Villagers’ agency in the Intangible Cultural Heritage designation of a Korean village ritual

This paper examines how the villagers of Pams?m village in Seoul acted as agents in configuring their own cultural identity which explores issues concerning Korea’s Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) designation system. It delves in detail how villagers practice their ritual of Pams?m Pugundang kut ? amidst the complex process of continuity and change as a way of sustaining and promoting collective village identity. By examining the implications of this cultural practices in contemporary society, this paper ultimately raises the question of who constitutes the true legatee of traditional culture of Pams?m village. The cultural practice of the Pams?m Pugundang kut carried out by the villagers of Pams?m can be interpreted not merely as a critique of the dynamics of political and cultural heritage, but the reconstruction of villager’s identity through the creation and continuation of their long village history. This study provides a useful case in examining a village community which describes in detail how the subject of this study constructs their cultural identity and faces the complex issues concerning Korea’s ICH designation system.     

State Archaeology and the Private Museum: An Integrated Approach to Archaeological Site Management for Local People in China

During the emergence of Chinese archaeology, the legislative system of cultural heritage in China included archaeological excavations and investigations as being the ‘exclusive right of state’. This mode of state archaeology has proved its worth by increasing the authority and quality of archaeological research and excavations, as well as enhancing the social values and benefits at the state level. The local communities, however, have hardly been embedded into the archaeological projects, nor have the archaeological projects been employed to improve local and regional economic development. This paper considers private museums as embodying regional values and beneficial to projects under the mode of state archaeology. With a case study outlining collaborations between archaeologists and local agents under the excavation and conservation of ancient kiln sites at the town of Zichuan, I argue that private museums could be relatively prominent platforms for public engagement in activities of state archaeology. It might contribute to a reconsideration of the following: indirect archaeological concerns, local economic benefits, identities and alternative interpretations of locality.     

时代、文化资本与支配权:对张謇创办南通博物苑的再思考

面对19世纪末中国空前的民族危机和剧遽社会变迁,张謇选择了"实业救国"、"教育救国"的道路。南通博物苑作为张謇教育事业的重要组成部分,是其教育救国思想的具体体现。张謇在南通博物苑创办过程中实现了资本的文化化和文化的资本化双重过程:一方面,将经济资本转化为文化资本;另一方面,又将文化资本转化为其象征资本的一部分,使其获得更大社会权力,从而能够按照自己的政治理想对地方社会进行塑造。张謇对于作为文化资本的南通博物苑的支配主要体现在三个方面:藏品内容及知识系统的构建、博物馆教育作用的树立及对参观者的规范。张謇对文化资本的支配表面上是其个人意志的体现,由其政治理念所驱动;而深究,终不免受时代和机构属性等因素的制约与影响。     

The reproduction of heritage in a Chinese village: whose heritage,whose pasts?

The study investigates heritage practices in a Chinese village, by describing the tensions that have played out among different voices, meanings and understandings centred on the village’s heritage. In the process of ‘heritageisation’, stakeholders that include the state, the local government, the villagers and the principal lineage strive to negotiate different cultural meanings, values and the traditions. Consequently, three different heritage discourses coexist alongside each other in one locality. On the one hand, the ‘authorised heritage discourse’ is taken up by the government to weave and frame a narrative of nation-building around a Memorial Park. On the other hand, the village uses the past to foster local identity of the place in an attempt to attract tourists. For its part, the major lineage in the village uses the ancestral hall to continue the long tradition of remembering their ancestors via worshiping ceremonies. In between are a medley of heritage sites and artefacts existing in a state of flux and struggle over their conservation. The authors contend that, no matter how mundane, grand or hybrid, assemblages of rich and locally meaningful heritage, such as depicted in this article, should be cherished and utilised for the present agenda of cultural construction in rural China.     

Museums and cultural sustainability: stakeholders,forces, and cultural policies

This paper explores the relationship between museums, cultural sustainability, and cultural policies. Specifically, it offers a theoretical model for the sustainable development of museums and a process for designing appropriate cultural policies for museums with cultural sustainability in mind. The case of Cyprus is used to demonstrate how strengths and gaps in cultural sustainability can be identified within a broader museum environment. The study examines the main stakeholders (the state, municipalities/ communities, and individuals), types of museums (archaeological, art, ethnographic, etc.) they establish and the forces influencing their decisions (such as politics, a sense of national identity, cultural tourism, economic revitalization, and personal agendas) in order to map the Cypriot museum environment and identify the emphasis placed on different parameters of cultural sustainability. By identifying cultural sustainability strengths and gaps on a national level, it becomes easier for cultural policy-makers to design appropriate cultural policies for museums.     

Book Reviews

Heritage is important for the social and cultural health of communities, whilst local stewardship of cultural heritage has the capacity to empower and recover cultural identity. This paper describes a recent project in Lakhnu – a small rural village in Uttar Pradesh, India – to restore a nineteenth century villa formerly used as the village school as an educational facility. In this discussion, we draw attention to the right of groups to manage their culture. The loss of cultural heritage is linked to a loss of identity. We argue that heritage projects have the capacity to empower communities to sustain their heritage and identity and provide useful places for social and material advancement through the concept of a shared ‘symbolic estate’. At Lakhnu, we plan to evoke grass-root conservation where local communities become the rightful stakeholders and decision-makers who are encouraged and facilitated in the realisation of their right to cultural heritage and to stimulate growth and build capacity for the community.     

Benefits of visiting heritage museums: Chinese parents’ perspectives

Abstract

The family, as a leisure unit, is an important museum consumer group. The literature on family leisure in museums concentrates on the cognitive and the learning aspects in science museums and art galleries in western contexts. It provides limited explanation of the leisure outcomes acquired from visiting museums. This work addresses this lacuna by exploring the benefits perceived by Chinese parents who take their children to a cluster of museums along China’s Grand Canal, a world heritage site in Hangzhou. A review of museum and heritage research, combined with 17 on-site, in-depth interviews, generated information on a range of benefits which was used to design a questionnaire that was completed by 450 respondents. Five perceived benefits were identified using factor analysis. In order of significance, they are family bonding, community attachment, cultural awareness, restoration and personal growth. These perceived benefits have implications for museums and other public facilities catering to the family leisure market, as well as for governments, community organisations, the heritage sector and other stakeholders that are charged with managing cultural heritage.     

The Symbolic Making of a Common Property Resource: History,Ecology and Locality in a Tank-irrigated Landscape in South India

Today there is a pervasive policy consensus in favour of ‘community management’ approaches to common property resources such as forests and water. This is endorsed and legitimized by theories of collective action which, this article argues, produce distinctively ahistorical and apolitical constructions of ‘locality’, and impose a narrow definition of resources and economic interest. Through an historical and ethnographic exploration of indigenous tank irrigation systems in Tamil Nadu, the article challenges the economic-institutional modelling of common property systems in terms of sets of rules and co-operative equilibrium outcomes internally sustained by a structure of incentives. The article argues for a more historically and politically grounded understanding of resources, rights and entitlements and, using Bourdieu's notion of ‘symbolic capital’, argues for a reconception of common property which recognizes symbolic as well as material interests and resources. Tamil tank systems are viewed not only as sources of irrigation water, but as forming part of a village ‘public domain’ through which social relations are articulated, reproduced and challenged. But the symbolic ‘production of locality’ to which water systems contribute is also shaped by local ecology. The paper examines the historical and cultural production of two distinctive ‘cultural ecologies’. This serves to illustrate the fusion of ecology and social identity, place and person, in local conceptions, and to challenge a currently influential thesis on the ecological-economic determinants of collective action. In short, development discourse and local actors are seen to have very different methods and purposes in the ‘production of locality’. Finally, the article points to some practical implications of this for strategies of ‘local institutional development’ in irrigation.     

Villages that Never Were: The Museum Village as a Heritage Genre

Villages of relocated buildings now constitute a phenomenon of the world’s repertoire of heritage. They go by a multitude of names depending on particular inflection: open air museum, folk museum, living history museum, heritage village, museum village and so forth. ¹ [1] On the range of villages, see Thompson, ‘The Social Significance of Folk Museums’; Marshall, ‘Folklife and the Rise of American Folk Museums’; Leon and Piatt, ‘Living History Museums’; Shafernich, ‘On‐site Museums, Open‐air Museums, Museum Villages and Living History Museums’; Moolman, ‘Site Museums’; de Jong, ‘Approaches and Concepts’; Chappell, ‘Open‐air Museums’; Corbin, ‘Representations of an Imagined Past’. This paper reviews the context of the form of the genre’s manifestation in Australia, where it is often known as the ‘pioneer village’. They are the fruit of a populist vision of national history which celebrates white rural settlement as its central theme. In practice, the villages manifest a deep commitment to collecting and saving old buildings as the meaningful construction of a favourite historical identity. But the generation that established Australia’s villages has been overtaken. Today, the intersection of museum villages with the managerialist pressures of local economy enhancement and modern professional standards of heritage management challenge most villages’ survival.     

A Forgotten Legacy: The Romanov Patronage of Finland’s Early Art Collections

The earliest art collections of Finland’s National Gallery came into being when, as the Grand Duchy of Finland, it was an autonomous part of imperial Russia (1809–1917). The prevailing view of Finnish museum studies, however, sees the Finnish Art Society, the precursor of the Finnish National Gallery, as being modelled on exclusively European cultural institutions. The history of the Society and its collections have thus been seen as resistant to any alien eastern influences, and as an attempt to differentiate Finnish culture from Russian art collecting practices. Drawing on the theoretical shift in cultural studies from the conception of stable, clearly demarcated cultural identities of nation states toward less rigidly defined identities, the aim of this essay is to reconstruct the hidden Russian presence in Finnish museum historiography. Based on original unpublished sources, my study shows that the earliest support of Finland’s cultural infrastructure was given by the Romanov patrons Nicholas I, Alexander II, and Alexander III. By exposing the absence and physical erasure of “imperial identity” in the official Finnish museum narrative, I reveal how museums can at once elevate particular discourses and practices while marginalizing other historical processes in a nation’s cultural past.     

Children’s museums as cultural development strategies for urban revitalization

Cities have increasingly invested in cultural institutions in hopes of revitalizing their urban centers. Critical of the value of these expenditures, scholars have called for an examination of the various types of cultural institutions in which cities have invested, to determine whether they are capable of simultaneously serving the economic, physical, and social goals of urban revitalization. In response to that call, I examine whether the children’s museum, a distinct type of cultural investment, is able to provide this range of public benefit. To do so, I draw on secondary sources to examine the origins, development, and current practices of children’s museum and present an illustrative example of a children’s museum that is intended to serve as a catalyst for urban revitalization in a small city in the USA. I contend that children’s museums are worthy recipients of public funding because they are simultaneously able to address these diverse agendas.     

Ecomuseums and the Democratisation of Japanese Museology

The idea of the ‘integrated museum’, a more socially inclusive form of cultural institution, was a key outcome from the UNESCO/ICOM ‘Round Table of Santiago’ in 1972. Many of the concepts embodied in this idea became part of ecomuseum philosophy and practice during the 1970s and 1980s, in particular the need to involve local communities and make museums more democratic. The ecomuseum has the potential to be a socially inclusive mechanism and is now a worldwide phenomenon. Many of its tenets (the museum as territory, fragmented sites, in situ conservation and community leadership) are used—in a variety of ways and with varying success—as a mechanism to conserve cultural and heritage resources and to construct and promote local or regional cultural identities. Although the philosophy and practice of ecomuseums has been subject to criticism, they are still being created, mainly in rural areas, as a means of conserving traditional landscapes and ways of life. Japan has embraced the ecomuseum philosophy, and three contrasting ecomuseums (Hirano, Asahi and Miura) are described here, their roles analysed and their democratic nature questioned. It appears that the ecomuseum does have the ability to be a truly democratic method of heritage conservation, but that ultimately much depends on leadership and the identification of the local community as the key stakeholder.     

Heritage,identity and community engagement at Dunluce Castle,Northern Ireland

As Northern Ireland transitions out of conflict, increased attention is being paid to the role heritage can play in building peace across society and developing a more sustainable future. Recent archaeological investigations at Dunluce Castle have uncovered elements of the site’s Gaelic past and the remains of an early seventeenth-century town built immediately prior to the Crown-sponsored Plantation of Ulster. The project included a dynamic programme of community engagement and outreach that created opportunities to work as a group in the embodied act of recovering the physical past. This formed a space in which to challenge aspects of the region’s contested past and facilitated the renegotiation of accepted local histories and existing identity constructs.     

Is there a future for the past? An overview of archaeology in western Russia and Ukraine

The current political and economic situation in Russia and Ukraine poses grave dangers for the archaeological and museum professionals who guard these nations' legacies. At the moment that political barriers to Western collaboration were removed, new problems have crippled the post-Soviet archaeological community. Concurrently, Westerners tend to misunderstand Soviet and post-Soviet archaeological theory, forgetting that techniques such as lithic microwear and taphonomic analysis were introduced by Soviet scholars. New discoveries are described in three general categories: the origins of food-producing economies in western Russia and Ukraine, the evolution of surprisingly large towns in Copper Age Ukraine, and the origins of pastoralism in the Russian and Ukrainian steppes.     

From Mission to Maynggu Ganai: The Wellington Valley Convict Station and Mission Site

The Wellington Valley Convict Station and Mission site, now known as Maynggu Ganai Historic Site (meaning “people’s land” in local Wiradjuri language), contains the archaeological remains of the convict agricultural station that was established in 1823. The site, subsequently taken over by the Anglican Church Missionary Society as a mission to the Wiradjuri, operated from 1832 to 1844. Drawing upon archaeological survey, the extraordinary historical archive associated with this site, and an analysis of community consultative research, this article explores the role of this site in colonial cultural exchange, as well as the contemporary cultural meanings of this history and its physical remains for the community today.     

What Is the Benefit of Community Benefits? Exploring Local Perceptions of the Provision of Community Benefits from a Commercial Wind Energy Project

Where community ownership of renewable energy projects is not feasible, there remains potential for residents to profit from locally sited projects through a ‘community benefits’ package from a commercial developer, usually as an annual cash payment to a community organisation. Despite support from policy-makers and developers for community benefit packages, the relationship between the benefit package and acceptance of renewable energy projects is not straightforward. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with local residents and other community actors near a wind development in central Scotland, this paper examines the ‘process’ and ‘outcome’ dimensions of the design and provision of community benefits, and considers how the relationship between these two dimensions affects local perceptions of the benefit of community benefits. Analysis of interviewees’ perceptions of the community engagement ‘process’ at the planning stage and the community benefit package ‘outcome’ reveals how a poorly defined engagement process, combined with a benefits package that is not deemed suitable for the needs of the community, can lead to negative perceptions of the project, even when these were initially positive. These findings have implications for renewable energy policy in Scotland, particularly as there is currently no legal obligation for developers to consult communities on community benefit arrangements.     

Modelling diversity: cultural district policies in Doha and Singapore

ABSTRACT

Over the last twenty years, cities around the world have seen the multiplication of cultural district projects, which aim to concentrate cultural organisations in a circumscribed urban space, or to label a neighbourhood’s cultural scene. This paper examines the adoption and adaptation of a globally circulating cultural policy model as an instrument of urban governance. Moving away from the notion of policy transfer, understood as a neutral and unidirectional process through which successful culture-led development models spread to other contexts, I show how local actors mobilise external references to position themselves in a transnational cultural policymaking field, and construct their city as a model. I compare the multi-scalar politics of urban modelling in Doha and Singapore, where globally circulating culture-led development models have been introduced not only as instruments of economic growth, but also as diversity management tools. On the one hand, cultural districts serve as discursive nation building/branding instruments to project an imagined identity locally and internationally. On the other hand, urban elites can mobilise cultural districts to make strategic shifts in the diversity management discourse, through an engagement with the urban environment, and the co-optation civil society actors at multiple scales.