The Heritagescape: Looking at Landscapes of the Past

Heritage sites are one of the most visible, accessible and tangible manifestations of heritage and are also some of the essential building blocks of heritage. Yet we are still without a sense of how they operate over time and in relation to each other. This paper will introduce the notion of the ‘heritagescape’ as a means of interpreting and analysing heritage sites as unique social spaces that offer an experience of the past. In contrast to previous attempts to investigate these places, the heritagescape offers the means to focus both on the underlying similarities and also on the relationships of different sites to each other. As such, heritagescape offers a coherent and overarching methodology by which to identify the universal processes and elements that characterise heritage sites and will allow us to take our examination of heritage as a cultural phenomenon into the future.     

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.     

Globalisation and memory

Abstract

We live in the ‘era of disparition’, in Paul Virilio's words. Globalisation causes our common markers to disappear: time is worldly and instantaneous. Perception of space is modified; everything can be in the same place at the same time; places tend to standardise. Communities are baffled by wars, ethnocide, emigration. In the midst of all this, collective memory fights for existence. The motto of museums could be, as Virilio says, ‘searching for signs rematerialising the world’. To counter the deleterious effects of disparition, museums should stress the importance of territory and history. Ecomuseums in particular can become the archetype of social places for meetings, for common elucidation resulting in exhibitions, for remembering collective memory. The museum must help the community undertake not so much a duty of memory as a work of memory. The function of the museum is awakening consciousness in many dimensions.