Heritage Ecologies

Torgeir Rinke Bangstad, Þóra Pétursdóttir, Torgeir Rinke Bangstad, Þóra Pétursdóttir

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781138294646
• eBook ISBN: 9781351587822
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Heritage Ecologies presents an ecological understanding of heritage that furthers a concern for how its making and unmaking always involves a wide range of human and other-than-human actors.

Recognizing the entangled nature-cultures of heritage is essential in the Anthropocene era, where uncertainty and rapid environmental change force us to recast common conceptions of inheritance and to envision new strategies for preservation. Heritage sites are meant to be open and shared spaces, and a recurring argument in the cases presented here is that this openness inevitably also overrides our selections, orders and appreciations. Through a diverse range of case studies, the chapters collected in this book aim to explore the affects and memories engendered by diverse heritage ecologies where humans are neither the sole makers nor the only inheritors. The common call is that the experiential, perceptive and informational plenitude enabled through contributions of other-than-human actors is key to an ecological rethinking of heritage in the twenty-first century.

Heritage Ecologies is unique in bringing heritage studies into closer proximity with a wide variety of non-representational and object-oriented theories and is an important volume for students and researchers in archaeology and heritage studies.

PART I
Introduction

1
AN ECOLOGICAL APPROACH TO HERITAGE

Torgeir Rinke Bangstad and Þóra Pétursdóttir

The naming of the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch suggests some fundamental changes in the relationship between humans and their environment. The term itself has resonated widely in scientific and popular debate in recent years and has encouraged a deeper reflection on phenomena that cross the nature-culture divide and challenge categories we have long taken for granted. Classic issues in the humanities, like memory, aesthetics, experience and meaning, have been reconfigured and are often treated as embedded in a wider ecology of worldly material and organic environmental relations, rather than transcendent properties that set our species apart from the world. One manifestation of this is how, in recent decades, ecocriticism and an ever broader use of various ecological frameworks have rendered ecology a mainstay across the humanities and social sciences, represented for example by media ecology (Fuller 2007), ecology of literature (Zapf 2008) theatre ecology (Kershaw 2007), memory ecology (Hoskins 2016) and here: heritage ecology. Anchored in different disciplinary traditions, these ecological approaches all share an interest in the entangled compositions and workings of mediatic environments, configured through an “indissoluble interconnectedness and dynamic feedback between culture and nature, mind and matter, text and life” (Zapf 2008, 86).

The term “ecology”, however, has a much longer pedigree and was first used in 1866 by the German zoologist and evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), who understood it as “the whole science of the relations of the organism to the environment including, in the broad sense, all the ‘conditions of existence’” (Haeckel 1866, 286, translated by Stauffer 1957, 140). Still to this day, this seems to be the most commonly accepted and widespread definition of ecology. For Haeckel, ecology belonged under the general physiology of organisms alongside chorology, or zoogeography, which was concerned with the spatial distribution of species. Ecology would for Haeckel mean that the relations of organisms to their organic and inorganic environment were placed front and centre. Oikos, which literally means “house” or “household”, is the etymological root of “eco” in both ecology and economy. Similar to other naturalists such as Carl Linnaeus, Charles Lyell, Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin, Haeckel referred repeatedly to the term “economy of nature” (Pearce 2010), implying a greater order maintained through a finely tuned balance of forces in nature known today as “dynamic equilibrium” (Stauffer 1957).

This idea of systemic balance has largely persisted throughout the later development of ecosystems theory. While modern ecosystem thinking is often described as the study of energy flows within a system, disturbances observed are, nevertheless, over time expected to develop towards the reinstating of an equilibrium, of nature’s fundamental balance. This is one of the enduring legacies of ecological thinking in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and one that has proven highly influential in the humanities and social sciences as well. Social scientists of the 1960s and 1970s approached human cultural systems in a similar way, drawing attention to analogous properties with “habitats” (Geertz 1963) and “niches” (Barth 1956) in the natural world. “Human” or “cultural ecology” were the names given to approaches in anthropology that treated cultural characteristics, such as different forms of subsistence technology and land ownership, as key to understanding how human societies adapted to a specific environment or habitat (e.g. Steward 1972).

Characteristic of these early approaches, however, is a clear distinction between culture and nature, where anthropogenic environmental change is not yet a significant factor and where the environment is treated as a given, a more or less unchanging set of natural conditions that human cultures adapt to through technological development. Hence, cultural ecology was eventually criticized for not being able to account for the changes that modern societies caused to environments. Adaptation, as a term, did not reflect the large-scale intentional manipulation of landscapes through agriculture, deforestation, urbanization and the extractive industries, nor how “nature” was rendered a “sediment of human practice, a construction in the material and not merely semantic sense of that word” (Biersack 1999, 9): “nature” qua artefact. It is, therefore, perhaps only in retrospect, looking back from a time when the aggregated actions of successive generations of human beings are finally being recognized as a geo-physical force of planetary reach, that we fully appreciate Haeckel’s contribution to an other ecology, where the history of human beings was already legible in Earth’s sedimented heritage. In 1868, he described the most recent phase of geological time as the “era of man”, “the Anthropolithic” or “the Anthropozoic age”, characterized by the wide dispersal of the human species and of human culture:

Man has acted with a greater transforming, destructive, and modifying influence upon the animal and vegetable population of the earth than any other organism. For this reason, and not because we assign to man a privileged exceptional position in nature in other matters, we may with full justice designate the development of man and his civilization as the beginning of a special and last main division of the organic history of the earth.

(Haeckel in: Kutschera and Farmer 2020, 2)

Interestingly, this is not far from contemporary approaches where ecology encompasses not only how human culture is conditioned by natural forces, but also how humans shape natural history on a local, regional and even planetary scale. Through technological means and conscious, intentional appropriation of nature, the human animal has long challenged any natural limits of a given habitat, and in comparison to other animal species, human beings seem far less conditioned by their natural surroundings. Humans have demonstrated “an adaptive capacity unrivalled among vertebrates” (Sullivan and Malkmus 2016, 5), which also implies that humans in comparison with other animals are “under-determined by nature and that the consequences of their actions are more significant and far-reaching” (Soper 2012, 366). Is it possible, with this crucial caveat in mind, to regard humans as simply a species among species, or is ecological thinking required to appreciate the disproportional and de facto exceptional status of humans as an unusually destructive force? Political ecology, ecocriticism and ecophilosophies increasingly venture beyond a notion of ecology as metaphor or analogy to raise questions regarding how to “best address – and improve upon – our current ecological situation” (Soper 2012, 366). The term “ecology” was popularized in the 1960s due to the growing public awareness of the environmental costs of human growth. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), not the least, contributed strongly to this by drawing attention to the long-term effects of pesticides on soil ecology, wildlife and human health. The further development of “deep ecology”, devised by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss (1973), became central in the critique of the anthropocentrism of Western Enlightenment philosophy which posited the self-contained, rational human subject as detached from the natural world.

And further yet, in contrast to earlier forms of ecocriticism and certainly in contrast to the deep ecology movement, several contemporary ecological thinkers have attempted to broaden the domain of the ecological beyond a rigid environmentalist discourse rooted in the idea of nature as an autonomous domain outside of cultural influence. The appreciation of large-scale processes that cut across these ideal domains reflects a need to reckon with what ecology might mean “after nature” (Escobar 1999; Morton 2007). Advances in biotechnology, molecular biology, nanotechnology and synthetic biology present several challenges to the conventional notion of natural organic life, and it has become more critical to bring ecological thinking past the notion of nature as a redemptive outside realm (Morton 2007, 2015, 2016).

This was also recognized, among others, by the French philosopher Felix Guattari, who in contrast to the naturalism of the deep ecologists, advanced a transversal thinking to enable an understanding of the interactions between natural ecosystems, the mecanosphere and the human, social universe. Guattari claimed that, “[n]ow more than ever, nature cannot be separated from culture …” (2000, 43). These kinds of observations have become more common with the recognition of the profound human impact on earth’s ecosystems, which makes the insistence on the fundamentally distinct realms of culture and nature difficult to sustain. This, we argue, is also why an ecology of heritage should attempt to exfoliate the binaries of culture and nature, human and non-human and make room for the appreciation that heritage phenomena are entangled in more-than-human material and environmental processes.

The contributions collected in this volume do not represent a uniform methodology or an ecology where tensions and provocations resolve and ensure a higher-level stability. Rather, the key insight of the diverse perspectives offered here, is the need to reflect critically on the anthropocentric assumption that heritage is an insular human property detached from its messy worldly relations.

To realize this – and while also embracing that the volume itself has grown into a rich and diverse ecology of cases and ideas – we particularly encourage a view of heritage from the perspective of ecological frameworks abounding in recent years under headlines such as object-oriented ontology, new materialism and post-humanism. As explained by Levi R. Bryant and Eileen A. Joy “the post- and nonhuman thingly turn is essentially an ecological vision of the world” (2014, x). Ecology, as they propose, implies a concern for “relations between entities of all kinds” (ibid, xi) – be they mineral, animal, human, plant or other – and how these act and interact. As such, thinking ecologically is to avoid anthropocentric understandings of agency and explore instead the distributed quality of emergent heritage phenomena. Importantly, this does not mean that entities are reduced to their relations or that their differences are replaced with symmetrical or flat ontologies. Rather, an ecological understanding of heritage is here concerned with the entanglements that take part in the formation of heritage and engender certain forms of significance, but where no one species, kind or relation is favoured by default. This is also essential in order to address issues of power vested in the humanist idea of the conscious and knowing subject that has foreclosed many non-discursive, affective, material, mnemonic and environmental accounts from the history of heritage preservation. For example, accounts of how non-human organisms make meanings by sensing patterns and recognizing novelty in their surroundings (Parikka 2010), how many biological systems are capable of “remembering”, without the aid of a conscious mind (Favareau et al. 2017), or how memory becomes enfolded in the world’s ongoing material reconfiguration and “sedimenting historicity” (Barad 2018, 84).

Understandings of humans as the prime makers of worlds and meanings have become inadequate, and there is, we believe, a need to replace linguistic, social constructivist and anthropocentric theories with a more materially oriented, environmental consideration of the extra-discursive conditions that enable, delimit and transform heritage. Thus, while the authors contributing to Heritage Ecologies are in no way a univocal group, they do signal a conscious effort to populate heritage with a broader range of affects and non-human actors. To us, ecological thinking represents a way of questioning the categories, scales and temporalities we have grown accustomed to as part of a long tradition of social-constructivist, representationalist, anthropocentric approaches. Here, the aim of ecological heritage research is to stress the interrelations between myriad actors and extras in our “theatres of memory” (Samuel 1994) in order to explore processes of heritage making, engagement and preservation.

Heritage and humanism

The study of heritage concerns fundamental questions about the human condition in the contemporary world. The right to control, define and actively engage with one’s own heritage is increasingly framed as a fundamental human rights issue, as visible in twentieth-century articulations of an ever wider, political commitment to preserve the world’s cultural and natural diversity to make it accessible for present and future generations (Meskell 2010, 2015).

Most formal definitions of heritage foreground the role it plays as a resource that may help sustain the life and wellbeing of human communities in the present and for the future. As such, heritage in its variety constitutes a significant building block of the human oikos, or human “household”. This not only pertains to natural landscapes, ecosystems or wildlife habitats but just as much to value priorities and matters of culture. Hence, the understanding of heritage as resource can be seen as ecological insofar as it recognizes that human lifeworlds rely on a precarious balance between the organic and inorganic environment of a system that requires precautionary measures and care to remain healthy.

Here, the idea of sustainability has also had significant leverage on the understanding of heritage as a limited and non-renewable resource (Holtorf 2008). A responsible and considerate use of heritage resources is seen as integral to sustainable development at a more general level. This is, for example, evident in the preamble to the Faro Convention (Council of Europe 2005), where the role of heritage in engendering sustainable development and quality of life in a constantly evolving society is emphasized. At the same time, present-day communities should manage their use and engagement wisely to ensure that it will not deny future communities the same potential for self-expression and -realization. Heritage is here and elsewhere seen as a fundamental part of human values, beliefs, identities, knowledge and traditions, as well as the manifestation of interaction between people, land and environment over time.

It would therefore not be a gross exaggeration to say that heritage has become an indis-soluble part of the Enlightenment humanist question of what it means to be human, “a concept of that which is proper to man” (Derrida 2001, 25). Moreover, the distinction between nature and culture reflected in most general taxonomies of heritage also mirrors the modern Western idea of humanity as ontologically distinct from nature. In modern Enlightenment thought, nature constituted an ontological negati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Anthropocene
• Part III Affect
• Part IV Memory
• Part V Entanglements
• Part VI Epilogues/reflections
• Index