The Representation of the Past

Museums and Heritage in the Post-Modern World

Kevin Walsh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134896660
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Museum Administration
• Index: Business

The 1980s and early 1990s have seen a marked increase in public interest in our historic environment. The museum and heritage industry has expanded as the past is exploited for commercial profit. In The Representation of the Past, Kevin Walsh examines this international trend and questions the packaging of history which serves only to distance people from their own heritage. A superficial, unquestioning portrayal of the past, he feels, separates us from an understanding of our cultural and political present. Here, Walsh suggests a number of ways in which the museum can fulfill its potential - by facilitating our comprehension of cultural identity.

1

The idea of modernity

Modernity: a brief definition

Jurgen Habermas has defined modernity as, ‘The epochal new beginning that marked the modern world’s break with the world of the Christian Middle Ages and antiquity [that] is repeated, as it were, in every present moment that brings forth something new. The present perpetuates the break with the past in the form of a continual renewal’ (Habermas 1989:48).

Modernity has its origins in the Renaissance, and the emergence of modern science—the discovery of ‘truths’ and ‘facts’, or rather claims for the possibility of objective truths about the world and ‘Man’s’ place within it. The ‘meta narratives’ which emerged during the modern epoch were essentially discourses which implied a rigid objectivism, and through this, the potential of a thorough analysis of the world. Such meta narratives might include Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and Marx’s analysis of capital. Modernism can thus be considered as a set of discourses concerned with the possibilities of representing reality and defining eternal truths.

The idea of progress

An essential proposition of modern thought is an idea of progress, a belief which developed as a constituent part of Enlightenment thinking, and provided modern thinkers with a faith in the ability of humankind to manipulate and exploit their environments for the benefit of society. Such a society could escape from the debilitating elements of the past, and could move ever forward to new horizons. If modernity has a particular essence, it is a belief in rational advancement through increments of perpetual improvement.

Enlightenment thinking provided the foundations of modernity, and must be seen within the contexts of European voyages of discovery and the Renaissance, and the establishment of world-wide trading, and Imperial, networks. These developments along with the foundation of new nation-states within Europe, notably Italy and Germany, can be seen as important elements in the foundation of modernity.

A fundamental of Enlightenment thinking was a conception of a society which was advancing, a society that potentially knew no bounds, a society that could overcome any of the problems that it was either forced to confront, or confronted out of choice. Progression through the exploitation of the environment, combined with a faith in humankind’s dominant position in the scheme of things, must be central to any appreciation of modernity. ‘Since the beginning of the modern era the prospect of a limitless advance of science and technology, accompanied at each step by moral and political improvement, has exercised considerable hold over Western thought’ (McCarthy 1984:v).

The belief in progress was in part based on Newtonian physics, as was the Enlightenment’s concept of time. A belief in growth provided a secure model for progress in all aspects of knowledge. To a certain extent it was this shift from the mythical/superstitious frameworks of the pre-Enlightenment period, to the rationalized lifeworld of modernity, which was to be symbolized by the museum displays of the nineteenth century. Such displays doubtless contributed to the idea of progress which helped develop an ‘horizon of expectation’:

The horizon open to the future, which is determined by expectations in the present, guides our access to the past. Inasmuch as we appropriate past experiences with an orientation to the future, the authentic present is preserved as the locus of continuing tradition and of innovation at once; the one is not possible without the other, and both merge into the objectivity proper to a context of effective history.

(Habermas 1987b:13)

The idea of progress influenced many areas of thought, including the understanding of language. ‘Speech and writing were considered to have improved during the past, and conscious attempts were made to foster further linguistic advance in the future. The progress of language seemed to have special significance because of its intimate relation to positive intellectual and social change’ (Spadafora 1990:12–13).

Pessimistic views of history began to disappear during the 1730s, and hardly existed come the latter half of the eighteenth century. Certainly in Britain, the idea of progress in history was fundamental to the way people thought about the past and was undeniably more important than the previously pessimistic outlooks.

By the turn of the century it would seem that the idea of progress was widely accepted amongst the educated classes of the First World. Whether progress was apparent to other societies, whose suffering seemed to be an essential element of industrialization, is doubtful.

During the eighteenth century, the Christian vision of history developed, with an emphasis on the correlation of past events with scriptural predictions: ‘the eschatologists of high eighteenth century Britain gave the Biblical prophetic programme a concrete chronological order and made it amenable to their historical understanding’ (ibid.:131). In contemporary Christian thought the idea of progress was inextricably part of a wider optimism in the divine program for spiritual advancement.

The wider conceptions of history tended to articulate frameworks which were essentially concerned to promote the idea of progress, or during the later nineteenth century, a form of progressive evolutionism. James Mill’s History of British India (1817) saw societal development as moving through stages ‘from primitiveness toward a high level of civilisation (as determined by contemporary Europe)’. India was deemed to be near the lowest stage of development (Spadafora 1990:397). Such an understanding of the world gave justification to the idea of the ‘white man’s burden’: the duty of the European to colonize and educate those who were perceived as being less fortunate. It was such a belief in progress, and the rationality of the European economic and political system, which gave rise to the myth of the struggling savages’ [sic] subsistence economy (Sahlins 1974:1–39).

The height of the popularity of the idea of progress was probably during the mid-Georgian period, rather than the mid-Victorian period (Spadafora 1990:387). But despite this, there is no doubt that for many Victorians, the nineteenth century was a period of great advances in both the arts and sciences, although many began to realize that progress in industrialization and urbanization was not progress for all. Despite this, it is undoubtedly true that, ‘Rarely has a single idea played so central a part in an intellectual world. To begin to understand that world requires that we recognize the significance of the idea of progress within it’ (ibid.: 415).

The idea of progress is an idea which has underpinned the teleological nature of many representations of the past, an ordering of the past which came about through a new conception of time and history, both of which can now be considered.

Time in modernity

Time is a culturally specific construction, although years and months are based on natural cyclic periods. The week is in fact a purely cultural unit of time, as are hours, minutes and seconds. Despite this, humans often seem to consider time as a universal or absolute phenomenon. Time, as it is widely understood in the First World today, has its roots in the Enlightenment. This idea of time is undeniably linked with the idea of progress and is crucial to any understanding of the modern world and any disciplines which adopt an historical perspective.

It is probably the Judaeo-Christian concept of time which has had the greatest influence on the modern understanding of time. This Jewish concept of time was based on the ‘linear concept of time, founded, in their case, on a teleological idea of history as the gradual revelation of God’s purpose’ (Whitrow 1988:51). Christians saw the crucifixion as a unique event, and it is this emphasis on the non-repeatability of events which is crucial to explaining the western idea of linear and non-cyclical history (ibid.:57).

Roman culture also emphasized an idea of linear history, attributing the success of the Roman Empire not to one person in the present, but to many ancestors during Rome’s past. As Whitrow illustrates, Tacitus often cited documents and authors and developed a critical form of history. He recognized the historian’s role as a judge of previous human actions. But as Marwick comments, ‘For the Greek and Roman writers history was unabashedly “exemplar history”, a preparation for life, especially political and military life’ (Marwick 1989:29).

During the Middle Ages there seems to have been little concern with a fastidious observation of time. According to Whitrow, people rarely even bothered to date their letters (Whitrow 1988:84). It was with the advent of accurate timekeeping during the latter half of the seventeenth century that the modern experience of time developed. The idea of time as an entity in itself emerged, a belief that there was in fact a definable context of time. Newton’s concept of mathematical time, as outlined in his Principia, understood it as a straight geometrical line. Newton went on to develop a concern with chronology, which, during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, was symptomatic of a wider concern with the authenticity of the Bible and its chronology (ibid.:131).

For much of the later Medieval period, time was considered to be a destructive force. ‘The typical Renaissance image of time was as the destroyer equipped with hour-glass, scythe or sickle’ (ibid.:132). However, during the Renaissance an awareness of change through time developed, and a more optimistic perception of time and its effects emerged.

By the eighteenth century, for many people an appreciation or new awareness of time had developed. This was a period of ‘discovery’ of historical perspective. In 1795 Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind was published. In this ‘Condorcet expressed his belief in the inevitability of human progress and in the power of science and technology to transform man’s knowledge and control over himself and society’ (ibid.:147).

During the nineteenth century a more scientifically coherent justification of linear time emerged. The unidirectional nature of time was legitimated by Becquerel’s discovery of radioactivity in 1896. Subsequently explained by Rutherford and Soddy in 1902, the decay of radioactive elements was shown to be uniform and linear.

The idea of progress and history

As discussed above, central to modernity was a belief in progress, but often this was a progress achieved through destruction, often a destruction of lifestyles that had not really altered since the early Middle Ages, or even the late third and second millennia BC. The Industrial Revolution was responsible for the uprooting and disturbance of large sectors of the population. It was partly as a result of this newly imposed rootlessness that an enchantment with the past emerged during the nineteenth century.
Despite the fact that the Victorian period was dominated by industrial and scientific progress, it ‘was also an age dominated by a fascination with the past’ (Bowler 1989:1). Of course, it is understood that societies prior to those of the nineteenth century had an interest in the past, but these interests were quite different from the histories and archaeologies which had their roots in the Enlightenment, and developed into the foundations of the modern disciplines of the twentieth century.

It can be argued that pre-industrial society’s awareness of the past was an experience which was entirely more organic than that understanding of the past which was to develop in the modern urban world. In the rural, or pre-industrial context, there seems to have been an appreciation of the processes which had, and still did, affected daily life. The past was something which was present in the construction of the sense of place. This may be considered as a more organic form of history, one which recognizes the crucial contingency of past processes on present places. Places, natural and human-made features, acted as ‘time-marks’, physical phenomena which exist in the present but possess, for those who know them, a temporal depth which gives them a special meaning. An important form of such a time-mark is the boundary, the perceived periphery of a community’s locality. These may range from boundaries made of stone in prehistory, to parish boundaries, and enclosed fields.

In this book, it is considered that a sense of place is an attachment to, or knowledge of, one’s locality, an understanding or appreciation of the processes which have affected a place, both through time and space. Such a sense of place is not based on a narrow parochialism or chauvinism, but rather an understanding of how other places and people have affected one’s place throughout history. This idea of a sense of place will be considered at length in chapter seven.

The experiences of industrialization and urbanization destroyed for many people this organic, or contingent, past. The sense of the past developed by the new urban mass was one that had to be created, in the same way as their places had to be created. The experiences of modernization wrenched a vast proportion of the population from settled, well-established lifestyles, where the past had been a part of their daily experience. ‘The Victorians’ fascination with the past was the product of an age obsessed with change, desperately hoping that history itself might supply the reassurance that could no longer be derived from ancient beliefs’ (ibid.:3). The move from the rooted place, to an ephemeral, transitory urban experience, resulted in a conception of the past which was dominated by change—progress towards the ever more modern world. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, there does seem to have been a developing awareness of the importance of the past, but this importance was increasingly neutered by the developing perception of the past as something which was separate and had a limited contingency for modern societies. This point will be expanded later in the book.

Also, the idea that such a past was essentially a tale of progress towards the modern was rarely ever questioned by the majority of people. As Dellheim argues in his discussion of the Victorian appropriation of images of the Middle Ages,

Liberal England’s middle-class politicians and businessmen appropriated medieval forms to create pedigrees for their values and to legitimize their quest for hegemony. Although their concern with historic paraphernalia superficially reinforced the authority of traditional symbols, actually it diminished the prescriptive force of the past by reinterpreting its meanings in the light of progressive aspirations.

(Dellheim 1982:179)

The Victorians tended to believe that social development was a movement in a purposeful, positive direction—a progression towards a meaningfully constituted society. It was this understanding of the nature of progress which saw its clearest articulation in Whig history:
the belief in inevitable trends, based on freedom of thought and commercial enterprise. ‘Evolution was the sum total of a vast multitude of individual progressive acts, allowing middle-class values to be seen as the driving force of an essentially purposeful system of nature’ (Bowler 1989:8).

This idea of progress was reflected in the work of Adam Smith, whose Wealth of Nations (1776) articulated the belief that, despite the fact that people are inherently selfish, their efforts for self-improvement would benefit society as a whole. If uninhibited by ‘unnatural’ controls, then the economy and society will develop naturally, and in a trend that will be in the interest of everybody. Contrary to Darwin’s emphasis on the uniqueness and haphazard nature of all evolutionary developments, it would appear that there was a profound belief in the inevitability of progress as the basis to Victorian evolutionism.

It is this model of progress that contributed to early ideas on societal development in prehistory. This kind of linear interpretation clearly lent itself to static display in museums, although it was probably not until just after World War I that such ideas were represented explicitly in museum d...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. The Idea of Modernity
• 2. Post-Modern Societies I
• 3. Post-Modern Societies II
• 4. Conserving a Past
• 5. Simulating the Past
• 6. Heritage Reconsidered
• 7. A Sense of Place
• 8. The Museum As a Facilitator
• 9. Conclusion: The Remoteness of the Past
• Bibliography