Defining “Official” Built Heritage Discourses within the Irish Planning Framework: Insights from Conservation Planning as Social Practice

Conservation of built heritage is a key planning process and goal which shapes urban development outcomes across European cities. In Ireland, conservation of the built heritage is a key part of the planning framework, albeit one that is, in comparative terms, only recently established. While it is widely recognized that the underlying rationale for conservation of built heritage varies considerably (from cultural priorities to place marketing), the literature suggests that heritage and conservation professionals perform a key role in controlling decision-making through an official or “authorized” heritage discourse (AHD), emphasizing expert values and knowledge and based around selective heritage storylines often reflecting elite tastes. Drawing on policy and practice in Ireland, in this paper, we contribute to these debates by further unpacking the AHD, exploring tensions within the heritage policy elite through examination of competing views and representations relating to the purpose of built heritage protection. Based on a discourse analysis following interviews with key national actors, we identify two key narratives—a “museum-curatorial” discourse and an “inclusive heritage” discourse—which in turn frame conservation practices. We argue that subtle variations of heritage meanings have the potential to either reproduce (museum-curatorial discourse) or challenge (inclusive heritage discourse) conventional modes of practice, particularly relating to the relationship between built heritage and identity and the role of public engagement.     

From bricks and mortar to social heritage: planning space for diversities in the AHD

This article investigates the authorised heritage discourse (AHD) through the lens of conservation planning practice. The AHD is characterised as an exclusionary discourse that privileges the physical nature of ‘heritage’, defined scientifically by ‘experts’. Set within the context of wider international trends towards more inclusive heritage practices, the article advances understanding of the contemporary AHD. Using local heritage designation as an investigatory platform, a thesis is developed to explain professional representations of heritage operating in this setting. In doing so, a pervasive, yet nuanced AHD is exposed. At the same time, a complex variety of contextual factors that constrain radical readjustment of the AHD are also uncovered. These include struggles over the subjectivity and operationalisation of social and cultural heritage values in rational planning environments. The conclusions drawn from this research challenge and subtly refine the AHD, and crucially, propose that wider trends in the heritage discourse cannot be adequately implemented within the current legal apparatus and mind-set of traditional rational planning. The article suggests that further research is required to understand how the multiple and diverse layers of heritage meanings can be emplaced and legitimised within planning settings.     

The heritage practices in a Chinese historic neighbourhood: the manifestation of traditional Feng Shui in Langzhong,China

By describing different voices, practices, and understandings centred on Langzhong’s Feng Shui, this research explores a vernacular way of manifesting, practicing and valuing the past. The analysis shows that as a living heritage, Feng Shui still exists in Langzhong in both a physical and social sense. The study of Feng Shui demonstrates how a non-western discourse of narrating the historic urban form could be deployed in Chinese heritage practice to interweave the past and present. Through this study, a vernacular way of practicing and conceptualising heritage is established. Moreover, it is argued that Feng Shui as a locally meaningful heritage, which has spiritually enriched the historic neighbourhood, should be cherished and utilised for contemporary heritage conservation and cultural construction in China.     

Rethinking the global heritage discourse – overcoming ‘East’ and ‘West’?

This article illustrates how Japan’s involvement in international heritage discourse, in particular since the Nara Conference in 1994, played an important role in the development of a global understanding of heritage and what it constitutes. It explores the way the Ise Shrine came to be represented as an iconic example of an ‘Eastern approach’ to heritage to become central in the paradigm shift within global heritage discourse towards acknowledging cultural diversity. In this article, however, I argue that the presentation and understanding of the Ise Shrine has perpetuated a number of misconceptions about an Eastern approach to heritage conservation. In particular, its presentation and interpretation as a cultural site devoid of its distinct religious and political significance, limits what can be learned from it. This article argues that without full recognition of the religious beliefs intimately embedded in the traditional social structures, practices and attitudes related to heritage sites, recognition of cultural diversity would remain limited.     

Sustainable architectural conservation according to traditions of Islamic waqf: the World Heritage–listed Stone Town of Zanzibar

Sustainability in the conservation of architectural heritage is now more extensively considered than it was decades ago. The introduction of the concept of sustainability to the field marked hopes to overcome problems threatening heritage sites. There are general concepts guiding sustainable conservation. However, heritage specifics play important roles in achieving sustainability, and may direct the formulation of sustainable concepts to be applied. This paper is an attempt to add to the discourse of heritage sustainability by discussing buildings managed through a tradition of Islamic waqf in the World Heritage Stone Town of Zanzibar. It examines sustainability in terms of its financial, social, managerial, and environmental aspects. The relatively good survival rate of waqf buildings in the old town over several centuries suggests sustainable and transmissible ‘genes’ within the tradition. Waqf was found to elaborate ways to strike a balance between heritage consumption and use, avoiding gentrification, and enabling collective urban conservation. It further suggests that sustainable conservation cannot avoid monetary sacrifices, and if it is to be sustainable in the long term it should be inherent in the heritage itself.     

Improving heritage impact assessment: an analytical critique of the ICOMOS guidelines

ABSTRACT

In 2011, ICOMOS published its Guidance on Heritage Impact Assessment for Cultural World Heritage Properties. By 2016, over 100 Heritage Impact Assessments (HIAs) had been requested by UNESCO. This paper provides an analytical critique of the HIA Guidelines focusing on their implicit assumptions. We argue that the assumptions in the HIA Guidelines derive from the ‘preservation’ discourse in heritage management, rather than from the ‘conservation’ or ‘heritage planning’ discourses. This is important because the discourse affects the way impacts and their severity are assessed within HIAs, thereby potentially affecting the conclusions reached. We also argue that this framing results in miscommunication and misunderstanding amongst the different stakeholders, about: (1) their perceptions of the nature of heritage value; (2) the perceived purpose of HIA; (3) the way impacts are assessed; and (4) the differing agendas of stakeholders. We recommend that HIA practitioners acknowledge the existence of the various discourses. This could make HIA a more effective heritage management tool. We also consider that for HIAs to be more robust that they be conducted by a multidisciplinary group and with a peer-review mechanism.     

Competing discourses of built heritage: lay values in Irish conservation planning

Built heritage conservation has traditionally been shaped by professionals through an ‘authorised heritage discourse’, emphasising expert knowledge and skills, universal value, a hierarchy of significance, and protecting the authenticity of tangible assets. However, while the purpose of built heritage conservation is widely recognised to be broad, encompassing cultural, social and economic benefits, it takes place in the presence, and on behalf, of a wider public whose values and priorities may differ starkly from those of heritage power-players. Drawing on the perspectives of a range of built heritage actors in three small towns in Ireland, this paper contributes to these debates, exploring the competing values and priorities embedded within lay discourses of heritage. Based on critical discourse analysis of interviews with local actors, the paper identifies that collected memory and local place distinctiveness, contributing to a sense of local identity, are of central importance in how non-experts construct their understanding of built heritage. In the Irish context, this is particularly important in understanding social and cultural statutory categories of heritage interest. The paper concludes on the implications for policy and practice and, in particular, the need to more effectively take account of non-expert values and priorities in heritage and conservation decision-making.     

Are We “Ensnared in the System of Heritage” Because We Don’t Want to Escape?

This paper explores why heritage practitioners continue to embrace the objective security of positivism, building on Sharon Veale’s (cited in Sullivan 2015:114) observation that we are “ensnared in the system of heritage, rather than in understanding and unravelling the social processes of its making.” Specifically, built heritage conservation/CRM practice is too standardized and motivated primarily by speed, efficiency, and compliance; the field is not innovative or flexible; and heritage/CRM practitioners and scholars do not engage with each other. The field needs to recognize that the regulatory environment is a fundamental barrier in bridging theory and practice and in integrating tangible and intangible approaches. Lastly, understanding heritage requires a transdisciplinary approach that is altogether absent in most aspects of theory and practice. Possible solutions to these issues will be offered, including the idea of reenvisioning the nature of “heritage conservation.”     

Complications and Effectiveness of In Situ Preservation Methods for Underwater Cultural Heritage Sites

Abstract

Underwater Cultural Heritage (UCH) as an outstanding division of the cultural heritage of humanity appears to be crucial and complicated when more general issues regarding preservation and conservation are raised. The essence of in situ preservation should be equally discussable for any kind of archaeological remains; on land or underwater.

There is a long history of different methods and concepts of intervention in a variety of sub-aquatic archaeological sites; from shipwrecks to submerged settlements. This paper will present an introduction to different techniques and theories of preservation and conservation of underwater cultural and archaeological sites since this kind of heritage has scientifically been explored and studied. A range of different preservation methodologies, from total or partial transference inland, to preservation underwater, will be compared; the advantages and disadvantages of each option will be highlighted. Different examples of international best practices will be illustrated. Different types of in situ conservation/protection will be explained and categorized. Furthermore, there will be a focus on the UNESCO Convention of 2001 on Conservation and Preservation of UCH, where the in situ conservation option has been recommended.

Moreover, the technical issue for preservation of UCH sites, either in situ or after displacement, will be explained. The implication of relocation for different sorts of sites and materials will be argued; for example, cases where some sites, such as shipwrecks, would more easily be displaced compared with submerged settlements, villages, or ports.

Finally, by stressing that the state of ‘being underwater’ makes many sites qualified to be regarded as UCH, the in situ preservation approach will prevail that this state is maintained.     

Love & loss in the 1960s

Roland Barthes observed that though there is a ‘lover's discourse’ shared by all those who are in love, it is a discourse ignored or disparaged by ‘surrounding languages’. Concerned that the discourse of heritage may participate in this closure against the ‘in love’ experience, I begin to explore ways the field of heritage studies might start speaking this language. Specifically, I ponder the ways that a young Chinese woman in the film Days of being wild, following the breakup of a love affair, becomes locked in a landscape of lost love that is populated with objects sticky with affect, objects which although they transmit painful affects nevertheless bind her by a dynamic that Lauren Berlant terms ‘cruel optimism’. I then turn to imagine the way a Balinese house compound gateway might, in a similar way, have become impregnated with affects relating to victims of the 1965–1966 killings in Bali and how, for those left behind, it might assume the ability to ‘presence’ a lost one. Archaeology and heritage studies have great potential to foster empathy with the experience of past others, but this calls for a sophisticated understanding of how objects become imbued with affect and how they transmit it.     

Dilemma of local socio-economic perspectives in management of historic ruins in Kilwa Kisiwani World Heritage Site,Tanzania

The study explored the value that local residents place on historic ruins, focusing on their socio-economic value. It also explored the implications of conventional Cultural Heritage Management’s (CHM) indifference to this. Using in-depth data from 22 residents in Kilwa Kisiwani World Heritage Site in Tanzania, the study found that residents not only attach cultural value to the ruins, but also consider them a conservation project and tourist attraction, from which they can earn money and get employment and see infrastructure and social facilities developed. It also found that the destructive activities of illegally digging to construct toilets and water collectors, letting domestic animals wander in the ruins, quarrying old underground walls for coral stones, and lighting fires are partly the result of limited socio-economic benefits, inconsistent business opportunities, complaints about employment and payment, and few feasible alternatives for making a living. By engaging with the socio-economic discourse, this study broadens our understanding of the integration of conservation in the broader social agenda, and contributes to the economist-anthropologic debate on CHM. It informs heritage managers and policy makers on alternative strategies that would maintain the sustainability of the heritage.     

The fusion of law and ethics in cultural heritage management: The 21st century confronts archaeology

Abstract

Archaeologists around the world face complex ethical dilemmas that defy easy solutions. Ethics and law entwine, yet jurisprudence endures as the global praxis for guidance and result. Global legal norms articulate ‘legal rights’ and obligations while codes of professional conduct articulate ‘ethical rights’ and obligations. This article underscores how a rights discourse has shaped the 20th century discipline and practice of archaeology across the globe, including in the design and execution of projects like those discussed in the Journal of Field Archaeology. It illustrates how both law and ethics have been, and still are, viewed as two distinct solution-driven approaches that, even when out of sync, are the predominant frameworks that affect archaeologists in the field and more generally. While both law and ethics are influenced by social mores, public policy, and political objectives, each too often in cultural heritage debates has been considered a separate remedy. For archaeology, there remains the tendency to turn to law for a definite response when ethical solutions prove elusive.

As contemporary society becomes increasingly interconnected and the geo-political reality of the 21st century poses new threats to protecting archaeological sites and the integrity of the archaeological record during armed conflict and insurgency, law has fallen short or has lacked necessary enforcement mechanisms to address on-the-ground realities. A changing global order shaped by human rights, Indigenous heritage, legal pluralism, neo-colonialism, development, diplomacy, and emerging non-State actors directs the 21st century policies that shape laws and ethics. Archaeologists in the field today work within a nexus of domestic and international laws and regulations and must navigate increasingly complex ethical situations. Thus, a critical challenge is to realign approaches to current dilemmas facing archaeology in a way that unifies the ‘legal’ and the ‘ethical’ with a focus on human rights and principles of equity and justice. With examples from around the world, this article considers how law and ethics affect professional practice and demonstrates how engagement with law and awareness of ethics are pivotal to archaeologists in the field.     

Empowering marginal lifescapes: the heritage of crofters in between the past and the present

There is a rich, but unacknowledged, heritage of rural subalterns, crofters, in Scandinavia. A Swedish-Norwegian interdisciplinary research-network investigated the most prominent category – the remains of crofts. Due to industrialisation, urbanisation and the modern welfare state, the institution of crofting was abolished, and many crofters left for opportunities elsewhere. The welfare state transformed a landscape of living and working people into a one filled with relicts mostly from the nineteenth century. Although numerous and important to local citizens, these sites fall outside the authorised heritage discourse (AHD) in terms of both research and heritage management. This paper takes an environmental justice perspective to challenge the AHD. Three themes are in focus: (1) bringing out the history of a subaltern and marginalised group of people; (2) promoting crofts as heritage of importance to local citizens and demanding complex management due to the various historical narratives and risks; (3) considering the crofting landscapes in relation to the (economisation) framing of heritage in development processes, especially in relation to fair development in present rural communities.     

Cultural effects of authenticity: contested heritage practices in China

In this study, I analyse how the Chinese Government imposes the concept of authenticity on local heritage practices in the process of heritage nomination, conservation and management. Rather than discussing authenticity as an objective criterion, I approach authentication as a social process in the heritage discourse that impacts on local cultural practice. Through illustrating two cases in China, I propose three cultural effects of authentication on local heritage practices, namely spatial separation, emotional banishment and value shifting. Moreover, the heritage practices in China have created space for dynamic negotiations between local and global value systems. When the concept of authenticity is imposed on local heritage practices by heritage agencies, local communities are not passive recipients; rather, they consume, contest and negotiate the concept of authenticity in various ways.     

Environment and Cultural Heritage in China: Introduction

The transformation of the natural and built environment over the past three decades has left China with a legacy of environmental degradation and loss of biodiversity. The loss of cultural heritage, including cultural forms associated with the natural ecology, has been just as dramatic. The three studies in this special focus section of Asian Studies Review explore significant issues in environmental conservation, cultural heritage, and grassroots activism in urban and rural China, with an emphasis on the relationship between the natural environment, the transmission of traditional cultural forms, and localised forms of agency or activism. As discussed here, while China's discourse on these issues is strongly influenced by global norms, different regions of China are developing their own individual responses to environmental conservation, the protection of biodiversity, and the ongoing transmission of endangered cultural forms.     

Re-visiting the field: Collaborative archaeology as paradigm shift

Abstract

The emphasis of the JFA on field methods resonates strongly with current disciplinary interest in multivocality and participatory research. In this new epistemology of inclusiveness, communities play an active role in the production of archaeological knowledge as well as in the conservation of cultural heritage. From the perspective of archaeologists trained in the U.S. who conduct research in Latin America, we historicize changes in the triadic relationship among archaeologists, contemporary communities, and things of the past. This examination focuses on the evolving social context of archaeological practice. The social milieu within which archaeology is conducted is explored further by reference to a recent survey of archaeologists that elicited comments on grand challenges to archaeology. A few examples of the many forms that an engaged archaeology might take are offered from the Maya region. Although collaborative research poses challenges that emerge as communities entangled with archaeological practice become research partners, we suggest that the enhanced relevance that accompanies this transformation is well worth the effort.     

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.     

The Hopi,the katsinam,and the French courts: looking outside the law in the repatriation of Indigenous cultural heritage

Katsinam (plural of katsina) are effigies central to the religion of the Hopi people of northern Arizona in the United States. Since 2013 the Hopi have sought the return of katsinam being sold in French auction houses. The Hopi have employed a series of legal actions to stop the auctions. All such actions, however, have been consistently denied by French courts. This paper uses social science analysis to understand why the legal actions of the Hopi failed. This paper treats the case of the katsinam as a cautionary lesson in cultural heritage studies, with the goal of drawing insights that can inform other situations involving the repatriation of Indigenous cultural heritage.     

‘No more road to walk’: cultures of heritage and leprosariums in Singapore and Malaysia

This paper examines how the state, social activists and former sufferers of leprosy participate in an international heritage discourse and how they construct the history of leprosy in contemporary Singapore and Malaysia. This paper finds both dissonances but also convergences between these different interests. The emergence of such entangled narratives is taking place at a time when the leprosariums are threatened by redevelopment and while social activists are calling for their conservation as heritage sites. The paper finds that both the state and social activists, in different ways, have selectively appropriated the history of leprosy to fit an international heritage discourse. Meanwhile aspects of that history, which are deemed incompatible, are discarded to fall in between the cracks of the discourse. By contrast, the oral history accounts of the leprosariums’ residents, as a possible source for intangible and radical heritage, are ambivalent about the sites’ heritage values. They reveal that while many residents reject the heritage discourse that seeks to save their homes from demolition, others have created a unique culture of heritage that appropriates the international discourse, but also expresses their own needs and perspectives. Cultures of heritage are, however, themselves fluid and liable to change like the memories on which they are based.     

A Methodological Approach Towards Conservation

Abstract

Since conservation became a recognized discipline, professionals involved in conservation projects have tried to find the best criteria for their interventions. Often these criteria remain quite vague, based on the idea that every historic building has its own special conditions, which make its problems different from other buildings. This conviction, which is appropriate at one level, has serious consequences due to the lack of a consistent methodology. More than a lack of criteria, we might talk about a lack of 'habit' in identifying values in the Mediterranean region: the concept of values is much more widespread in Anglo-Saxon countries.

If we take a look at the history of conservation, there are a number of cases which are often used as models: for example, the Colosseum or the Arch of Titus in Rome, both interventions which are greatly admired and included in many conservation manuals. More recently there are projects which are widely accepted by the heritage conservation community as well: the paper explores the Palace of the Partal (Granada), the Villa Romana del Casale (Piazza Armerina), the theatre at Orange, and the Insula Orientalis I in Herculaneum. In this article, I suggest that there are constant elements within these conservation projects, reflecting typological, structural, constructional, functional, aesthetic, formal, historical, and symbolic values. These features represent a way of planning a conservation project and a critical methodology to judge the outcomes of the project in an objective manner. The methodology is qualitative rather than quantitative. All historic buildings have a set of values developed from their origins and throughout their history. These values can be analysed to extract the most important elements to be preserved. Analysing the values of our built heritage will allow us to create better decision-making processes.