Introduction to the themed section ‘digital heritage and the public’

Abstract

This introductory essay for the themed issue “Digital Heritage and the Public” begins by alluding to the profound effect of the digital revolution in how society manages the production, administration, publication and access to information. The effect on heritage is noticeable in all fields. The process of digitalisation, traceable from the early days in the 1960s, is increasingly impinging on the relationship between the professionals and the public. Critics have debated on the advantages and challenges of the digital revolution in the heritage field. Related to that discussion, in this themed issue the first article by Taylor and Gibson questions whether the assumption often made inextricably linking the digital media with democracy is correct. This contribution is followed by two others in focusing on case studies of use of digital media in heritage. Mazel explains about three projects in which their use has facilitated access and encouraged public participation to rock art sites in Northern England. In the last article of this issue, Purkis argues that in the ‘Local People’ exhibition she organised in Derry/Londonderry, digital media allowed the creation of heritage out of people’s ordinary lives. This way of disrupting ideas of heritage also turned the museum into a contact zone, a place for cultural and social mediation.     

Fleshing out the geographies of social movements: Colombia's Pacific coast black communities and the ‘aquatic space’

The intersections between the concepts of space, place and resistance have recently received increasing attention from geographers dedicated to the study of social movements. Space and place are not merely seen as providing a physical background for mobilisations but as mutually constitutive of social movement agency. Yet, critics of theoretical frameworks drawn up by geographers have often rightly pointed to the lack of convincing empirical evidence presented in their support.This paper addresses these critiques by offering a theoretically informed and empirically grounded account of recent mobilisations by the social movement of black communities in the Pacific coast region of Colombia. Drawing on both the objective aspects of place and the subjective feelings that are derived from living in a place, I will show how these mechanisms have impacted on the specific spatial organising forms adopted by black communities. In particular, I will propose the concept of ‘aquatic space’ as a set of spatialised social relationships among Afro-Colombians, and show how these concrete everyday geographies have been drawn upon by black communities in the establishment of community councils along river basins.The paper argues that to make a strong point for more spatially sensitive analyses of social movements, geographers have to sustain their theoretical frameworks with concrete empirical data that not only illustrate spatial processes at play, but also convincingly demonstrate their very embeddedness in social practice. I thus argue for a strong consideration of ethnographies as a privileged research methodology to flesh out the geographies of social movements.     

‘Keeping up the Culture’: Gunai Engagements with Tourism

ABSTRACT This paper intervenes in the hidden history of Aboriginal art in south eastern Australia. I argue that for Aboriginal people living in the assimilation era engagement with tourism represented an important means of cultural survival. Working across anthropology and art history this paper focuses on the boomerangs and other artefacts produced by Gunai in Gippsland, Victoria for their own use and for exchange with tourists. The findings from this paper show that, far from being a sign of commodification and a capitulation to capitalism, this cultural production was carried out in opposition to authorities who viewed it as potentially disruptive and counter to assimilation policies. It was this history of cultural practice which contributed to the resurgence of Koorie culture in the 1970s and 1980s.     

Decolonizing cartography and ontological conflict: Counter-mapping in Colombia and “cartographies otherwise”

Discussions in decolonial literature have recently drawn on the concept of “ontological conflict” to reflect on the conflictual entanglements of diverse cosmologies. In Latin America (as elsewhere) these conflicts are frequently of a territorial nature, with indigenous and black communities making claims to communal land rights as indispensable part of their respective ways of being-in-the-world, which the post-colonial state has increasingly begun to acknowledge, often in the form of new political constitutions. In this article I examine the role of cartography in the resolution of such ontological conflicts; in particular a participatory mapping exercise in Colombia known as “social cartography,” which aims to challenge dominant cartographic representations and empowering local communities vis-à-vis the state. At the same time, I reflect on the limits of such an emancipatory vision and on the ways in which Colombia's version of counter-mapping has been coopted by dominant power. Inspired by the Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality framework, I contextualize this experience within other radical mapping exercises, or “cartographies otherwise,” in places such as Australia, Palestine and the Straits of Gibraltar, to finally suggest that the art of decolonizing cartography may be seen as a tool of Hardt & Negri's project of a multitude in resistance.     

‘If anything is to be done with the Indian,we must catch him very young’: colonial constructions of Aboriginal children and the geographies of Indian residential schooling in British Columbia,Canada

Although not fully conceptualized as such by geographers, children and concepts of childhood were focal points of colonialism. Well into the twentieth century, Aboriginal peoples in Canada were discursively constructed by colonists as child-like subjects in need of colonial intervention in order that they ‘grow up’ into de-Indigenized Canadian citizens. Further, an important aspect of the colonial project entailed confining Aboriginal children in institutions known as Indian Residential Schools wherein, through material and curricular means, efforts were made to transform the children and dispossess them of socio-cultural identities. Much of the literature on children's geographies contemplates the socially constructed nature of childhood and critiques the pervasive (yet under-evaluated) understanding that childhood is a clear and demarcatable state of being prior to adulthood. Little attention, though, has been paid to historic or social discourses that relegated groups of people to a perpetual state of truncated childhood while simultaneously removing their children in order that those children mature into adults who embodied radically different cultural traits than their ancestors. This paper explores how Aboriginal peoples were doubly confined; firstly, by colonial constructions about children, childhood, and Othered (Aboriginal) peoples and then, secondly, within the material geographies of colonial residential schools.     

Towards ‘Embedded Non-creative Work’? Administration,digitisation and the recorded music industry

Abstract

For contemporary cultural policy, ‘non-creative’ work continues to form a conceptual blindspot: a foil to define and value creativity against. This paper develops existing categories to augment the task-focused notion of ‘embedded creativity’ with a more situated view of work’s cultural and institutional embedding. It first interrogates this ‘embeddedness’, taking a ‘cultural economy’ approach to intermediation and administrative support. Drawing on observations from an in-depth qualitative study of employees in major record labels, the second part articulates the heightened importance of ‘admin’ to recorded music industries, after ‘digital disruption’. Routine bureaucratic labour presents an atypical example, revealing much about the hidden relational and identity work that goes into constructing ‘creative industries’ as such. The intention is not to show that ‘embedded non-creative workers’ are in fact ‘creative’ but, on the contrary, to articulate the distinct contributions and value of support work in this context, questioning a persistent reliance on creative/non-creative dualisms. Policy research would benefit from enriched understanding of culture's assembly in marketable objects, reorienting understandings of ‘cultural’ labour markets and careers, and reimagining the role of traditional cultural ‘administration’ in the contemporary ‘creative economy’.