Heteroglossic heritage and the first-place of the Kalahari

Abstract

Using Bakhtin’s concept of ‘heteroglossia,’ this article examines the layering and intersections of multiple claims to heritage places that form dialogics about heritage truths. Social groups derive their collective-self, in part, through association with a place, or places, to which they attribute their origin, described here as a ‘first-place.’ Identity maintenance can occur through the praxis of heritage tourism in which group members exhibit emotional performances during their visits to a first-place. Through the extended example of the Tsodilo Hills in Botswana and the various social groups – local ethnic communities, national citizens, and segments of the global community – who each form a collective-self using Tsodilo as a first-place, this article addresses the roles of science (archaeology) and tourism, and their interplay, in enabling several languages or dialects of belonging to coexist without dissonance. The argument is that heteroglossic heritage is possible because visitors’ affect-mediated encounters with heritage places facilitate the reaffirmation of their shared group identity. While all heritage discourse is heteroglossic, the article focuses on claims to a first-place set within a postcolonial context of nation building and modernising that involves the politicisation and re-spatialization of heritage places through tourism development.     

Heritage,transnational memory and the re-diasporisation of Scotland

For a long time in Scotland, diasporic – and popular – heritage with its imaginary emphasising kinship, stylised images and ritualised practices was either overlooked or discredited. The term ‘diaspora’ itself to define Scotland’s vast overseas population has been scrutinised for its usefulness. However, since devolution, it has gained currency in public discourse and policies and has led to the ‘re-diasporisation’ of Scotland. Yet, the ‘diaspora’ had long been identified as an important niche market in relation to heritage perceived as an economic resource. This article explores the changing perception and place of diasporic heritage in Scotland since the 1970s through two case studies. Focusing on processes of remembrance of nineteenth-century Highland emigration materialised through monuments and museums, it highlights the conflicting and shifting relationships that different communities – home and diasporic – have with their past, place and the meanings ascribed to them. The transnational memories increasingly promoted in Scotland act as a means of re-energising nationhood and initiating revisions and re-reading of popular and diasporic culture.     

Critical heritage studies and the legacies of the late-twentieth century heritage canon

ABSTRACT

In recent years an interest in ‘critical heritage studies’ (CHS) has grown significantly – its differentiation from ‘heritage studies’ rests on its emphasis of cultural heritage as a political, cultural, and social phenomenon. But how original or radical are the concepts and aims of CHS, and why has it apparently become useful or meaningful to talk about critical heritage studies as opposed to simply ‘heritage studies’? Focusing on the canon of the 1980s and 1990s heritage scholarship – and in particular the work of the ‘father of heritage studies’, David Lowenthal – this article offers a historiographical analysis of traditional understandings and approaches to heritage, and the various explanations behind the post-WWII rise of heritage in western culture. By placing this analysing within the wider frames of post-war historical studies and the growth of scholarly interest in memory, the article seeks to highlight the limitations and bias of the much of the traditional heritage canon, and in turn frame the rationale for the critical turn in heritage studies.     

Plotting Jane Austen: heritage sites as fictional worlds in the literary tourist’s imagination

Fans seeking engagement with Jane Austen and her fictional creations seek out heritage locations linked both temporally and geographically to her life and works. This article adopts a multidisciplinary framework that triangulates fan studies, literary criticism, and heritage studies to analyse three Austen-linked fan spaces: Chawton Cottage (Austen’s former home and now a museum), Lyme Park (‘Pemberley’ in B.B.C.’s 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice), and two Austen-themed literary walks. I argue that the fan’s desire for connection is by no means an organic or natural quality of the heritage site itself. Rather, creating connections between the revered object (Austen) and the physical spaces that purport to contain her necessitates imaginative work on the part of the literary tourist. That such performative work is necessary in both the ‘real’ (Chawton) and ‘fictional’ (Lyme Park) locations demonstrates the problematic nature of previous critical emphases on the authenticity – or lack thereof – of such spaces. The significance of the fan’s pilgrimage to Austen-linked heritage sites lies not in the author to be ‘found’ there but in how the tourist actively constructs ‘their’ Jane by inscribing her presence – and those of her characters – onto these spaces.     

Commemorative events at destination memorials – a dark (heritage) tourism context

In the past, sites and events related to war and atrocities were viewed in the wider context of heritage tourism. The term ‘dark’ was added with the aim of recognising heritage sites closely related to death and suffering. Given that commemorative events as part of dark heritage are not prevalent in heritage and tourism literature, there is a need to understand the behaviour of visitors involved in visiting these sites or attending this type of event, which presents a special challenge. Public commemorations, especially those that mark particularly disturbing occurrences, such as ‘The Great School Hour’ – an event which is presented in the artistic form of a ‘school class’ – are unique form of tourist activity that has not been thoroughly investigated previously. Thus, the aim of the study is to explore the influence of the main motivators on revisit intention and willingness to recommend for those who attended the commemorative event ‘The Great School Hour’ in Kragujevac, Serbia, with a particular focus on younger people. The results suggest that learning, emotional response and uniqueness have a significant positive effect on revisit intention, while emotional response and uniqueness have a significant positive effect on willingness to recommend.     

Trafficking in Liquor,Trafficking in Heritage: Beer Branding as Heritage in Post‐apartheid South Africa

A burgeoning literature on post‐apartheid heritage configuration has largely overlooked the use of branding in the creation of heritage discourses in South Africa and the significance of liquor for national identity. This article brings these two concerns together through an examination of two heritage‐scapes—the SAB World of Beer and the SAB Newlands Brewery Heritage Centre—constructed by South African Breweries (SAB) in 1995. It suggests that the commercial construction of heritage as branding provided a vehicle for a powerful corporate capitalist narrative in the post‐apartheid rhetorical contestation over a desired path for the future. It also suggests that dissonance within and between these corporate visitors’ centres mirrored a wider uncertainty over the meaning of national identity in early post‐apartheid South Africa.     

Returning home: heritage work among the Stl’atl’imx of the Lower Lillooet River Valley

This article focusses on heritage practices in the tensioned landscape of the Stl’atl’imx (pronounced Stat-lee-um) people of the Lower Lillooet River Valley, British Columbia, Canada. Displaced from their traditional territories and cultural traditions through the colonial encounter, they are enacting, challenging and remaking their heritage as part of their long term goal to reclaim their land and return ‘home’. I draw on three examples of their heritage work: graveyard cleaning, the shifting ‘official’/‘unofficial’ heritage of a wagon road, and marshalling of the mountain named Nsvq’ts (pronounced In-SHUCK-ch) in order to illustrate how the past is strategically mobilised in order to substantiate positions in the present. While this paper focusses on heritage in an Indigenous and postcolonial context, I contend that the dynamics of heritage practices outlined here are applicable to all heritage practices.     

The pit: landscape scars as potential cultural tools

A huge and continuously growing pit is about to divide the Swedish mining town of Malmberget into two halves. What once was the town centre is now a 200 metres deep hole, and private homes and key buildings like the old school and the church have had to be demolished or moved. The pit is a human imposed ‘landscape scar’ epitomising the town’s lost golden age of mining, its present situation of decline and uncertain future prospects – despite a recent recovery in the mining industry. Although the pit is decisively present in the local community, it is not articulated as significant, especially not from a heritage perspective. Why is this so? In this article, we examine the pit as a potential cultural tool for heritage processes, and find that it is indeed used by individuals in this respect, but not in collective memorialisation. We conclude that landscape scars definitely can constitute critical cultural tools, although they may not always need to be labelled as belonging to an ‘authorized heritage discourse’. Instead, the potential of the landscape scar is to enhance the amount and recognition of shared memories in the local community.     

The social life of ruins: sites of memory and the politics of a Zimbabwean periphery

This article explores conflicts over a series of ruins located within Zimbabwe's flagship National Park. The relics have long been regarded as sacred places by local African communities evicted from their vicinity, and have come to be seen as their ethnic heritage. Local intellectuals' promotion of this heritage was an important aspect of a defensive mobilization of cultural difference on the part of a marginalized minority group. I explore both indigenous and colonial ideas about the ruins, the different social movements with which they have been associated and the changing social life they have given the stone relics. Although African and European ideas sometimes came into violent confrontation – as in the context of colonial era evictions – there were also mutual influences in emergent ideas about tribe, heritage and history. The article engages with Pierre Nora's notion of ‘sites of memory’, which has usefully drawn attention to the way in which ideas of the past are rooted and reproduced in representations of particular places. But it criticizes Nora's tendency to romanticize pre-modern ‘memory’, suppress narrative and depoliticize traditional connections with the past. Thus, the article highlights the historicity of traditional means of relating to the past, highlighting the often bitter and divisive politics of traditional ritual, myth, kinship, descent and ‘being first’. It also emphasizes the entanglement of modern and traditional ideas, inadequately captured by Nora's implied opposition between history and memory.     

The paradox of ‘Incompiuto Siciliano Archaeological Park’ or how to mock heritage to make heritage

During the last 50 years, and due to the dilapidation of public funds, hundreds of unfinished public works have been erected Italy. In 2007, the group of artists Alterazioni Video declared these ruins a formal architectural style – ‘Incompiuto Siciliano’ – and, in doing so, their aim is to change the buildings’ dark side and turn it into something positive. One of the tangible outcomes within the artists’ proposal is the eventual creation of the ‘Incompiuto Siciliano Archaeological Park’ in Giarre, a Sicilian medium-sized village that has the highest density of unfinished public works in Italy. This article analyses how such a provocative project contains serious implications in terms of heritage. It is stated that, in order to forge a positivized ‘unfinished heritage’, Incompiuto Siciliano Archaeological Park builds bridges between aspects that, in principle, seem to be the opposite of each other. This opens the possibility of putting traditional heritage assumptions in question through the production of a critical heritage whose novelty lies in the constructive use of irony, sarcasm and double meaning.     

Caught between nationalism and internationalism: replicating histories of Antarctica in Hobart

In December 2013, a replica of ‘Mawson’s Hut’ (a historic structure in Antarctica) joined a growing list of polar tourist attractions in the Australian city of Hobart, Tasmania. Initially promoted as the city’s ‘latest tourist hotspot,’ the ‘replica museum’ quickly took its place in Hobart’s newly redeveloped waterfront, reinforcing the city’s identity as an ‘Antarctic Gateway’. The hut forms part of a heritage cluster, an urban assemblage that weaves together the local and national, the past and present, the familiar and remote. In this article, we examine the replica hut in relation to the complex temporal and spatial relations that give it meaning, and to which it gives meaning. Our focus is the hut as a point of convergence between memory, material culture and the histories – and possible futures – of nationalism and internationalism. We argue that the replica hut, as a key site of Hobart’s Antarctic heritage tourism industry, reproduces and prioritises domestic readings of exploration and colonisation over a reading of Antarctic engagement as a transnational endeavour. However, like other ‘gateway city’ heritage sites, it has the potential for aligning with a larger trend in international heritage conservation and heritage diplomacy, that of prioritising narratives of the past that weave together transnational connections and associations.     

Affective spaces,sensuous engagements: in quest of a synaesthetic approach to ‘dark memorials’

Although relatively recent, the concepts of ‘dark tourism’, ‘difficult heritage tourism’ and ‘Holocaust tourism’ have already been approached from historical, cultural, sociological, anthropological and managerial perspectives. The article offers a philosophical inquiry of ‘dark attractions’, inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s work on aesthetics, with an aim of divorcing the term ‘dark tourism’ from its typically negative valance. It makes use of a synaesthetic understanding of experience and relies on an enlarged idea of perception conceptualised as a dynamic continuity between bodily/affective and intellectual cognitive faculties that are activated in the vibrant interaction with the architectural landscape of the ‘dark site’. The emphasis on immediate perception necessarily implies formulation of a concept of ‘affective aesthetics’ which refers to bodily process, a vital movement that triggers the subject’s passionate becoming-other, where ‘becoming’ stands for an intensive flow of affective (micro)perceptions. Such an approach sheds a different light on ‘Holocaust tourism’ and the ‘pleasures’ associated therewith, especially because it provides an explanation to a situation (common at many Holocaust memorials) when visitors are pleased, or positively affected, with representation/image/expression of sadness/atrocity. The synaesthetic operations of ‘dark attractions’ will be briefly illustrated with an example of the Holocaust memory site in Be??ec, Poland.     

Politics of tangibility,intangibility, and place in the making of a European cultural heritage in EU heritage policy

The EU has recently launched several initiatives that aim to foster the idea of a common European cultural heritage. The notion of a European cultural heritage in EU policy discourse is extremely abstract, referring to various ideas and values detached from physical locations or places. Nevertheless the EU initiatives put the abstract policy discourse into practice and concretize its notions about a European cultural heritage. A common strategy in this practice is ‘placing heritage’ – affixing the idea of a European cultural heritage to certain places in order to turn them into specific European heritage sites. The materialisation of a European cultural heritage and the production of physical European heritage sites are crucial elements in the policy through which the EU seeks to govern both the actors and the meanings of heritage. On the basis of a qualitative content analysis of diverse policy documents and informational and promotional material, this article presents five strategies of ‘placing heritage’ used in the EU initiatives. In addition, the article presents a theoretical model of circulation of the tangible and intangible dimensions of heritage in the EU heritage policy discourse and discusses the EU’s political intents included in the practices of ‘placing heritage’.     

Interpreting umeewarra mission

Abstract

Indigenous occupation of Australia for at least the last 60,000 years, was followed by European settlers in 1788. Christian missions and government reserves established at this time, often removed Aboriginal children from their parents, families and land. These children are ‘the Stolen Generation’. One such mission was Umeewarra Mission at Port Augusta in South Australia, which was established by the Brethren church in the 1930s and operated until recently. Some of the former children who were raised at the Mission have established a committee, the Umeewarra Nguraritja (meaning ‘place’ or ‘home'), to oversee the Mission site. The Umeewarra Nguraritja wants to establish an Interpretive Centre to tell the Aboriginal and missionary history of the Mission. It needs to preserve and interpret the mission culture in a way which maintains the integrity of that history and presents the material culture, the oral histories and stories from former children of the mission, sensitively to visitors. This paper reports on the research process being used for strategic planning of site management and interpretation. The paper addresses in particular the need for the researchers to be sympathetic to both indigenous and missionary cultures, playing both supportive and leadership roles in order to give something back to the ‘stolen generation’.     

Single female tenants in South Delhi – gender,class and morality in a globalizing city

Based on ethnographic data gathered over 12 months of fieldwork with unmarried women living alone or in flat-shares in different middle class South Delhi localities, this article traces the way shifting gendered norms – often epitomized by growing numbers of single women households – are negotiated within class specific and highly localized contexts of the residential neighborhood. Despite growing economic opportunities for middle class and elite women, cultural anxieties surrounding the notion of ‘delayed’ marriage and women living outside of the familial or marital home persist and obstruct attempts at establishing independent households. Single women experience difficulties finding apartments to rent; have to contend with hostile intrusions from neighbors; or feel obliged to self-monitor their behavior within their neighborhoods. As South Delhi’s liberalised urban landscape has become home to an increasingly globalized, consumerist middle class, disciplinary measures such as curfews, regulations over houseguests and increased surveillance simultaneously indicate a middle class recalibrating its gendered social coordinates by proving its commitment to values of female propriety. While popular discourses draw juxtaposed imaginaries of the ‘modern’ and the ‘traditional’ in their depictions of increasing individualism and a loosening of ‘traditional’ role expectations, this article demonstrates the need to consider the different structural conditions and local inflections in which struggles over women’s agency take place. Looking beyond the supposedly universalizing forces of globalized consumer modernity, the residential neighborhood hereby provides a view into the lived experiences of – at times incongruous – mechanisms at play in societies undergoing social change.     

Sustaining popular music’s material culture in community archives and museums

This article examines the challenges of sustainability faced by community archives and museums that are concerned with the preservation and display of the material culture of popular music’s recent past. The sustainability of grassroots sites of popular music heritage is of great concern due to their role in making accessible cultural artefacts that have limited representation in the collections of more prestigious institutions. Drawing on three sites that have ceased operation – Jazz Museum Bix Eiben Hamburg, Mutant Sounds and Holy Warbles – the article highlights difficulties faced by the founders and volunteers of physical and online archives in sustaining their ‘do-it-yourself’ heritage practices in the medium- to long-term.     

Heritage destruction and cultural rights: insights from Bagan in Myanmar

Recently, the UN Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights has stated that the intentional destruction of cultural heritage is a violation of cultural rights. The Rapporteur examines a timely issue but bases her statement on narrow understandings ‘heritage’ as irreplaceable and ‘destruction’ as ideologically motivated and aggressive. This reinforces hegemonic ideas about heritage and what constitutes its destruction. In this article, I discuss the case of Bagan in Myanmar to illustrate the limitations of the Rapporteur’s statement. In Bagan, whether and how ‘heritage’ should be protected has been the topic of controversy. By implication what is – or is not – considered intentional destruction is contested. Ambiguity about the meaning of cultural rights, the dissonant nature of heritage, the subjectivity of destruction, and complex multi-layered motivations behind ‘destructive’ practices make overarching statement about the destruction of cultural heritage and cultural rights violations too bold and call for more nuance and contextualised research.     

‘The Pathos of Conservation’: Raphael Samuel and the politics of heritage

When Raphael Samuel’s Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture was published in 1994, it was critically received. Yet, the book has not had the impact of other key works such as Lowenthal’s The Past is a Foreign Country (1985) or Hewison’s The Heritage Industry (1987). A number of factors have contributed to this, such as Theatres essentially being an unfinished project, and ‘heritage’ in the book having multiple personas – the net result being that Samuel’s arguments can at times be hard to pin down. Yet with interest in his approach to heritage now growing, this article seeks to unravel Samuel’s core ideas and arguments pertaining to heritage, and to give an historical background to their evolution. With the central tenets of Samuel’s argument essentially being a case for the democratisation of heritage; the validity of what we might today call ‘unofficial’ narratives and discourses; and to challenge the dominant view that heritage was ultimately history’s poor cousin, I argue that Samuel’s ideas have much to offer contemporary research agendas in heritage.     

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’.     

Cannibalism & politics: The English Renaissance revisited

This article explores how anthropological approaches to Anglo-Native American exchanges in the 16th and 17th centuries – thinking through and beyond terms like ‘cannibal’ – can draw attention to different facets of encounter and shed light on the influence of indigeneity on English heritage. Using the Englishman Anthony Knivet’s travels to Brazil in the 1590s as a case study, what emerges is the importance of interdisciplinary approaches which acknowledge the complicated and at times surprising interactions between representations and lived experience, between rituals and their appropriations. Further, acknowledging the influence of indigenous American people and artefacts on English history has important implications for addressing the legacy of imperialism in cultural institutions, opening up new possibilities for collaboration, display and reconciliation.