Beverly Butler-Heritage and The Present Past

Handbook of Material Culture
Heritage and the Present Past
Contributors: Beverley Butler

Editors: Christopher Tilley & Webb Keane & Susanne Kchler & Michael Rowlands &
Patricia Spyer
Book Title: Handbook of Material Culture
Chapter Title: "Heritage and the Present Past"
Pub. Date: 2006
Access Date: November 04, 2014
Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd
City: London
Print ISBN: 9781412900393
Online ISBN: 9781848607972
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781848607972.n30
Print pages: 463-480
2006 SAGE Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
This PDF has been generated from SAGE knowledge. Please note that the pagination
of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781848607972.n30
[p. 463 ]
Chapter 29: Heritage and the Present Past

We are all too inclined as Lowenthal observes to populate the past
with people like ourselves, pursuing the same aims and responding
with similar feelings, albeit dressed up in different cultural costumes
Whether the concern is with people of the past or of the present,
otherness is here reduced to the cosmetic variety of consumer choice
(Ingold 1996: 204)

My chosen point of departure for this chapter is a debate which took place between
the historian David Lowenthal and a group of anthropologists the proposition of which
was: Is the past a foreign country? This theme was prompted by a book written by
Lowenthal, which is oft-cited as the foundational text of the heritage studies canon.
Entitled The Past is a Foreign Country (1985), as Lowenthal explains, the volume takes
as its guiding metaphor the opening lines of L.P. Hartley's novel The Go-between: The
past is a foreign country. They do things differently there (Lowenthal 1985: xvi). As
such Lowenthal makes an intervention which privileges a model of the past defined
in difference from the present as the critical dynamic of his book (ibid.). The ensuing
debate saw the above participants taking on a historical approach and a memorial
approach to the past respectively (Ingold 1996: 202). In so doing, as the chair of the
debate Ingold highlights, fundamental issues, concerning the relationship between
past and present, the construal of difference, the awareness of time and the respective
modes of history and memory as modes of apprehending the past or of bringing it to
bear in the present emerge as core preoccupations (Ingold 1996: 2012).
In what follows I take these key shifts accessed by the debate as the broad critical
framework from which to review the main preoccupations of heritage studies (past,
present, future) and to readdress the core question What constitutes heritage and
heritage value? My approach has been to critically rehearse the dominant explanatory
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models and metaphors put forward by various contributors, which, as my text illustrates,
operate across theoretical and empirical understandings of heritage, across a number
of different registers (for example, ideological, metaphysical) and across North-South
paradigms and contexts. As such, the first part, critically rehearses the historical
approach to the past in order to narrate the rise of heritage within the Western
imagination and within the academy. The second, by way of contrast, uses the
memorial approach as a starting point to chart out alternative or parallel heritages.
Writ large, this shift of focus takes me from a discussion of the past as a foreign
country to that of heritage as a powerful resource for creating a future and to the
recognition of how a fundamental reconceptualization of heritage is uniquely placed not
only to address claims about identity, ancestry and cultural transmission but to engage
with key moral-ethical issues to our times: notably, conceptualization of otherness and
the capacity for othering and, as such, core qualities of what it is to be human.
[p. 464 ]
The Historical Approach: Heritage in the

Western Imagination
Inside the Academy: Establishing the
Canon
The standard means of reviewing the rise of heritage is to begin by charting this
rise in terms of the emergence of heritage as a new discipline establishing itself
within academia. This is achieved by tracing the aforementioned historical approach
in terms of formative intellectual links made by historians from the 1960s and 1970s
onwards in their critical study of the past and by mapping the increased interest in
the related studies of tradition, landscape, identity and nation to the dynamics of
nostalgia, authenticity origins, time, place (for example, Lynch 1972, Plumb 1973,
Blythe 1969; see Merriman 1996 for a review). The initial focus of these authors critical
attention has typically been upon the Euro-North American academic context and upon
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an historical understanding of the construction or invention of heritage in the Western

imagination. Lowenthal's canonical text The Past is a Foreign Country (1985), as the
author himself states, is influenced by these above scholarly shifts which also provided
the chief motivation for his follow-up text The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of
History (1996), which appeared over a decade later.
As previously stated, Lowenthal's specific mobilization of a model or metaphor of the
past defined in difference from the present is important. It allows him to take forward
fellow historian Plumb's (1973) pronouncement on the death of the past a death
which is understood as synonymous with the shift from a pre-industrial to an ever
increasingly industrialized, urbanized modernity in order, more specifically, to address
the subsequent resurrection and new commodifications of the past. Lowenthal's
critical focus thus engages with a certain paradox: to show how the past, once virtually
indistinguishable from the present [i.e. pre-industrial revolution], has become an ever
more foreign realm, yet one increasingly infused by the present (Lowenthal 1985: xxv).
His emphasis then is upon a certain popular turn to the past increasingly expressed in
the material objectification and preservation of the vestiges of history in the form of
monuments, museums, sites which have come to characterize a dominant Eurocentric
definition of what constitutes the heritage (ibid).
Moreover, in order to interrogate this turn to the past Lowenthal focuses upon key
epochs to emphasize how the Western imagination has become bound up in the
establishment of lines of cultural transmission and claims to ancestry across ancient
and modern worlds. His focus thus highlights what are invested as nodal points of
rupture and reinvention: the Renaissance, the Enlightenment; nineteenth-century
Victorian Britain and revolutionary and post-revolutionary America (Lowenthal 1985:
xx-xxi). In critically rehearsing this trajectory I want to place alongside Lowenthal's text
other heritage texts similarly committed to developing these themes.
Heritage Revivalism and Redemption

Returning to the above-mentioned nodal points, the Renaissance is profiled by authors
as an epoch synonymous with the often creative reclamation of the archetypes
of antiquity which subsequently infused the whole of European culture and in
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so doing secured the West the acquisition of a past notably in the form of a
classical civilizational pedigree and ancestry (ibid). A potent example here is that
of the canonization of the ancient Alexandrina Mouseion/library as archetype and
ancient ancestor institution (Butler 2001a, b, 2003: see also Findlen 2000). This
act of reclamation in turn highlights core foundational features of traditional heritage
discourse. A key dynamic here is that what has become known as the Alexandrina
paradigm is underpinned by a myth of return and redemption (cf. Foucault 1964).
As such, this canonization of Alexandria can be seen as a particularization of a more
general sense in which the West invests heritage discourse as a redemptive formula
and as a medium by which to mythologize, reclaim and repossess lost pasts, imagined
homelands, ancient Golden Ages and to re-engage with roots and origins.
This wider myth of return and redemption also reveals a further core concern of
heritage discourse: that which holds in tension an initial interest in a return to the
past as a resource for intellectual, literary, metaphorical and metaphysical projects of
retrievalism and that which is concerned with heritage revivalism as synonymous with
literal, material objectification of the past. The former position sees the past invested
as a resource for spiritual/metaphysical refuge and renewal, as a quarry for ideas and
ideals and for the redemption of a lost authenticity of self/self-group. It is then with
[p. 465 ] the forward march of modernity that heritage acquires its now dominant
associations with more material substance and monumentality. As Lowenthal clarifies,
in the pre-industrial revolution period the physical remains of classical vestiges
suffered a certain neglect or even destruction when mined by the West for its own
works rather than protected against pillage and loss (Lowenthal 1985: xvi).
The specific and creative reclamation of the Alexandria paradigm has thus seen
the ancient Alexandrina objectified as the point of origin and template for archival
and museum institutions from the Renaissance onwards (notably the British Museum
and Louvre; see Lewis 1992: 10) and as the icon from which the traditional salvage
paradigm of heritage loss and preservation establishes its roots (Lowenthal 1985:
67). Crucially too, this act of canonization is motivated by what is characterized as
the traumatic loss of the ancestor institution, the result, it is argued, of an originary
act of iconoclasm (ibid.). The event embeds the Alexandrina paradigm in an entropic
poetics of melancholy, nostalgia and loss which draws from Aristotelian and Platonic
philosophical models and which is also the mechanism which gives birth to the
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repetitive desire to rebuild the institution on the ruins (Butler 2003). In this wider
process of what might be best termed as the Westernization of the origins and roots
of heritage discourse the broader foundational values of the classical world as the
birthplace, for example, of universalism, democracy, civilization humanism and
cosmopolitanism are also essentialized as core heritage values (ibid.) and as key
motivations underpinning modernity's ongoing heritage crusades (Lowenthal 1996).
Heritage Enlightenment
It is with the coming of the Enlightenment that what is couched as the ongoing
relationship or quarrel between Ancients and Moderns is subsequently re-expressed
as dialectic of reverence and rejection (Lowenthal 1996: xx-xxi). Lowenthal, for
example, argues that the classical tradition while remaining the font of veneration is
increasingly pitched in relationships with modernity's new loci of power and authority
(ibid.). This sees authors characterize the rise of heritage as inextricably bound up
with the rise of science, the decline of religious authority and the establishment of the
meta-narratives such as discourses of progress and rationality. Modernity and the
West as synonymous with the forward march of history, of capital and of imperial
ambition are highlighted as central to this context (see Walsh 1992). As such one can
trace the complex interactions in the construction of heritage discourse across rational,
romantic and colonial imaginations. Moreover, the crux of this interaction relates to
experiences of rupture, displacement and the concomitant traumatization of temporality
synonymous with episodes of radical change (ibid.). The effects of revolution both
political and industrial are, for example, credited with bringing crisis to notions of
identity, place and to notions of the past (ibid.). Urban migration, the creation of new
industrial landscape and ideals of nationhood and citizenship which notably the French
revolution ushers in are understood as inextricably bound up in experiences of timespace compression which exacerbate modernity's experiences of rootlessness, rupture,
displacement and estrangement (ibid.; see also Lowenthal 1985).
Again these changes are seen to encompass both metaphysical and more literal
experiences of loss and dislocation as both epistemological certainties and
traditional modes of life are put into crisis in the face of the unprecented pace of
change and trauma affecting both real and ontological worlds (Walsh 1992; Maleuvre
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1999). This results in what is regarded as an overdetermined investment in the

redemptive aspect of heritage. This creates a certain paradoxical context which sees
heritage bound up in both desires to revive (or more clearly, as Hobsbawm et al.
(1993) demonstrate, invent) tradition and to nationalize its monumental vestiges.
The museum and the creation of monumental heritage landscapes are credited as
key emblems of modernity and of the imagined community of nationhood (Anderson
1991). Heritage as buoyed up on the ebullience and confidence synonymous with
modernity's nation and empire building is, however, undercut by the recognition that the
redemption offered by a return to the past is only ever partial (Maleuvre 1999: 1).
This, in turn, leads some authors to highlight the intellectual empathetic identification
made by philosophers between the rise of heritage and recognition of the impossibility
of finding metaphysical comfort and cure capable of encompassing the metaphysical
trauma synonymous with modernity's experience and intellectualization of the opening
up of human and historical consciousness (ibid.). As such, heritage and archival spaces
emerge as modernity's privileged medium for reflecting upon the human condition and
for addressing the [p. 466 ] core question: What is it to be human? (cf. Bazin 1967;
Maleuvre 1999). For others it is poof that heritage is a transitory enchantment amid a
wider and more negative economy of Weberian disenchantment (Walsh 1992: 58). It
is here too that the death of the past is bound up in anxieties regarding the death of
the self with the subsequent turn to heritage indicative of attempts to deny, displace
and possibly mediate and manipulate the reality of mortality and/or to monumentalize
oneself'/ self-group as a strategy of securing a form of immortality (Huyssen 1995).
Nostalgia and Authenticity

It is from this complex context that authors highlight the deployment of certain motifs
and metaphors which are regarded as central to the legitimation of Western heritage
concepts and to the subsequent development of heritage practice. Notions of nostalgia
and authenticity or more correctly a nostalgia for authenticity are highlighted for
particular attention as core heritage values and as key underpinning and motivating
dynamics of modernity's escalating desire for roots and origins. The concept of
nostalgia, for example, is analysed by authors etymologically nostos, meaning return
to the native land, and algos, meaning grief and placed in the context not only of
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relationships between modernity's sense of cultural nostalgia for its Greek childhood
but of different historical expressions (Lowenthal 1985: 10). Some authors, for example,
have traced references to nostalgia both within antiquity for example, in the writings
of Aristotle, more specifically Plato, and in the texts of Homer and Virgil in terms of
their preoccupation with the heroic, pastoral past (ibid.; see also Bazin 1967) and
the nostalgia for antiquity. In the latter category, authors include thinkers such as
Petrarch, whose characterization of nostalgia reiterated the concept of the past as
refuge (Lowenthal 1985: 8).
Emphasis is also placed upon the seventeenth-century use of the term to describe a
physical complaint and an illness diagnosed as common in those who once away
from their native land languished, wasted away and even perished (Lowenthal
1985: 10). A condition, authors argue, synonymous with displacement through war
and economic rupture (Gregory 1998: 31). In this sense the disease can be seen
as a symptomization of the physical and emotional violence that characterised the
history of modernity and the concomitant desire of homecoming (ibid.). As critics show
nostalgia gained medical currency during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
where it was understood as part of a melancholic pathology and as such was used
as a legitimate medical diagnosis until the Second World War (Lowenthal 1985: 11).
What from Hegel through Darwin, Marx and Freud have been referred to as intellectual
pogroms on nostalgia have resulted in a negative, banalized version of nostalgia as
a cultural pathology related to a society's inability to cope with the present (Gregory
1998: 31). As Lowenthal has it: nostalgia is the universal catchword for looking
back (Lowenthal 1985: 4). Critical rearticulations of the term have, in turn, drawn out
the oppressive colonizing aspects of this trope and are best expressed in Rosaldo's
characterization of colonial nostalgia (Rosaldo 1989). A specific and enduring
connection, however, is made between the Romantic movement and nostalgia, which
not only see this motif mobilized as a reaction and resistance to the rise of rational
discourse but, as outlined below, is it bound up in the literalization of the search for
authenticity (Lowenthal 1985: xvii).
The concept of authenticity has similarly been analysed in terms of an initial affirmation
of ancient Greek culture as the space of origin, originality and thus authenticity
(McBryde 1997). These dynamics are subsequently pitched in relationships to the
Roman copy and with notions of the imitation and fake (ibid). The etymological
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term authenticus is also used to illustrate links between the notion of originality and
that of the author and authority (ibid.). Here the dynamic of the collective creative
emulation of ancient archetypes synonymous with the Renaissance period becomes
eclipsed by the construction of a science of preservation and conservation. Not only
does authenticity subsequently undergo rationalization to emerge as an objective
absolute category but custodial authority is given to a (first amateur and subsequently
professionalized) expert culture and to an emergent practice bound up in re-inscribing
authenticity within discourses of scientific proof and as legitimated in the material
analysis, in particular, of artefacts and monuments (Lowenthal 1996: 385). Within
this context emergent canons of taste and expertise are crucial too in legitimating
the auratic quality of the art work and the concept of the individual (male) genius as
creator (cf. Benjamin 1968). It is here that a historical anti-heritage critique or intellectual
museumopho-bia takes root and becomes preoccupied with the metaphysical
implications of the obvious [p. 467 ] inauthenticity as they see it of such domains
(Maleuvre 1999; Huyssen 1995).
As previously stated, the search for authenticity does, however, become increasingly
bound up in its territorialization as heritage. The Romantic movement's own
preoccupation with landscape, nature, the cult of the ruins, the relic and the souvenir
are crucial here, as is the authentication of vernacular architecture and settings. Here,
critics draw out the importance of the site established in 1873 by Artur Hazelius at
Skansen (Lowenthal 1985: xvii). The objective of this proto-heritage project was
to salvage local buildings, artefacts and folklore traditions which were disappearing
throughout Scandinavia owing to changes wrought by industrialization. Bolstering
patriotism was a further aim of this and related projects which are seen as indicative
of European and North American attempts to define nation heritage icons at both local
(folk life) and (elite) state level (see Walsh 1992: 957). Selecting and authenticating
national Golden Ages has seen, for example, the German Romantics privileging of
the Middle Ages, for example, as a site of redeemed culture and future utopia and
as the bedrock of German nationalism (Huyssen 1995: 19). It is with the shift into the
twentieth century that the definitions of heritage which originated from legal concepts
of inheritance as personal wealth typically handed down through family units became
aligned to a concept of public patrimony. As Lowenthal comments, not only did this lead
to people conceiving] of the past as a different realm but this new role heightened
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concern to save relics and restore monuments as emblems of communal identity,

continuity and aspiration (Lowenthal 1985: xvi).
Heritage Crusades and Religious

Metaphors
Lowenthal's text which follows fully centres upon heritage in its late twentieth-century
transformation from an elite preoccupation into a major crusade to save and celebrate
all that we inherit from the past (Lowenthal 1996: 2). Mobilizing a powerful religious
metaphor, Lowenthal argues, heritage relies on revealed faith rather than rational
proof (ibid.). Lowenthal's thesis echoes other theorists who have similarly positioned
heritage as a form of secular religion (cf. Horne 1984; Duncan 1995). These texts
have given further critical depth to the relationship of the rise of heritage to modernity's
experience of secularization, to the reorganization of religious experience and to the
redeployment of its civilizing rituals and theological languages. As such critics draw
out how this transfer of power and authority was made to serve the ideological needs
of the emerging bourgeois and to substantiate the nation state, civic democracies and
reproduce good citizens (Duncan 1995: 78).
In the contemporary context the museum as secular shrine and sacrilized heritage
1
landscapes (cf. MacCannell 1978/1989) are situated by such authors as stations

which map out a redemptive course for the performance of modernity's heritage
crusades. Horne's analysis of Europe as a great museum, for example, demonstrates
how former European pilgrim routes are now populated by tourist pilgrims armed with
travel guides as devotional texts (Horne 1984: 1). In his critical commentary on the
then Cold War ideological polarizations of context he explores how communist and
capitalist political cultures manipulate heritage in specific commodifications of power
which see them inscribe their own ceremonial agenda on the landscape and similarly
on the people (Horne 1984: 3). The patriarchal nature of heritage commodification is
also highlighted, as Horne points out, in that apart from the Virgin Mary and Joan of
Arc there is an absence of female heritage figures (Horne 1984: 4). Moreover, unlike
the stated aspiration of heritage as a vehicle of humanism, Horne concludes with
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the need to challenge the negative, alienating aspects of heritage tourism, which he
characterizes as synonymous with human life drained of cultural meanings (Horne
1984: 249).
Intellectual Ancestors and Heritage as

Commodity
An exploration of the methodologies which underpin these texts and the emergent
critical study of heritage shows that alongside historians preoccupied with historical
conceptualizations of the past are critics who engage with the broader intellectual
shifts taking place within the social sciences and draw from, among others, Marxist,
sociological, postmodern, post-structuralist and anthropological theories as alternative
explanatory models. It is, however, the Marxist-influenced critiques (which Duncan 1995
and Horne 1984 share an intellectual engagement with) that are mobilized initially by
authors to articulate more explicitly the political/ideological agendas which dominate
the rise of heritage. This genre of critique led by what one critic refers [p. 468 ]
to as the lure of polemics is regarded as as valid for the analysis of heritage vis-vis the imperialist past as it is in the Age of Corporate Sponsorship (Huyssen 1995:
16). This early canon of ideological critiques has, therefore, done much to challenge,
problematize and politicize the assumed neutrality of culture and heritage and has been
particularly effective in the analysis of the European and North American museum and
heritage boom of the 1970s and 1980s. (See Huyssen 1995 and Merriman 1991 for a
critical review.)
Ground-breaking papers in this canon include Marxist interpretations of heritage sites
such as Colonial Williamsburg by Leone (1973) and Wallace (1981) (see Merriman
1991: 1416). The application of Althusserian frameworks and the positioning of
heritage and cultural institutions as part of Repressive State Apparatus have
likewise drawn out the use of heritage to legitimate top down dominant ideology (see
Meltzer 1985 on the National Air and Space Museum, Washington; Merriman 1991:
16). From these critical positions the above authors show that heritage ideology is
used variously to substantiate the American Dream (ibid.). These critiques were
also accompanied by a first wave of feminist critiques and texts which highlight the
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heritage culture's complicity in empire and in oppressive characterizations of race

and cultural difference (see Simpson 1996 for a critical review). The rejectionism,
pessimism and theoretical negativity of these critiques which see heritage as bad
faith, false consciousness and as social control (see Merriman 1991: 16), as a
patriarchal construct (Porter 1996) and a racist colonial enterprise thus have been
noted (Coombes 1994).
Furthermore, while these studies were to be offset by others committed to highlighting
the more positive and potentially liberating role of heritage (Merriman 1991: 17)
critics have claimed that the very bad press given by intellectuals from both right
and left, though especially perhaps the latter to heritage is linked in turn to the
aforementioned historical anti-heritage discourse and intellectual museumophobia (Huyssen 1995: 1819). Not only are Nietzsche and Marx's characterizations of
the past as burden and nightmare regarded as major interventions within this critical
genealogy but the Frankfurt school of critical theory has been identified as a highly
symbolic intellectual ancestor (ibid.). Critics draw out the importance of Adorno's
characterization of the deathly museal consciousness (Adorno 1981) and Benjamin's
unveiling of the quasi-religious rituals and auratic qualities of the museum space to
new intellectual explorations of authenticity and ritual agenda and in terms of critical
concerns with both the negative and more liberating aspects of technical/mechanical
reproduction (Benjamin 1968).
Heritage critiques also need to be placed in the broader context of the Frankfurt school's
radical critique of modernity. The famous characterization of the Enlightenment project
as mass deception and the complicity of its associated ideologies of progress,
objectivity, modernization, universalism in projects of totalitarianism have, as
Huyssen states, revealed how heritage and museological commodification too are
implicated in the complexities of fascism and Third International communism (Huyssen
1995: 17). It is, however, the characterization and commodification of mass culture as
synonymous with a culture industry and as ultimately bound up in the preservation of
capitalism that emerges as an ongoing critical theme (Walsh 1992: 64). For example,
the strategic choice of a book title made by the journalist/academic Hewison allowed
him to ground his specific rallying call to resist the massive commercialization and
commodification of contemporary culture in the Frankfurt school critical genealogy. As
such his The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline (1987) was a clear echo
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of Horkheimer and Adorno's The Culture Industry (1979) and is a text which has come
to symbolize the most recent revival of the anti-heritage thesis.
Hewison was one of a number of critics or heritage baiters (cf. Samuel 1994: 259)
(these included left-wing academics and media commentators) in the UK context, who
together were responsible for the production of a series of polemics which drew out
the complicities between the heritage boom of the 1980s and new forms of political
commodification inextricably linked to the rise of the New Right. Wright's On Living in
an old country (1985), for example, characterizes Britain as a society which seemed to
be making not just a virtue out of the past but a set of political principles (Wright 1985:
1). The specific focus of what has become known as the heritage debate was upon a
context of rapid change in which the growth of profit-making heritage centres, open-air
museums, heritage attractions at an unprecedented rate saw the vast heritagization
of both rural and newly redundant urban landscapes. Again in the UK context authors
not only regarded this as symptomatic of a country in decline and of a society unable
to face the future but identified specific falsifications of history [p. 469 ] motivated by
new top-down expressions of vulgar nationalism and jingoism in which the desire
to manipulate a deep Englishness gives substance not only to rampant Europhobia
but also to a wider attack on multiculturalism and to the mobilization of an anti-foreign/
anti-asylum discourse which helped give political substance and a reality to Fortress
Europe (see Walsh 1992; Samuel 1994; Hall 2000). Concomitant analyses of European
notably German and French and US contexts drew out the same major themes
and collectively have critically defined the heritage debate as a key contour of the
Euro-North American culture wars (see Sherman and Rogoff 1994; Lowenthal 1996;
Huyssen 1995).
Postmodern Heritage
Related theorizations of the above dynamics have opened up further intellectualpolitical analyses by specifically positioning the heritage debate and the policies of
the new right as symptomatic of the wider postmodern condition (Walsh 1992: 61).
As Huyssen states this stages the anti-heritage debate as the latest instance of the
quarrel [specifically recast as a] battle between moderns and postmoderns (Huyssen
1995). Heritage commodification is subsequently pitched in relationships with what
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Walsh defines as the world of the post a world simultaneously postmodern, postethical, post-moral (Walsh 1992: 2) and with what Huyssen further refers to as the
end of everything discourse (Huyssen 1995: 13). Here the broad characterization
emerges of postmodernity as synonymous with the New Right belief (cf. Fukyama
1992) that the capitalist West has achieved a position of unparalleled supremacy in
both space and time, thus signalling the end of history and confidence in the assertion
that the American Dream is now a reality (Walsh 1992: 67). Authors have responded
by mapping out the more nightmarish implications of a postmodern landscape in which
the predominant motif/metaphor to emerge is that of the hyper-reality and simulated
spectacles and of the theme park (Walsh 1992: 11315).
Baudrillard, dubbed the postmodern prophet of doom, and his genre of nihilistic
hypercriticism are mobilized by authors alongside Eco's Faith in Fakes: Travels in
Hyperreality in the United States (1986) in order to draw out how heritage emerges as
empty-signifier exhibiting the crisis in which reality has been lost to an inauthenticity
theorized as both a dehistoricization and a simultaneous generation by models of a
real without origin or reality (Baudillard, quoted in Walsh 1992: 58) and expressed as
a collection of simulations and simulacra synonymous with the simultaneous death of
nostalgia and birth of hyper-nostalgia (Walsh 1992: 589). Moreover, this postmodern
themepark is located within a genealogy which links Skansen as proto-heritage and
as the model for Colonial Williamsburg and Greenfield Village (both of which are
understood as, mythical place[s] built on the whims and dreams of the world's greatest
capitalist, i.e. Rockefeller and Ford respectively): these latter sites, in turn, are seen as
a prophecy of postmodern heritage and as the prompt for the development in 1955 of
Walt Disney's theme park development (Walsh 1992: 957).
The motif of Disneyfication can also be linked to further theorizations of the
museal sensibility. The theorist Jeudy for example, analyses a postmodern force
of musealization in terms of its commodification of whole industrial regions, inner
cities and in terms of the self-musealisation synonymous with new technological
consumptions of self bound up in new simulation apparatus (Huyssen 1995: 30
1). For critics such as Walsh and Huyssen this critique is undertaken in order to
draw out the neo-colonizing aspect time-space compression at stake which, in
turn, is used to legitimate the superiority of one culture [the West] over all others in
space and time (Walsh 1992: 67) simultaneously re-establishing them as cultural
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mediators (Huyssen 1995: 35). It is here too that Walsh argues the need to return to
the political real in order to bring to bear the complicities of the heritage discourse
in contemporary neo-colonial violence synonymous with society's unquestioning
2
acceptance of the need to go to war (Walsh 1992: 2). Both authors ultimately seek to
identify some critical role for heritage in the future. For Huyssen this is located in the
opening spaces for reflection and counter-hegemonic memory (Huyssen 1995: 15)
and as a means to find an effective mode of cultural mediation in an environment in
which demands for multiculturalism and the realities of migrations and demographic
shifts clash increasingly with ethnic strife, culturalist rascisms, and a general resurgence
of nationalism and xenophobia (Huyssen 1995: 35). While for Walsh (mobilizing
Jameson's critical perspectives regarding the reclamation of the real and of place) this
is located in a certain strategic revivalism of heritage as a means to reinstate [p. 470 ]
a temporal depth and a sense of place (Walsh 1992: 150).
Sociological Critiques and Reinvestment

The above shifts also show a certain relationship with a broader critical shift from
heritage rejectionism to reinvestment. Alongside the aforementioned ideological
critiques can be sociological critiques, for example, which position heritage and
museum spaces as sites for the reorganisation of cultural capital (Huyssen 1995:
17). These, in turn, have been responsible for a series of critiques which address
reception theory (influenced by the work of Bourdieu) in the form of visitor surveys
and increasingly non-visitor surveys in order to reshape heritage to address objectives
of access, empowerment and inclusion (see Merriman 1989; Hooper-Greenhill 2001).
An initial impetus for this transformation came from within the museum world and with
calls for the definition of a new museology (capable of spanning both theoretical (Vergo
1989) and practical worlds (Mayrand 1985)). This movement is synonymous too with
the emergence of the eco-museum, a critical muse-ological model conceived of as
an anti-museum, which inverts the notion of the museum as classical temple and
agent of decontextualization in favour of a reconceptualization of the museum within its
authentic contextualized landscape (see Walsh 1992: 1614). Here then the concepts
of the museum and site merge. In terms of intellectual shifts as Walsh expands further,
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The origin of the eco-museum and deconstruction are the same Not only was this
bound up in the desire to deconstruct the totalization of government (and more
specifically the French government) and as synonymous with the emergence of poststructuralism but also, he argues, in the light of the failure of the radical politics of
mid to late 1960s, the earlier war in Algiers, and the break-up of the Empire (Walsh
1992: 162). While theorists support the democratization of access to the past this ecomuseum brings with it calls for the extension of such a vision to encompass heritage
proper as a category reconceptualized beyond or away from its rejection as Disneyfied
ideology (Walsh 1992: 170).
The historian Samuel more recently reiterated this position by challenging the above
rehearsed heritage baiters polemical attacks on the heritage industry by drawing out
the emergence of alternative characterizations of heritage created by the people
and as such he argues these are a democratic force which offers points of access
to ordinary people and constructs a wider form of belonging and a strategy for
constructing a pluralist society (Samuel 1994: 259). His largely celebratory thesis can
be placed, for example, alongside Hall's critical investigation of the issues at stake in the
relationship between heritage, cultural diversity and inclusion (Hall 2000).
The formation of Heritage Studies within the academy has similarly had a troubled
journey from rejectionism to reinvestment. As Huyssen argues, the museum
changed from its role as whipping boy to favourite son in the family of cultural
institutions (Huyssen 1995: 14) and as such has undergone a radical transformation
which has seen Museum Studies consolidate itself within the academy as a
vocational, training course and increasingly as a subject for theo-rization across
disciplinary divides. This process has in turn legitimated and been legitimated by the
professionalization of the museum world. The museum culture in response initially
defined itself in difference from heritage and as such the term held little credibility within
the professional and academy worlds. (In the latter domain heritage was largely still
regarded by many as a Disney subject.) Newer shifts, however, have seen the growth
of both postgraduate and undergraduate heritage courses which have signalled a new
phase of engagement. Heritage has thus been recouped as an intellectualized dynamic
within the academy while recognition has been given to heritage discourse as a crucial
component of globalized futures not only in terms of job markets but as a medium, for
example, of human and cultural rights.
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As Lowenthal argues the search for heritage dominates the contemporary global
context. As such he argues that the once Western/Eurocentric preoccupation with
roots and origins has now become an international phenomena as massive migration
sharpens nostalgia and the trauma of refugee exodus has defined new heritagehungry constituencies (Lowenthal 1996: 9). Here, he argues, are not only AfricanAmericans and Italian-Americans, for example, part of this context but Palestinians,
Liberians, Rwandans and Bosnians are also part of this contemporary heritage
constituency (ibid.). One is, however, left with the struggle of opening up of the above
largely Westernized heritage discourse with its Eurocentric base to a wider global
context it is this context I address in part two.
[p. 471 ]
The Memorial Approach: Alternative and

Parallel Heritages
To speak of the past as a foreign country is to make a metaphorical
statement about difference. always caught between the twin poles
of anodyne difference and absolute otherness. Remaining mindful of
these poles we must steer a cause between them as best we can. To
pretend that the differences highlighted by the metaphor are ephemeral
is a delusion.
(Harvey, in Ingold 1996: 224).
Anthropologizing Heritage: Memorial

Approaches
As stated in my introduction, in this second part of the chapter I want to return to the
debate staged between Lowenthal and anthropologists which critically addresses the
question: is the past a foreign country? in order to use this as a framework from which
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to draw out new and alternative concepts and models for the theo-rization of heritage
discourse. At stake is a radical redefinition of what constitutes heritage and heritage
value and a critical shift of focus away from Eurocentic models, frames and sources
and from the Western academy's intellectual preoccupations with internal identity
crises and pronouncements of its own death and resurrection (cf. Huyssen 1995:
33) and a movement towards understanding alternative models of cultural transmission,
ancestry and memory work. Anthropological understandings of memory work, for
example, crucially bring into view non-Western contexts, concepts and practices and
in so doing pose questions regarding relationships to the other and the capacity for
othering which are central to this critical context. As such, the focus on the memorial
approach to the past also provides a means to bring into focus what can be best be
described as alternative or parallel heritages and alternative framings of difference.
Feeley-Harnik, in defining the memorial approach, begins by making her own critical
return to L.P. Hartley's novel in order to engage in a radical refocusing of issues.
Here, she argues, the central theme of his [Hartley's] story is not the past as a foreign
country, but how the past has come to seem that way, owing to energetic forgetting
and desperate attempts to deaden feeling. And it is about the going-between from
which new life comes (Feeley-Harnik, in Ingold 1996: 212). Highlighting relationships
between the key dynamics of memory work, forgetting, embodiment and personhood,
she continues, we have no knowledge of past people except through present people;
we have no way of knowing others except through ourselves (ibid.), with Ingold arguing
further that the placement of mind and body in the world presupposes a history of
past relationships. Enfolded in the consciousness of the self, as its memory, this past is
active and present (Ingold 1996: 204).
Calls for adoption of the memorial approach also manifest as calls for a radical
critique of the orthodox notion, in cognitive psychology, of memory as a store, a cabinet
of images and recollections from which the mind can pull out whatever it needs for
different purposes and its underpinning Eurocentric schema (ibid.). The point is
reiterated by Kchler when seconding the motion: we have also to do away with the
idea contained in the notion that the past is stored in a distant, foreign place waiting
to be opened up through selective recollection (Kchler, in Ingold 1996: 2267). She
argues rather that The presenting of the past in memory is relevant in the sense that
it is self-relational and thus involved in the fashioning of identity, but this in itself forms
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a predisposition for certain aspects of the past to be incorporated within personal or

cultural history (ibid.).
Moreover, the memorialist anthropological concern with the presenting of the
past in memory is detailed further as a concern with various acts of recollection
and commemoration in which events which actually took place in the past
are represented (literally made present again) whether in writing, oral narrative,
monumental sculpture or dramatic performance (Ingold 1996: 202). This approach
highlights how so-called authentic reconstruction synonymous with the dominant
heritage forms outlined in section one far from bringing the past to bear in the present,
tends to highlight the disjunction (Ingold 1996: 203). It is here that Feeley-Harnik
privileges alternative approaches to memory (including ecological approaches)
as a means to go beyond past/present dichotomies (old universalisms and new
relativisms) to engage with non-Western expressions of cultural transmission and
memory work (Feeley-Harnik, in Ingold 1996: 2134). Here, for example, she refers
to the weeping bird sound word songs of Kaluli funerals and gisalo ceremonies to
illustrate alternative paradigms [p. 472 ] which, she states, evoke powerful images
of landscapes, paths and places through which, as they harden in the course of the
singing, living people reconnect with their ancestors in seen and unseen worlds (ibid.).
These practices can also be understood as alternative means of understanding a core
heritage dynamic: that of reconnecting to ancestors. As such, this can be set alongside
the aforementioned historical approach and Western meta-genealogies which in
cultural-historiographic terms, for example, have seen the privileging of classical
origins, Greek memory and Aristotelian concepts of culture as a means to define and
reconnect to ancestry.
The memorialist approach is also crucial in problematizing further key concepts that
underpin the historical approach. Moreover, further core heritage motifs such as the
directionality of time's arrows and the redemptive formula are highlighted for critical
attention (Feeley-Harnik, in Ingold 1996: 21718). While Feeley-Harnik rehearses how
European past-to-present directional histories are associated with bringing particular
kinds of redemption in territorially defined states, she challenges this paradigm by
arguing, I see no clear direction, no foreign country against which we might see or
measure our redemptive nativity, as it were our renewed becoming (ibid.). Here
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the Holocaust is singled out for discussion as a powerful indicator of the controversy
concerning the ability to claim that the past exists at all (ibid.). Questions of the
relative merit of evidence in terms of conventional historical data, archival documents
and the substantial convictions of people whose memories are divisible from their
flesh and blood (ibid.) are critically discussed. She argues, For North Americans and
Europeans, these are not remote questions: they are concretely embodied in people,
notably, survivors (ibid.). These discussions are placed within her wider call for an
understanding of what she terms the placedness of time (Feeley-Harnik, in Ingold
1996: 216). Here she states, The past is not a foreign or distant country; it is the very
ground on which, in which, with which we stand, move and otherwise interact; out
of which we continually regenerate ourselves in relations with others, partly through
distanciation (ibid.). Her illustrations focus upon other forms of traumatic pasts, for
example Malagasy pasts and experiences of slavery, and in so doing reject the
dominant focus on space-time relationships in favour of centring issues upon the
appropriation of land (ibid.).
A shared desire subsequently emerges in terms of how the political real operates
across these two historical and memorialist approaches. In critical support of
Lowenthal's motion, Harvey intervenes to reiterate Eric Wolf's call for anthropologists
to discover history (Harvey, in Ingold 1996: 222). She thus attempts to offer an
alternative understanding of the past and of heritage to that operating at the level of
international Expo culture which she sees as promoting a tasteful, sanitised ubiquitous
difference that we produce for ourselves, in the vicious circle of what has been
called postplural nostalgia where the innovations and changes that produce variety
have simultaneously destroyed tradition, convention and choice (Harvey, in Ingold
1996: 220). She continues, [Wolf] stressed, that he was not referring to Western
history divided into separate nations but the contacts, connections, linkages and
interrelationships (Harvey, in Ingold 1996: 2223). Harvey states her interest is rather
in how memory operates to humanise such interrelationships while also arguing the
strategic benefits of retraining a model which addresses the nature of immensurability
between the past and the present as a means to more directly address attitudes to
otherness (Harvey, in Ingold 1996: 2212). Here a study of the past and of heritage
is argued to be a means too of readdressing alternative and parallel understandings
of first contact, the extremes of foreignness and the image of absolute other (ibid.).
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Issues which have re-emerged too in the wake of 11 September 2001 and the ensuing
war against terror.
Kchler, as Feeley-Harnik's seconder, consolidates these main critical trajectories by
putting forward an alternative view which restores the past to its active engagement
in the present, not as a fictional by-product of that present, but as a constituent of the
real world (Kchler, in Ingold 1996: 2267). Here she reiterates her commitment to
defining a model of cultural transmission that can be mobilized in the shaping of the
future (ibid.). This model is subsequently placed alongside a complex therapeutics
(rather than grand narrative redemption) of remembering and forgetting and questions
concerning strategies for alternative reconceptualizations of past, present and future
and of otherness and othering (Ingold 1996: 423). Beneath these core agendas
emerges a sense in which any reconceptualization of the past and of heritage beyond
Eurocentric paradigms is inextricably related to a certain humanization of the discourse
which is bound up in a contemporary politics of return, redistribution, respect and
recognition and with a complex politics of [p. 473 ] memory work. In what follows I
give detail to these dynamics.
Heritage as Memory
The above shifts of discourse give recognition to how dynamics both within and
significantly from outside the academy have established lines of debate, action
and have influenced, if not at times dictated, the radical re-vision of heritage value.
This alternative perspective, for example, highlights how the archival compulsion
to return to origin and to revive tradition is now not only seen as symptomatic
of the profound sense of cultural loss and erosion in the Western imaginary but is
increasingly present in non-Western contexts due to the feelings of cultural loss
caused by contemporary experiences of globalization. The consequences of such
experiences are capable of framing alongside the West's invention of the past and
modernity's rise of heritage and concomitant Eurocentric urges to build lieux de
mmoire (places of memory) because there are no more milieux de mmoire (real
environments of memory) (Maleuvre 1999: 59) contemporary acts of repossession in
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which the dream to both define and repossess one's lost heritage endures, as does an
4
increased faith in, and calls for, culture as cure (Butler 2003).
In this sense new investments are being made in the archive as a place of return,
diagnosis and cure and thus as a potent locus for the narrativization of traumatic
loss. One can include here, for example, the South African Truth and Reconciliation
Commission (see Derrida 2004). With a more critical edge the historical anti-archival
discourse has not only provided a mobilization of the more subversive models of
memory (from, for example, Nietzsche, Benjamin and Adorno to Derrida) to destabilize
modernity's dominant preoccupations with a stifling historicism (see Maleuvre
1999) and its archival traumas (Derrida 1996) as a searing internal critique of the
Westernization of heritage, but has seen critics raise questions about the haunting of
the archive by those constituencies exiled, marginalized and misrepresented within this
sphere. Here, for example, case-study contextualizations take in non-Western contexts
such as China (Feuchtwang 2000a, b).
Similarly the memorialization of modernity's violent conflicts has not only witnessed the
centring of Holocaust memory within heritage discourse (Young 1993) but has seen
the definition of historical and contemporary sites of human suffering, genocide and
terror across the globe (Duffy 2001). It is here too that heritage discourse is confronted
with certain crises of the representation. The notion of the crisis of representation,
famously articulated by Adorno, Lyotard, Levinas and others following the Holocaust,
has, for example, implicated the act of monumentalization as at risk of repeating the
same totalizing logic that underpinned the rationalization of the Holocaust itself (see
Adorno 1949/1973; Young 1993; Radstone 2000). These dynamics have, in turn, not
only given rise to recent interventions synonymous with the counter-monument (Young
1993) and discussions of post-memory (Radstone 2000) but in other contexts of
suffering, controversies have similarly raged over the appropriate strategies for the
objectification of memory in architectural form and the moral-ethical framing of the ritual
performance of memory work and mourning in contexts of murder (Duffy 2001). It is
here too that psychoanalytic and other theories of memory and of trauma theory have
generated a significant body of texts (Forty and Kchler 1999; Antze and Lambek 1998;
Kwint 1999; Radstone 2000). These have offered an alternative means, for example,
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to investigate the impulse to commemorate as part of acts of sacrifice and healing

(Rowlands 1999).
It is here, however, that the limits of memory discourse need to be brought into view.
One can argue that memory and trauma, like heritage itself, can be seen as Western
concepts and emerging from a Eurocentric base (see Yates 1978). As such, this raises
questions concerning the need to apprehend specific cultural practices in terms of
both tangible and intangible rituals, performances and commemorative strategies
in non-Western contexts of suffering. Das and Feuchtwang, for example, use the
alternative conceptualization of critical events and cataclysmic events to explore local
responses to experiences of violence in India's (Das 1995) and China's recent past
respectively (Feuchtwang 2000a, b). The challenge of moving beyond what might be
defined as a Holocaust paradigm of suffering and redemption and the problematization
of terms, such as, trauma, loss, mourning and acts of working through and closure
cross-culturally is, however, still an outstanding agenda. With the memorialization of
sites synonymous with transatlantic slavery, the Gulags, the Palestinian Nakba (the
catastrophe of 1948) and of genocide, in among other contexts, Armenia, Croatia,
Cambodia, Nigeria and Rwanda, these questions appear more urgent than ever (see
Duffy 2001).
[p. 474 ]
Heritage as Well-being
Alternative readings of Eurocentric sources have, however, successfully drawn out
debates on otherness and strategies of othering. Freud's therapeutic schema and
his preoccupation with notions of speaking cures and, more particularly, his radical
inversion of dominant memory models in order to profile the dynamic of forgetting
have provided a basis for the radical rethinking of heritage across North-South. For
postcolonial critics, for example, Freud's work not only offers significant insights into
the relationship between heritage and the unconscious but as Said (2003), Spivak
(1992, 1993) and Bhabha (1994) have demonstrated, into non-Western identity work.
Moreover, Freud's theorizing of a disturbance of memory (Freud 1936/1984: 443
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56) as an exploration of how the literalization of icons and images of the past in the
present has the potential to access submerged and repressed memories has been reworked as a means to understanding the complex psychodynamics and interactions of,
among other factors, materiality, memory and persons-object relations, with the more
revelatory dimensions of heritage rituals (see Rojek 1997).
Heritage as a site of contestation, conflict and in terms of competing interpretations
of sites and monuments has also resulted in clashes in which the cultural heritage has
become a scene of violence and even death (see Layton et al. 2001 on the destruction
of the mosque at Ayodhya, India). Similarly dominant discourse on iconoclasm has
not only met its radical other in the Taliban's destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas
in Afghanistan (dubbed by UNESCO Director General Matsurra as a crime against
culture) and in other cultural fundamentalisms (Stolke 1995) synonymous with
ethnic cleansing but has been itself problematized by new characterizations of
heritage as a renewable resource (see Holtorf 2001). This shift is captured by calls to
actively and responsibly engage in renewing the past in our time rather than simply
preserve and conserve and thereby sustain the monumental vestiges left by posterity
(ibid.). The contemporary focus upon intangible heritage similarly offers alternative
conceptualizations of culture (see http://www.unesco.org/).
What has not yet been fully centred within a critical heritage discourse is a broader
cross-cultural exploration of concepts of well-being. Perhaps a concept such as
heritage magic could be called upon here in order to apprehend insights into diverse
global contexts in which, for example, strategies for the prevention of shock and fear
and everyday practices which seek to bring about cure, well-being and protection
are an essentialized part of what it is to be human (see Meneley 2004). This act of
reconceptualization also holds the possibility of accessing further insight into contexts
in which people (as tourists, restorers, refugees) attempt to create narrative to reveal
and to potentially heal past suffering and engage objects and places in this process
(Scarry 1998; Hoskins 1998; Parkin 1999).
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UNESCO and New Global Constituencies

These above themes define the complex, hybridized nature of dominant and alternative
heritage discourse in the contemporary global context. This is a context which has also
been problematized by Derrida in his deconstructionist reading of the major global
culture broker, UNESCO. Derrida argues the need for UNESCO to make a conceptual
and moral-ethical break with its historical, cultural and metaphysical preoccupation
7
with Greek memory and Greek origins (Derrida 2002b: 40) . He further argues that
UNESCO's origins are bound up in an Occidental ontological tradition whose violences
have displaced, among others, Egyptian, Jewish, Arabic memory (ibid.). Derrida's
point, however, is to make a claim that even at origin, in its Greek moment, there was
already some hybridization, some grafts, at work, some differential element within
UNESCO's foundational philosophies (ibid.).
It is this hybridizing force which Derrida sees as UNESCO's subversive dynamic, as it
reveals how the organization necessarily participates in an othering of its foundational
values. Derrida's final appeal is for the mobilization of a new ethics capable of reenvisioning the institution as an essentialized part of a new internationalism (no longer
tied to exclusively Kantian universalizing values) which will open up UNESCO's logic
and its existence as a truly world institution (Derrida 2002b: 74). He sums up this
strategy in terms of a moral-ethical debt, duty, response and responsibility towards
the archive of another to difference and to the simultaneous opening-up the selfvalidating aspect of the institution to the voice of the other (Derrida 2002b: 23) and to
a remodelled future institutional cosmopolitics (Derrida 2002b: 40). Furthermore, [p. 475
] Derrida's broader discussions of cosmopolitanism and hospitality are rooted in both
refugee and asylum rights and in critical reflections on amnesty truth and reconciliation,
which he regards as an integral part of his moral-ethical project of restoring heritage
to dignity and creating a just future (Derrida 2004: 5).
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Indigenizing Heritage
This sense of heritage as a resource for defining a just future is perhaps nowhere
more pronounced and more contested than in the utilization and reworking of heritage
8
by new constituencies notably indigenous groups as a powerful metaphor by

which to express historical and ongoing grievance and injustice and as bound up
in accompanying demands not only for the restitution of cultural objects and human
remains but of human dignity justice and respect (Rowlands 2002). Contemporary
debates on cultural rights and cultural property have moved hand in hand with
subsequent attempts to indigenize heritage, to reclaim land and to reinterpret sacred
sites (see Niec 1998). This has often wielded a critical edge, confronting the heritage
culture with its own complicity in the often violent appropriation of land, artefacts
(including cultural treasures and secret sacred material), human remains and in the
scientific, cultural and intellectual colonization of other cultures (see Simpson 1996;
Fforde 2004).
Here, for example, the development of culture and ethnic-specific cultural centres and
indigenous meeting places has offered new engagements with alternative dynamics
of cultural transmission (Simpson 1996). Not only have such institutions repossessed
tradition but have witnessed a hybridization of knowledge and cultural forms that has
fundamentally problematized dominant motifs of spectator-ship, authorship, control and
exhibition (ibid.). Similarly, critical reconceptualizations of ethnographic representation
have drawn out alternative strategies of cultural reciprocity in cultural spaces in, for
example, in South East Asia and the Pacific (Stanley 1998). Heritage as living tradition
and as part of expressions of local control and empowerment has likewise defined
the Vanuatu Cultural Centre (Geismar and Tilley 2003) and as a particular model of
what a true post-museum (cf. Hooper-Greenhill 2001) may represent. The strategy of
anthropologizing the West and the profiling of ethnographic methodologies have also
resulted in research into Western heritage contexts, such as Colonial Williamsburg
(Handler and Gable 1997) and London's Science Museum (MacDonald 2001).
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Provincializing Heritage
One is thus confronted with both the limits of traditional heritage discourse and its
possible futures in terms of the ability to embrace the above and other parallel and
alternative heritages. Here one can find a resonance with the postcolonial critic
Chakrabarty's (2000) assertion that the key values, concepts and paradigms that
emerged from European thought are inadequate to understand non-European life
worlds. Therefore, the future reconceptualization of a globally responsive and moral
and ethically responsible heritage studies discourse depends on the ability to address
Chakrabarty's broader project of provincializing Europe and strategizing attempts to
apprehend non-Western histories, subaltern memories and other modernities (ibid.).
This is accompanied by the need to look beyond the existing or established canon
of cultural heritage texts in order to refocus our attention upon a wider scholarship
committed to further disrupting and displacing dominant heritage. The concept and
reality, therefore, of a Chinese modernity or Arab identity and heritage as a product of
these communities own long-term history not just of contact need to be considered
alongside theorists calls to provincialize the place of Europe within our understanding
of the dynamics of cultural power and influence and as a means to challenge the
presumed universalism of human and cultural values (ibid.).
Postcolonial theory, although still a shamefully under-theorized area within mainstream
heritage studies, offers a potent insight into key themes of identity, representation and
the mediation of identity. To return to the work of Spivak (1988) and Bhabha (1994),
the project apprehending the subaltern voice and the critical reconceptualization of
mimicry have done much to challenge dominant Eurocentric notions of authenticity.
As such, these critics make it clear that the intellectual must resist nostalgic desires to
reconstruct the subaltern as a lost object and to recover the pure form and redeem
the unified, true and unmediated voice of the people and instead argue the need
for a more critical, subtle line in strategies of representation and in the mediation of
identity (Spivak 1988). From this starting point both the tactical mobilization of forms of
mimicry and [p. 476 ] strategic essentialism and more metaphysical preoccupations
with Greek Jew identities are addressed and problematized by these authors (Spivak
9
1992) .
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Heritage as a New Humanism

The broad shift of this chapter is a movement from the historical approach to heritage
and its focus on the past as a foreign country to that of heritage as an essentialized
resource for creating a future in the contemporary global context. The need to define a
set of new and alternative agendas, concepts, methodologies and research questions
oriented towards engaging with this context, as the above also demonstrates, is
a project still in its infancy. What is clear, however, is that this urgent need for a
reconceptualization of heritage discourse at both intellectual and operational level
is based upon alternative sets of values, critical approaches, theorizations and lived
experiences which are located outside mainstream heritage studies and, as such,
remain largely unrecognized. The question of what constitutes heritage? therefore
demands a shift towards a consideration of: what are current constituencies of heritage
in the global context? How are these needs and futures to be communicated and
represented in terms of heritage values? As such, these constituencies, which notably
include displaced, diasporic, transnational, indigenous cultures and cultures in conflict,
need to be fully centred as the basis for heritage studies articulation of its own possible
futures.
As Chakrabarty argues, the failure to be responsive to lifeworlds not yet visible
within current framings would leave heritage studies in ignorance of the majority of
humankind and, as such, it would be a redundant force (Chakrabarty 2000: 29). With
this in mind, heritage critics would do well to engage in wider calls from elsewhere
in the academy for the definition of a new humanism (cf. Said 2004), no longer tied
to the oppressive filter of Western liberalism, which is not only capable of critically
apprehending alternative conceptualizations of otherness and othering but which is
responsive to the besieged subject (Said 2003). I would argue that a resonant starting
point for remodelling heritage discourse on these lines requires the enactment of
a strategic return to the core preoccupation of heritage studies with the question of
what it is to be human. Thus alongside cultural and human rights discourse alternative
experiences and conceptualizations of personhood need to be brought into view, as
do the diverse modes of representation that being human takes. Only once these had
been fundamentally reconceptualized could one agree (cf. Ingold 1996) that heritage
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discourse is uniquely placed not only to address claims about identity, ancestry and
cultural transmission but is equipped to take on the key moral-ethical issues of our times
and to fully engage with, and assist with the definition of, emergent global heritage
futures.
Notes
1 MacCannell's text is a key part of the tourism theory canon, which also includes Smith
(1989); Boniface and Fowler (1993); Cohen (1988); Urry (1990). See Selwyn (1996) for
a review.
2 Walsh states how the heritage industry especially [has ] to shoulder the shame for
the movement towards [the first Gulf] war (Walsh 1992: 2).
3 This genealogy defines the still globally dominant salvage or container models
of heritage. For Renaissance arts of memory and the other nodal points of this
Eurocentric genealogy see Yates (1978); Samuel (1994); Forty and Kchler (1999).
4 See, for example, the contemporary revival of the ancient Alexandrina project initiated
by the Egyptian government in co-operation with UNESCO (see Butler 2001a, b, 2003).
5 All three critics have used Freud to analyse the (colonial) fantasies of the Western
psyche and to outline potential postcolonial transformations of identity work.
6 Freud's first visit to Athens saw him experience a disturbance when his literal
confrontation with the Acropolis (repressed by Freud as an object of the imagination)
brought about the possibility of accessing the unconscious (Freud 1936/1984: 44356).
7 Other UNESCO literature includes Lacoste (1994); Mayor (1995); O'Brien (1968);
Hoggart (1978); Titchen (1996); Cleere (1995, 1996, 2000, 2001); Hylland-Eriksen
(2001).
8 See Kuper (2003) and Kenrick and Lewis (2004) for critical debates on indigenous
identity.
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9 Levinas in the pivotal post-war period issued a challenge to the dominant Greek
metaphysical position by arguing a place for the figure of the Jew within the domain
of philosophy/ethics (Levinas 1987). The possible stagings of a third position to
destabilize the GreekJew binary have [p. 477 ] engaged Spivak, Bhabha and also
Derrida (see Bennington 1992).
Web Site
UNESCO: http://www.unesco.org/.
BeverleyButler
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Dialectics , trans. E.B. Ashton, ed. . New York: Continuum.
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Handbook of Material Culture

Heritage and the Present Past

Contributors: Beverley Butler

Chapter 29: Heritage and the Present Past

(Ingold 1996: 204)

Handbook of Material Culture: Heritage and the

The Historical Approach: Heritage in the

Handbook of Material Culture: Heritage and the

an historical understanding of the construction or invention of heritage in the Western

Heritage Revivalism and Redemption

Handbook of Material Culture: Heritage and the

Handbook of Material Culture: Heritage and the

Handbook of Material Culture: Heritage and the

1999). This results in what is regarded as an overdetermined investment in the

Nostalgia and Authenticity

Handbook of Material Culture: Heritage and the

Handbook of Material Culture: Heritage and the

Handbook of Material Culture: Heritage and the

concern to save relics and restore monuments as emblems of communal identity,

Heritage Crusades and Religious

landscapes (cf. MacCannell 1978/1989) are situated by such authors as stations

Handbook of Material Culture: Heritage and the

Intellectual Ancestors and Heritage as

Handbook of Material Culture: Heritage and the

heritage culture's complicity in empire and in oppressive characterizations of race

Handbook of Material Culture: Heritage and the

Handbook of Material Culture: Heritage and the

Handbook of Material Culture: Heritage and the

Sociological Critiques and Reinvestment

Handbook of Material Culture: Heritage and the

Handbook of Material Culture: Heritage and the

The Memorial Approach: Alternative and

Anthropologizing Heritage: Memorial

Handbook of Material Culture: Heritage and the

Handbook of Material Culture: Heritage and the

a predisposition for certain aspects of the past to be incorporated within personal or

Handbook of Material Culture: Heritage and the

Handbook of Material Culture: Heritage and the

Handbook of Material Culture: Heritage and the

Handbook of Material Culture: Heritage and the

to investigate the impulse to commemorate as part of acts of sacrifice and healing

Handbook of Material Culture: Heritage and the

Handbook of Material Culture: Heritage and the

UNESCO and New Global Constituencies

Handbook of Material Culture: Heritage and the

by new constituencies notably indigenous groups as a powerful metaphor by

Handbook of Material Culture: Heritage and the

Handbook of Material Culture: Heritage and the

Heritage as a New Humanism

Handbook of Material Culture: Heritage and the

Handbook of Material Culture: Heritage and the

Handbook of Material Culture: Heritage and the

Bennington, G. (1992) #Mosaic fragment: if Derrida were an Egyptian ## , in D. Wood

Handbook of Material Culture: Heritage and the

Cleere, H. (2001) #Uneasy bedfellows: universality and cultural heritage# , in R. Layton,

Handbook of Material Culture: Heritage and the

Handbook of Material Culture: Heritage and the

Handbook of Material Culture: Heritage and the

Layton, R. Stone, P. Thomas, J. (2001) Destruction and Conservation of

Handbook of Material Culture: Heritage and the

McBryde, I. (1997) #The ambiguities of authenticity: rock of faith or shifting sands?

Handbook of Material Culture: Heritage and the

Handbook of Material Culture: Heritage and the