While Lammy brings a particularly personal note to the subject, previous holders of this post have been equally quick to promote Britain’s diversity (Smith 1998). Indeed, concerns over multiculturalism and national heritage precede the current debates by at least three decades (Littler and Naidoo 2005: 15). From the 1990s, in particular, a number of reports have increased awareness of structural differences between the perceptions and experiences of Britain’s heritage held by different groups of visitors and non-visitors along lines of race and ethnicity (Desai and Thomas 1998). The results are too numerous to cover here but it is fair to say that there have been many initiatives which have addressed cultural diversity in the UK museum context, prompting organizations, particularly those with public funding, to review their collections, exhibitions, marketing, audiences, recruitment and workforce training.

This activity has produced commendable results. However, much of the activity around diversity and heritage so far has been about diversifying the national story by attempting to include those previously marginalized. While evidently a necessary step, if the core is left unchallenged, the centre/periphery hierarchy remains intact. Stuart Hall, for example, has argued that

the majority, mainstream versions of the Heritage should revise their own self-conceptions and rewrite the margins into the center, the outside into the inside. This is not so much a matter of representing ‘us’ as of representing more adequately the degree to which ‘their’ history entails and has always implicated ‘us’ across the centuries, and vice versa…. The first task, then, is re-defining the nation, reimagining ‘Britishness’ or ‘Englishness’ itself in a more profoundly inclusive manner.

(Hall 2005: 31)

Re-imagining ‘England’s heritage’ online: Displaying dissonance

Recognition of the need to profile these debates publicly has motivated some largescale projects. One of these is the ICONS of England website (www.icons.org.uk), on which members of the public can nominate, comment on and vote for items perceived to be symbolic of England’s national heritage. Given its participatory nature and its attempt to question mainstream ideas of Englishness, it represents a particularly apt way to examine competing discourses surrounding national heritage. It also illustrates the continual slippage between Britishness and Englishness even on...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I Place and identity
• PART II Remembering and forgetting
• PART III Domination and contestation