Heritage as Community Research

Legacies of Co-production

Graham, Helen, Vergunst, Jo, Helen Graham, Jo Vergunst

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781447345299
• eBook ISBN: 9781447345329
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Heritage as Community Research explores the nature of contemporary heritage research involving university and community partners. Putting forward a new view of heritage as a process of research and involvement with the past, undertaken with or by the communities for whom it is relevant, the book uses a diverse range of case studies, with many chapters co-written between academics and community partners. Through this extensive work, the Editors show that the process of research itself can be an empowering force by which communities stake a claim in the places they live.

Part One: Ways of knowing

We are using ‘ways of knowing’ to link the first five chapters of this book. By this, we want to indicate that when heritage is framed as a form of community research, it is produced through plural and interacting modes of understanding and making sense of the past in the present. The phrase ‘ways of knowing’ offers a nod to debates in anthropology and participatory and action research, which have drawn attention to knowing as an expansive and ongoing process that might rely as much on feelings, intuition, social interaction and communication as on formal research methods. In these chapters, this more expansive – or ‘extended’ (Heron and Reason, 2001) – epistemology is very much in evidence.

In our first chapter, Jo Vergunst, Elizabeth Curtis, Neil Curtis, Jeff Oliver and Colin Shepherd explore how collaborative archaeological research draws on ‘ecologies of skill’ that ‘bring together landscapes, materials, people and their social interactions’. From this, the notion of an ‘archaeological imagination’ is developed, in which ‘more voices are heard and more people become skilled at working within their own landscapes’. The research is spatially and temporally situated in ways that open up future possibilities for environmental change.

Also concerned with how different ways of knowing – in this case, of singers, musicians and anthropologists – John Ball, Tony Bowring, Fay Hield and Kate Pahl, in Chapter Two, enact the improvisatory mode of their music-making in written form. Through a staging of a sequence reminiscent of both an improvisatory music session and an action research cycle, they explore how the process of ‘do–think–say–write–do’ led, over time, to drawing their differences into a shared framing for making sense of their collaboration and its implication for the transmission of musical heritage.

Chapter Three offers an emphasis on contesting popular representations, with Jodie Matthews drawing attention to the dangerous and damaging stereotypes of the Romani community in the media and on social media. Matthews explores how archives and sharing personal experience offer resources for pluralising and challenging these restricted modes of representation.

Reflecting on their involvement as academics in projects that create digital resources for community heritage groups, Nick Higgett and Jenny Wilkinson, in Chapter Four, show the significance of different expectations, time frames and perceptions to the collaborative process. In an honest exploration of these differences, they recognise that miscommunications can mean less satisfaction with a project and recommend greater conversation as projects begin to establish shared understandings.

In Chapter Five, Helen Smith and Mark Hope explore how a community arts organisation working together on the histories of lavender farming produced a series of social and metaphorical resources for working the organisation’s future into being. As much to do with memory and the senses (the smell of the lavender) and the act of cutting and nurturing the lavender, the work gave the group an embodied shared reference point to the conceptual legacy of the research project.

All of these chapters are concerned with the forms of knowing that emerge when lots of different people from different perspectives actively take part. A common theme here is of an epistemology that is situated in many different collaborative activities: of archaeology, of improvisation, of social media, of making digital reconstructions and of lavender cutting. In these chapters ‘knowing’ contains the active participation not only of people, but also of things – whether of plants, smells, instruments, digital objects, soil, trees, charts and displays – indicating the epistemic significance of a more-than-human participation in community heritage as research, in the ‘ecology of skill’ evoked by Vergunst et al in the first of these chapters.

The chapters in this section also develop another dimension. Through the process of research – and from seeking to know the past and places together – new social relations and new metaphoric resources emerge. In making room for many ways of knowing and in seeking to know and to understand the past socially and in the spirit of inquiry, something akin to a prefigurement of a future-to-come is worked into being.

Reference

Heron, J. and Reason, P. (2001) ‘The practice of co-operative inquiry: research with rather than on people’, in P. Reason and H. Bradbury (eds) Handbook of action research: Participative inquiry and practice, London: Sage, pp 179–88.

ONE

Shaping heritage in the landscape among communities past and present

Jo Vergunst, Elizabeth Curtis, Neil Curtis, Jeff Oliver and Colin Shepherd

Introduction

Can community-based archaeology achieve different outcomes from more traditional academic approaches? In this chapter, we explore how ways of knowing the past can alter significantly when the landscape is encountered through collaborative means. This not only provides a contrast to how archaeology is usually practised in university and professional settings, but also enables us to study relationships with landscape that span the past, present and future. If one of the preoccupations of mainstream archaeology is the regular chronological ordering of human activity from the past towards the present, working through a collaborative methodology opens onto how time and landscape can be understood in different ways.

Research co-design and co-production undermines assumptions that the past is a stable and static entity that can be uncovered and read off layer by layer (Simonetti, 2013). By drawing inspiration from phenomenological perspectives on landscape, we explore how notions of time develop from practical and discursive involvement with landscape. These forms of activity can become mediums through which senses of the past, present and future emerge; in this way of thinking, ‘time duration is measured in terms of human embodied experience of place and movement, of memory and expectation’ (Bender, 2002: S103). We would add that plants, animals, seasonality and other non-human components of landscape also create senses of time. As ways of life in the landscape continue, so time itself unfolds, not simply according to a calendrical or ‘clock’ chronology, but also by way of the qualities of being past, present and future, and of duration and change. This holds true for the ways of practising archaeology as much as for the landscapes of the past being described. Field research on ‘heritage’ can serve to provoke notions of temporality beyond standard associations with the past and beyond the imposition of a sense of time onto the landscape. By these means, collaboratively exploring the past of a landscape is also an emergence of its present and future.

Our argument builds on ideas and practices of community and public archaeology. Dalglish (2013: 2) writes that community archaeology:

is evident in the many projects which have community participation as a primary aim and in the new funding streams which support such projects … it has become possible to see such involvement as a particular way – not the only way – of doing archaeology.

While we broadly celebrate the involvement of the public in archaeology and other heritage research, others have drawn attention to the somewhat limited successes that can result from such work. Simpson and Williams (2008: 80) note that although standard archaeological excavations are often ‘the draw’ for the public, there may then be ‘a lack of participation in subsequent non-excavation activities’. The same might also be said for preparatory work such as surveying and test pitting, which is often hidden from public view or involvement but vital for setting the scale and scope of the research. More broadly, the task ‘of really empowering the community in relation to its heritage’ is much more difficult than merely providing the ‘expected deliverables’ of site visitor numbers, a greater level of engagement with the archaeological process and so on (Neal and Roskams, 2013: 151).

Moving practices of heritage away from the authorised heritage discourse (Smith, 2006) of professional or official interpretations that are passively received by non-experts is what is at stake here. For Abu-Khafajah et al (2015: 194), writing in the post-colonial context of Jordan, a significant liberation from such received truths is at stake: ‘This liberation is essential for re-establishing the connection between lay people and heritage, reviving the role of heritage in building people’s identities, and launching a future for heritage beyond tourism’. From this perspective, community or public archaeology is about substantially more than merely involving non-professionals at various, and usually isolated, points of the research process. In parallel with Abu-Khafajah et al’s work, we seek an active, creative and critical form of heritage, rather than one led by an expert-driven or rigidly scientific approach whose instrumental outcome is often commodification for tourism purposes.

The material we present is not intended as a straightforward evaluation of a further case study of community archaeology, although we do describe the ways in which we have worked. Instead, it is about the broader terms of temporality and landscape in which community archaeology and related forms of heritage research could engage. The empowerment that scholars engaged in public or community archaeology speak of, we argue, can be usefully conceived of in terms of the ability to imagine the possible futures of heritage sites and their associated communities, and to help bring them into being. Empowerment may be complicated by different agendas, perspectives and politics; yet, at the same time, it is these very processes that give the edge – or even the vital force – to heritage research by purposefully bringing in multiple voices and practices. First, however, we need to briefly explore some key concepts in landscape, heritage and enskilment that ground the way we are thinking about heritage. We then move on to present our activities at the archaeological remains of the Bennachie Colony, together with how the future is being imagined through them.

A Scottish landscape, heritage and skills

At the hill of Bennachie, on the edge of the Grampian Mountains about 20 miles from Aberdeen in North-East Scotland, there are two main ways of getting around. Having arrived at the visitor centre or one of the car parks, one may simply follow a series of signposted paths on foot (or perhaps with a bicycle or on horseback). The paths are mostly broad and well-made, and lead to the open moorland at the top of the hill or through plantation forests of conifers that encircle it. One of these lower circuits will take you around the small collection of ruined croft houses and partly enclosed fields and pasture – now mostly a timber plantation – that comprised the 19th-century informal settlement known as the Bennachie Colony. Visitors can observe the ruins of toppled enclosure walls and the lower courses of stone buildings, along with the occasional quarry from which the stones were prised. It is, however, quite easy to miss these remains through the often thick undergrowth of broom, gorse, heather and bracken; most of the time, people pass by on their way around the forest or to the top of the hill.

The second way of getting about Bennachie is used less frequently by those who make the approximately 100,000 visits occurring each year. It involves stepping off the modern, well-laid paths and making one’s way through the trees and the undergrowth. This would not be to attain a particular destination; it is more suited to simply seeing what is there or what happens along the way. There are some small paths that have been formed through common use, and areas that afford passage by virtue of not being too overgrown. It is the way of moving through the landscape that a dog-walker might experience with their dog following a scent, or that a child might entertain – to look for a stick, to hide among the bracken and heather, or just because being off the path is more interesting than being on it. It is also how those wishing to explore the history of the landscape might choose to move, at least every now and then. Where does the wall of that field actually end? Traipsing away from the main paths brings a distinctive set of visual and bodily relations with the landscape. In a literal sense – being less concerned with gaining the view from the top of the hill, and being on a much less even surface – the walker looks down and around, and feels the ground itself rather than just the laid path.

Figure 1.1: The hill of Bennachie as background landscape

Source: Photo by Jo Vergunst

There are broader historical resonances to these two ways of moving that speak to the themes of heritage we are concerned with. In the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, dominant visual modes involve the gaze onto an empty landscape, perhaps with iconic mountains, rivers, forests or moors (eg the art of Edwin Landseer or, in literature, Compton Mackenzie’s novel Monarch of the glen (1941), which was inspired by Landseer’s 1851 painting of the same name depicting a red deer stag). Conspicuously, the people are absent, unless they are outfitted in tartan as a form of marketing for diaspora tourism (Gouriévidis, 2016). This vision of rural Scotland has underlain the highly concentrated pattern of landownership in which much of the Highlands, and elsewhere, has been owned by a small number of people by way of large and thinly populated estates (Wightman, 1996). Mackenzie (2013: 12) describes this way of seeing the land in Scotland as a ‘colonizing optic’ that presents ‘narratives of a sporting estate empty of people or a place of “wildness” that must be protected from people’. Within such settings, there is an association of scenic nature with the landscape in these forms that can be traced to travellers undertaking a version of a Grand Tour in the later 18th century (following the subjugation of the Highland clans at Culloden in 1746), and became part of an emerging ‘green consciousness’ in the UK and beyond (Smout, 1991; Macdonald, 1998; Olwig 2002). However, locally, it also underpinned the development of large-scale recreational uses of the landscape for sporting purposes, such as grouse-shooting and deer-stalking, which themselves followed the sheep farming that was key to the removal of large parts of the rural population from the Scottish Highlands and Islands in the 19th century (Richards, 2000; Lorimer, 2002; Hunter, 2015). In short, the tropes of heritage that come through to the present are often comprised of images of a wild, unpeopled landscape, which in North-East Scotland, is combined with castles and whisky. Given the strength of such populist discourses, it is easy to forget that these places were, and are, also the homes of rural people and are also inhabited by many regular visitors. Their pasts, and how they might be brought into the present, are far less frequently considered.

To metaphorically step off this ‘main path’ of conventional heritage offers a chance to see and feel things differently. By this reckoning, the landscape is not simply what is contained within a view from a mountain top. Even while this kind of ‘gaze’ is not, these days, necessarily a powerful appropriation when undertaken by ordinary hillwalkers (Lorimer and Lund, 2008), the historical and political resonances of the landscape are also altered. Rural histories in Scotland are being told in forms both traditional and new, and rural communities have been part of the broader turn towards community heritage activity in recent years that provides alternatives to the mainstream construction of the past. This has encompassed work in community archaeology (Dalglish, 2013), the arts (Smith and Hope, this volume), crafts (Bunn, 2016), archival history (Macknight, 2011) and technology–heritage hybrids (McCaffery et al, 2015), as well as established work in oral history and ethnology (such as the continuing interest in work among Scottish Traveller communities in the 1950s and 1960s by Hamish Henderson). All of these forms of heritage activity are, in different ways, resituating the agency of communities themselves in terms of the past and present, and in terms of how they have lived with the landscape and its resources.

At the same time, the politics of the land in Scotland have taken a series of sharp turns away from traditional vested interests through the establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1999 that had land reform on its agenda. The Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 instigated a community right-to-buy of land in the crofting areas of the Highlands and Islands, and recent evaluations of the policy suggest that the changing relationships and new partnerships that involve communities in the management of the land have been significant compare...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and table
• Notes on contributors
• Series editors’ foreword
• Preface
• Introduction: heritage as community research
• Part One: Ways of knowing
• Part Two: Heritage as action
• Conclusion: Co-producing futures – directions for community heritage as research