The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Heritage Research

E. Waterton, S. Watson, E. Waterton, S. Watson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137293558
• eBook ISBN: 9781137293565
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire moderne

This book explores heritage from a wide range of perspectives and disciplines and in doing so provides a distinctive and deeply relevant survey of the field as it is currently researched, understood and practiced around the world.

Part I

Heritage Meanings

1

The Ontological Politics of Heritage; or How Research Can Spoil a Good Story

Emma Waterton and Steve Watson

Criminologists, perhaps more than other social scientists, are much exercised by the extent of what they do not know. Theirs is a field dominated by the efforts of the controlling state and its law enforcement apparatus to record criminal behaviour in all its myriad forms, gleaning information that is then used as a basis for policy-making and the allocation of resources to further that end. Important stuff, of course; but it does mean that the study of crime has become more than usually obsessed with the dichotomy of ‘presence’ and ‘absence’ in its thought world. It is well known, for example, that recorded crime is the tip of an iceberg, the remainder of which is made up of a bulky and submerged ‘dark figure’ of unknown and unknowable criminal enterprise, as set out in the well-cited paper ‘On Exploring the Dark Figure of Crime’ by Biderman and Reiss (1967). And then there is the issue of what constitutes crime in the first place, a phenomenon that appears to be bounded more by legal codes than any deeper ontology, and which therefore begets attempts on the part of criminologists to find a better way of describing … what? Law-breaking? And how does that make us judge the law itself? Or is it about deviance, lawful or otherwise?

It might seem odd to commence a chapter about heritage research with a reference to criminology, but, as ever with heritage, there is much to be learned from its connections with other disciplines in the social sciences. What we borrow from criminology is the idea of a ‘dark figure’ of heritage – those practices and experiences that lie beyond its conventional, official, touristic, popular or commercial manifestations: in other words, its good stories. Our concern with this is informed by the idea of an ‘ontological politics’, or the recognition that in the definition of what constitutes heritage – and, by extension, heritage research – there are various expressions of definitional power. Sometimes these are ‘hard’, as in the form of ideological constructs that are exclusive of other understandings or meanings, and sometimes softer, in the form of received wisdoms, accepted practices, habits. While we have come to this concern with ontological politics via various detours through other fields (see, for example, Mol, 1999), it is from this perspective that our interest in the presence/absence dichotomy that defines heritage – in both commonsense and academic research – emerges. John Law (2003, p. 3) perhaps best summed up this dichotomy when he argued:

In post-structuralism presence by itself is impossible: presence necessitates absence. In research practice this suggests that some things (for instance research findings and texts) are present but at the same time other things are being rendered absent. But what? The answer is: two kinds of things. One: whatever we are studying and describing, our object of research. And two, other absences that are hidden, indeed repressed. Othered.

(Emphasis in original)

Where, we might ask, is the ‘dark figure’ of heritage, and of what is it constituted? What defines what is present and what is absent in the heritage field? What, then, is Othered? And how can we flex our research into both capturing the latter and truly interrogating it? Here we part company with our criminology colleagues and occupy our own field with thoughts about how we can find a way of addressing these questions, in a way that does justice to the diversity and theoretical complexity that are so evident in the rest of this book.

In turning to our own field we borrow again from Mol (1999) in order to establish our theoretical ground, which is what we shall call the ontological politics of heritage. It is precisely this politics, we believe, that has framed much research into heritage over the last 30 years and, in doing so, has written stories for us about what heritage is, what it is not and, moreover, what constitutes ‘data’ and how it ought to be looked into and explored. While the ontological politics of heritage is not univocal and encompasses both conventional and critical accounts, our intention in this chapter is to suggest that it gives us not only the firm basis for a critique of much existing research in heritage but also the momentum to move it to a different level and provide additional perspectives. Our offering is not, then, a ‘how-to’ chapter; rather, it is something of a survey, or a collecting together of some of the key ways in which heritage has been approached and understood empirically. We cannot, of course, survey the full range of methods that might find synergy with heritage research here. Instead, we use the chapter to look at some of the methods that are given most attention within the field, as well as those that have been developing elsewhere and might have utility. In conducting this survey, we examine the way that current thinking about heritage – and the employment of a critical imagination in that process – asks new questions of empiricism and defines new strategies and methodologies. First, though, we have some ghosts to lay.

Dark figures of heritage

If we are to accept John Law and John Urry’s (2004) claim that social science research methods are productive and carry the potential to help make the world, then methods, like many of the other themes in this volume, ought to be taken very seriously. They are invested with power. Indeed, as Law and Urry go on to argue, ‘they do not simply describe the world as it is, but also enact it … [They] are performative … they have effects; they make differences; they enact realties; and they can help to bring into being what they also discover’ (Law and Urry, 2004, p. 391–4). Yet it is not unusual for ‘method’ to remain implicit, perhaps even a little vague, in academic texts concerning heritage. We may carefully frame and write about methodological choices in our doctoral theses, research proposals and any associated ethics protocol, but an explicit articulation of the empirical means by which we have come to understand heritage often slips from view in those final ‘output’ stages of writing: book chapters, monographs, journal articles. We know what we mean by ‘semi-structured interviews’ or ‘social surveys’ and so they mostly surface without much by way of elaboration. It is perhaps because of this that the methods toolkit in the field of heritage studies has come to lack imagination. It is only infrequently, for example, that we find within the pages of heritage-themed journals articles dedicated to explorations of the proliferating methodological developments going on in the wider social sciences. Yet the potential for innovation surely inheres within our own field, too. More surprisingly, it is only rarely that we encounter thorough engagements with visual research methods (see Waterton and Watson, 2010), despite the fact that visuality – in some form or other – is undoubtedly a province of the heritage field.

What, then, are the conditions under which we have thus far come to ‘know’ heritage? There is no doubt that the field has been haunted by some odd methodological ghosts, largely from a canonical positivism that is residual in the social sciences and which seeks to abjure the messiness of the world in favour of identifying and locating categories of things and the laws that govern them. We are not alone in this observation, and can defer to the eloquence of Patricia Clough’s (2009, p. 47) observation that ‘[today] sociologists are mainly positivists but under cover and the cover is a reclaimed social constructivism’. We see this lingering in attempts to categorize heritage, people doing heritage, practices of visiting, motivations for visiting and so forth. In this, it has been aided by a certain instrumentality and a need not so much for research per se as for information, which then defines not only the type of research carried out but what should be investigated in the first place: Who visits? How often? What are their characteristics? What do they do? What are their attitudes? The instrumentality of heritage research is thus intensified in the operational nexus and the need for data, for planning, for marketing and for evaluation: an instrumentality still further intensified in the commodifications of tourism and the ‘heritage attraction’ (see Herbert et al., 1989; Prentice, 1989, 1993; Goulding, 1999; and others in the same vein).

The effects of this instrumentality have been rather startling. First, instead of developing appropriate and creative methods to address the diversity of phenomena in the heritage sphere, we seem to be stuck with the old ones, together with anxieties about whether we are doing them properly, or well enough, or whether the sample size is too large or too small. These anxieties are policed by a fierce cabal of methodologists who only seem to declare themselves at doctoral examinations, or in peer reviews, or if they happen to write a textbook, in which case they may become insufferable. Research methodology, in the field of heritage at least, has thus become the stuff of rulebooks used to dictate what should be done and how. And thus we dutifully genuflect to the relevant authorities, our first mistake having been to treat them as such. This methodological oppression has led to an equally undesirable reaction, wherein people declare themselves either for or against various methodological strategies, usually aligned around the quantitative and the qualitative, the presence or otherwise of a working knowledge of statistical methods being a key determinant of one’s position.

But it goes deeper than this. Indeed, these are just the symptoms of an ossification of method and a profound lack of imagination in the way that we make knowledge. Sociologists such as Mike Savage and Roger Burrows have already indicated that empiricism in their own field has reached a point of crisis, not least because commercial market research seems more adept at most of it and also because of the proliferation of digital social data that challenges conventional methodologies (see Savage and Burrows, 2007, 2008, 2009). They have also argued, as we do here, for a shift in emphasis from faulty examinations of causality to a more textured concern with description and classification:

If we see the power of contemporary social knowledge as lying in its abilities to conduct minute description, we can better situate our concerns as exposing these descriptions, challenging them, and presenting our own descriptions. In such a process we need a radical mixture of methods coupled with renewed critical reflection. Such a call for a descriptive sociology does not involve sole reliance on narrative but seeks to link narrative, numbers, and images in ways that engage with, and critique, the kinds of routine transactional analyses that now proliferate.

(2007, p. 896)

A ‘radical mixture of methods’ and a ‘renewed critical reflection’? Surely heritage studies could not be better placed to reflect on these and benefit from them. Heritage is already undoubtedly understood from a variety of theoretical and methodological standpoints, having arrived at its present position from a number of different traditions and carried along numerous intellectual itineraries. Archaeology, history, sociology, anthropology, museum studies, cultural studies, tourism, architecture, geography and memory studies are all fields that have produced key contributors to our own field, as the biographies for the authors in this volume attest. Given, also, the social, cultural, political and economic dimensions of heritage, it is a field that greatly needs to add to the rather thin seam of methods it currently employs by bringing to the mix a style of research capable of attending to its complex, mobile, messy, creative, affective, emotional, personal and performative nature.

So what is our own dark figure? What is absent and what are we missing? Only by reconfiguring our research can we actually address those aspects of heritage that are currently not researched, and identify potential new methods that might assist in our conducting of such research. There are two significant ontological-political considerations attached to this: first, questioning what constitutes the proper objects of heritage research; and, second, questioning the motives for such research, especially in applying critical thought to the instrumentalities of conventional research as outlined above. These two dimensions intersect around individual experience of – and engagement with – heritage (loosely defined). Given that we have only just admitted the term ‘loosely defined’ into our discussion, we should start with the issue of what constitutes heritage. Or, put differently, what is missing from its present constituents?

The individual, configured as a sentient, prescient, thinking, emotional, feeling and embodied consciousness, we suggest, is central. This, we argue, is the dark figure of heritage and should be as much the starting point of heritage research as the representations of it that are found in the various discourses in which it is currently discovered and researched. We do not believe that we are presenting an alternative view of heritage, however. Rather, we are suggesting that heritage has effects that go beyond its representations and the ways these are understood. Our agenda, then, is to explore these effects and their contexts and to identify the means to do so. To get there, we first need to shed a little more light on some of the ontological shifts that have been occurring within the field, commencing with David Harvey’s work in 2001, solidifying with Laurajane Smith’s work in 2006, and then continuing to expand with the work of Divya Tolia-Kelly and Mike Crang (2010), David Crouch (2010, this volume) and Joy Sather-Wagstaff (2011) to gather in a sense of relating to the world, rather than just knowing it.

Heritage researched

In discussing heritage research we need to explore the ontological relationship between what is researched and how. This is because it is from this relationship that specific research questions – with their attendant aims and objectives, together with strategies and methods that are considered appropriate to address them – emerge. Thus, the objects of heritage and the methods to research them are inseparable, locked together in a conceit of reciprocal meaning. ‘Heritage’ came to be known, therefore, through this ontological framework. This provided it with an objective reality, a ‘something out there’, given empirical proof in the materiality of its objects and a veracity of method underwritten by the science of its origins. Thus, a reified form of heritage research was put beyond ontological examination.

At the same time, a commonsense version of heritage, a repository of good stories told through interpretation in countless museums, theme parks, monuments and popular or ‘public’ histories, coincided neatly with its official definitions. These, in turn, spilled into the academy and into the way it was researched there. What we have previously described as theory in heritage (see Waterton and Watson, 2013) organized a research agenda around its material objects and the ways in which these were made available and accessible. Such an orientation exhibits its assumptions as much as its content, the first and foremost of which is that there is some inherent value in the objects that it presents. A heritage ‘gaze’, to borrow from Urry (1990), is thus configured around a nexus of value endowed by pastness, scarcity and aesthetics: a nexus that is moderated and invested with further value by the given status of experts: academics, art and architectural historians, archaeologists, specialists of one sort or another, and connoisseurs, and, closer to the operational level, curators, conservators, educators, managers, marketers, interpretation and design professionals, enthusiasts and re-enactors. All of these agencies determine the heritage that is then consequently found by the non-expert, the non-professional, the tourist with a passing interest, the child on a school trip, the viewer of television programmes.

Where the ontologies of this construction of heritage have been challenged, often on political grounds, a process of assimilation has taken place. All that was oppositional was simply admitted to the fold, given a label and represented in a non-threatening way as heritage – deracinated and depoliticized from class domination, gender inequalities and racial oppression. Indeed, any and all of these could be included if they were dealt with in the right way, assuaged by the balm of a san...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Heritage as a Focus of Research: Past, Present and New Directions
• Part I: Heritage Meanings
• Part II: Heritage in Context
• Part III: Heritage and Cultural Experience
• Part IV: Contested Heritage and Emerging Issues
• Part V: Heritage, Identity and Affiliation
• Part VI: Heritage and Social Practice
• Part VII: Conclusions
• Index