Heritage, Memory and the Politics of Identity

New Perspectives on the Cultural Landscape

Yvonne Whelan, Niamh Moore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754640080
• eBook ISBN: 9781317122258
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

The study of the cultural landscape has gained momentum in recent years, revealing new insights to geographers, archaeologists, sociologists and architects. The cultural landscape is often viewed as an emblematic site and thus a key player in the heritage process. This book explores the overlapping and often complex relationships between identity, memory, heritage and the cultural landscape. It provides an overview of new approaches in the study of these relationships, combined with evidence from Ireland, England, Scotland and the United States. These case studies demonstrate the significance of the past in the contemporary construction of identity narratives and draw attention to the powerful role of monuments and parades as sites of cultural heritage. The focus then shifts to the way in which heritage has become politicized for various ends, demonstrating the changing perception of particular heritage sites and buildings, and the role that this has played in constructing and reconstructing particular identities.

PART I
Landscape, Memory and Identity

Chapter 1

Landscape and Memory: Historiography, Theory, Methodology

Tadhg O’Keeffe

Introduction

The achievement of the so-called ‘cultural turn’ more than twenty years ago was to finally secure as orthodoxy the view that the study of society is not objective, ideologically-neutral, value-free, or apolitical, either within or without a scientific method. Liberated by this breakthrough, students of social things and social relationships no longer needed to argue that they were, or are, situated inside rather than outside their field of research, or that society is a construct of humanity rather than a phenomenon of nature, or even that scholarship’s intellectual produce is simultaneously and fundamentally social produced. This transformation encouraged many scholars – geographers, anthropologists, archaeologists – outside the narrowly defined and traditionally vocational field of ‘social science’ to identify a role for themselves in shaping contemporary social agendas, even if there is an argument that no praxis connecting the theory-driven view of the social world to the ‘real’ world of peoples’ experiences and problems was ever developed (Sayer, 2000).

The principal affect of culturalism in the wide humanistic field, shared by the authors in this book, has arguably been a new, albeit often implicit, engagement with the issue of consciousness, as mediated through such counter-Enlightenment – as distinct from post-Enlightenment – projects as phenomenology and hermeneutics (White, 1999). Nowhere is this clearer than in the latest conceptualization of landscape, and its increasingly popular coupling with identity.

The development of a landscape-identity nexus can be followed historio-graphically. Until the mid-1980s most scholars within the humanities had been happy to treat landscape as a naturally-produced canvas – the metaphor is deliberate – to be primed and painted over by people but to which people are, in a fundamental sense, external. Landscape, in this view, is primordial. It does not require human inhabitation, cognition, or representation to exist. It can be altered by human agency, but it is not, of itself, socially-produced space in any Lefebvrian sense. Thus, most published landscape histories of the decades before the 1980s prefaced their discussions of the cultural features of landscape with descriptions of the natural environment. Braudel’s Mediterranean (1949), while technically not a landscape history, is a classic example from the Annaliste tradition (and indeed one of the first books in which this approach was adopted). Common to all such studies is the identification of a natural, ecologically diverse, landscape on which human activity is inscribed; some of the studies, like Braudel’s, attribute or at least imply a strong deterministic role to the primordial landscape.

Although this view of landscape as possessing both natural and cultural layers, with the former being the more deeply-rooted, still informs a lot of landscape-historical research, Marxist-oriented or Marxist-derived work from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s offered an alternative perspective (see Daniels, 1989). Landscape was identified as inherently social-cultural in its production, its cartographic reproduction, and its use, and power was identified as its operating system. It could be argued, though, that by enfolding landscapes into the conspiracies of false consciousness by which élite power is maintained – landscape is implicated in relations of power through its ownership, control and manipulation by social élites – these Marxian readings effectively maintained landscape’s externalizing of non-élites, and reduced non-élites’ engagements with landscape to acts of compliance (such as the flower-strewn park in front of Kensington Palace after Princess Diana’s death in 1997) or resistance (such as the anti-capitalist graffiti that one might find on a public monument during a G8 summit).

Now, however, many of us have bought into the counter-Marxian, and to a large degree constructivist understanding of ‘landscape’ that took root during the 1990s (Mahoney, 2004). The critical change is that, whereas the Marxian view of landscape-as-power tended to externalize (and victimize?) non-élites, among whom we number ourselves, we now see ourselves and others as situated inside landscapes, forming and reforming them. On a simple level, the funeral vista and graffitied wall can now be understood not as landscape-situated responses (of compliance, of resistance) to authority that is articulated in the landscape, but as acts of landscape-construction and so of identity-formation in their own right. More abstractly, we claim landscapes to be ‘spaces’ or ‘places’, or both simultaneously, that exist reflexively in our cognitive as well as our corporeal experiences of the material world, shaping and being shaped by our simultaneously multiple identities as humans. Landscape, then, is now characterized implicitly as a product of mindscape, to borrow a word from Zerubavel (1997). Its connection with the realms of the cognitive and mnemonic, and so with the general issue of consciousness (including ‘non-consciousness’, in the sense of Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’), is therefore inalienable. So too is its democratic value: everybody knows, possesses and partakes in ‘landscape’. Here it intersects with Raphael Samuel’s ‘resurrectionism’, a model of history that embraces the popular and vernacular, the feminine and domestic, and is ‘inconceivably more democratic than the earlier [models]’ (Samuel, 1994, 160).

History and the Politics of Collective Memory

The relationship of history to memory has long been a central issue in epistemological debates within the historical sciences. Without getting bogged down in its historiography, there is at the heart of the debate the sort of confusion about terminology and meaning that is often generated when topics from one discipline are dragged across the boundaries of another. The view of the relationship to which I subscribe is that history, which is narratological, is always about memory, the first implication being that memory is larger, or something more, than history, and the second being that history cannot ever claim to be any more than one line, or one cluster of lines, bringing the past into the present.

The definition of history raises a range of issues, and one hesitates to allow the academic discipline of History complete custody of what the term constitutes, but we can probably agree, first, that a document-form record or testimony that we customarily describe today as historical is an artefact that contains something which its author wished to be remembered for some duration, however brief, and secondly, that historians reconstruct pasts by sculpting idealised collective (after Halbwachs, 1950) or, better still, collected (after Young, 1993) memories out of such raw ‘historical’ material. ‘Historical memory’ can be regarded, therefore, as that of which we are reminded, as distinct from that which we remember, and ‘historical consciousness’ can be regarded as alluding to that part of the mindscape that chooses history, or rather historicity, as the model for ordering the world of past experience. To my mind, then, collected memory is always historical (or narratological) and is always the product of some programme of being-reminded. However, and at whatever scale a collective is constituted, we have no collective capacity to share memories that are not in some way externally programmed for us.

For example, I, like so many others, have memories of the visit of Pope John Paul II to Ireland in 1979 and the day-long mass in Dublin’s Phoenix Park. On the one hand, I have memories that are intensely personal since they relate to my sensual (mild claustrophobia) and emotional (teenage melancholy!) experiences of the time. To properly visit those memories now, sitting in my study in Dublin, would actually involve great mental energy. Empathetic remembering demands that one ‘switches off’ (or, to use computer language, ‘quits other applications’) in order to create the appropriate memory space. So, I could reconnect to some extent with those sensual and emotional experiences right now, but I would need to disconnect from what I am doing – writing this paper, listening to music but also hearing the background silence should it be broken by the baby crying – in order to concentrate on doing so. On the other hand, I have other memories of that day in the park that owe more to the mediation of the event (through television, for example, see Bourdon, 2003) than to my personal experience of it. Those memories are visual-factual rather than sensual-emotional. I could recount them here and now and still be able to listen to music in the background. These are the memories of mine that I regard as commonly possessed, as elements of a collected memory. In fact, they are not really memories of the event but memories of its mediation. I do not actually remember a congregation of more than one million people because I saw no more than several thousand, so my memory of the vast gathering of people is a memory of its image.

I argue, using this simple personal example, that collected memory is a product of external programming, and that – borrowing words used by Gerald Vizenor (1998) in a different though not-unrelated context – it represents a triumph of ‘simulation’ over ‘trace’. Before developing that point here with respect to landscape, I suggest that there is a moral imperative to accept this proposition about collected memory: the opposite concept, which is of an intuitive collective memory, is dangerously essentialist, since it burdens the individual with a store of memory over which he or she has no control, and potentially ensnares the individual in a web of collective responsibility.

Landscape is obviously a touchstone for remembering both the visual-factual and the sensual-emotional. This function is not a by-product of landscape but is integral to its definition. While the new landscape culturalism emphasizes our experiential and empathetic engagements with the world, and suggests a study of landscape mynomony that acknowledges the importance of sound and smell, most scholars continue to privilege vision over other senses. The study of landscape and memory often devolves, therefore, into a study of tangible, visual, aides de mémoire within landscapes. This is certainly the case with respect to western capitalist societies, where its origin can be traced back to the Renaissance ‘theatre of memory’ and further back into classical times (Yates, 1978). The implication that the capacity to ‘read’ ancestral memory and locate identity in the non-monumentalized landscapes is the preserve of indigenous non-western peoples (as documented by Morphy, 1995 and Santos-Granero, 1998, for example) is a troubling one.

Lieux de Mémoire

A number of scholars have mapped the ways in which personal memories have been reshaped into collective memories by forms of political intervention in western capitalist landscapes, particularly through ‘official’ acts and objects of commemoration (White, 1999; Shackel, 2001). Among the most interesting explorations are those marshalled by Annaliste scholar Pierre Nora in the multi-volume study of lieux de mémoire in France (Nora 1997, 1998, 2001). Placing memory at the centre of the French psyche, he contends inter alia that the cohesion of ‘France’ as both an object and a locus of national identity is preserved in a range of memorial forms devised especially by state institutions and encountered as places of memory in people’s individual daily and public rituals. Nora laments what he sees as a decline of a national, collective, identity-forming, memory in the age of globalization, just as Hough (1990), operating at regional rather than national scales, sees market forces and technologization as agents that homogenize the landscapes of places that were otherwise unique, thus depriving them of their special character (see also Zukin, 1991). Nora even attributes its ‘demolition’ to the ‘terrorism of historicized memory’ as promoted by the academic discipline of History (Nora, 1989, 14).

Nora draws our attention to the importance of rupture in the generation of collected memory, the point being that moments of social stress or fracture ignite desires to collect memories that can be shared. Fritzsche (2004) has shown how, for example, in places like New England, the rupturing effect of nineteenth-century ‘progress’ generated a nostalgic, melancholic, yearning for a forgotten past that, in turn, generated conscious strategies of memorializing, not least within the domestic landscape of the household, itself a place of collectivity. Nora himself attributed changes in the collective mnemonic to the cataclysmic ruptures of war. He saw the French Revolution as a critical moment in the crystallizing of a French national memory embracing France’s medieval past, and saw twentieth-century world wars, especially the second, as critical to that shift from memory to history that he laments. It could be argued, though, that the great wars significantly enlarged the field of collected memory, generating new rituals of public commemoration on the one hand (Figure 1.1) and, as Samuel has argued, a new tradition of regarding the bric-a-brac of everyday, vernacular, contemporary culture as heritage on the other (Samuel, 1994).

Figure 1.1 Remembering War at the Cenotaph, Belfast, November 2004

Source: Tadhg O’Keeffe

The combining of rupture, as discussed by Nora, and vernacularization, as discussed by Samuel, to reassert national identity finds a dramatic exemplification in two elements of the story of the World Trade Centre after its violent destruction on September 11, 2001. First, those everyday, vernacular objects, such as briefcases, that were retrieved from the naked, smouldering core of downtown Manhattan acquired from their context of rupture a magnitude of meaning as heritage objects that would have been quite unimaginable in other circumstances. They were asked, in the very title of the Smithsonian Institute exhibition in which they found a home, to ‘bear witness to history’. Second, as modernist works, the World Trade Centre towers had denied historicity during their lifetimes – they celebrated the materials of their present (glass and steel) and insisted that their aesthetic was their structural honesty, and they presented a Miesian environment of unadorned structural transparency to an industry (bond trading/non-retail banking) that only deals with the present and the future. But as ruins they acquired historicity, partly by virtue of being ruins, since ruins imply ‘history’, and partly by recalling those French Gothic buildings that, in their own medieval age, represented modernity. So now, having once possessed a modernism that refused to incorporate memory, the towers find themselves the objects of a memory cult.

Pierre Nora’s multi-volume project was fundamentally political: if the bonding agents of French national identity are ever stripped away by some conspiratorial alliance of History, as Nora understands it, and globalization, the volumes will fill the space that is left, becoming a rallying point for a reinvigorated national cultural consciousness. Lieux de mémoire will thus become a lieu de mémoire in its own right. I suggest that there is an interesting parallel here with The Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape (Aalen et al, 1997), a work very...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Maps and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Part I Landscape, Memory and Identity
• Part II The Politics of Heritage and the Cultural Landscape
• Index