Re-imagining Heritage Interpretation

Enchanting the Past-Future

Russell Staiff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317068679
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Museum Studies

This book challenges traditional approaches to heritage interpretation and offers an alternative theoretical architecture to the current research and practice. Russell Staiff suggests that the dialogue between visitors and heritage places has been too focused on learning outcomes, and so heritage interpretation has become dominated by psychology and educational theory, and over-reliant on outdated thinking. Using his background as an art historian and experience teaching heritage and tourism courses, Russell Staiff weaves personal observation with theory in an engaging and lively way. He recognizes that the 'digital revolution' has changed forever the way that people interact with their environment and that a new approach is needed.

Chapter 1
Anecdotes and observations

Past/Present

For some time I have been wrestling with the question of whether or not the advent of digital media and the rapid and continual developments in digital technologies was fundamentally changing not only how heritage interpretation was being created and delivered, but also whether or not digital media was changing heritage interpretation itself (Kalay, Kvan and Affleck 2008). This was one of the more pressing starting points for the book.

It soon became apparent, however, that any question about digital media quickly opened out to include a number of other issues that were also pertinent to the way heritage sites presented and communicated themselves to their publics and the way these publics engaged and interacted with ‘heritage’. Consequently, a key question about digital media and heritage interpretation encompasses a series of related issues: the heritage experience itself and its relationship to the tourism experience; the history of heritage interpretation; the role of representation in interpretation; the role of fiction in all its guises; the way heritage interpretation is knitted into visual cultures; the predominance and power of narrative; the problems associated with cross-cultural translation; and finally the social and cultural practices associated with digital media. The more I researched the original question, the more complexity was made manifest.

One of the problems I encountered, very early in these investigations, was the increasingly standardized definition of heritage interpretation operating in the Anglophonic world and now, with the 2008 ICOMOS Charter for the Interpretation and Presentation of Cultural Heritage Sites, penetrating the non-English speaking world. It is fair to say that before the 1980s there were a variety of understandings about the interaction between visitors and heritage sites, places, landscapes, museums and objects all shaped by a number of disciplines. In art museums stylistic analysis (loosely the composition, colour, texture, materials and techniques of art) and iconography (loosely the study of the subject matter and the meaning of art works) dominated how paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings, mosaics and so on were interpreted to the public. My own disciplinary background resides in the world of the visual arts and any gallery guiding I did never strayed too far from the discipline of art history even as it was undergoing changes wrought by the debates now clustered under the term ‘postmodernism’. A colleague in classical studies and archaeology and another in history regarded the material culture of the past as more a stage for historical narratives. House museums and history museums did much the same thing. Historical method, a clumsy term for a great variety of approaches for researching and (re)presenting the past, was inevitably the frame within which objects, places and landscapes were described by historians (see, for example, the way material places are integrated into three recent, but very different histories, by Clendinnen’s 2003 story of the encounters between the English and the Eora people in Sydney Cove in the late eighteenth century CE; Gere’s 2006 study of Agamemenon’s tomb and Starkey’s 2010 history of the English monarchy). The Palazzo Medici in Florence was used by my colleague to tell the story of the Medici clan, its economic and political power, its patronage, the neighbourhood networks within which it operated and individual biographies of family members. In the sphere of natural heritage, ecology was the frame and as ecotourism began to make its mark into the late 1980s, messages about environmental futures were the hallmark of the interpretation. In other words, there was a huge variety of approaches and understandings of interpretation operating across a vast and diverse field of objects, places, landscapes and museums.

Increasingly, during the 1980s, disciplinary approaches to interpreting tangible heritage couched in disciplinary traditions, thinking and methodology (art history, history, architecture, ecology and environmental science, science and technology, ethnography, geography, musicology and so on) began to give way to similarities rather than differences. International conferences addressing heritage interpretation appeared and in the Anglophonic cultural sphere the Second International Conference on Heritage Interpretation held in the UK in September 1988 stands out because of the two volumes of papers, edited by David Uzzell, that appeared soon after (Uzzell 1989). National interpretation associations were founded – for example, the UK Association for Heritage Interpretation, the US National Association of Interpretation and the Interpretation Association of Australia – and, via the conference circuit and the important work of these associations, heritage interpreters began conversing across disciplines and across heritage fields so that museum curators and educators were talking with ecotourism interpreters and guides and national park staff and so forth. While this is a shorthand description of what was actually happening in those years, it serves to indicate the move towards a shared terrain. What could be common to a visit and the interpretation offered to a tourist visiting the Great Barrier Reef off the eastern coast of Australia or a visit to Pompeii in Italy or a visit to the Metropolitan Art Museum in New York or a visit to Warwick Castle in the UK or the British Museum in London or the Forbidden Palace in Beijing or the rock art sites of the Ukhahlamba-Drakensberg Mountains in South Africa or the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC or historical cities like Siena in Italy or the Taj Mahal in India or the Tuoi Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh? To speak across disciplines – and across cultural contexts – the common denominator at heritage interpretation conferences and within national interpretation associations was communication and education.

While Freeman Tilden’s 1957 book Interpreting Our Heritage was well known within natural heritage circles in North America and increasingly in other national parks’ services, the book became a pivotal influence when it was used to define interpretation across disciplines and across hugely different cultural and natural heritage sites. Because education was a key characteristic of Tilden’s description of heritage interpretation, education was reinforced as the central characteristic of the interaction between visitors and heritage sites/places where interpretation activities were offered. And education was underscored by urgency: the perceived environmental crisis enveloping the developed world. Thus, through the 1980s and 1990s, the definitions of heritage interpretation became increasingly systematized. Many of these definitions bear the imprint of Tilden and most regard interpretation as an educational activity (see, for example, Beck and Cable 1998; the Wikipedia entry for heritage interpretation; and the definitions offered on the websites of the Association of Heritage Interpretation and the Interpretation Association of Australia).

However, Tilden wasn’t the only influence operating in the emergence of a consensus discourse about heritage interpretation. The public museum sector had, since the nineteenth century, regarded knowledge formation as central to its mission of collecting, documenting, conserving and presenting material culture (Hooper-Greenhill 1992; Schubert 2009). More recently, museums have increasingly identified with education and learning (Hein 1998; Falk and Dierking 2000; Hooper-Greenhill 2007). Consequently, when personnel across different heritage sectors began to interact with each other in the 1980s and beyond, Tilden’s ideas happily co-existed with the educational role of the museum. Today, the distinctions between natural and cultural heritage(s) and tangible and intangible heritage(s) have blurred (Smith 2006) and furthered the momentum towards a heritage interpretation consensus discourse.

While the disciplinary frameworks for explaining heritage sites and places were overly restrictive, and were often about protecting disciplinary knowledge and power, the education definitions ‘threw the baby out with the bathwater’ by relegating disciplinary knowledge to a more marginal position. Today, in heritage interpretation the ‘experts’ are the educators, communicators and designers, not necessarily the specialist curators or the archaeologists or the historians or the architects or the conservators. In saying so, I’m not harbouring a complaint about the move away from disciplinary knowledges, but the now pervasive education paradigm in heritage interpretation is stifling and restrictive in its own way. Although, having said this, the disciplinary basis of heritage interpretation has in fact not altogether gone away, but has simply shifted its centre of gravity. No longer is it ethnography or history or ecology or archaeology or architecture or art history or science and technology that dominates the form of interpretation, it is now psychology and the critical questions relating to informal learning, visitor motivations and attitudes, effective communication, behavioural change and assessing communication techniques. Naturally, I’m not suggesting these things are unimportant, they clearly are and the recent history of heritage interpretation cannot be ignored. Rather, I’m suggesting the emergence of a heritage interpretation orthodoxy has reached a type of limit that, in effect, has been exposed by firstly, digital media and digital technologies and, secondly, advances in thinking about the heritage/tourist experience. It is now possible, I would contend, to think about heritage interpretation differently (cf. Ablett and Dyer 2010).

Anecdotes: rethinking heritage interpretation

Over the past two years I have been collecting anecdotes for this book. Originally, I perceived them as small examples and case studies to be quoted throughout the text, but now I regard them collectively as an assemblage of narratives that provide a cogent and compelling case for why rethinking heritage interpretation is necessary. The anecdotes are presented, in the first instance, with little commentary. Each of them is suggestive and each of them illuminates something of the complexity of the interaction between people and heritage places and objects or, in a less binary tone, the embodied engagement of places, objects, monuments and landscapes.

I

I remember sitting on the edge of a high peak in Doi Inthanon National Park in northern Thailand. It was much cooler than I had expected but as I looked across the ridges of mountain peaks blue and misty, the crispness in the air was refreshing after the much warmer streets of Chiang Mai whence I’d travelled. I was lost in two worlds. One was visual: a world where the clear pale watery sky of early morning mingled with the mountain-cradled mists across vast distances both upwards and outwards from my vantage point. This boundless envelope of air and remote terrains completely dwarfed me. The other world was aural. The volume of my iPod had been turned up and I was listening to the second movement of Beethoven’s Emperor piano concerto, the achingly beautiful and poignant conversation between the lilting sounds of the piano and the opulent and velvety orchestral accompaniment. The fused visual and aural experience was exalting: all affect and no language; deeply sensorial and without thought.

It was here that I had a type of epiphany. That moment of mountains, vaporous sky and the elegiac sounds of the piano and orchestra was more powerful and more aesthetically arresting than all the information that I had passed by on my morning climb to one of the mountain peaks. I had passed through an information centre with maps and pictures and diagrams that explained the ecology of the park and the lifestyle of the Hills-tribe people who lived there. I had passed by signs that explained, in Thai and English, features of the terrain and the flora and fauna of the mountains. I had carried a guidebook that told me that this was where the great Himalayan mountain range finally petered out and the place of my reverie was the tallest peak in Thailand. My epiphany was thus: in an age of relentless information overload, what mattered was not the considerable interpretation (that just seemed like ‘more information’), but what I felt, the ‘purity’ of the moment. It was the feeling of exaltation that I had sought and, now in this memory, I recall with affection.

II

The day was far from pleasant, grey and windswept with a chill coming off the harbour. It was a relief to finally skip up the wet steps of the Art Gallery of New South Wales and find shelter. I’d promised my nephew, aged 16 and a Swiss citizen, to take him on a quick tour of modern Australian art beginning with Grace Cossington Smith’s The Sock Knitter (1915). We were discussing the late arrival of modernism in Australia and, more generally, the influence of Paris on the early moderns in Europe. I knew Smith had been in England just before the outbreak of World War I, but I couldn’t recall whether she’d travelled to Paris.

Suddenly, my nephew pulled out his iPhone and plunged into Wikipedia and within moments he had discovered she had not, apparently, gone to Paris on that particular trip. Using the Wikipedia entry external link, he found the National Gallery of Australia’s website devoted to the Grace Cossington Smith retrospective mounted in 2005. One hundred and thirty-five of her sketches and paintings were available for viewing as both thumbnails and larger details and so there we stood comparing these with The Sock Knitter. I moved us on to some of her other works on display that day. My nephew was particularly taken with her painting The Curve of the Bridge (1928-1929) depicting Sydney Harbour Bridge during construction. We compared the Art Gallery of NSW picture with the more famous The Bridge in-curve (1930) from the National Gallery of Victoria collection displayed on his iPhone screen. Still on the NGA website, he found an essay by Deborah Hart, the curator of the exhibition, and read out aloud a couple of passages.

After our tour we retired to the café for a pot of tea. While I was reading an art magazine I had picked up, my nephew was busy typing away on his iPhone keyboard. And what was he doing? Writing a story on Facebook about the construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and oblivious to all copyright rules, and thanks to Google Images, had pasted a picture of Grace Cossington Smith’s The Bridge in–curve into his story alongside his own photos of the bridge. On that cold wintry Sydney day, Web 2.0 caught me with a jolt. That which was somewhat extraordinary for me was simply matter-of-fact for my young companion.

III

I was trying to walk along Thanon Mahathat heading towards Thommasat University on my way to the National Museum in Bangkok. Thankfully, I wasn’t in a hurry. The crowds were pressing in on me from every side, all of us jostling to make a way forward but crammed onto the footpath by the road traffic moving along slowly, accompanied always by its incessant noise and the belching of heat and exhaust fumes into the already humid monsoonal air. It was hot, maybe 34° centigrade. But the moist heat was not overly daunting. Despite the traffic smells and the discomfort of the crowd, I was seduced by the sensorial journey along the road: by the intoxicating aromas of food being cooked and displayed; by the endless stalls selling drinks, statues of the Buddha, amulets, vegetables, pharmaceuticals, dentures, shoes, books, stationery, pirated CDs and DVDs, newspapers, glasses frames, umbrellas, jewellery and so on. The chaos of this footpath ‘supermarket’ and its slow-moving crowds with the cacophony of sounds and the exquisite and not so exquisite odours, had a living intensity that was addictive. I loved this vibrant street with its shop-house terraces on one side and the Buddhist University on the other; with the mingling of locals and students from three major universities, including orange-robed monk students; with the glimpses of the Chao Phraya River beyond the small sois, or lanes, that run down to Bangkok’s major waterway.

On this particular day, I stopped at a small shop-front restaurant that specialized in food from the Isan region of northeast Thailand. I squatted on a four-legged stool and ordered om gai and sticky rice. Om gai is a heavily herbed and spicy chicken soup that is thick with spring onions, lemongrass, chilli and dill weed. It’s one of my many favourites. The tangy flavours of the soup – the rush of chilli heat on my tongue and in my throat – perfectly matched the mood of the street.

Not long after my light meal, I arrived at the National Museum. The contrast with Thanon Mahathat couldn’t have been greater. The grounds of the museum were relatively quiet despite the traffic on the busy road outside the gates. On this day there were few people around. The ticket seller appeared barely awake. After lodging my backpack with an attendant, also dozing, I stepped into the history pavilion of the museum. I was immediately surrounded by dioramas and cases of objects as I traversed a familiar narrative: a history of Thailand chronologically arranged and presented via the twin loci of the four successive capital cities of the Thai-speaking peoples and the monarchs who ruled over these cities and their kingdoms.

After the intensity of my walk along Thanon Mahathat the inanimate presentation of Thai history and culture seemed perverse, as though all the vibrancy had been leached out. The static dioramas seemed particularly lifeless. The objects, although quite beautiful, were nevertheless mute. The stillness of the pavilion’s atmosphere, so carefully choreographed for the visitor, was somnambulistic. Something vital was missing. As I read the text panels and looked at the many displays, I wished, somehow, to be back in the chaotic world of Thanon Mahathat.

Some days later, I took the riverboat to Tha Tien and then ambled along, heading towards another museum. After the shock of the pungent smell of dried fish in the small market beyond the ferry landing, I turned into Thanon Mahathat, the very same road l had walked along to the National Museum, but this section, some distance away, ran behind Wat Pho. I dallied at the shops selling herbal medicines and bulk grains. I especially liked the assorted array of rice types, the wild black varieties and the familiar commercial varieties. The grocery shops were particularly special as I had little idea about most of the wares ‘hidden’ under shapes, textures and colours that lacked familiarity and ‘hidden’ under labels in Thai script or Chinese characters, neither of which I could read. As I approached the River Books bookshop I forced myself to delay a visit and instead headed through the back entrance to what was once the Commerce Department Building, a carefully restored ‘colonial’ building with its long, deep and open verandas on each of the front-facing levels. This was the home of the new Siam Discovery Museum opened in 2008.

I was greeted by a young PhD student who was investigating the impact of new media on museums and heritage presentations in Thailand. I bought my ticket and we were almost immediately ushered into an auditorium with intriguingly curved screens. The lights were dimmed and an evocative and all-embracing soundtrack, that seemed to be both Thai and Western at the same time, surrounded us as the first images brought the space alive. The narrative of the presentation, across the multiple screens, introduced us to seven characters, each one having both a contemporary persona and an historical persona. The film narrative dissolved the distinctions between past and present and we were provided with a visual feast of Thai landscapes contemporary and historical blended with dialogue that gently and indirectly asked us to reflect on the questions of what it is to be Thai and what is ‘Thai-ness’?

The film over, we began the one-way journey through the many rooms of the museum. Each room was aesthetically different, so the impression was of entering a series of quite distinct atmospheres with its own distinguishing colour scheme, its own distinguishing architecture and design features, varying lighting states and strikingly contrasting soundscapes. The moods ranged from the inquisitive (archaeological remains, ancient ritual practices and the problem of an ancient death) to the suggestive (the historical landscapes of Siam) to the meditative (Buddhism in Thailand) to the playful (modernity and pop culture in Thailand). This was not as alive an experience as walking down Thanon Mahathat, but it was equally memorable. And perhaps the reason could be found in the crescendo of visual and aural effects created in each room. Interspersed throughout thematically designed galleries, were screens that, once activated, played short films involving one of the characters we had met in the introductory presentation. These film narratives were produced using every ‘trick’ of contemporary cinema – detailed sets, designs and costumes within panoramic landscapes, a narrative arc, immediately engaging characters, clever and often humorous dialogue and fervid soundtracks. We were effortlessly transported into the cinematic world being created and within the space of five minutes, felt as though we had indeed travelled in time back to some earlier place in Thailand’s past.

As we stepped out into the sultry monsoonal atmosphere of Bangkok, the clouds threatening rain, I left the Siam Discovery Museum thinking of the title of Andrea Witcomb’s book Re-imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum (2003). Was this the type of museum space she had in mind? And so, separated by just a few days I had been to the National Museum (object dense, interpretation dense, serious-minded and ideologically positioned) and the Siam Discovery Museum (object light, interpretation rich in a highly orchestrated and intensely evocative multi-media environment that made for a memorable experience). The National Museum looked and felt like a ‘traditional museum’. The Siam Discovery Museum looked and felt like a close cousin of ‘new media’.

IV

In a class on material culture, I showed my students pictures of the present day archaeological site of Mycenae in the Peloponnese (southern Greece). I told them two stories and also provided some online notes on the history and archaeology of the ancient city, inscribed onto the World Heritage list in 1...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dediction
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue: the known, the unknown and other ruminations
• 1 Anecdotes and observations
• 2 Tilden: beyond resurrection
• 3 The somatic and the aesthetic: embodied heritage experiences
• 4 Visual cultures: imagining and knowing through looking
• 5 Narratives and narrativity: the story is the thing
• 6 Digital media and social networking
• 7 Conversing across cultures
• 8 Enchantment, wonder and other raptures: imaginings outside didacticism
• References
• Index