Heritage, Affect and Emotion

Politics, practices and infrastructures

Divya P. Tolia-Kelly, Emma Waterton, Steve Watson, Divya P. Tolia-Kelly, Emma Waterton, Steve Watson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781472454874
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317122371
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Heritage and its economies are driven by affective politics and consolidated through emotions such as pride, awe, joy and pain. In the humanities and social sciences, there is a widespread acknowledgement of the limits not only of language and subjectivity, but also of visuality and representation. Social scientists, particularly within cultural geography and cultural studies, have recently attempted to define and understand that which is more-than-representational, through the development of theories of affect, assemblage, post-humanism and actor network theory, to name a few. While there have been some recent attempts to draw these lines of thinking more forcefully into the field of heritage studies, this book focuses for the first time on relating heritage with the politics of affect. The volume argues that our engagements with heritage are almost entirely figured through the politics of affective registers such as pain, loss, joy, nostalgia, pleasure, belonging or anger. It brings together a number of contributions that collectively - and with critical acuity - question how researchers working in the field of heritage might begin to discover and describe affective experiences, especially those that are shaped and expressed in moments and spaces that can be, at times, intensely personal, intimately shared and ultimately social. It explores current theoretical advances that enable heritage to be affected, released from conventional understandings of both 'heritage-as-objects' and 'objects-as-representations' by opening it up to a range of new meanings, emergent and formed in moments of encounter. Whilst representational understandings of heritage are by no means made redundant through this agenda, they are destabilized and can thus be judged anew in light of these developments. Each chapter offers a novel and provocative contribution, provided by an interdisciplinary team of researchers who are thinking theoretically about affect through landscapes, practices of commemoration, visitor experience, site interpretation and other heritage work.

1 Making polysense of the world

Affect, memory, heritage

Joy Sather-Wagstaff

Attention to the lived and narrated experiences of heritage consumers, constructors, and producers is one means to critically re-think the powerful discursive authority of heritage practice. One thematic aspect to such an approach is a critique of academic devaluations of experiential, senses-inclusive meaning-making in the world over presumably purely cognitive forms of knowledge construction. Across disciplines, much of this critique has centered on what has become a sort of standard shorthand—a convenient gloss, if you will—for the experiential in all of its rich dimensions: embodiment. Any truly rigorous focus on embodiment requires unpacking the performative human body, even if only partially, in order to avoid reifying a universal or essentialist definition of embodiment. In this chapter, I propose a careful re/theorizing of the role of the sensory and performative body in knowledge construction and (re)production. In this process, I address the potential of sensoria-attentive research focused on narrated experiences, using an expanded conceptualization of discourse analysis that focuses on the senses for a critical heritage theory and practice. The contextual focus here is on bodies of work that critically interrogate the relationships between memory, memorywork, affect, emotion, subjectivities, and the material world in relation to ways of knowing that occur in the dialogical and slippery interface between the bodily and the cognitive.

Critical to understanding such relationships is a very brief discussion of affect as the potential to elicit intense embodied, physiological responses with very powerful effects. I do so in the context of evaluating and weaving together multiple threads of current and past work in cultural geography, anthropology, tourism studies, and other humanistic fields that attend to the performative, agentic, and sensing body, affect (even if only implicitly), emotion, and meaning-making in the world, work exemplified by scholars such as Denis Byrne, Mike Crang, Britta Timm Knudsen, Sharon Macdonald, Nadia Seremetakis, David Stoller, Divya Toila-Kelly, Emma Waterton, and Steve Watson, among others. I find this particular set of approaches to be exceptionally fruitful given that attention to affect is becoming a means to thinking through a number of challenges posed in heritage research. They also add a crucial element that allows us to go beyond the theory to application and further (re)theorizing: Ethnographic and participant-based methodologies that generate, in all their human messiness, knowledge about what people are actually experiencing. This is critical to unfolding the latent individual and social meanings of experiences as a form of embodied knowledge and cogent responses, even when not fully articulated, as well as the potential politics of affect through ambiguous and constantly shifting articulations and social effects.

Affective experiences translate into multiple effects, one being knowledge (and by extension memory and in some cases, heritage) and the other an excess residual that may never be fully categorized cognitively. As will be discussed, affect has been addressed in relationship to emotion and memory, particularly in terms of theorizing geographies of either emotion, feeling, or memory (see Crang and Tolia-Kelly, 2010; Crang and Travlou, 2001; Davidson et al., 2005; Picard and Robinson, 2012; Thien, 2005; Thrift, 2008). Yet the senses, as an element of affect-in-action, have rarely been explicitly discussed as part of the constellation of the interdependent sociocultural and biological phenomena that engender emotion and memory. It is the incorporation of the broadest array of the sociocultural and biological aspects of the sensory that I argue for here, particularly in terms of attention to the politics of affect and the senses and emotion as entangled in the processual construction of memory and knowledge, both of which are crucial elements to the dynamic construction and performance of heritage.

A strong case for the significance of the sensory and sensorial for theory and practice in critical heritage studies requires situating such in the context of current approaches to the body, senses, embodied performativity, and affect. Such approaches include those from anthropology, cultural history, and cultural geography, as well as studies that traverse traditional disciplinary boundaries including heritage, tourism, performance, museum, and memory studies. I then concentrate on that which is called “negative” or “difficult” heritage—the tangible and intangible results of war, genocide, terrorism, poverty, crime, and other human-made atrocities as represented in memorial museums and landscapes as heritage sites. I do so due to a public and scholarly propensity to sometimes criticize the consumption of such heritage as morbid, undesirable, inauthentic, or destructive rather than as part of the productive and dynamic social construction of heritage and knowledge, even if it is heritage built upon the darkest aspects of the human experience. A focus on difficult heritage also allows for a critical disruption in how we think about dark heritage sites, moving away from assuming that they have limited or predictable affective capacities and toward a perspective that considers the highly variable individual and social effects of visiting these sites over time and space. By utilizing an expanded conceptualization of critical discourse analysis that also considers forms of communication and meaning that are beyond the spoken, we may move toward an emergent understanding of the highly polysensorial, affective experiences these sites generate.

I aim to engender a multimodal, multidimensional approach to difficult heritage (or any sense of heritage) as processually formed, performed, and reformed through dialogic processes of affective, sensory stimuli and responses, cognitive sense-making, narratives, and reverie as memory performance, as well as other forms of bodily performance and interpretation over time and space. Such an understanding further complicates not only notions that heritage, knowledge, and memory are somehow contained in the built environment, objects, landscapes, or people, but also approaches to affective experiences as “beyond discourses.” The first step toward this understanding is to interrogate why attention to the body, embodied knowledge, and the senses is germane to any human experience-based discipline, and particularly so for those theorizing heritage from a critical standpoint. Over the past few decades there has been a highly significant turn in social sciences disciplines to the body as a vehicle for the construction of knowledge and the display and performance of a wide range of sociocultural phenomena. This turn is grounded in a deeper historical interest in the body and the bodily, but takes a much more expansive and reflexive approach to the bodily as a part of making sense of our worlds. Briefly unpacking this turn and its underpinnings shall initiate discussion of the value of attention to an expanded theorization of human sensorium as polysensory and intrinsic to analyzing the role of embodied experiences for knowledge and heritage construction.

The senses unbound: toward a polysensory model

Given that interest in the body and the senses also has a history as deep as that of humanity itself, a truly comprehensive overview is impossible to present here. Such an overview may be found collectively in the rich ethnographic and historical works of Classen (1993, 2012), Classen et al. (1994), Howes (2005, 2008), Kwint (1999), Landsberg (2004), Lock (1993), and Stoller (1989, 1997). However, a very brief outline of some of the key contours of the study of the bodily in cultural contexts over part of the past century as they influence work in the present is necessary to contextualize the proposition for a polysensory approach to heritage. A key starting point comes from anthropology, where cultural attention to the body has a deep, shifting, and sometimes contentious history. As Howes notes, Douglas’s Purity and Danger (1966) evidenced the establishment of an anthropology of the body, albeit one that was “curiously desensualized” (2008, p. 443), focusing on the body and bodily strictly in terms of symbolic meanings rather than through the senses as bodily experienced. Part of this desensualization stems from historically deeper notions regarding social hierarchies of knowledge and power where conceptualizations of doing and being in the world derived in part from highly racialized cultural evolutionist paradigms of the late nineteenth century (see Howes, 2008; Lock, 1993). In such a paradigm, emotions (and most things bodily or sensuous) were marked as “primitive” while cognitive “knowledge proper” and “rationality” were associated with “civilization,” a position that still underpins various popular and scholarly conceptions of what constitutes human knowledge. In the nineteenth century, the individual senses were even organized into a racialized hierarchy, with “civilized” Europeans associated with vision and “primitive” Africans with the body, specifically touch (Howes, 2008, p. 444).

Avoiding analysis of the sensual in favor of a focus on the symbolic (rather than sensory) dimensions of the bodily was thus a means for anthropologists to distance themselves from such theories without a significant critique of such. This also accounts for the fact that, as Lock notes, the “body’s explicit appearance has been sporadic throughout the history of the discipline [of anthropology]” (1993, p. 134). However, in the 1980s and 90s, Seremetakis (1994) and Stoller (1989, 1997) established a foundation for a highly sensuous anthropological scholarship that embraces the cultural and corporeal lushness of the senses. Their work engendered critical attention to the everyday importance of performed and interpreted sensory worlds, the processes through which this occurs, and the broader tangible and intangible social effects of the sensory in the world. These works also stimulated interest in how the critical interrogation of local epistemologies of the senses reveals different interpretive classifications as well as types and hierarchies of the senses, allowing for productive critiques of what Tolia-Kelly identifies as a “Westnocentric” sensory repertoire (2006, p. 214). How many senses one is believed to have and how they are interpreted (that is, identified and translated into emotion or other types of embodied performative responses) should indeed be understood to depend upon the cosmology of the cultural systems to which one belongs, despite the biological universality of the sensory system as a foundational aspect of human physiology. From the late 1970s through the 1990s, corporeal and linguistic turns in several disciplines generated attention to the body and embodied performance as a form of meaning-making, influencing work on topics including material culture past and present, human geographies, media, heritage, learning, and expressive culture such as dance and music.

In heritage and museum studies in particular, a turn toward critically thinking about the embodied performance occurred at least partially in response to perspectives in the literature that considered visitors to facilities to be “passive, uncritical consumers of ‘heritage’” (Bagnall, 2003, p. 87). Attention to embodiment and performance currently also centers frequently on how engaging with heritage is very often a physical effort, requiring both “an effort of organization and a full-body presence” (Macdonald, 2013, p. 234). In contrast to works that focus solely on the representational analysis of heritage on display, much of the key literature addresses heritage experiences as a two-way street—visitors perform physical consumption, cognitive production, and emotional labor both on-site and beyond in response to the performative representations of museums and heritage sites themselves (see Bagnall, 2003; Bærenholdt et al., 2004; Crouch, 2010, 2012; Dicks, 2003; Jackson and Kidd, 2011; Smith, 2006; Staiff et al., 2013). Despite a significant focus on the performative and embodied in heritage studies and beyond, the body does continue to be somewhat desensualized, with senses frequently mentioned but not always the central factor in analyses. Several exceptions exist, including, most notably, powerful work on the senses, heritage, subjectivity, and emotion by Crang and Tolia-Kelly (2010), Bryne (2009, 2013), Knudsen and Waade (2010), and Macdonald (2013). Macdonald (2013, p. 79), for example, accords critical attention to “feeling the past” through “embodiment and emplacement, materiality and affect,” whereby

… specific and embodied constellations of affect accompany some forms of past presencing … [some of which] are harder to characterize—the mix of melancholy and pleasure in touching, and being touched by, the indentations on an old chest of drawers or spade handle left by years or use; or the sense of being pulled into wistful recollection by the scent of hyacinths or the notes of a street piano.

Macdonald notes that a key issue with the analysis of embodiment and materiality, particularly in getting at the effects of affect and feeling, is that in the current “affective turn,” the body becomes the privileged vehicle for creating “authentic” knowledge and this “has the effect of separating ‘the felt’ from the linguistically expressed,” thus dismissing discourse (2013, p. 81). Yet, as Waterton and Watson ask, “what happens to our bodies” that changes us through processes of experiences “within spaces of heritage, whether they are physical, discursive or affective” (2013, p. 551–2, emphases added)? I, like Macdonald (2013), argue that we must bring discourse and the sensing body together into both analyses and “theories in, of and for heritage” (Waterton and Watson, 2013, p. 547, emphasis in original), considering multiple performative, discursive forms beyond that of just oral narratives as linguistic expressions. Imagining ways of doing this aims to meet, in part, Waterson and Watson’s challenge to heritage studies to take an “approach that pays due respect to—and draws from—a number of disciplinary sources of theory” without generating complete stand-alone theories and which attends to the “range and purpose of various theoretical interventions in order to apply them usefully in appropriate contexts” (2013, p. 547). However, this first requires more specific discussion on what constitutes the sensorium and its relationship to affect and meaning-making in the world.

That the lived sensorium is sometimes overlooked as specific or primary information for the analysis of heritage experiences may also reflect a reluctance to engage in approaches that could be construed or interpreted as biologically deterministic. However, if we take embodied performance to mean physical (re)actions in space and time, humans are always engaged in embodied activity at biological levels and, during our waking hours, involved in such through a complex interface of the sociocultural and the biological. As an example from the human sensorium, we might examine this through the multiple senses and associated systems supporting one of our most basic biological needs, food: the preparation and presentation of food engenders sensory acts of “making it right” in terms of physical technique in space¹ as well as aromas and visual appeal which trigger various autonomic, predigestive responses. One prepares food and eats for biological sustenance but also as a way of facilitating, making sense of, and reinforcing social relations. Acts of food preparation and consumption are wrapped up in a biosocial constellation that may involve all five of the basic physical senses, from taste and smell to touch, vision, and hearing. And through the sensorium, foodways, as synesthetic and kinesthetic heritage, also provoke various affective modes of sociocultural identification (including memory and remembering) with communities of belonging in the present as connected through individual and collective knowledge and memories of temporally and/or spatially distant communities of the past.

Given this complex nature of the sensorium in practice, I utilize the term “polysensory” rather than “multisensory.” While it is normative to employ prefixes for words from the same language of origin, the employment of a non-isomorphic prefix does occur as a means to expand or disrupt normative, long-standing definitions for a term. An example of this is the term “polyvocal” (a Greek-derived prefix modifying a Latin-derived root word) as used in semiotics to understand (if not encourage) ambiguity and slippage in meaning-making through the use of multiple, sometimes overlapping or intertextual narratives. This contrasts with a standard, normative understanding of “multivocal” as simply describing multiple narratives or voices. As such, a polysensory theory and approach requires that we incorporate a more fluid and dynamic consideration of the slippage between and complexity within bodily stimuli and responses (intersensorality) along with the diverse interpretive schemas for such.² It also allows for thinking about the elusive registers of the affective and a constellation of meaning-making processes rather than clearly delineated, discrete clusters of fully identifiable, universal end-point or “final” knowledge. A polysensory approach also encompasses imagined (versus actually experienced) sensory stimuli or responses as well as acknowledges the power that acts of oral or written narration have for invoking sensory responses; the performance of language itself joins this expanded repertoire of sensory stimuli. The term “polysensory” itself also captures the essence of the sensorium as a highly complex, culturally mediated, and thus varied, biologically grounded (but not biologically determined) processual meaning-making phenomenon.³

The sensorium incorporates a much wider array of stimuli and responses than the five most recognized senses of hearing, smell, taste, touch, and vision. It includes the kinesthetic, from proprioception—an awareness of the orientation or positioning of the body and body parts in space, including that of one’s posture, muscle activity, limb positioning, or facial expressions—to other forms of body movement through or in space, such as walking or gesture. Equilibrium, pain, temperature awareness, various responses of the skin (such as blushing), and an array of internally based stimuli and responses, some of which are categorized biologically as the sympathetic parts of the autonomic nervous system related to fight-or-f...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Heritage, Affect and Emotion
• 1 Making polysense of the world Affect, memory, heritage
• Part I Memories
• Part II Places
• Part III Practices
• Index