Heritage and Community Engagement

Collaboration or Contestation?

Emma Waterton, Steve Watson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415583626
• eBook ISBN: 9781317986577
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

This book is about the way that professionals in archaeology and in other sectors of heritage interact with a range of stakeholder groups, communities and the wider public. Whilst these issues have been researched and discussed over many years and in many geographical contexts, the debate seems to have settled into a comfortable stasis wherein it is assumed that all that can be done by way of engagement has been done and there is little left to achieve. In some cases, such engagement is built on legislation or codes of ethics and there can be little doubt that it is an important and significant aspect of heritage policy.

This book is different, however, because it questions not so much the motivations of heritage professionals but the nature of the engagement itself, the extent to which this is collaborative or contested and the implications this has for the communities concerned. Furthermore, in exploring these issues in a variety of contexts around the world, it recognises that heritage provides a source of engagement within communities that is separate from professional discourse and can thus enable them to find voices of their own in the political processes that concern them and affect their development, identity and well-being.

This book was published as a special issue of the International Journal of Heritage Studies.

Heritage and community engagement: finding a new agenda

Steve Watson^a and Emma Waterton^b

^a York St John Business School, York St John University, York, United Kingdom; ^bSchool of Social Science, University of Western Sydney, Sydney, Australia

Introduction

To place the notion of ‘community’ beside that of ‘heritage’ is to revive a series of questions that have surrounded both terms – separately and together – since they first entered the academic lexicon. As contested domains, both have incited much debate in the past. The theme for this volume, then, must at first sight seem a strange one to have pursued, given that the debates surrounding ‘community heritage’ must surely have reached a mature stage, requiring little further attention beyond a few more case studies. Yet this apparent saturation of a research field has created what we see as an environment in which well-meaning practitioners and professional heritage managers seek either to lend political credibility (and thus justification) to their own work or to genuinely engage with communities who are seen, in some ill-defined sense, as ‘owners’ or ‘stakeholders’ in a particular heritage. Whatever the context, ‘community heritage’ emerges as something that is inherently valuable, something that must, therefore, be seen as a ‘good thing’. To make ourselves clear at the outset, our purpose here is not to chase after and revivify such debates; rather, this volume attempts to transform these deliberations by redefining the very notion of ‘community heritage’, much of which will be achieved through a sustained challenge aimed at unpacking the consequences of policies and practices concerned with community heritage in contemporary society.

As a starting point for this challenge, we chaired a session at the Sixth World Archaeological Congress (WAC6) at University College Dublin in July 2008, which we titled Community Engagement: Collaboration or Contestation? At the time, we were surprised by the amount of interest our theme generated, given that it circled a debate that received wisdom suggested was over and done with. While we certainly received a sizable collection of submissions that rehearsed these tired debates, we were also fortunate enough to attract a collection of probing presentations that triggered unexpected observations, an outcome that prompted us to pursue the same theme through a special volume of the International Journal of Heritage Studies (Vol. 16, No. 1–2, 2010) and here in this subsequent book. The resultant discussions confirmed for us the presence of a widely held perception that the very notion of ‘community’ had indeed ossified into a set of assumptions and practices that were now rarely examined. How had this situation arisen? In some ways, it had been facilitated by the box-ticking expediencies associated with ideas about social inclusiveness, especially where these were the product of political imperatives that celebrated the value of community without ever examining its definition or content (Waterton 2005; Crooke 2007; Tlili 2008; Smith and Waterton 2009). In other senses, it was a consequence of what can only be described as a kind of self-satisfactory hum within the heritage community that the job had, indeed, been done. It was assumed that all that remained to be done were periodic updates about yet another case study demonstrating the importance of professionals engaging with communities that either simply played host to their activities, or were active stakeholders in those activities. Taken together, these perceptions – both of a continued interest in the debate and of issues that remained to be addressed – provided an agenda for research, the starting point being to question the validity of the terms on offer: heritage, community and, moreover, engagement. In order to re-examine the meaning of these terms and shape our position on the issues, we have arranged this volume around four major themes:

1 The global diversity of heritage meanings and how this affects community engagement

The role that heritage plays in a particular society is central to the way that communities engage with it, particularly in terms of its relationships with identity, dominant ideologies and the extent to which it is integrated with other social phenomena such as leisure, professionalisation, contestation and lived culture.

2 The politics of engagement and the power relations these represent

Who defines what is of interest, how it is to be organised and what is to be represented? This is important not just for museums but also in terms of research objectives and priorities. How are the issues framed? Who determines the agenda?

3 New (or challenged) concepts of community

How does problematising the concept of community affect the interface between heritage professionals and the communities thus problematised? This involves not only the conceptual aspects of community, but also considerations about defining a community in a particular context.

4 Contexts

The sectoral complexity of heritage from agencies concerned with cultural resource management to those involved with museums and archives and the organisation of tourism implies the need to examine the commonalities and differences between them and draw from this whatever insights might be made in relation to the first three themes above.

Out of necessity these are broad themes. Yet they imply detailed questions and, moreover, a quality of research that defies any conventional belief that the work on community heritage is done. On the contrary, we sought contributions for this volume that turned such comforting notions upside–down and replaced case studies with genuine expressions of both theory and practice; expressions that sought to draw out the diversity that we had already sensed, the politics of these engagements and the challenges these made to comfortable assumptions in the very wide range of sectors and activities encompassed by community engagement in heritage. We begin, therefore, by sketching out a brief theoretical basis upon which to set the scene and provide an initial exploration of the themes outlined above.

Heritage and engagement

Over the past 30 years the heritage debate has settled into two, if not opposing then somewhat disengaged, camps: those who are concerned with the materiality of what conventionally constitutes heritage and have consequently focussed upon the technicalities of its conservation; and those who employ critical social science approaches to deconstruct and understand heritage as a cultural process (Smith 2006). Understanding the interface with communities in light of this disparity between the two sides of the debate is therefore immediately problematic. An uncritical and unexamined view of heritage will tend to generate an equally uncritical, and thus unproblematic, view of a community’s engagement with it. This is very clearly the case in the United Kingdom, where there is a perceived discontinuity between the past and the present (Walsh 1992, p. 2), in effect sealing it, or freezing it over, so that the events of the past are not seen as connected to the conditions of the present (Walsh 1992, p. 176; Emerick 2003). In this way, the present can be constructed as something essentially of the present and not a result of processes that have a past, as revealed through experts and professionals working in or from museums or ‘with’ communities. The risk here is that without a political agenda that derives from such communities, the past can be shorn of anything other than professional or aesthetic meanings so that it comes to be represented by collections of professionally interpreted buildings, objects and artefacts (see Urry 1996; see also Smith and Waterton 2009). As Wright (1985, p. 69) has put it, ‘[p]urged of political tension [heritage] becomes a unifying spectacle, the settling of all disputes’.

This is the background in which the objects of heritage are made available and intelligible through professional interventions such as museums and archaeologists, and this is a world of enchantment where those who are interested can ‘reconnect’ to a lost and now recovered past. The growth of the ‘heritage industry’ over the last 20 years has also had an effect in motivating and energising individuals and communities to engage with the past in a broad range of activities from watching television programmes to visiting sites as tourists and, not least, through the organisation of community activity.

Smith’s (2006) penetrating account of heritage challenges the very foundations of the conventional view of the centrality and inherent value of heritage objects. These are seen, rather, as ciphers for important cultural constructs, markers of identity and power, and richly expressive of both. Heritage is thus more than a collection of objects or a set of aesthetic judgements; it is a discursive process within which an authorised version of the past emerges, an Authorised Heritage Discourse (AHD) as Smith describes it (Smith 2006; Waterton et al. 2006). This discourse is authenticated by the very objects it venerates and its dominance is underwritten by the powerful and mediating institutions of the state, and by a culturally conditioned deference to professional expertise. The question inevitably raised when this new account of heritage is considered in relation to community engagement is to whom a particular narrative actually belongs, especially when, as in the United Kingdom, it is so heavily mediated by agencies external to the communities in question. This issue has been explored in practice by Waterton (2005) in a paper that examines the interaction of discordant views of a particular landscape, one of which represents the meanings attached to it by local residents whilst the other, within a heritage management framework, expresses professional expertise:

The paradox, of course, is that we have the label ‘public heritage’, but there is no distinct role for the ‘public’ within the management process; rather, more often than not, this role is found at the end of the process, in the form of educational or informational criteria. Instead the public is largely removed from the equation by a process that enables archaeological and other heritage experts consistently to apply hegemonic understandings of the past by allocating exclusive priority to monumental and scientific values (Waterton, 2005, p. 319).

The commonsense route is therefore ‘to leave it up to the experts’; the community – however well-meaning the experts are – is marginalised. Exceptionally, communities may empower themselves, but as Hodges and Watson (2000) have demonstrated, this depends on their ability to assert their own objectives and to effectively channel expert resources according to their own priorities and to have at least a shared perception of what they want to achieve (see also Smith and Waterton 2009, p. 230–234). In such communities there is typically a high level of organisational ability, know-how and a capacity for getting things done by talking to the right people. These are, essentially, articulate, middle-class communities who share the same professional and social status as the experts they ‘bring in’ to help them. The value of such particular analyses, however, and the critical perspective they bring to bear, depends to a large extent on their applicability to other cases that can be deemed similar. The question arises, then, as to the generalisability of these conclusions. At this point, we engage with the first of the major themes that might merit some renewed interest in the subject: the great diversity in the nature of community engagement and the ways in which this is manifest in a global context. Our first imperative has therefore been to respond to the diversity that is apparent in forms of engagement around the world and we have sought to represent this as an opportunity to reflect on the nature of heritage and engagement with it as a key feature of contemporary heritage practice.

In some places, such as the United Kingdom, other parts of Western Europe, North America and Australia, heritage is very strongly linked with the leisure activities of the informed and constructive variety, something that might easily be read as a merging (or de-differentiation) of the spheres of education and leisure (Barthel 1996; Harvey 2001). After all, most community heritage engagements will take place within that segment of the personal daily schedule that is dedicated to non-work activity and recreation, which is not, of course, to diminish its social and cultural significance. Indeed, it can be argued convincingly that heritage as leisure provides a more effective expression of the AHD than heritage acting in isolation. Moreover, professional power and expertise is all the more acceptable when it is helping people to enjoy themselves and when it is represented by amiable and approachable people. In other locations, however, community engagement with heritage is more overtly and directly linked with a communal past rather than a discursively constructed hegemonic version of it. Thus it may be linked with cultural distinctiveness, identity and nationalism, or exist as an articulation of ancestral links with important places, traditions and narratives. Professional and expert interventions might be expected to be different in these contexts: less mediating and more facilitative? But what does this amount to and how is it managed? Here we have the second major theme of this book, to revisit the politics and the micro-politics of community engagement and the power relations that were manifest in the particular configurations of policy and practice that have developed over time. Did the ‘cosiness’ of some accounts of engagement actually mask abiding and inequitable imbalances between professionals and communities in relation to the control of resources and narratives? And where professional interventions work well, how is this judged and what makes it different?

Communities of heritage

Talk of community began, of course, somewhere other than in the field of heritage studies. Indeed, it is part of a much broader sociological tradition that has its roots in the nineteenth century. From here, community studies gradually developed as a way of examining either: (a) macro level structures and processes and their configuration at local levels, or (b) how people and groups interacted in geographically circumscribed locales (Bell and Newby 1971; Bell and Newby 1974; Crow and Allan 1994). Latterly, community has come to refer to other groups: people with a shared set of values or beliefs such as the business community, the gay community, and various other communities of interest who may be geographically dispersed but drawn together by shared interests as an expression of diversity and empowerment (Hoggett 1997). In the elective communities of cyberspace, there are still more opportunities for groups to form and express identity and intent, and those whose collectivities form around notions of heritage can define it in their own terms and even challenge existing representations (Harrison 2009; Smith and Waterton 2009). The availability of images and interpretations, as well as the opportunities to search, select and re-represent these in the Web 2.0 environment, has given life to non-professional and even subaltern versions of heritage, or at least the potential for these to thrive and even change the ways in which museums are ‘visited’ and their collections understood (Parry 2009; de Groot 2009, 2010).

The challenge to conventional notions of community long pre-dates these developments. Even in the heyday of community studies there were those who cast doubt on the value of the concept in understanding the complexities of these social interactions, preferring to examine the actual social networks, local or otherwise, that characterise them (Bott 1957; Stacey 1969). The contestability of community has been accentuated by more recent communitarian perceptions and its assimilation by a Blairite political agenda (Alleyne 2002; Waterton 2005; Wetherell 2007; Neal and Walters 2008). This supposedly new or ‘third’ way sought to reconcile market with community interests by seeking to align conventional community values with new expressions of social action that were separate from the state and its historic role in mediating the provision of public services such as health and education.

These considerations lead us to our third major theme, which is how we shall define the nature and role of community in relation to the already contested domain of heritage. There are two levels of meaning here: one concerns the very concept of community and what the actors involved mean by it; and the other involves pragmatic definitions of communities in particular instances. Both can be problematic, and so they should be if we are to truly challenge established orthodoxies that have rarely been challenged in heritage contexts.

Heritage formations

Our final major theme is the diversity of heritage itself. If geography, politics and organisation are one set of conditioning factors, then the variety of heritage, from archaeology to museums and from built heritage to memory, is another. We have therefore sought to achieve as broad a representation of the heritage field as could be accommodated in the space at our disposal. We have accounts from contemporary archaeological practice (Abu-Khafajah; Greer; Prangnell et al.), the museums and archives sector (Crooke; Perkin; Stevens et al.), those concerned with policy development and resource management (Chirikure et al.), and the representational practices associated with tourism development (Grydehøj). It would be useful if, having mapped such sectoral representations to each of the authors in this volume, we could do the same with the other major themes, but we find that most contributors touch on all of them even where their focus is on one. This is understandable. These are, after all, major themes, and we would expect them to be reflected somewhere in the ideas of those whose work is presented here.

The theoretical scene is set by Emma Waterton and Laurajane Smith and their reflections on the recognition and misrecognition of community heritage. Drawing extensively on the work of critical theorist Nancy Fraser and her ‘politics of recognition’, this opening chapter challenges the reader to rethink the term ‘community’, particularly in terms of what it currently means – and what it potentially could mean – in practice. The central thrust of their piece is to suggest that an essentially uncritical account of community has come to permeate the meanings and practices of community heritage projects, where images of the white middle-classes dominate and communities of expertise are set adrift from traditional clusters of communities. This has resulted in a significant lack of parity for many community groups as the relations of power settle around expertise in the first instance, and the cultural symbols of the white middle-classes thereafter. As a first step towards remedying this situation, Waterton and Smith propose a more complex understanding of ‘commu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• List of figures
• List of abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• Abstracts
• 1 Heritage and community engagement: finding a new agenda
• 2 The recognition and misrecognition of community heritage
• 3 The politics of community heritage: motivations, authority and control
• 4 Unfulfilled promises? Heritage management and community participation at some of Africa’s cultural heritage sites
• 5 Heritage and empowerment: community-based Indigenous cultural heritage in northern Australia
• 6 New frameworks for community engagement in the archive sector: from handing over to handing on
• 7 Uninherited heritage: tradition and heritage production in Shetland, Åland and Svalbard
• 8 Decentring the new protectors: transforming Aboriginal heritage in South Australia
• 9 Beyond the rhetoric: negotiating the politics and realising the potential of community-driven heritage engagement
• 10 Meaning-making and cultural heritage in Jordan: the local community, the contexts and the archaeological sites in Khreibt al-Suq
• 11 Power relations and community involvement in landscape-based cultural heritage management practice: an Australian case study
• Index