Crafting heritage: artisans and the making of Indigenous heritage in contemporary Taiwan

Since the 1990s, Indigenous groups in Taiwan have been increasingly engaged in retrieving and reviving cultural practices that are considered ‘traditional’ and markers of Indigenous identities. This article takes such recent and ongoing revival of cultural practices and connected material culture amongst Taiwanese Indigenous groups as the departure point to argue that the idea of a ‘contemporary Indigenous heritage’ is constructed (notably by Indigenous artists and artisans) through the conflation of ‘tradition’, ‘value’, ‘authenticity’ and ‘indigeneity’, as well as creativity and innovation. In the article, I endeavour to explain this process. To this end, I identify and illustrate a set of strategies and discourses through which Indigenous artists and artisans in Taiwan construct their work as both ‘Indigenous’ and ‘heritage’. I suggest that such strategies and discourses revolve around the following: (i) materiality, (ii) visual display and performance, (iii) Indigenous cultural research and (iv) knowledge transmission. Building on the Taiwanese case study, this article furthers scholarly enquiries into the making of heritage by generating an enhanced understanding of the role of artists and artisans in the creation, renewal, authentication and transmission of ‘Indigenous heritage’.     

面向文化遗址保护的物联网技术研究与应用

大部分文化遗址因其所处环境的特殊性,导致现有常规的信息化技术手段无法有效实施,而传统的文化遗址保护技术也无法实现文化遗产保护与利用的最大化。物联网作为一项新兴的前沿热门信息技术,已经广泛应用于众多领域,具有能够与文化遗址保护工作紧密结合的发展潜力。本工作首先分析了文化遗址保护的现状与面临的问题,并对物联网技术与文化遗址保护的关系进行了深入阐述。针对文物保护领域的特殊需求,着重描述了文物本体与环境信息采集、监测数据的远距离传输,监测数据的实时分析处理三方面相关的物联网技术,并对涉及关键技术应用解决方案进行了分析说明。最后简要介绍了已经部署运行的典型文化遗址保护利用系统———基于物联网技术的敦煌莫高窟保护与利用系统,系统经过连续几年的运行积累了大量的监测数据,为敦煌莫高窟文物的保护做出了重要的贡献。随着物联网技术的进一步发展,在文物保护方面的应用将更加深入和广泛,这将进一步提升文物保护工作的效率。     

Protecting contemporary cultural soundscapes as intangible cultural heritage: sounds of Istanbul

This paper aims to evaluate culture and traditions of everyday life from a sonic perspective and to suggest ways for protecting characteristic sounds and soundscapes. This multidisciplinary research, having roots in such fields as soundscape studies, intangible cultural heritage (ICH), museum studies and sensory studies, explores the larger contemporary cultural soundscape of Istanbul. This paper also draws on the project The Soundscape of Istanbul (https://soundscapeofistanbul.ku.edu.tr/), which is archiving the contemporary elements of the cultural soundscape of Istanbul that were determined by public contribution, and outlines examples from this collection. Sounds constitute an inevitable part of daily life and are therefore very important as ICH. Thus, they deserve to be protected to strengthen cultural memory. However, sonic culture is twice endangered due to the physical characteristics of sound itself and the dynamic structure of intangible culture. Therefore, urgent protection of contemporary cultural soundscapes in the context of ICH is crucial for transferring the present sonic environments to following generations in order to maintain cultural identity.     

Authenticity and adaptation: the Mongol Ger as a contemporary heritage paradox

The Mongol Ger is a transportable felt tent deriving from an ancient nomadic civilization. The structure encapsulates a specific Mongolian nomadic cultural identity by encompassing a way of life based upon pastoral migration, complex familial relationships and hierarchies, and spiritual beliefs. As Mongolia has rapidly urbanised over the past century, the form and function of the ger have changed, with some of the integral facets of the structure lost with a view to commercialising and/or adapting a nomadic symbol for modern consumption. This paper will explore the ger as a vernacular and globally recognised form, assessing whether its nomination by the Mongolian State Party on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity as a craft-skill is either sufficient or indeed appropriate. It will further be argued that to understand the ger in its totality requires an understanding also of the concept of authenticity to disentangle variations between the ‘livingness’ of the ger and its appropriation for a wider audience.     

An Unwanted Past: contemporary tourism and the heritage of communism in Romania

This paper considers how the legacy of communism and revolution has become the focus of interest among Western tourists in post-communist Bucharest. It argues that 'communist heritage' tourism - the consumption of key sights and sites associated with the Ceausescu regime and its overthrow - has emerged as a particular form of cultural or heritage tourism for special interest tourists. However, this is a heritage which is defined and constructed entirely outside Romania. Within Romania itself there is understandably little desire to remember the period of communist rule, and the legacy of this period is powerfully dissonant with the country's post-communist aspirations. Consequently, as a consideration of two case studies illustrates, there is no concern to interpret the legacy of communism for tourists; instead there is an attempt to deny or airbrush out this period of the country's history.     

White noise: sound,materiality and the crowd in contemporary heritage practice

Sounds of our Shores was a joint venture between the National Trust and the British Library that employed a crowdsourcing methodology to create a permanent archive of British coastal sounds. In this paper I pursue a critical analysis of that project in order to problematise the recent emergence of practices aimed at capturing and preserving everyday sounds as ‘sonic heritage’. More broadly, I use the case study to think through two trends in contemporary heritage practice. These are, first, a turn towards crowdsourcing as a means of democratising representation, and, second, a current trend towards the accumulation and preservation of an ever-broader range and mass of materials as heritage. The framework for my analysis is provided by a dual reading of the term ‘white noise’. Thus, for my purposes, ‘white noise’ describes both an acoustic phenomenon (the product of every possible frequency sounding simultaneously; a sonic expression of perfect equality and perfect chaos), and a particular mode of racialised sound production and audition, modulated and constrained by whiteness. White noise displaces and silences its Others. The white ‘listening ear’, to borrow Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman's terminology, is either deaf to, or appalled by, the sounds those Others make.     

Action heritage: research,communities, social justice

Societies are unequal and unjust to varying degrees and heritage practitioners unavoidably work with, perpetuate and have the potential to change these inequalities. This article proposes a new framework for undertaking heritage research that can be applied widely and purposefully to achieve social justice, and which we refer to as action heritage. Our primary sources are semi-structured conversations we held with some of the participants in three heritage projects in South Yorkshire, UK: members of a hostel for homeless young people, a primary school, and a local history group. We examine ‘disruptions’ in the projects to understand the repositioning of the participants as researchers. The disruptions include introducing a scrapbook for personal stories in the homeless youth project and giving the school children opportunities to excavate alongside professional archaeologists. These disruptions reveal material and social inequalities through perceptible changes in how the projects were oriented and how the participants thought about the research. We draw on this empirical research and theorisations of social justice to develop a new framework for undertaking co-produced research. Action heritage is ‘undisciplinary’ research that privileges process over outcomes, and which achieves parity of participation between academic and community-based researchers through sustained recognition and redistribution.     

水下文化遗产原址保护研究概述

长年埋藏于水下的文化遗产,在适应周围的化学、物理及生态环境后可达到一种平衡的保存状态。通过概述水下埋藏环境对文物产生的影响,并对国外文物保护工作者在沉船、水下文物点、古代聚落遗址等类型水下文化遗产原址保护的成果进行研究,为中国水下文化遗产保护相关工作的开展提供一定的借鉴。     

The marginalisation of Paralympic heritage

The impact of the Paralympic Games and disability sport upon the lives of people with disabilities and the perceptions of non-disabled society regarding people with disabilities has been immense. Yet examples of this disability sport and Paralympic heritage are all but invisible amongst the wider area of sports heritage. This paper will attempt to outline some of the possible reasons why this might be the case and cite some examples of how this apparent marginalisation of Paralympic heritage might be overcome as we move forward beyond the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.