An irreconcilable first-place: the precarious life of tourism and heritage in a southern European historic centre

Abstract

This article discusses the ambiguous relationship between heritage tourism and everyday life in the historic centre of Naples. This area, long characterised by a lower-class residential population and intermittently considered off-limits to tourists, has over the last two decades become the focus of a burgeoning heritage tourism industry. The article adopts the idea of precariousness – understood contra conventional formulations as a condition that elicits both anxiety and emancipatory release – in order to make sense of the allure and repulsion that the historic centre exerts in tourist encounters with the city. Through three examples – a bus sightseeing tour, online responses to a New York Times article about Naples and local people’s perceptions of a pedestrianised piazza as a tourist contact zone – the article illustrates how the historic centre as a tourist destination is constituted by a mix of foreboding and excitement; where affective experience tends to trump the monumental gaze. Thinking in terms of precariousness not only underlines the contradictory role that this area plays in the local production of cultural heritage but also poses a challenge to those accounts that see in the advent of a visitor economy the inevitable ‘museumification’ and gentrification of historic centres.     

Recently completed doctorates in social and cultural geography

The Black Men of Labor is a local social club whose parade marks the beginning of New Orleans' parading season on Labor Day weekend. Coincidentally, the homosexual, predominantly White male Southern Decadence party and parade is that same weekend—hosted by a large gay community living primarily in New Orleans' French Quarter. Although these two parading groups appear outwardly different, both parades make claims to the same street at different times. We call their politics ‘parallel politics’ because the parades have similar political motivations, yet they literally parade in parallel, and therefore fail to connect and protest their socio-spatial marginalization together. This missed opportunity led us to consider how these two parades territorialize space and project a unified community identity. Territoriality, according to Sack (1983 Sack, R. 1983. Human territoriality: a theory. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 73: 55–74. [Taylor &; Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), is an attempt to control a geographic area and establish differential access to it. Moving beyond previous work on parades as observed performances, boundary markers or negotiated representations, we show how parades create a territorially-based identity through cultural nodes, and how their exclusivity is both a process and outcome of territoriality. We argue that territoriality and identity are fused, which forecloses the possibility of collective action between these two communities. We find that parade territorialities simultaneously and complexly establish both social and spatial claims.     

The maginot line: An indestructible inheritance

Abstract

Every French town has its rue Charles de Gaulle. None has a Boulevard Pétain or Place Maginot. These names associated with the defeat and dishonour of France in 1940 have no place in the national heritage. Pétain died disgraced, But the line bearing Maginot's name remains, though kept firmly off the official tourist map. Constructed as ‘France's Shield’ amd beheld as the eighth wonder of the world’, it nevertheless, warped conceptions of modern warfare and bred defeatism. Hence the Fall of France, hence the line's heritage oblivion. And yet, amateur enthusiasts (German as well as French) persist in their efforts to restore the forts of the Maginot line to an order approaching their original state. Their passion has less to do with revising historical reputations than with archaeological engineering. Visitors witness the spectacle of a private heritage‐subverting dedication to make these vast underground ships ready to sail again.     

Ethnographic reflections on ‘oppositional heritage discourse’ in two post-earthquake Italian cities

This article explores the politicisation of cultural heritage during the aftermath of the 1980 earthquake in Naples and the 2009 earthquake in L’Aquila. It begins by critically addressing the positions of Tomaso Montanari and Salvatore Settis, two prominent heritage intellectuals at the forefront of national campaigns to restore the damaged historic centre of L’Aquila. Both have been instrumental in shaping an ‘oppositional heritage discourse’ in Italy that underscores the civic virtues of the nation’s cultural patrimony while simultaneously railing against its marketisation. Reflecting upon observations in L’Aquila, where locals involved in protests at government inaction have been scolded by fellow inhabitants for their lack of obeisance to cultural heritage, and drawing on longstanding ethnographic research in Naples, where heritage campaigns against redevelopment in the historic centre in the 1980s were later incorporated into an ambitious regeneration agenda, the article argues that this oppositional heritage discourse is not only premised upon idealist notions of collective identity but also, as a result of its attempts to legislate the boundaries of heritage citizenship and its disavowal of philologically incorrect relationships with historic centres, it ultimately provides tacit support to the very same neoliberal urban processes against which it claims to take a stand.     

Literacy and the law in Lombard government

This article examines the Lombard law code as evidence for literate practices in government and society in seventh- and eighth-century Italy. The effectiveness of the code as an instrument of government is testified by the charter evidence, in which the precepts of the code are implicitly acknowledged or cited directly. Although largely the result of a necessary appropriation of late Roman property law, Lombard legislation and notarial practice applied further literate methods to document, and hence to validate, a range of transactions. The use of written law was not merely limited to male landowners, but affected Italo-Lombard society more widely, as is revealed by the evidence for women's property rights and manumission. The charter evidence and references within the code itself suggest that various uses of writing for governmental administration extended beyond the royal and ducal levels into local society.