A Companion to Heritage Studies

William Logan, Máiréad Nic Craith, Ullrich Kockel, William Logan, Máiréad Nic Craith, Ullrich Kockel

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781118486665
• eBook ISBN: 9781118486641
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

A Companion to Heritage Studies

BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY

A Companion to Heritage Studies

"This Companion provides a gateway to heritage studies for students and scholars alike. Taken together, the essays testify to how exciting and dynamic this field has become."
Valdimar Tr. Hafstein, University of Iceland

"Interdisciplinary and international in scope, A Companion to Heritage Studies succeeds in bringing together critical and practical, historicizing and future-oriented scholarship on what has become an all-pervasive global interest and industry, passion and resource."
Regina F. Bendix, Göttingen University, Germany

"A vast and complete overview of the contemporary challenges of heritage preservation and management. This is an important book for practitioners, planners, and policy makers. The Companion fills a gap and helps address many of the uncomfortable questions heritage preservation is facing today."
Francesco Bandarin, Special Advisor to UNESCO for Heritage and Professor, University Iuav of Venice

A Companion to Heritage Studies is a comprehensive, state-of-the-art survey of the interdisciplinary study of cultural heritage. Featuring a substantial framework-setting essay by the editors, and contributions from an international array of scholars, including some with extensive experience in heritage practice through UNESCO, the World Heritage Centre, ICOMOS and national heritage systems, this Companion offers a cutting-edge guide to this emergent and increasingly important field that is global in scope, cross-cultural in focus, and critical in approach. The selected essays have been innovatively organized into three sections on the expansion, use and abuse, and the recasting of heritage. The Companion covers all of the key themes in research, including old and new outlooks on cultural heritage and its management, heritage as a form of cultural politics, the emergence of critical heritage studies, the role of heritage in times of rapid change and conflict, heritage in environmental protection, the rise of intangible heritage, museums and digital heritage, World Heritage and tourism, and heritage ethics and human rights.

A Companion to Heritage Studies will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars of anthropology, archeology, and cultural studies, as well as anyone interested in better understanding the historical, social, and political significance of heritage.

CHAPTER 1
The New Heritage Studies: Origins and Evolution, Problems and Prospects

William Logan, Ullrich Kockel, and Máiréad Nic Craith

Heritage and heritage studies have evolved in quite astounding ways over the last sixty years. Nobody could have imagined when the Venice Charter (ICASHB 1964) jump-started the heritage profession in the aftermath of World War II that there would be a veritable heritage boom in the 1990s, and continuing into the twenty-first century. Who would have predicted that so much attention would now be paid to protecting environmental features, material culture, and living traditions from the past, or the vast numbers of community members, policy-makers, practitioners, and scholars engaged in caring for, managing, and studying heritage? Who would have foreseen the explosion of heritage-based cultural tourism, the reconfiguration of heritage as an economic asset, and a World Heritage List comprising of more than a thousand properties spread around the globe?

This volume seeks to investigate the story of expansion in heritage and heritage studies. Containing 37 chapters commissioned from 44 scholars and practitioners from 5 continents, it is designed to provide an up-to-date, international analysis of the field, the steady broadening of the concept of heritage and its social, economic, and political uses, the difficulties that often arise from such uses, and current trends in heritage scholarship. Starting from a position of seeing “heritage” as a mental construct that attributes “significance” to certain places, artifacts, and forms of behavior from the past through processes that are essentially political, we see heritage conservation not merely as a technical or managerial matter but as cultural practice, a form of cultural politics.

We are interested in the different extent to which various groups within global, national, and local communities are able to participate in heritage identification, interpretation, and management. Moreover, we want to address the extent to which communities have access to and enjoy heritage once it has been officially recognized, conserved, or safeguarded. This interest inevitably leads to human rights considerations, to developing closer intellectual links with international lawyers and others in the human rights field, and to strengthening both the multidisciplinary nature of heritage studies and what we sees as the critical relationship between theory and practice.

Whether this new vision of heritage studies represents a “paradigm shift” or only the culmination of changes already occurring in the heritage studies field since the late 1980s is an issue we will discuss later. For now, let us go back to the field’s origins and interpret its evolution.

Expanding Heritage

When ideas of “heritage” were initially formalized, their focus was on monuments and sites. This was especially the case in Europe, from where these ideas spread across the British, French, and other European empires and the anglophone United States (Nic Craith 2007). Writer-practitioners such as John Ruskin and Nikolaus Pevsner in England, and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc in France, were enormously influential in the early days of heritage identification and protection. From these beginnings, heritage planners around the world have sought to protect broad areas of historic, aesthetic, architectural, or scientific interest. Although there is considerable variation across the world, most countries now attempt to protect, as official policy and through professional practice, a much wider range of features than they did 60 years ago.

It was gradually realized, for instance, that the protection of a monument or building was not in itself enough, and that good conservation work was often being rendered ineffective by unsympathetic developments allowed to occur in front of, beside, behind, or even over heritage buildings. Attention therefore extended to the precincts around major monuments and buildings. A further extension of interest took place in 1962, when André Malraux, then the French minister for culture, first established planning regulations (known as the loi Malraux) designed to protect and enhance the historic features of the Marais district of Paris. The English were also expanding their focus at about this time, to take in conservation areas, the first of which were designated in 1967. England now has over 8000 protected areas, including the centers of historic towns and cities, fishing and mining villages, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century suburbs, model housing estates, and historic transport links and their environs, such as stretches of canal (English Heritage n.d.).

At the international level, the World Heritage List established under UNESCO’s Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (1972), or as it is commonly known, the World Heritage Convention, now contains a large number of cities inscribed for what the convention calls their Outstanding Universal Value. An Organization of World Heritage Cities, founded in 1993 with headquarters in Quebec City, today brings together 250 cities that are either inscribed or have inscribed sites within them (OWHC 2014). In 1992, the World Heritage Committee added the new category of “cultural landscapes” to the World Heritage system to allow recognition of places presenting a blend of cultural and natural elements. Twenty years later, the landscape concept was translated into urban areas as the “historic urban landscape,” blending modern and historic architectural and urban design forms rather than natural and cultural elements, but nevertheless emphasizing, like cultural landscapes, the need for a holistic view of the environment and a sensitive, balanced approach to new human interventions.

Vernacular structures are now seen as being of cultural heritage interest; that is, structures that are not architect-designed but owner- or community-built, using available resources and traditional techniques. So, too, are industrial structures. Publications by Miles Lewis (1977), Paul Oliver (1997), and William Siew Wai Lim and Tan Hock Beng (1998) began to fill in major gaps in the tangible heritage literature. More recently there has been considerable heritage interest internationally in “cultural routes.” The Council of Europe in 1987 established a program of European cultural routes that is managed from a specialized institute located in Luxembourg. The program’s first initiative is the Santiago de Compostela Route, the famous Christian pilgrimage route of the Middle Ages. In the United States and Canada, efforts have been made to commemorate the Underground Railroad – the route taken by slaves trying to reach freedom before the Civil War – by protecting a series of key sites along its length. In Asia, UNESCO is supporting the Silk Road Project for developing cultural heritage and cultural tourism along the traditional routes of the silk trade between south-eastern Europe and China.

In the international development field, there was a marked shift in the 1990s in the attitude of key agencies such as the World Bank towards cultural heritage. Rather than seeing cultural heritage protection as an obstacle to development, it is now recognized that the two can go hand in hand to bring about more effective programs to raise standards of living in developing countries and elsewhere (Logan 2003: xxi).

Neil Silberman (Chapter 2) explores the evolving heritage conception, and the changing forms and functions of heritage places from their initial validation as national institutions in the early nineteenth century to their multicultural context in the early twenty-first century. He shows that the meanings and values of heritage places are neither static nor inherent, but ascribed by particular social groups choosing to emphasize or ignore particular items or aspects for social and political purposes. Romantic nationalism led to a first “heritage boom” during the emergence of nation-states in nineteenth-century Europe, as commemorative sites and structures were created to serve as tangible evidence of a nation’s pedigree, harmonizing the diverse populations of nations into singularly national peoples, or sometimes re-fragmenting them, laying the foundations for new identity claims in the future. Already by the late nineteenth century, accelerating domestic and international tourism engendered a second “heritage boom,” albeit differently motivated: the new “heritage tourists,” on their quest for historical authenticity and exotic landscapes as means of (however temporary) escape from modern industrial life dominated by economic calculus, contradictorily created the demand that allowed for the commoditization of built heritage as a “cultural resource.”

A focus on the built environment is arguably based on a European concept of cultural heritage, which is entirely appropriate for an environment dealing largely with the conservation of buildings made of stone, brick, and other durable materials (Logan 2006). This view of heritage has been frequently criticized. Walled cities, cathedrals, and eye-catching landscape formations like the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland heavily dominate the list of European World Heritage sites. This contrasts starkly with the concept of permanency found on other continents. An example of this is the imperial shrine at Ise, Japan. From a Western perspective, this shrine hardly qualifies as “old” since it is rebuilt every twenty years. However, from a Japanese perspective, it is old because it is rebuilt “in exactly the same way – using the same ancient instruments, materials – with each step of the process marked by appropriate ancient rituals” (Sahlins 2002: 9).

Although heritage has for a long time been defined primarily in terms of material objects, as “tangible heritage,” there has been a parallel interest in what is nowadays called “intangible heritage,” which for most of the past two centuries, however, remained in the shadow of the more prominent heritage of material objects and the built environment. To some extent and in some parts of the world, particularly Europe, North America, and Australia, this reflects the different social and political status of the signified: whereas monuments, works of fine art, castles, and cathedrals materially and visually project and transmit the heritage of the hegemony, folk songs and wisdom, as with many other traditional skills, tend to project and transmit heritage of the lower classes non-materially and orally.

Kristin Kuutma (Chapter 3) traces the emergence of folklore as an academic discipline and its subsequent involvement in cultural policy-making, including the contemporary transition from “folklore” to “intangible cultural heritage,” and the discipline’s contribution to the international management of heritage regimes. Originating during the period of nation-building, when they formed part of the creation of national cultural heritages, collections of folklore represent past repertoires and practices of mostly pre-industrial (peasant) lifestyles that nowadays often feed various linguistic, ethnic, or other local revival movements. As global power relationships at the turn of the twenty-first century are creating ever-shifting discourses of inclusion and exclusion, rootedness, and rights for possession, a need to identify and safeguard intangible cultural heritage was postulated, leading to the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, adopted in 2003, and commonly known as the Intangible Heritage Convention. Although intangible elements had always been included in understanding the significance of heritage places under the World Heritage Convention (1972), this new convention focused on and led to a system for evaluating and safeguarding intangible heritage in its own right.

Heritage in the post-war years was conceived as and called “cultural property,” an understanding and terminology that is still found today in relation to some disciplines (e.g. anthropology) and some forms of heritage (e.g. intellectual property). Pertti Anttonen has observed that “the cultural representations that are selected for making heritage-political claims are commonly called traditions, with a special emphasis on their character as cultural properties; that is, representations with an ownership label” (Anttonen 2005: 39). Ownership, lying at the heart of the notion of cu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• CHAPTER 1: The New Heritage Studies: Origins and Evolution, Problems and Prospects
• PART I: Expanding Heritage
• PART II: Using and Abusing Heritage
• PART III: Recasting Heritage
• Index
• End User License Agreement