Engaging Heritage, Engaging Communities 1783271655, 9781783271658

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction • Bryony Onciul
Engaging Concepts
1 The Gate in the Wall: Beyond Happiness-making in Museums • Bernadette Lynch
2 Assembling Communities: Curatorial Practices, Material Cultures and Meanings • Philipp Schorch
3 Interview – John Tunbridge
4 Interview – Gregory Ashworth
5 Engaging with Māori and Archaeologists: Heritage Theory and Practice in Āotearoa New Zealand • Elizabeth Pishief
6 Horizontality: Tactical Politics for Participation and Museums • Helen Graham
Engaging Creatively
7 Re-imagining Egypt: Artefacts, Contemporary Art and Community Engagement inthe Museum • Gemma Tully
8 Interview – Evita Buša
9 Interview – Shatha Abu Khafajah
10 Engaging Communities of De-industrialisation: the Mapping Baybrook and Mill Stories Projects of Baltimore, USA • Michelle L. Stefano and Nicole King
11 Interview – Ashley Minner
Engaging Challenges
12 Embattled Legacies: Challenges in Community Engagement at Historic Battlefields in the UK • Justin Sikora
13 At the Community Level: Intangible Cultural Heritage as Naturally-occurring Ecomuseums • Michelle L. Stefano
14 Subaltern Sport Heritage • Gregory Ramshaw
15 Museums and the Symbolic Capital of Social Media Space • Julian Hartley
16 Relational Systems and Ancient Futures: Co-creating a Digital Contact Network in Theory and Practice • Billie Lythberg, Carl Hogsden and Wayne Ngata
17 Interview – Conal McCarthy
List of Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Heritage Matters

ENGAGING HERITAGE, ENGAGING COMMUNITIES

Heritage Matters ISSN 1756–4832 Series Editors Peter G. Stone Peter Davis Chris Whitehead Heritage Matters is a series of edited and single-authored volumes which addresses the whole range of issues that confront the cultural heritage sector as we face the global challenges of the twenty-first century. The series follows the ethos of the International Centre for Cultural and Heritage Studies (ICCHS) at Newcastle University, where these issues are seen as part of an integrated whole, including both cultural and natural agendas, and thus encompasses challenges faced by all types of museums, art galleries, heritage sites and the organisations and individuals that work with, and are affected by them. Previously published titles are listed at the back of this book

Engaging Heritage, Engaging Communities Edited by

Bryony Onciul, Michelle L. Stefano and Stephanie Hawke

THE BOYDELL PRESS

©  Contributors 2017 All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner First published 2017 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge ISBN 978–1–78327–165–8 The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com

The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

This publication is printed on acid-free paper

Typeset by www.thewordservice.com

Contents List of Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction Bryony Onciul

1 Engaging Concepts

1 The Gate in the Wall: Beyond Happiness-making in Museums Bernadette Lynch 2 Assembling Communities: Curatorial Practices, Material Cultures and Meanings Philipp Schorch 3 Interview – John Tunbridge 4 Interview – Gregory Ashworth 5 Engaging with Māori and Archaeologists: Heritage Theory and Practice in Āotearoa New Zealand Elizabeth Pishief 6 Horizontality: Tactical Politics for Participation and Museums Helen Graham

11 31 47 51 55

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Engaging Creatively 7 Re-imagining Egypt: Artefacts, Contemporary Art and Community Engagement in the Museum Gemma Tully 8 Interview – Evita Buša 9 Interview – Shatha Abu Khafajah 10 Engaging Communities of De-industrialisation: the Mapping Baybrook and Mill Stories Projects of Baltimore, USA Michelle L. Stefano and Nicole King 11 Interview – Ashley Minner

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107 113 119

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Engaging Challenges 12 Embattled Legacies: Challenges in Community Engagement at Historic Battlefields in the UK Justin Sikora

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Contents

13 At the Community Level: Intangible Cultural Heritage as Naturally-occurring Ecomuseums Michelle L. Stefano 14 Subaltern Sport Heritage Gregory Ramshaw 15 Museums and the Symbolic Capital of Social Media Space Julian Hartley 16 Relational Systems and Ancient Futures: Co-creating a Digital Contact Network in Theory and Practice Billie Lythberg, Carl Hogsden and Wayne Ngata 17 Interview – Conal McCarthy

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List of Contributors

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Index

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179 189 205

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Illustrations COVER IMAGES (Top) Former Sparrows Point Steel Mill Workers at a fall 2015 Mapping Dialogue community event Photo by William Shewbridge (Middle) Ruakapanga house, Hauiti marae, Tolaga Bay, New Zealand Photo from National Library NZ, reproduced with permission (Bottom) Working kanohi ki te kanohi in Uawa Photo by B. Lythberg FIGURES Title page

Dancers bending their swords together at DERT 2008 in Liverpool, UK Photo by M. Stefano

5.1 Places mentioned in the text in the North Island New Zealand Map prepared by Justin Pishief from Google Earth 5.2 Map of heritage places in Hawke’s Bay mentioned in the text Map prepared by Justin Pishief from Google Earth 7.1

Khaled Hafez, Saffron 1, 2013 Reproduced by kind permission of Khaled Hafez (image owner)

58 62 96

7.2 Ancient and modern shabtis on display in the gallery Photo by Gemma Tully

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10.1 UMBC students interviewing steelworker, Randy Duncan Photo by William Shewbridge

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10.2 A community event at Benjamin Franklin High School, Fall 2015 Photo by William Shewbridge

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Illustrations

13.1 Dancers bending their swords together at DERT 2008 in Liverpool Photo by M. Stefano

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16.1 Contact network: hubs with their nodes connected in a network © C. Hogsden and E. K. Poulter 2012

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16.2 Ruakapanga – a carved house for communal gatherings Photo from National Library NZ, reproduced with permission

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16.3 Categories of mea © B. Lythberg, C. Hogsden, W. Ngata

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16.4 Working kanohi ki te kanohi in Uawa Photo by B. Lythberg

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16.5 A tukutuku panel in Ruakapanga Photo by Fiona Collis

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TABLES 7.1 The simple timeline and artefacts used during workshops





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The editors, contributors and publishers are grateful to all the institutions and persons listed for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any omission, and the publishers will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in subsequent editions.

Acknowledgments This book began its journey in 2009 at the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded conference Engaging Communities, organised by Bryony Onciul, Michelle Stefano and Nikki Spalding, and supported by Stephanie Hawke, Justin Sikora, Tori Park and the academic and administrative teams at the International Centre for Cultural and Heritage Studies at Newcastle University. The conference took place in the Great North Museum: Hancock, in Newcastle. It brought together early career academics with established scholars and professionals in the field of heritage. The two-day event sparked discussions on heritage, museums and community engagement that, over the years, have influenced and shaped this volume. We would like to thank Nikki Spalding, who led the funding application to host the 2009 Engaging Communities conference. We are eternally grateful to Professor Peter Davis, who supported and encouraged this publication from its early beginnings through to completion, as well as to Catherine Dauncey, for her advice and preparatory assistance. Equally we are deeply indebted to the International Centre for Cultural and Heritage Studies, where each of us trained, and which provided expert guidance in our research, dissemination and publication endeavours. We would like to thank the authors in this volume and acknowledge all of the people engaging with heritage who feature in these chapters for their enthusiasm and drive. Their efforts, often voluntary and in their leisure time, give heritage its meaning, power and vivacity. Bryony Onciul, Michelle L. Stefano and Stephanie Hawke

Introduction Bryony Onciul

A

cross the global networks of heritage sites, museums and galleries, the importance of communities to the interpretation and conservation of heritage is increasingly being recognised. Meaningful community engagement is noted as a worthy institutional goal and is a common requirement of funding bodies. Yet the very term ‘meaningful community engagement’ betrays a myriad of contrary approaches and understandings. Who is a community? How can they engage with heritage? Why would a community want to? How do communities and heritage professionals perceive one another? What does it mean to ‘engage’? These questions unsettle the very foundations of community engagement and indicate a need to unpick this important but complex trend. Engaging Heritage, Engaging Communities critically engages with and explores the latest debates and practices surrounding community collaboration. By exploring the different ways in which communities participate in heritage projects, the book questions the benefits, costs and limitations of community engagement. Whether communities are engaging through innovative initiatives or in response to economic, political or social factors, there is a need to understand how such engagements are conceptualised, facilitated and experienced by both the organisations and the communities involved. The terms that are central to this volume, ‘community’, ‘engagement’ and ‘heritage’, are key touchstones in the vocabulary of modern museology and heritage practice and theory. Yet they remain fluid, undefined terms with a multiplicity of logics and conceptions that range so broadly as to be entirely dissimilar. Engaging Heritage, Engaging Communities focuses upon untangling these terms and questioning the assumptions upon which community engagement is often built. The use of the term ‘engaging’ in the book title, and subsequent subheadings, plays upon the multiple readings of the word. It relates directly to the process of working with, or co-producing, that is central to the analysis in the volume, but it also hints at the assumed attractive and compelling qualities associated with doing ‘good’ community work. It emphasises the way that this phenomenon of engagement has occupied and held the interest of academics and practitioners in the field of heritage, not as a fleeting fad but as a real shift in logic. While the word ‘engaging’ can be used positively, it can also describe more limiting and restricting forms of relationships. Many of the chapters in this volume explore the darker sides of engagement through their analysis of theory in practice, and attempt to reconceptualise and challenge traditional thinking around co-production and participation. Thus this playful term ‘engaging’ is evocative, filled with creative potential and complex concerns. The book brings together international multi-disciplinary perspectives to the key question of community engagement in theory and practice in a diverse range of heritage settings. The nature of these contexts enables differences and similarities to be drawn out and explored in relation to a range of factors, including geographical, sector- and discipline-specific, political and professional,

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as well as differences borne from the variation in the models of engagement used and the perceptions and assumptions around what a community is and what engagement means in practice. The volume builds upon an increasingly rich source of literature on community engagement. Many of the engagement models used in heritage and museum practice are drawn from a range of disciplines (notably Arnstein 1969; Farrington and Bebbington 1993; Pretty 1995; White 1996; Galla 1997; Clifford 1997; Simon 2010; Onciul 2015). While much of the literature on engagement focuses upon the benefits and importance of museums working with communities (Karp et al 1992; Dicks 2000; Peers and Brown 2003; Crooke 2006; 2007; Watson 2007), there has been less emphasis on heritage (Smith and Waterton 2013; Watson and Waterton 2010; Onciul 2015). Increasingly, recent publications have critically analysed the challenges and problems with engagement (notably Watson and Waterton 2010,1 2011; Lynch and Alberti 2010; Lynch 2011a; 2011b; Golding and Modest 2013; Onciul 2013; 2014; 2015). Emerging from this literature is an impression that, while engagement has been embedded into heritage and museum practice, the long-term and unexpected consequences of this involvement are significant, varied and in need of further analysis and consideration. The very building blocks of engagement (terminology, methods and expected outcomes) are in need of new, or re-, conceptualisation. The volume addresses this need by continuing the critical analysis of community engagement, whilst not losing sight of the importance and vast potential community engagement offers to our understanding and management of heritage. Perhaps of greatest merit is the way that authors have attempted to plot new conceptions of this now familiar process to both unsettle norms and assumptions that can limit engagement and to bring new cultural perspectives to help decentre engagement from its Western viewpoint (in particular see Schorch, Pischief, Lythberg, Hogsden and Ngata, and McCarthy in this volume). Engaging Heritage, Engaging Communities brings together the voices of community members, academics, museologists, curators, archaeologists, architects, teachers, artists, geographers, technology experts and heritage professionals, creating a complex dialogue on the issues surrounding our current conceptions of heritage, community and engagement. Through this process, current disciplinary and professional boundaries are transcended, creating a unique ‘snapshot’ of current theory and practice. The seventeen chapters, presented in three sections, examine the core assumptions encapsulated in the language and practice of engagement and explore interdisciplinary and alternative approaches from case studies across the globe. The volume brings together analysis of some of the latest technological advancements through the utilisation of information technology in engagement with some of the oldest values – working together face-to-face, respecting one another and appreciating the political and moral onus on developing real, long-term relationships built on positive reciprocation. Overview of the book The volume brings together new scholars with established leaders in the field, both academic and professional practitioners, from a wide cross section of inter-related disciplines. Together this enables a diversity of voices and perspectives to come into concert with one another,

1

A special issue of the International Journal of Heritage Studies was dedicated to the topic ‘Heritage and Community Engagement: Collaboration or Contestation?’ in 2010.



Introduction 3

enabling a deeper, broader understanding of the key issues around community, heritage and engagement. Interspersed throughout the book are interviews with academics and practitioners from around the world who engage with the field of heritage. The pieces explore the role of community engagement with heritage in a number of contexts, from contemporary art to archaeology, and consider the meaning of key terms in theory and practice. The interviews speak to the role of recent developments in heritage studies, including the rise of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies (ACHS). These discussions are pertinent to the new developments in heritage studies and relate to the editors of this volume, as the UK and US Chapters of ACHS were founded by Bryony Onciul and Michelle Stefano respectively. These conversational pieces speculate on the future of heritage as a practice and academic subject, highlighting areas for development and concern. The book is divided into three sections: Engaging Concepts; Engaging Creatively; and Engaging Challenges. The first section focuses on deconstructing and redefining the terms and concepts that shape the ways in which community engagement is approached in heritage. The second section focuses upon creative approaches to community engagement with heritage through the use of art, architecture, archaeology and oral history. The third section considers challenges, particularly in the in-between spaces of intangible and digital heritage. Throughout the sections common threads link the discussions: the interrogation of the terms of engagement, heritage and community; the challenges of theory in practice; the importance of engagement; the need to acknowledge the many and varied forms engagement takes; the potential for negative consequences; and the potential to positively innovate and reimagine this process. Section 1, Engaging Concepts, focuses upon analysing and reconceptualising the key terms used in engagement and the assumptions tied to the processes of working with communities. Chapter 1, ‘The Gate in the Wall’, sets out one of the core dilemmas for community engagement: the expected reciprocal nature of participation. Bernadette Lynch builds on her previous UK-based work by exploring engagement as a form of gift, and the strings that are attached to such forms of exchange. She also critiques the recent trend in measuring happiness. Lynch argues for the importance of and need for conflict and strife within museums, stating the need to listen to, rather than necessarily cure, problems. As such, Lynch concludes that museums should be viewed not as purveyors of happiness and wellbeing but as sites of struggle that can create change. This chapter opens the floor for further critique of the core assumptions around engagement, heritage and communities. Philipp Schorch continues the interrogation of assumptions by exploring the concepts of ‘community’ and ‘engagement’ in a Polynesian context. Schorch applies the notion of assemblage to communities, analysing the relational networks between people, places, objects, practice and meaning. He draws upon hermeneutics to engage with the processes of translation, interpretation, meaning-making and relationship-building at the heart of interactions across assemblages of human and non-human actors in these Pacific entanglements. In doing so, Chapter 2 opens up the discussion of communities, presenting them as ‘dynamic networks that become interpretively assembled, disassembled and reassembled’ through their interactions with actors, objects and practices. Schorch also expands upon the role of the curator in this process and, in doing so, prompts questions about the purpose and future of museums and the heritages they care for. In the two chapters that follow the style of the discussion shifts to interviews with two highly esteemed academics, John E. Tunbridge and Gregory Ashworth. Together they have led the

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academic discussion of heritage for decades, particularly in the discipline of Geography. John Tunbridge unpicks the concept of ‘heritage’, emphasising the importance of understanding it as a process of meaning-making and interpretation. Tunbridge considers the history of heritage and as well as its future, emphasising the need for ‘heritage’ to be viewed as an evolving concept that considers and allows for loss and destruction, as well as maintenance and preservation. Gregory Ashworth, who has co-authored five books on heritage with Tunbridge, guides the reader through the early emergence of the term ‘heritage’ and explores its academic and practical applications, critiques and resistance. In closing, Ashworth raises a key provocation to the future of heritage, identifying the potential that, in its current guise, some would argue it has run its course. Together these conversational pieces remind us that the current naturalised conceptualisation of heritage is a recent phenomenon. Chapter 5 places this modern understanding of heritage into a deeper time frame. Elizabeth Pishief discusses collaboration between archaeologists and traditional Māori Elders in their approach to understanding the importance of place in New Zealand. Pishief studies the Māori ideas of ‘warming’ places and of ‘the connect’ in the meaning-making of heritage. This chapter provides further case studies and examples that support the earlier discussions on assemblage by Schorch and the challenges of engagement highlighted in Lynch’s opening chapter. Helen Graham deepens the analysis of engagement in Chapter 6, problematizing the term ‘engagement’ as an act one does to another and arguing instead for the need to build real reciprocal relationship networks that involve one another in each other’s lived world experiences, decentering the museum and thinking of participation across connected nodes. She draws upon her experiences of working with museums and communities across a range of projects in the UK. Section 2 moves the discussion into the area of creativity and imagination. The section is entitled Engaging Creatively as it explores the role of art, architecture, archaeology and oral history in engaging communities with heritage. Section 2 opens with a chapter by Gemma Tully in which she analyses a case study that brought together archaeologists, artists and communities to re-examine Egypt in an exhibit produced in the UK. Taking up the theme of collaboration, Tully demonstrates the positive outcomes of working with a diversity of people across age, culture and disciplines to instigate a reimagining of Egypt within the mind of visitors. Importantly, Tully highlights the value of respecting input from all stakeholders and argues for the importance of involving children in the changing of mind-sets and the dissemination of new information. The following chapter continues the analysis of contemporary art through an interview with Evita Buša, the Head of Public Programming and the Educational Department at the Museums of Contemporary Art in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Buša focuses on the roles art can play in community collaboration and empowerment, looking specifically at recognising the value of art in working within neighbourhoods in the San Juan region. This is complemented by an interview with Shatha Abu Khafajah, who is based in the Architecture Department of The Hashemite University, Jordan. Through examples of student-led work, she focuses on the role and importance of communities in the interpretation of archaeological sites in the Jordanian context. In Chapter 10, the importance of examining place through community collaboration is reinforced by Michelle Stefano and Nicole King in their discussion of two interlinked projects that focus on revealing the sociocultural impacts of de-industrialisation in the Baltimore (US) region: Mapping Baybrook and Mill Stories. The chapter considers the importance of place and ground-up methodologies of community engagement. Through this analysis the authors explore



Introduction 5

the value of working with a place-based, community-driven methodology, even when places have been ‘lost’, by bringing together oral history, ethnographic interview and cultural mapping techniques. The authors argue that the projects help to amplify the voices of those impacted by de-industrialisation and complicate the mainstream, and often oversimplified, narrative of industrial boom and bust in the US. The final chapter in this section is an interview with Ashley Minner, a community-based visual artist and scholar also based in Baltimore. In Chapter 11 Minner discusses growing up in a neighbourhood associated with the Sparrows Point Steel Mill featured in Chapter 10. Minner discusses the experiences of Lumbee Native Americans living in Baltimore and the places and cultural initiatives that have been established as a means of providing community support: the Baltimore American Indian Centre; the Title VII Indian Education Program; the South Broadway Baptist Church; and the Native American After School Art Program founded by Minner in 2007. This conversational piece draws together issues of identity, place, culture and art, echoing some of the earlier discussions in Section 2. Minner argues that art-making can be a methodology of resistance for communities and highlights the fluid, changing nature of identity and what this means for heritage engagement, particularly for Indigenous communities in North and South America. The chapters in this section take the reader to a number of different geographical, cultural and temporal locations, and illustrate the importance of engaging with living communities to represent, interpret and safeguard heritage in innovative and creative ways. Section 3 is entitled Engaging Challenges as it explores the physical and virtual places and spaces where heritage occurs and is engaged with, challenged and critiqued. It highlights unexpected negative outcomes, as well as opportunities to reimage and improve engagement. In Chapter 12 Justin Sikora examines the dissonance and conflict in heritage by exploring the way battlefields are identified, interpreted and conserved. Sikora analyses two case studies: one in which conservation has resulted in a disengagement with the local community and another in which a lack of conservation has ignited local concerns about preservation. He illustrates the role of ‘authorised heritage discourse’ (Smith 2006) and politics in conservation decisions and the potential for conflict between stakeholders to occur even when all parties ultimately aim to achieve the same thing. Building upon the idea of ecomuseums introduced in Sikora’s chapter, and following Tunbridge’s statement that all heritage is intangible, Chapter 13 considers the difficulties in safeguarding intangible cultural heritage. Michelle Stefano explores a case study of the Rapper Dance, distinctive to the North East of England, and considers how potential ‘museological interventions’ could help maintain the dance. She proposes that, as a living cultural phenomenon, the traditional dance acts as a ‘naturally occurring ecomuseum’. Drawing upon Rivard’s (1984: 92) formulae, this shifts engagement from being driven by ‘experts’ to a community-based model, allowing for both preservation and innovation of heritage. In a manner similar to Sikora’s chapter, this raises questions about who owns heritage and who are the experts on, and keepers of, traditions and history. Chapter 14 picks up the theme of safeguarding community heritage and explores the potential for subaltern resistance and counter narratives in the interpretations of sports heritage. Gregory Ramshaw considers four case studies where the traditional ‘authorised heritage discourse’ (Smith 2006) of sport is subverted, challenged and resisted by local community interpretation. Drawing examples from Australia, the UK and US, he explores issues of race, ability and class in sport.

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The chapter highlights an under-acknowledged form of heritage and argues that sports heritage has a power in the way it brings together the critical and celebratory to help reconsider the past. However, he highlights that such subaltern heritages are not always welcomed by sports organisers or sponsors, bringing us back to the keen insight of Graham et al (2000), who argue that dissonance is an integral part of heritage. Ramshaw discusses the importance of the role of social media in linking sporting events with wider civil rights movements. Chapter 15 further develops the theme of social media, as Julian Hartley explores the structure of online social space and the challenges this poses to museums’ digital engagement with audiences. Drawing on Bourdieu’s (1977; 1984; 1986; 1989) theories, he argues that, while social media appears to offer greater democratic access and inclusion, museum approaches to virtual audiences can in fact recreate issues of disengagement that are faced by museums in the physical world. The chapter draws upon three examples of successful digital museum engagements: Click! at the Brooklyn Museum; the Tate’s engagement with real-time news; and the Powerhouse Museum’s use of folksonomies. Nevertheless, Hartley conclude that social media’s ability to ‘unfix’ communities from place and bring users together in real-time has yet to be embraced by museums, which tend to resist real-time immediacy and still operate with the notion of museum as destination. While Chapter 15 explores the challenges of digital inclusion, Chapter 16 considers the challenges and benefits of exclusive digital spaces that can allow for the controlled sharing and creation of information between select groups. Billie Lythberg, Carl Hogsden and Wayne Ngata discuss two interrelated projects (‘Artefacts of Encounter’ and ‘Te Ataakura’) that were designed to enable the digital sharing of sacred Māori collections and knowledge between museums and source communities. By embracing Māori concepts and approaches to working, the digital contact network they created enabled new forms of knowledge repositories and exchanges to take place, and facilitated relationships, revitalisations and reciprocations across vast distances. Importantly, the authors share the difficulties they faced in creating these digital relations across cultures, times and places, and emphasise that traditional face-to-face contact and long-term trust building is essential to such collaborations. The volume closes with an interview with Conal McCarthy, director of the Museum and Heritage Studies programme at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He highlights the leading role New Zealand has played in integrating Māori concepts of heritage, which has enabled the embedding of community control and ownership into museum and heritage practice. McCarthy, like Lythberg, Hogsden and Ngata, Pishief, Schorch, and Onciul (2015), recognises the value of utilising source community cultural concepts of heritage management in the way heritage is conceived and conserved, and the manner in which community engagement is approached. Together these chapters demonstrate the dynamic nature of community engagement and heritage, which presents both challenges and holds great potential to move beyond current conceptions of community relationships and offers positive reconfigurations of the way heritage and culture can be maintained and shared. Through the three sections of this book the chapters weave a detailed tapestry of different theories and practices played out in various disciplinary, cultural and geographical contexts. Yet, through the differences, similarities of concerns can be discerned. Key themes that emerge concern the value of community involvement, although challenging; the chapters illuminate the many ways communities enrich and deepen understanding and engagement with the past. The need for holistic approaches and respect for multiple sources is also demonstrated. Perhaps the



Introduction 7

message that emerges most clearly is that, while community engagement is currently in vogue, it is not passé. The need for meaningful engagement remains, and deeper understandings of how it can be better conceptualised and improved are still required. The chapters show that challenges and divergences can create new and positive ways forward and that the very terms through which we discuss engagement can be re-evaluated and reconceptualised to be more accurate and meaningful to those who engage in the process. Bibliography and References Arnstein, S R, 1969 A Ladder of Citizen Participation, JAIP 35 (4), 216–24 Bourdieu, P, 1977 Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge ——, 1984 Distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA ——, 1986 The Forms of Capital, in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (ed J G Richardson), Greenwood Press, New York, 241–58 ——, 1989 Social Space and Symbolic Power, Sociological Theory 7 (1), 14–25 Clifford, J, 1997 Routes. Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, Harvard University Press, London Crooke, E, 2006 Museums and Community, in A Companion to Museum Studies (ed S Macdonald), WileyBlackwell, Oxford, 170–85 ——, 2007 Museums and Community. Ideas, issues and challenges, Routledge, New York Dicks, B, 2000 Heritage, Place, and Community, University of Wales Press, Cardiff Farrington, J and Bebbington, A with Wellard, K and Lewis, D J, 1993 Reluctant Partners: Non-governmental Organisations, the State and Sustainable Agricultural Development, Routledge, London Galla, A, 1997 Indigenous peoples, museums, and ethics, in Museum Ethics (ed G Edson), Routledge, London, 142–55 Golding, V and Modest, W, eds, 2013 Museums and Communities: Curators, Collections and Collaboration, Bloomsbury, London Graham, B, Ashworth, G J and Tunbridge, J E, 2000 A Geography of Heritage: Power, Culture and Economy, Arnold, London Karp, I, Kreamer, C and Lavine, S, eds, 1992 Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture, Smithsonian Institution, Washington Lynch, B, 2011a Whose Cake is it Anyway? A collaborative investigation into engagement and participation in twelve museums and galleries in the UK, The Paul Hamlyn Foundation, London [online], available from www.phf.org.uk/downloaddoc.asp?id=547 [28 October 2013] ——, 2011b Collaboration, Contestation, and Creative Conflict: On the efficacy of museum/community partnerships, in The Routledge Companion to Museum Ethics: Redefining Ethics for the Twenty-First-Century Museum (ed J Marstine), Routledge, London, 146–63 Lynch, B and Alberti, S, 2010 Legacies of prejudice: racism, co-production and radical trust in the museum, Museum Management and Curatorship 25 (1), 13–35 Onciul, B, 2013 Community Participation, Curatorial Practice and Museum Ethos in Canada, in Museums and Communities: Curators, Collections and Collaboration (eds V Golding and W Modest), Bloomsbury, London ——, 2014 Telling hard truths and the process of decolonising Indigenous representations in museums, in

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Challenging History in the Museum: International Perspectives (eds J Kidd, S Cairns, A Drago, A Ryall and M Stearn), Ashgate, Farnham ——, 2015 Museums, Heritage and Indigenous Voice: Decolonising Engagement, Routledge, New York Peers, L and Brown, A, eds, 2003 Museums and Source Communities: A Routledge Reader, Routledge, London Pretty, J, 1995 Participatory learning for sustainable agriculture, World Development 23 (8), 1247–63 Rivard, R, 1984 Opening up the Museum or Toward a New Museology: Ecomuseums and ‘Open’ Museums, Québec City Simon, N, 2010 The Participatory Museum, Museum 2.0, Santa Cruz Smith, L, 2006 The Uses of Heritage, Routledge, London and New York Smith, L and Waterton, E, 2013 Heritage, Communities and Archaeology, Bloomsbury, London Watson, S, ed, 2007 Museums and Their Communities, Routledge, London Watson, S and Waterton, E 2010 Heritage and Community Engagement, International Journal of Heritage Studies 16 (1–2), 1–3 White, S C, 1996 Depoliticising development: the uses and abuses of participation, Development in Practice 6 (1), 6–15

Engaging Concepts

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The Gate in the Wall: Beyond Happiness-making in Museums Bernadette Lynch A monkey was walking along a river and saw a fish in it. The monkey said, ‘Look, that animal is under water, he’ll drown, I’ll save him.’ He snatched up the fish, and in his hand the fish started to struggle. And the monkey said, ‘Look how happy he is.’ Of course, the fish died, and the monkey said, ‘Oh, what a pity, if I had only come sooner I would have saved this guy.’ Traditional African parable, The Monkey and the Fish (Mia Cauto, cited in Gourevitch 2010)

I

want to talk about generosity on the part of the cultural sector in its dealings with the public, and the problem with it. One has only to look to southern hemisphere voices – writers, playwrights, poets, academics – to hear a very different perspective on northern hemisphere generosity as demonstrated by its institutions – but, first, a small literary allegory. There are a number of moments in the Somalian author Nuruddin Farah’s wonderful book Gifts (Farah 2000) in which Duniya, a single mother and nurse working at the hospital in Mogadishu, has cause to question the generosity of others, such as when Bosaaso offers her a lift in his taxi. You see, Duniya distrusts givers. Bosaaso: ‘Why don’t you come with me?’ Duniya: ‘Why’ she asked, curious to know what his answer would be. Bosaaso: ‘I’ll give you a lift, then reward you with further gifts.’ Duniya: ‘But I haven’t asked you to do me a favour, or give me a lift or reward me with presents, have I?’ Bosaaso: ‘You are a fool if you don’t.’ Duniya: ‘Let me be’, she said in such a hostile voice that he drove off.

Later, when Duniya finally accepts the lift, she asks him, ‘Why do you give me these lifts, Bosaaso? Please tell the truth.’ Bosaaso: ‘Why do you accepts lifts from me?’ he asks. Duniya: ‘That’s a foolish question, since your giving precedes my acceptance or rejection. My accepting your gift of a lift is itself a reciprocal gift. So may I now ask why you accept my gift?’

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Bosaaso: ‘Why are you hesitant about receiving things from others?’ Duniya: ‘Because unasked for generosity has a way of making one feel obliged, trapped in a labyrinth of dependence … haven’t we in the Third World lost our self-reliance and pride because of the so-called aid we unquestioningly receive from the so-called First World?’ (Farah 2000, 21–2)

I ask the reader now to make a mental leap across oceans and continents, from the dusty streets of Mogadishu to a noisy UK city, down a busy urban thoroughfare to where one finds the imposing, white-marble-pillared edifice of a well-established publicly funded museum: a museum like many created in Victorian Britain. This particular museum is surrounded by a high Victorian wall. Beyond the wall is a large high-rise housing estate of poorly maintained public housing: 1960s tower blocks that are, these days, filled with migrant populations, including many Somali people, like Duniya, fleeing war in their homeland. The tower blocks contain this large African diaspora living on the margins, as well as the older white unemployed, young single mothers and working poor. The estate has a number of social problems, with the substandard housing the cause of many. The museum next door has, over many years, staged arts and heritage projects, programmes and events for the people on the housing project. These are the museum’s ‘gifts’. Through the gift of ‘access’ and ‘engagement’, the Western museum thus seeks to humanise the world on its doorstep by making it a place that is more socially cohesive and hospitable. Yet, if we look to the deceptively simple message in Farah’s novel, we find that it transforms the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss’s famous theory of ‘the gift’ in suggesting that we should look beyond such notions of giving that continue to be rooted in Western Christianity. The gift, as described by Mauss, was understood as evidence of altruism and solidarity in non-Western societies (Mauss 1990). Yet Farah’s appropriation of Mauss’ concept demonstrates the complexity of the moral and political implications of gift-giving. The problem is that the Christian kindliness and succour of ‘gift-giving’ has too often resulted in destroying the worlds of aid-receiving peoples because it regards them as passive, suffering victims and objects of pity, and erodes their dignity and self-determination – perhaps a little like the people beyond the walls of the tower block housing estate mentioned earlier. In a recent Guardian article ‘The doctrine of humanitarianism is not as benign as you might think’, Jeremy Seabrook notes that the Western humanitarian impulse is still ‘seen as a work of rescue, even of salvation, and produces a sense of reverential piety’. He adds, ‘as soon as any belief or doctrine becomes an “ism”, we should be on our guard (Seabrook 2014). We have to ask ourselves: has social inclusion in museums become such an ‘ism’? The difficulty is that, within such relations, there is, in addition (as the character of Duniya astutely noted), despite claims to the contrary, the expectation of a return embedded within the language of the gift, and with it the resultant growth of dependency. The gift that is given may even take the form of what Firth wonderfully calls ‘indebtedness engineering’ (Firth 1983, 101). On receiving the gift (in the form of the museum’s efforts – its projects and programmes), the recipient may instead become what Rabinow termed ‘the good informant’, who ‘seemed to enjoy [the] process and soon began to develop the art of presenting [their] world to me’ (Rabinow 1977, 79–80). Thus, we have ‘happy’ reports of smiling people engaged in museum activities as ‘evidence’ of improved well-being for the funders.



Beyond Happiness-making in Museums 13

The museum’s rhetoric of service places the subject (community member/housing estate resident) in the role of ‘supplicant’ or ‘beneficiary’, and the giver (the museum and its staff) in the role of ‘carer’. How clear is it to the museum staff, or to the ‘beneficiaries’ on the receiving end, that power is at work within such language and in the roles it gives the institution in relation to its so-called community ‘partners’? Can we transpose such notions of aid-giving from the developing world to museum social relations here in the West? I believe we can, for we can see Gramsci’s notion of ‘hegemonic power’ at play within these relations between gift-giver and passive receiver, wherever they may occur (Gramsci 1971).1 Ubiquitous ‘Participation’ Recently, institutions such as museums and galleries have been asked to offer ever-increasing opportunities for citizens’ active participation, but what does ‘participation’ mean, in this respect? Let’s look at ‘participation’, that ubiquitous buzzword. Development theorist Uma Kothari points out that participation can reinforce ‘a normative discourse that reflects a group consensus … while the complexities and “messiness” is filtered out’ (Cooke and Kothari 2001, 147). Ernesto Laclau adds the useful reminder that ‘Everything depends, as Lewis Carroll would put it, on who is in control’ (Laclau 1996, 118). In most cases it is, incontrovertibly, the museum, as is perhaps the case in the relationship between the museum and the housing estate noted earlier (to which we will return). Much participatory practice with local and originating communities has thus been criticised as essentially flawed, providing an illusion of participation while, in reality, consensual decisions tend to be coerced, or rushed through on the basis of the institution’s control of knowledge production and its dissemination, or on the basis of its institutional agenda and strategic plan, thereby manipulating a group consensus on what is inevitable, usual or expected (Graham 2013; Lynch and Alberti 2010; Lynch 2011a; 2011c; Marstine 2011; Sandell and Nightingale 2012). Recent debates have questioned the effectiveness of participatory practice in museums and, in particular, its failures to overcome institutional power (Crooke 2007; Lynch and Alberti 2010; Peers and Brown 2003). Despite good intentions, participation is not always the democratic process it claims to be; rather, it more frequently reflects the agendas of the museum institution where the processes are tightly controlled (Fouseki 2010; Lynch 2011a). Museums avoid the discomfort of actual participation through something else: co-option. It is the very ambiguity of participation, citizenship and empowerment that have made them vulnerable to appropriation for political agendas; differently positioned users put very different versions of these concepts to use. The influential report Whose Cake is it Anyway? (Lynch 2011a), following a UK-wide study on behalf of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, reviewed the effectiveness of public engagement and participation in the UK’s museums. The study showed that, despite best intentions, museums frequently run into direct conflict between funder expectations and participant aspirations. 1

Antonio Gramsci suggested that institutional power maintains control not just through violence and political and economic coercion but also ideologically, through a hegemonic culture in which the values of the bourgeoisie became the ‘common sense’ values of all. Thus a consensus culture developed in which people in the working class identified their own good with the good of the bourgeoisie, and helped to maintain the status quo rather than revolting. For Gramsci, hegemonic dominance ultimately relied on coercion and, in a ‘crisis of authority’, the ‘masks of consent slip away, revealing the fist of force’ (Gramsci 1971, lxxxix).

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Of course, as Robert Chambers (coming from an international development perspective on participation) reminds us, we should not be surprised at the institutional fear of losing control that this displays, reminding us that ‘any professionals need the solid structures of their realities, their prisons’. These structures and rules are not necessarily explicit; power is frequently expressed through the implicit understanding of ‘how things work’ (Chambers 1997, 234). Over the past few years, on behalf of government foundations, funding agencies and arts/ heritage institutions, I have conducted action research throughout the UK, looking at the effectiveness of public engagement in museums from the point of view of those on both the delivery and the receiving ends. What became clear is that expanding democratic engagement in museums calls for more than invitations to participate (Lynch 2011a), as was made evident in Whose Cake is it Anyway? Following decades of government investment in public engagement in the UK’s museums and galleries, the Whose Cake is it Anyway? report found that public engagement continues to leave the public largely outside the walls of the institution. Examining the underlying institutional values that inform the museum’s public engagement and participation, the Whose Cake is it Anyway? report, as well as my subsequent research, demonstrated the effects of the politics of ‘kindness’ in socio-cultural relations in the museum. Thus the museum/gallery as institution practises a theory of change based upon a therapeutic model that places the unwitting recipient in the role of passive beneficiary. The overwhelming experience of museum participants has been one of ‘empowerment-lite’ (Cornwall and Coelho 2007). Token consultations without authentic decision-making power and relationships that disempower and control people are widespread within museum public engagement practice in the UK, while increasing the ‘well-being’ of others gains prominence. There are vestiges of a triumphant neoliberalism that too often permeate emerging public engagement policy, with the tendency to inflate the problem of emotional vulnerability, minimising the ability of the person to cope. Tolerance and empathy have troubling undercurrents throughout this practice (Brown 2006), while people’s low self-esteem is presented as an invisible disease that undermines the ability of people to control their lives (Furedi 2011). Community participants soon come to learn a few hard lessons, which they may or may not have suspected at the outset. Being included in what Nancy Fraser, the noted critical theorist concerned with notions of justice, memorably calls ‘invited spaces’ (Fraser 1992) is no guarantee of participation. Similarly, the social anthropologist Andrea Cornwall reminds us that simply ‘having a seat at the table is a necessary but not sufficient condition for exercising voice. Nor is presence at the table [on the part of institutions] the same as a willingness to listen and respond’ (Cornwall 2008, 13). The ‘progressive’ well-meaning inclusive and engaged museum thus inadvertently continues to be based on a centre–periphery model (Clifford 1997). By placing people in the position of being beneficiaries of their assistance (of their gifts), the museum/gallery exercises invisible power and can inadvertently rob people of their active agency and the necessary possibility of resistance. Museums continue to be stuck within what Mark O’Neill coined a ‘welfare model’ (O’Neill 2010). Similarly, Cornwall traces the changes in the discourse of participation in development studies (from which museums can usefully learn), especially the recent shift away from notions of participants as ‘beneficiaries’ (which reminds us again of O’Neill’s Welfare Model in museum participation), and notes the shift to the more political and rights-based definitions of participation by citizens, who are the ‘makers and shapers’ of their own experiences (Cornwall and Gaventa



Beyond Happiness-making in Museums 15

2001). This is more akin to what O’Neill calls a ‘social justice model’ (O’Neill 2010), which focuses on areas such as human rights, inequality and poverty, with a new focus on solidarity. Empathy and Well-being as Charity I don’t believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is vertical, so it’s humiliating. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other person and learns from the other person. I have a lot to learn from other people. (Eduardo Galeano, quoted in Barsamian 2004, 146)

While some museums explore a social justice, rights-based approach, fostering notions of active citizenship, in yet another shape-shifting exercise in the cultural heritage sector there has emerged another strand of practice in UK museums. With a notable new emphasis on ‘empathy’ with local communities, particularly those most marginalised, this strand of practice bases itself on the notion that arts and culture ‘may have a vital role for creating the conditions for kindness to grow’ (Broadwood 2012). Connected to this is a related emphasis on the museum’s ability to increase levels of ‘happiness’, such as in the Happy Museum Project, in which museums focus on ‘how they might better articulate the possibilities of a good life … ’ (The Happy Museum 2011). Launched in April 2011 and funded initially by an award to the project’s founder Tony Butler by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Breakthrough Fund, the Happy Museum Project provides a leadership framework for a growing group of museums to investigate a holistic approach to sustainability and well-being. The project’s manifesto is underpinned by ‘a number of core principles which examine how museums might cement the linkage between well-being and environmental sustainability … ’ (The Happy Museum 2011). The Happy Museum creates, tests and shares this practice widely in the museum sector. However, there is a growing critique of what Ahmed calls ‘the happiness turn’ (Ahmed 2008) in society, which would seem to apply to this move within the museum sector that aims to embrace happiness. By focusing on the psychology of happiness and on alleviating the symptoms (the affects) of social exclusion and environmental threat, museums may divert attention away from people exercising resistance and their democratic right to be unhappy enough to challenge and confront causes, and thus collectively work to bring about change. By embracing individualised notions of happiness, museums may in effect produce a passive receptivity, undermining active democracy in the museum, and ignoring the long and ongoing history of struggle. For, as Davies puts it: Even a cursory examination of the evidence on unhappiness in neo-liberal societies draws the observer beyond the limits of psychology, and into questions of political economy … and while demanding levels of enthusiasm, energy and hope, it is in danger of ignoring [people’s very real] insecurity and powerlessness … (Davies 2015a)

Thus, the recent ‘happiness turn’ in the museum shifts the analyses of social engagement and participation away from the museum’s institutional hegemonic power towards a focus on social psychology and improving the happiness of the individual. The museum therefore deftly side-

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steps issues of social inequality, prejudice, exclusion and economic and political powerlessness. Hence we witness a huge increase in museums working within the areas of mental health and disability. Whether or not this work has value, it marks a return of the perception of the participant as passive beneficiary in a perpetual state of helplessness and need of improvement. It also marks a shift away from active agency, and any possibility of community participants acting as the institution’s ‘critical friends’. Hence, for the museum institution,there is no change.2 As Davies asks ‘Is it too much to hope that, if critique can be rendered psychological, then the reverse may also be true: that mental ill-being may be rendered critical?’ (Davies 2015a). Where did all this Happiness and Well-being come from? The fast-growing ‘happiness turn’ within the cultural sector, with its accompanying industry of measurement indices, has been directly influenced by UK government policy. There was a shift, post-financial collapse, from focusing on the economy to prioritising ‘happiness’ and ‘well-being’, and this has filtered down through funding agencies to museums. See, for example, this from the Happy Museum’s manifesto: ‘a happy society need not set economic growth as its most meaningful measure … [it] offers a chance to re-imagine the purpose of the museums’ (The Happy Museum 2011) – as well as the UK’s Measuring National Wellbeing (Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology 2012). On 30 July 2013, in a report titled ‘Happiness index shows small improvement in 2013, the ONS say’,3 the BBC noted that there had been an improvement in the nation’s ‘happiness index’; for example: A UK-wide well-being survey has found ‘small improvements’ in people’s happiness over the year. The proportion of people rating their life satisfaction as seven or more out of 10 rose from 75.9% to 77.0%, the Office for National Statistics said. It said the Olympics and Diamond Jubilee may have ‘influenced people’s assessment of their … well-being’. (BBC News 2013)

This is a shift away from measuring progress in society in economic terms to measuring a society’s happiness index, or well-being (ONS 2014a; 2014b). This can then be seen permeating the cultural sector. The Happy Museum project’s manifesto (The Happy Museum 2011) has, for example, been heavily influenced by the work of the New Economics Foundation on well-being (NEF 2014). In their opening statement on well-being NEF maintains that A successful society is one where economic activity delivers high levels of sustainable well-being for all its citizens. NEF has been researching well-being – how people experience their lives and flourish – for over a decade. Our work seeks to understand, measure and positively influence 2

In contrast, see, for example, the ‘Our Museum’ project, a four-year initiative of democratic cultural change in museums funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, involving nine museums across the UK: ourmuseum. ning.com. See also Our Museum project’s online resources: http://ourmuseum.org.uk/ [4 November 2015]. 3 ONS is the acronym for the UK government’s Office of National Statistics.



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well-being, develop ways of integrating it into policy, and promoting it as an alternative measure of progress. (NEF 2014)

NEF earlier developed their (influential to museums) Five Ways to Well-being, which is a set of what they term ‘evidence-based actions which promote people’s wellbeing’. These are: Connect, Be Active, Take Notice, Keep Learning and Give (Thompson et al 2008). NEF went further, making international claims regarding how nations might focus on and measure their population’s happiness, with what they call The Happy Planet Index: The Happy Planet Index is a new measure of progress that focuses on what matters: sustainable well-being for all. It tells us how well nations are doing in terms of supporting their inhabitants to live good lives now, while ensuring that others can do the same in future. (Abdallah 2012)

Such a persuasive focus on proselytising happiness can certainly produce happy reports from those involved, particularly as it is manifested in museum community engagement activities. But is ‘ill-being’ never justified, its causes worth analysing, resisting and combatting? Surely realising one’s power to resist is at the heart of democracy – for, as Davies notes: Human ill-being is never merely an absence of pleasure, which is one thing that consumer society can usually promise to avoid; nor is it even an absence of any substantive meaning, which the ‘spirit’ of capitalism can partially deliver on, if only as an epiphenomenon. Followed to its logical conclusion, it is an absence of democracy, and consequently a basis for resistance and critique. (Davies 2015a)

The question is, does such a focus on personal well-being do anything to encourage, as Ahmed put it, a heightened ‘capacity to act’ (Ahmed 2010, 246)? In her perceptive book The Promise of Happiness Ahmed raises critical questions about the moral order imposed by the injunction to be happy. She is concerned about what she calls ‘the instrumentalisation of happiness as a technique’ (Ahmed 2010, 10). She writes: reifying certain routes to happiness, economic happiness data locates and stratifies the happy over and in relation to unhappy others. A ‘happy life’, a ‘good life’ involves the regulation of desire. It is not simply that we desire happiness but that happiness is imagined as what you get in return for desiring well. (Ahmed 2010, 37)

Ahmed refers to this regulation of desire as ‘the Happiness Turn’ (Ahmed 2010, 63) and notes its worrying impact on economics, psychology, social and cultural policy. Thus, people’s so-called emancipation has a new name – well-being – and its beneficiaries are rewarded for ‘desiring well’. As applied to museums, is it possible that this ‘happiness turn’ in policy and practice may simply continue to feed and borrow from postcolonial theorist Leela Gandhi into:

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the logic of the colonial ‘civilising mission’ fashioned … on a form of tutelage … concerned with bringing the colonised to maturity … [it is fundamentally] a developmental project. The coloniser … is principally, if not exclusively, an educator … The project betrays its Enlightenment legacy … of improvement for all humanity … a ‘calling’ to spread the word and proselytise on behalf of an emancipatory creed. (Gandhi 1998, 32)

If we return once more to Duniya’s concern with the gift, notions of the provision of wellbeing may prove only to create a passive receptivity (often accompanied by resentment), leaving out, or at least not actively encouraging, the possibility of resistance, protest and the opportunity to act. These days such an offer of well-being by museums, particularly to young people, may more frequently be met, as social anthropologist Ghassan Hage notes, with something like the following response: ‘Good for you, but I don’t care’ (Hage 2008). The Trouble with the ‘Happiness Turn’ in Museums At an awards event for an international museum mentorship programme in London recently the partners from southern hemisphere museums were lined up, smiling for the cameras, while being handed paper certificates. They had spent a year ‘buddied-up’ with the UK museum professionals present in what was made clear was really a one-way ‘teaching’ partnership.4 Demonstrating her humanitarian credentials, the British bureaucrat in charge of the project’s funding spoke of the UK reaching out to help museums from these ‘troubled’ parts of the world, who were now enabled to bring back to their home museum a sense of museum solidarity and well-being based on this experience. In his critique of humanitarianism, Seabrook notes that ‘Humanitarianism is what the West uniquely practices, bringing its kindness and goodwill to dark places of the world, where savagery and barbarism still rule (or have reappeared) at the heart of “primitive” or regressive cultures’ (Seabrook 2014).5 The trouble with an emphasis on humanitarian ‘kindness’ promoting the happiness and wellbeing of others, as practised close to home or in so-called ‘troubled’ parts of the world, is that it converts too easily, as Leela Gandhi noted above, into a kind of missionary zeal. The expectation of a return on this gift of ‘happiness’ that is not their own leaves them with a happiness duty. This is what the character of Duniya had astutely recognised in the novel. Thus the uncomfortable sense in the room during the awards ceremony (for completion of the museum mentoring scheme) was just that: a palpable sense of gratitude expected, smiles beamed for the photographic record. Job done. But Ahmed sees such promotion of happiness as even more worrying because ‘it conceals the ongoing realities of discrimination, non-recognition and violence, and requires that we approximate the straight signs of civility’ (Ahmed 2010, 9). She concludes that ‘We must stay unhappy with this world’ (Ahmed 2010, 9). 4

When the UK museum professionals were asked if they had learned anything from the partnership, there came no response. 5 This critique of humanitarian ‘giving’ was recently powerfully echoed by Pheng Cheah (Rhetoric Studies, University of California, Berkeley), in a March 2014 lecture at London’s Birkbeck College, tellingly titled ‘Resisting the Humanitarianization of the World: Towards an Ethics of Giving’.



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Ahmed here finds unusual company with the political philosopher Slavoj Zizek, who notes that unhappy divisions [such as those between the museum and the neighbouring housing estate mentioned earlier in this chapter] must be understood and, if anything, made clearer. At this time of economic, environmental, even spiritual crisis he argues, somewhat counterintuitively, ‘an authentic division is urgently needed – a division between those who want to drag on within the old parameters and those who are aware of the necessary change. Such a division, not opportunistic compromise, is the only path to true unity’ (Zizek 2014, 185). Thus the way to resist the pervasive ‘happiness turn’ is to insist on a political understanding of happiness and unhappiness in which people are authorised to articulate and offer explanations for their feelings (Davies 2015a). This means understanding that some forms of unhappiness – such as a sense of injustice or anger – need hearing, not treating. This in turn requires careful nurturing and the development of institutions, such as museums, that may have the unrealised capacity to facilitate divergent voices being heard. Therefore, in order to be socially relevant in these troubled times, museums could, and should, throw open the gates and welcome differences of opinion, becoming spaces for contestation and negotiation between protagonists who are what Chantal Mouffe calls ‘friendly enemies’ (Mouffe 2005, 13). Museums could become spaces for collaboration in which people, such as those on the housing estate mentioned earlier, may bring diverse views and divergent agendas. Museums could thus usefully occupy an important civil society role as sites of assembly and discourse. Acknowledging unhappiness, to which Ahmed refers, with, for example, the complex social problems in the immediate surroundings of many inner city museums does not mean people being sad or miserable with their lot. Rather, as Ahmed maintains, it means resisting happiness. This ‘opens up other ways of being’ that are not constrained by preconceived visions of happiness and the good life from museums or other agencies. These other ways of being could allow for an increase in possibilities of what could/does/should happen (Ahmed 2010, 16). It is the subtle ways in which a focus on ‘happiness’ diverts away from this ability to disagree, to act, to self-determine and make change happen that raise concerns about its current emphasis in museum community-engagement practice. Under its banner, dangerous assumptions are likely be made about how the museum as institution can facilitate the well-being of others. In relation to this, allow me to take you back to the museum situated next to the large housing estate and tell you about the gate in the wall (the reason for this chapter’s title). As mentioned earlier, this well-established publicly funded museum is surrounded by a high Victorian wall. Right behind the wall is the large housing estate. A few years ago a resident artist at the museum had the idea of creating a gate in the wall. Funding was sought and an opening was made, a fissure between the cool intellectual aesthetic of the museum and the teeming busyness of the tower block estate. The museum staff openly responded with fear of a loss of control, despite the fact that the residents largely stayed away, not using the gate to enter the gallery. Recently the gate is more often than not locked, the key ‘mislaid’.6 As cultural commentator Alistair Hudson7 put it:

6

It should be noted that at the time of writing (July 2015) there is renewed discussion of a new way to ‘manage’ the gate remaining open, and plans to do so. 7 Alistair Hudson is formerly Deputy Director of the internationally renowned and innovative project Grizedale Arts in the Lake District: see www.grizedale.org [4 November 2015].

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We’ve got these buildings – physical and conceptual – designed around the spectatorship experience that goes back to the late 19th century, and we haven’t been able to shake it off. It’s so rigid. The genuine intention to be socially participatory is continually undermined. Museum professionals are entrapped with a way of working in which only certain channels of communication are allowed … We are still working inside the bubble of a fixed construct. (Hudson 2014, pers comm)

If we look at this museum’s long history of engagement on the housing estate, we can see that, despite best intentions, the work continues to be loaded with assumptions that define the roles of those involved: active and passive, carer and beneficiary. The museum assumes that it is there to help, believing that the work it does is recognising the needs of those on the housing estate. Yet the tenants recount a continued feeling of not being listened to and not being heard. In such (all too typical) situations, while the illusion of creative participation is on offer, decisions on behalf of communities tend to be coerced or rushed through on the basis of the museum’s agenda or strategic plan, manipulating a group consensus of what is inevitable, usual or expected – or ‘good for’ the people involved. Meanwhile, as in the housing estate, people’s concerns, complexities, the ‘messiness’ of people’s real needs and the realities of their everyday lives, are filtered out. Much later, after the gate was no longer regularly in use, I interviewed someone from the tenants’ association of the housing estate. I asked him how the museum might ideally be useful to the estate’s tenants. Interestingly, despite the fact that the museum had spent a number of years staging interventions on the estate, and is thus well-known for its community engagement, and despite the fact that there was a tangible frustration with the museum on the part of the tenants, this tenant had a suggestion. He asked why the museum could not instead work together with the tenants’ association to develop a five-year plan for what they – as neighbours – might want to achieve together. This simple but profoundly different request, shifts the power dynamics of the relationship between the museum and the estate in a very significant way. Yet, in museums such as this there is too often a continued failure to effectively address the public role of the museum as a whole. Many inaccurate assumptions continue to be made on the public’s behalf while claims about the institution’s recognition of community partners’ needs and interests are proclaimed to the funding agencies. The recognition of others is a long-held claim by museums in their community engagement work, but, as social anthropologist Ghassan Hage notes: We can start from a very simple observation, and that is that recognition or the verb to recognise always involves a recogniser and a recognised. While, to negotiate does not involve a negotiator and the ‘negotiated’? It involves another negotiator. And this means that any negotiation involves recognising the person you are dealing with or the group you are dealing with as a subject, not as an object. And I think this is quite important because this has been increasingly the limit of the paradigm of recognition on which [such public engagement work] has been based. (Hage 2008)

Throughout my research into public participation with museums and galleries I have been struck by how the museum continues to define the rules of engagement, subtly denying the active



Beyond Happiness-making in Museums 21

agency of participants while claiming open ‘negotiation’ (Lynch 2013; 2011a; 2011b; 2011c; 2010a; 2010b). As Boast puts it, ‘No matter how much museums have argued for a pluralistic approach … [the] control has largely remained in the hands of the museum’ (Boast 2011, 60). From behind the high museum wall, the comforting perspective of the museum’s colonising gaze remains largely ‘panoptic and thus dominating’ (JanMohamed 1992, 10). If, instead, the museum behind the wall should take up the offer of working with the residents in a different way – as neighbours – negotiating a future five-year plan, there is the capacity to collectively foster what Nobel Prize-winning welfare economist Amartya Sen calls ‘capability development’ for all concerned, thus defining capability as ‘the power to do something’ (Sen 2009,19) while establishing relationships built on trust. Conclusion: Changing Ourselves In every epoch, the attempt must be made to deliver tradition anew from the conformism which is on the point of overwhelming it. (Benjamin 1940)

My extensive action research around the UK in recent years8 has shown that continued attempts at collaborating have rarely been an effective challenge to institutional habits of mind. In fact, such well-meaning efforts by museums more often demonstrate a situation where the museum is committed to social change but, as an institution, has difficulty in changing itself. This research has shown that many museum professionals have continued to struggle to examine personal and institutional values, and largely operate on assumptions about the worth of the work they do on behalf of others. In one session that I led, museum curators posed the following questions: ‘Who are “we”? Individuals? Institutions? What about thinking of the museum as part of community, or an emanation of community – not as needing to connect to “it”’ (Anonymous Engaging Curators workshop participant). Perhaps we in museums must, to borrow from Borsa, take leave of the cultural, theoretical and ideological borders that enclose us within the safety of ‘those places and spaces we inherit and occupy, which frame our lives in very specific and concrete ways’ (Borsa 1990, 36) – spaces such as the one safely behind the locked gate of the museum. Behind these problems of developing equitable (if not equal) relationships is the central question of one’s theory of change, for there is such a theory at work within all that we do in the cultural sector. In a museum in London a couple of years ago a Chinese community member brought the museum’s neighbourhood consultation meeting to a standstill simply by asking of the museum professionals present, ‘What is it the museum wants to do to me? What is it that needs changing or improving? What is it for?’ In other words, how were the museum’s public engagement practices ‘useful’, and for whom? And on what foundational assumptions does this 8

I have conducted research for: the Paul Hamlyn Foundation (phf.org.uk) and the Tate Gallery (http://www. tate.org.uk/download/file/fid/29111), as well as working with MEG (Museum Ethnographers Group) (www. museumethnographersgroup.org.uk) and compiling MEG’s ‘Engaging Curators’ case studies (http://www. museumethnographersgroup.org.uk/en/resources/400-engaging-curators-case-studies.html). In addition I reviewed the UK North West region’s Cultural Olympiad Stories of the World project (http://www.artscouncil. org.uk/what-we-do/our-priorities-2011–15/london-2012/stories-world/).

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work continue to be based? Fundamentally, this woman’s question asked what theory of change lies at the heart of the museum’s social improvement agenda.9 Thus, examining a theory of change would not be complete without creating the opportunity for a collective articulation of the assumptions that the stakeholders use to explain the change process – the first step in a process of true collaboration. The assumptions unearthed will inevitably explain the expectations about how and why proposed interventions will bring about change. Words matter; being able to explain to ourselves and others what we do and why it matters. But we can reuse these words and revisit them with participants as an exercise in open, reflective practice, or constructive deconstruction. The useful concept of ‘constructive deconstruction’ is borrowed here from development theorists Cornwall and Eade. It is about: the taking apart of the different meanings that … words have acquired as they have come to be used in discourse … If the use of buzzwords as fuzzwords conceals ideological differences, the process of constructive deconstruction reveals them: and with this, opens up the possibility of reviving the debates that once accompanied the use of bland, catch-all terms like civil society and social capital … tracing their more radical meanings … wresting back more radical usages of even some of the most corrupted of terms in the current … lexicon, such as empowerment. (Cornwall and Eade 2010, 14)

As Cornwall and Eade point out, it requires close attention to be paid collectively to meanings and a focus on ‘actual social practices rather than wishful thinking’ (Cornwall and Eade 2010, 14). If we apply this to museums, reflective practice as an exercise in constructive deconstruction must include openness to collaboration and critical self-appraisal and, most importantly, must involve collaborative reflexivity. To successfully achieve this, museums need ongoing external input; they need their neighbours, their community partners.10 As the eminent Canadian museologist Robert Janes reminds us (Janes 2011), museums exist in a troubled world in which the future is increasingly precarious for us all. Given the harsh choices to be made in terms of public investment, some museums in the UK are adopting a new approach, actively promoting the language of ‘active democracy’, ‘social justice’ and even ‘social change’ as guiding principles of their work (with active ‘public participation’ cited as a key strategy). There is a new generation of human rights museums that calls into question the social purpose of public museums. These museums are in sync with Jane’s proclamation that the institution has ‘unrealized potential’ as an essential social institution and a key agent in civil society (Janes 2009, 18). This shift in purpose is demonstrated by museums that claim to go beyond the representation of human experiences, taking a ‘campaignist’ approach and advocating for progressive change (Fleming 2010).11 Similarly, museum scholars Sandell and Dodd are seeking an ‘activist practice’ (Sandell and Dodd 2010, 3). 9 A theory of change does the following: it defines all the building blocks required to bring about a given longterm goal. This set of connected building blocks is interchangeably referred to as outcomes, results, accomplishments or preconditions. It also describes the types of interventions (a single project or a comprehensive community initiative) that bring about the outcomes. Each outcome is tied to an intervention. 10 See Lynch 2014[AQ not in bib] interviews on reflective practice on the Our Museum website: http://ourmuseum.org.uk/ [4 November 2015]. 11 See the Federation of International Human Rights Museums: http://www.fihrm.org/ [4 November 2015].



Beyond Happiness-making in Museums 23

This call-to-arms asks museums to rethink their relationship with the publics they serve, their approaches to collecting, exhibiting and programming, their sustainability efforts and, perhaps most significantly, the social purpose or mission they embrace (Abram 2005; Janes 2009; Sandell 2002; Silverman 2010; Carter 2013). Yet precisely what is meant by museums when they invoke the language of rights could usefully be further explored. Does it include people like those on the housing estate referred to earlier? As development critic Peter Uvin points out in another context, ‘rights-talk may amount to a thin veneer over … business as usual’ (Uvin 2001, 323). While announcing their social justice credentials, museums and galleries have yet to make convincing arguments regarding their useful civic role. What about a rights-based practice closer to home, a role for museums that might focus on publicly promoting a rights-based practice, including people’s right to resist the museum itself? As one young person put it: We’re here to challenge, and I fear that others may not challenge us back. It’s not for you to just listen to us being angry and just listen. The point is the dialogue. The point is that we could be totally wrong. I don’t personally believe I’m wrong – but I am willing to listen to somebody who totally disagrees with me. (Revealing Histories 2007)

This issue of conflict avoidance was powerfully underlined in the Whose Cake is it Anyway? report and in another study I co-authored of exhibition co-production with communities on the sensitive subjects of race (Lynch and Alberti 2010). For those who do express their frustration, museum professionals typically meet the challenge with a cool, managerial or academic response. One community participant expressed their anger at what they saw as the museum’s attempt to control and contain people’s frustrated anger on the subject of race (including contemporary and institutional racism) in this way: I’m not an academic, but sometimes my problem is with academia: analysis usually leads to paralysis. It’s like people who don’t talk about racism but the symptoms of racism. Racism is about human beings. It’s not about analysing it in an exhibition. It’s the feelings we have inside, the hatred, the palpable feelings. That’s the racism I’m interested in. (Revealing Histories 2007)

A key outcome was the widespread acknowledgment within these studies that there are subtle but powerful limitations to that which can be expressed in the dialogue between museums and their community partners, and hence limitations on change. In the Whose Cake is it Anyway? report community members spoke about the experience of engaging with museums as one in which the institution attempts to control heightened emotions and effectively divert people’s often justified anger. For no matter how progressive and ‘wellmeaning’ the museum’s practice may be, it becomes clear that the museum too often remains firmly in the centre, displaying a relationship of ‘chairperson’, ‘teacher and pupil’, ‘carer and cared-for’, even while citing high moral ground emancipation and ‘rights-talk’. The rhetoric of service, in whatever guise, continues to place the subject in the role of ‘supplicant’, ‘beneficiary’

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or ‘learner’, and the provider (the museum and its staff) in the role of ‘teacher/carer’. One is once again reminded of Duniya’s suspicion of the ‘gift’ mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, and of the relationship between the museum and the people in the housing estate beyond the museum’s ‘wall’. Do they have the right to challenge or contest the ‘helping hand’, the ‘gifts’ bestowed upon them by their neighbour, the museum? For many publicly funded museums and galleries, the reality of their public engagement work frequently fails to match the rhetoric, even when the work is inspired by a genuinely democratic impulse and hailed as empowerment, happiness, social justice or human rights (Lynch and Alberti 2010; Lynch 2011a). The question remains: what do people want from museums? Do they want to be made to feel happy? Or do they want to contribute their views and make change happen, to do something? It seems that perhaps they do. The findings of two major research projects conducted between 2001 and 2004, ‘Exhibitions as Contested Sites: The Roles of Museums in Contemporary Societies’ (funded by the Australian Research Council) and ‘Contested Sites Canada’ (funded by the Canadian Museums Association) included the aim ‘to move beyond the specifics of exhibition controversies and theoretical rhetoric to examine the relevance, plausibility and practical operation of a range of museums as civic centres and for the engagement of topics of contemporary relevance and importance’ (Cameron and Kelly 2010). Survey respondents were asked a range of questions, including: ‘Should museums act as provocateurs and take a leading role as social and political activists to bring about change, and to assist in the resolution of issues on a personal or political level?’ (Kelly 2006). The surprise for many was that the results of both the Canadian and Australian studies showed overwhelmingly that people considered museums to have a social responsibility to take a leading role in inspiring people’s social and political activism in order to help bring about change. To these wide-ranging survey respondents on two continents the museum plainly has the potential to be, as Hebdige put it in another context, a ‘focalising agent, capable of drawing together diverse, even antagonistic constituencies’ (Hebdige 1993, 272). Yet the conclusion of these studies questions whether ‘museums [are] ready and willing to provide this?’ Such a shift in the work of museums as these studies recommend would mean supporting people’s rights as citizens, underscored by a notion of active agency and even resistance in the museum. To that end, socio-cultural theorist Fiona Cameron suggests that museums move away from a pedagogic model, view the public sphere as diverse and non-unifiable, position audiences at the centre of debates and create landscapes of diverse and accessible forms of expert and citizen knowledges with opportunities for audiences to reclaim cultural territory and most importantly, play out their political potential. (Cameron 2006)

Yet it seems that museums, throughout their many recent manifestations, still attempt to control the dialogue, to contain and divert resistance and any form of struggle and public unrest. As Stallybrass and White put it, ‘the history of political struggle has been the history of the attempts to control significant sites of assembly and spaces of discourse’ (Stallybrass and White 1986, 80). Dialogue is at the heart of civil society and museums are uniquely well placed to facilitate the bridging of divergent relationships, positioning the museum as a site of anti-hegemonic



Beyond Happiness-making in Museums 25

discourse, filling the gap in such discourse left by other groups, such as religion, trades unions, women’s groups and so on. The point for museums is not to model themselves on a culture of fear and security, but to take up this opportunity – this responsibility – to openly engage with people as fellow social actors in contributing to the co-creation of an ideal of their shared neighbourhood. But, first, museums, through dialogue with their local communities, must explore their assumptions when engaging with communities, considering who they anticipate will take which role in participatory encounters: active and passive, carer and beneficiary. Museums therefore have a clear and urgent choice to make in terms of which path to take: stay within the old parameters, behind the ‘wall’ of the institution, or step up and bravely embrace their civil society role at the heart of our divided metropolises. The museum’s traditional role in containing and diverting tensions or smoothing over the cracks in relations with communities with talk of ‘happiness’ may no longer be useful or even desirable. As Davies notes: For democratic politics [the happiness turn] is a disaster. We need to accept that people often have reasons to feel happy or unhappy, and that those reasons are as important as the feelings themselves. Recognising this would lead us to focus on institutions that grant people a voice that is heard, both as individuals and as groups, and less on the vagaries of sensation and sentiment. (Davies 2015b)

Museums could usefully choose to focus on making a significant contribution to the democratic co-creation of an ideal of the neighbourhood or city. Co-creating a new sense of place, as political affairs journalist Paul Mason recently suggested in the Guardian newspaper, that indispensably [has] a democratic political culture the inhabitants are proud of, that calls them regularly to the streets, to loud arguments in small squares … and allows them to assimilate the migrants that will inevitably flow inwards, and to self-identify as products of the city as they themselves navigate the global labour market. (Mason 2014)

Hope matters. Such a society does not yet exist, but it is one that museums might help to create. Influential critical pedagogue Henry Giroux (drawing upon the works of Paulo Freire, particularly Freire 1972) writes, ‘there is a need to mobilise the imagination and develop a language of possibility in which attempts to foreclose on hope can be affectively challenged’ (Giroux 2011; 2009). Working with young people in particular, a critical pedagogy as a praxisoriented social movement (Shor 1992, 129) must become the focus of museum engagement with young people, to encourage critical thinking, resistance and hope. Thus, museums might effectively re-engage in the critically important challenge of working with young people, helping them to mobilise their imagination, creativity, resistance and hope. Such a re-engagement, as urban geographer David Harvey puts it, might include exploring ‘the right to the city … construed not as a right to that which already exists, but as a right to rebuild and re-create the city as a … body politic in a completely different image … ’ (Harvey 2012, 138). This work for the museum has never been more precious. Political economist Pablo Leal suggests (and museums may take this on board) that ‘our primary task is, as it should always

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have been, not to reform institutional … practice, but to transform society’ (Leal 2010, 99). This is a ‘theory of change’ that the museum might urgently begin to embrace. We must begin to view museums not in terms of purveyors of the happiness and well-being of others but as sites of struggle. This necessarily includes the opening up of the possibility of resistance connected to the chance, the hope, of self and social change. Nina Simon, author of the influential blog Museum 2.0 and the online book The Participatory Museum, recently called for ‘museums that are used for social bridging in order to build stronger communities’ (Simon 2014). Some museums have already taken up this challenge, not to sell happiness, not as some gift to those in need, but to work together as mutually dependent collaborators, based on mutual respect as partners in a joint project to make change happen.12 Such a theory of change echoes the wish – the hope – suggested by that member of the tenants’ association noted earlier, who hoped that those on either side of the locked gate might begin to work together as neighbours, despite – or maybe even because of – their divisions, towards a jointly imagined future. Such a project would not be easy; it might be contentious, encountering many differences, but it would be worthwhile. This, then, would be true museum engagement. For, as eminent museologist James Clifford stated at a recent conference in Oxford on the future relevance of the museum, ‘If we in museums don’t do it, who will?’ (Clifford 2013). Bibliography and References Abdallah, S, 2012 The Happy Planet Index [online], available from: http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/ entry/happy-planet-index-2012-report [5 July 2015] Abram, R, 2005 History is as history does: The evolution of a mission-driven museum, in Looking Reality in the Eye: Museums and Social Responsibility (eds R Janes and G Conaty), University of Calgary Press, Calgary, 19–42 Ahmed, S, 2008 The Happiness Turn, Editorial essay, New Formations 63, Winter 2007/2008, 7–14 ——, 2010 The Promise of Happiness, Duke University Press, North Carolina Barsamian, D, 2004 Louder Than Bombs: Interviews from The Progressive Magazine, Boulder CO BBC News, 2013 Happiness index shows ‘small improvement’ in 2013, ONS says [online], 30 July, available from: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23501423 [5 July 2015] Benjamin, W, 1940 On the Concept of History, Fragment VII, Belknap Press, Harvard University, Cambridge MA Boast, R B, 2011 Neocolonial Collaboration: Museum as contact zone revisited, Museum Anthropology 34 (1), 56–70 Borsa, J, 1990 Towards a Politics of Location: Rethinking Marginality, Canadian Women Studies 11 (1), 36–9 Broadwood, J, 2012 Arts and Kindness [online], People United, available from: http://www.pdsw.org.uk/assets/ Uploads/Breathe-Arts-Kindness-Report-People-United-report-2012.pdf [11 November 2015] Brown, W, 2006 Regulating Aversion, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ Cameron, F, 2006 Beyond Surface Representations: Museums, ‘Edgy’ Topics, Civic Responsibilities and Modes of Engagement, in Contest & Contemporary Society: Redefining museums in the 21st Century, Open Museum Journal 8 [online], available from: http://archive.amol.org.au/omj/volume8/volume8_index

12

See examples in Simon 2010: http://www.participatorymuseum.org/; and the interesting Our Museum project funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation in the UK: ourmuseum.ning.com.



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Cameron, F and Kelly, L, eds, 2010 Hot Topics, Public Culture, Museums, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne Carter, J, 2013 Human rights museums and pedagogies of practice: the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, Museum Management and Curatorship 28 (3), 324–41 Chambers, R, 1997 Whose Reality Counts? Putting the first last, Intermediate Technology Publications, London Clifford, J, 1997 Routes: Travel and translation in the late twentieth century, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA ——, 2013 ‘May you live in interesting times’, speech at the conference ‘The future of ethnographic museums hosted by Pitt Rivers Museum and Keble College’, University of Oxford [online], 19–21 July 2013, available from https://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/PRMconference.html [16 June 2016] Cooke, B and Kothari, U, eds, 2001 Participation: the New Tyranny? Zed Books, London Cornwall, A, 2008 Democratising Engagement: What the UK Can Learn From International Experience, Demos, London Cornwall, A and Coelho, V S P, eds, 2007 Spaces for Change? The Politics of Citizen Participation in New Democratic Arenas, Zed Books, London Cornwall, A and Eade, D, eds, 2010 Deconstructing Development Discourse Buzzwords and Fuzzwords, Practical Action Publishing in association with Oxfam GB, London Cornwall, A and Gaventa, J, 2001 From Users and Choosers to Makers and Shapers: Repositioning Participation in Social Policy, Institute of Development Studies Working Paper, Brighton Crooke, E M, 2007 Museums and Community: Ideas, Issues and Challenges, Routledge, London Davies, W, 2015a The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold us Well-Being, London, Verso ——, 2015b Is happiness worth measuring?, The Guardian [online], available from: http://www.theguardian. com/membership/2015/apr/23/is-happiness-worth-measuring [6 July 2015] Farah, N, 2000 Gifts, Penguin, New York, London Firth, R, 1983 Magnitudes and Values in Kula Exchange, in The Kula: New Perspectives on Massim Exchange (eds J W Leach and E Leach), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Fleming, D, 2010 The role of human rights museums, paper presented at the Inaugural Conference of the Federation of International Human Rights Museums, 15–16 September, Liverpool Fouseki, K, 2010 Community voices, curatorial choices: community consultation for the 1807 exhibitions, Museum and Society 8 (3), 180–92 Fraser, N, 1992 Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy, in Habermas and the Public Sphere (ed C Calhoun), MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 109–42 Freire, P, 1972 Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Penguin, Harmondsworth Furedi, F, 2011 On Tolerance: A Defence of Moral Independence, Continuum, London Gandhi, L, 1998 Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction, Columbia University Press, New York Giroux, H A, 2009 Paulo Freire and the Politics of Postcolonialism [online], available from: http://www. henryagiroux.com/online_articles/Paulo_friere.htm [5 July 2015] ——, 2011 On Critical Pedagogy, Critical Pedagogy Today Series, Bloomsbury, London Gourevitch, P, 2010 What is to be done? The New Yorker [online], 3 November, available from: http://www. newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-moral-hazards-of-humanitarian-aid-what-is-to-be-done [5 July 2015]

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Graham, H, 2013 A right to know? Museums, knowledge and co-production, Ways of Knowing project blog [online], available from: http://waysofknowingresearch.wordpress.com/2013/04/22/a-right-to-knowmuseums-knowledge-and-co-production/ [7 July 2015] Gramsci, A, 1971 Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Lawrence and Wishart, London Hage, G, 2008 Ghassan Hage and the Weight of Words, Up Close, episode 43, University of Melbourne, Australia [online], available from: http://upclose.unimelb.edu.au/episode/43-ghassan-hage-and-weight-words [4 November 2015] The Happy Museum, 2011 [online], available from: http://www.happymuseumproject.org/?page_id=488 [7 July 2015] Harvey, D, 2012 Rebel Cities: From the right to the city to the urban revolution, Verso Books, New York Hebdige, D, 1993 Training: some thoughts on the future, in Mapping the Future: Local Cultures, Global Change (eds J Bird, B Curtis, and T Putman), Routledge, New York Hudson, A, 2014 Personal communication (conversation with the author), December, Manchester Janes, R R, 2009 Museums in a Troubled World: Renewal, Irrelevance or Collapse? Routledge, Oxford ——, 2011 Museums and the end of materialism, in Redefining Museum Ethics (ed J Marstine), Routledge, London, 54–69 JanMohamed, A R, 1992 Worldliness-Without-World, Homelessness-as-Home: Toward a Definition of the Specular Border Intellectual, in Edward Said: A Critical Reader (ed M Sprinker), Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 96–120 Kelly, L, 2006 Measuring the impact of museums on their communities: The role of the 21st century museum, paper presented at INTERCOM 2006 [online], available from: http://www.intercom.museum/documents/1– 2Kelly.pdf [5 July 2015] Laclau, E, 1996 Emancipation(s), Verso, London, New York Leal, P A, 2010 The ascendancy of a buzzword in the neo-liberal era, in Deconstructing Development Discourse: Buzzwords and Fuzzwords (eds A Cornwall and D Eade), Practical Action Publishing in association with Oxfam GB, London, 89–100 Lynch, B, 2010 Custom-Made: A new culture for museums and galleries in civil society, Arken Bulletin 5, 65–75 ——, 2011a Whose Cake is it Anyway? A collaborative investigation into engagement and participation in 12 museums and galleries in the UK, The Paul Hamlyn Foundation, London [online], available from: http://www. phf.org.uk/reader/whose-cake-anyway/ [5 July 2015] ——, 2011b Custom-made reflective practice: can museums realise their capabilities in helping others realise theirs? Museum Management and Curatorship 26 (5), 441–58 ——, 2011c Collaboration, Contestation, and Creative Conflict: On the efficacy of museum/community partnerships, in Redefining Museum Ethics (ed J Marstine), Routledge, London, 146–63 ——, 2013 Reflective Debate, Radical Transparency and Trust in Museums, Special Issue, Working through conflict in Museums: Museums, objects and participatory democracy, Museum Management and Curatorship 28 (1), 1–13 Lynch, B and Alberti, S J M M, 2010 Legacies of prejudice: racism, co-production and radical trust in the museum, Museum Management and Curatorship 25 (1), 13–35 Marstine, J, ed, 2011 The Routledge Companion to Museum Ethics: Redefining Ethics for the twenty-first century, Routledge, Oxford Mason, P, 2014 The 10 things a perfect city needs, The Guardian [online], available from: http://www. theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/25/10-things-a-perfect-city-needs [7 July 2015]



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Mauss, M, 1990 (1950; 1954 first English translation) The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, Routledge, London Mouffe, C, 2005 On the Political, Routledge, Oxford NEF (New Economics Foundation), 2014 Our Work: Wellbeing [online], available from: http://www.neweconomics.org/issues/entry/well-being [5 July 2015] ONS (Office of National Statistics), 2014a Measuring what matters: Measuring National Well-being [online], available from: http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/guide-method/user-guidance/well-being/index.html [5 July 2015] ——, 2014b National Well-being Measures, March 2014 [online], available from: http://www.ons.gov.uk/ ons/rel/wellbeing/measuring-national-well-being/life-in-the-uk--2014/national-well-being-measures-march-2014.html [5 July 2015] O’Neill, M, 2010 From the Margins to the Core? paper presented at the Victoria and Albert Museum conference From the Margins to the Core? London, 24 March 2010 Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, 2012 Measuring National Wellbeing [online], Houses of Parliament, Postnote, Number 421, September, available from: www.parliament.uk/briefing-papers/post-pn421.pdf [5 July 2015] Peers, L and Brown, A, eds, 2003 Museums and Source Communities, Routledge, London Rabinow, P, 1977 Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco, Berkeley University Press, Berkeley CA Revealing Histories, 2007 AV recording of participant in Manchester Museum’s ‘Are Museum’s Racist’ discussion, 4 October, previously available from: www.revealinghistories.org.uk/are-museums-and-galleries-racist Sandell, R, 2002 Museums and the combating of social inequality: roles, responsibilities, resistance, in Museums, society, inequality (ed R Sandell), Routledge, London, 3–23 ——, 2003 Social inclusion, the museum and the dynamics of sectoral change, Museum & Society 191, 45–62 Sandell, R and Dodd, J, 2010 Activist practice, in Re-presenting Disability: Activism and Agency in the Museum (eds R Sandell, J Dodd and R Garland-Thomson), Routledge, London, 3–22 Sandell, R and Nightingale, E, 2012 Museums, Equality and Social Justice, Routledge, London, New York Seabrook, J, 2014 The doctrine of ‘humanitarianism’ is not as benign as you might think, The Guardian, 8 September Sen, A, 2009, The Idea of Justice, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA Shor, I, 1992 Empowering Education: Critical teaching for social change, University of Chicago Press, Chicago Silverman, L, 2010 The Social Work of Museums, Routledge, London Simon, N, 2010 The Participatory Museum [online], Museum 2.0, Santa Cruz CA, available from: http:// www.participatorymuseum.org [7 July 2015] ——, 2014 Rigorous methodology in participatory practice [online], Skype presentation at the Our Museum conference, Brighton, UK, June, available from: http://ourmuseum.org.uk/rigorous-methodology-in-participatory-practice-nina-simon/ [7 July 2015] Stallybrass, P and White, A, 1986 The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY Thompson, S, Aked, J, Marks, N and Gordon, C, 2008 Five Ways to Wellbeing: The Evidence [online], NEF, London, available from: http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/entry/five-ways-to-well-beingthe-evidence [6 July 2015] Uvin, P, 2001 Reading the Rwandan Genocide, International Studies Review 3 (3), 75–99 Zizek, S, 2014 Event: Philosophy in Transit, Penguin, London

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Assembling Communities: Curatorial Practices, Material Cultures and Meanings Philipp Schorch

N

ations in the South Pacific face the dramatic dual pressures of local reinventions and global engagements over processes of political decolonisation (both external and internal), cultural revitalisation and economic development. However, we have a limited understanding of how cultural practices can embody these processes and illuminate the ways in which they are being negotiated. This chapter addresses this situation by laying the foundation for a documentation and analysis of the contribution of curatorial practices in museums to (re)negotiating identities, cultural revitalisation and economic development. The South Pacific region is strongly affected by global forces such as mass migration and media through rapid technological developments in transportation and communication. However, while transpacific connections and crossings have multiplied and accelerated over the last decades, one should not lose sight of their grounding in historical processes of sea voyages, encounter and exchange. Scholarship has begun to illuminate the endemic movements of people, histories and practices across the Pacific, which cannot be exhaustively explained through totalising understandings of colonialism or conventional categories of analysis such as the nation. Instead, the South Pacific region has always been characterised by transpacific entanglements of histories, cultures and economies (Dürr and Schorch 2016; Hau’ofa 1994; Matsuda 2012; Thomas 2011). Museums have not only functioned as mirrors that reflect these processes but have been involved as actors in the processes themselves (Bennett 2013; Bennett et al 2014). That is, museums have played an active role in imperial colonisation and its political decolonisation, scientific and anthropological knowledge production and its postcolonial critique, and contemporary cultural revitalisation and economic development. Museums, then, offer a window into these larger processes and an empirically grounded illustration of the underpinning complexity. The complex function of museums in mediating the cultural, political and economic dimensions of contemporary life is particularly prominent in the South Pacific. Here, a plethora of new museums have emerged and been branded ‘experiments in culture’ (Healy and Witcomb 2006), implicated in the ‘making of culture’ (Message 2006) and the creation of ‘destinations’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998). South Pacific museums appear at the cutting edge of recent developments in museum and heritage theory and practice, especially through the active engagement with Indigenous concepts, practices and forms of knowledge production (Kreps 2007; Stanley 2007). Scholars have shown the influence of Indigenous thought on museum practice (McCarthy 2011), the dialogue with notions of Western theory (Schorch and Hakiwai 2014; Schorch et al 2016) and engagements between museums and source communities (Peers and Brown 2007). But what is a community, and what is engagement?

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In this chapter I conceptualise ‘engagement’ through curatorial practices in museums and their function in negotiating new identities, achieving cultural renewal and developing economic opportunities. This entails an approach to the institution of the ‘museum’ as a kind of practice that entangles curatorial work, material cultures and communities, thus intertwining interpretive and material agency in a complex web of relations that connect human life and the material world. I draw on both assemblage theory and hermeneutics to approach curatorial work with Pacific collections and the associated relationships with people as a hermeneutic performance through which meanings are negotiated and assemblages are created. ‘Communities’, then, do not exist a priori as locally confined, organic socialities, but instead as fluid networks that become assembled and interpretively negotiated through the relations between cultural actors, objects and curatorial practices across and between multiple localities. The chapter sets the theoretical, conceptual and methodological scene for future research on particular empirical realities across the South Pacific. I begin by bringing an assemblage approach into dialogue with hermeneutics, before conceptualising what I call ‘the figure of the curator’ and concluding by sketching out its ethnographic investigation. Community as Assemblage and Engagement through Hermeneutics In the museum and heritage studies literature growing attention has been paid to the continuing relevance of objects for originating source communities. Increasingly collaborative and often contested relationships between museum institutions and communities have prompted changes to ethnographic practices and forms of engagement in academia and museums (Crooke 2007; Golding and Modest 2013; Karp et al 1992; Peers and Brown 2007; Waterton and Watson 2011; Watson 2007). Both ‘community’ and ‘engagement’, however, have proven to be elusive concepts that resist clear definitions. As the editors of this volume highlight, ‘the very term “meaningful community engagement” betrays a myriad of contrary approaches and understandings’ (see also Onciul 2013). Moreover, the proclaimed objectives of ‘collaboration’ and ‘co-production’, which are supposed to govern museum–community relationships, often do not offer forms of participation beyond the ‘disillusioning experience of “empowerment-lite”’ (Lynch 2011, 4) among community partners, as research has shown in the UK. In the wider social sciences,the notion of ‘community’ has been theorised for over a century and, given our ‘era of mobility’, both physical and virtual, it has been argued that the concept is in ‘crisis’ and that other, arguably more dynamic and flexible notions, such as ‘network’, might better reflect contemporary realities (Colic-Peisker 2010). In my opinion it is a matter of how rather than what. That is, we might invent new analytical categories that change our analytical literacy but still remain unversed in the language of agency, or life as it is lived and performed. I think it is reasonable to claim that, despite the ongoing academic debates, ‘community’ is still a common label widely used by cultural actors in practice to conceptualise, interpret and articulate a sense of belonging to a collective. ‘Community’, then, has not lost its theoretical and empirical validity but, rather, should be seen differently, less homogenous and territorially confined and more complexly assembled, disassembled and reassembled. In this chapter I approach community as assemblage and engagement through hermeneutics. This conceptual move enables me to unpick rather than deny ‘community’ and show how ‘engagement’ is performed and experienced. The ultimate goal outlined below is an empirically grounded understanding, explanation and critique of actually existing community engage-



Curatorial Practices, Material Cultures and Meanings 33

ments as lived and interpreted phenomena, rather than the imposition of new theory upon the same empirical reality. Approaching phenomena through an assemblage lens enables us to avoid any self-evident point of departure by dissecting the assembled, rather than given, nature of seemingly takenfor-granted categories and their underpinning assumptions. Key concepts such as colonialism, modernity and community can thus be unmasked as heterogeneous and contested complexes instead of self-enclosed and homogenous totalities. An assemblage perspective, exemplified by the metaphor of the ‘rhizome’, chosen by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987), with its principles of ‘connection’, ‘heterogeneity’, ‘multiplicity’, ‘rupture’ and ‘cartography’, equips us with an analytical toolkit to work with and through more subtle units of analysis to move beyond causal, hierarchical and chronological understandings. Moreover, our attention and suspicion is called to the complex processes and relations involved in the production of even the most detailed category itself to ‘avoid imputing analytical divisions a priori’, as Sharon Macdonald (2009, 118) succinctly puts it, which would award these the unattainable status of ‘magical notions’. Owing to ‘its rejection of scalar models, in which, say, the micro is seen as nestling inside the macro, or the local inside the global, an assemblage perspective potentially provides more nuanced accounts of complexes of interrelationships’ (Macdonald 2009, 118–19). The local and the global thus appear not as diametrically opposed categories but as mutually constitutive dimensions which continuously become (re)produced and (re)assembled through multidimensional processes as enacted through cultural practices (Schorch and Dürr 2016). Within the context of this chapter, curatorial practices should thus be seen as articulations and performances ‘moving across and reconstituting … specific situations’ (Ong and Collier 2005, 4), or local places, within a global space. Throughout these processes, the associated communities become ‘territorialised in assemblages’ and (re)defined through new virtual, economic, cultural, political, historical as well as ‘material, collective, and discursive relationships’ (Ong and Collier 2005, 4). Thinking through assemblages, initially inspired by Deleuze and Guattari (1987), has burgeoned in recent years and reached the shores of various academic disciplines and fields (Bennett and Healy 2011; DeLanda 2006; Latour 2005; Law 2004; Ong and Collier 2005), including museum and heritage studies (Gosden and Larson 2007; Harrison et al 2013; Macdonald 2009). However, while an assemblage perspective importantly includes the ‘intermingling of bodies’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987), materialities, technologies and other non-human actors, it often does so at the expense of language, relegating linguistic processes to the vicarious role of an outsider or denying them a ‘constitutive role’ (DeLanda 2006). Moving beyond such abstract reasoning, which seems to naturalise and perpetuate the dichotomous divisions that an assemblage lens attempts to dissolve, towards historically grounded ethnographic investigation, Macdonald (2009, 313) shows, however, that ‘language, classification and meaning’ are indeed ‘crucial in the course assembling takes’. I therefore need to suspend or qualify my allegiance to assemblage thinking. Once we enter the realm of human life, and thus of culture, we cannot ignore the significance of language in constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing worlds of meaning. I think that Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987, 84) claim ‘language is not life; it gives life orders’ derives from a limited structural and almost mechanical view of linguistics which does not capture the infinite and fluid world of interpretive and imaginative assemblages. Here I need to call for another analytical reinforcement, in the form of hermeneutics, with its maxim that life – that is, human life – interprets itself.

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At the heart of this interpretive condition, or ‘hermeneia’ (Ricoeur 2006), of life lies a continuous translation between cultural worlds of meaning, which seems difficult in theory but has always been performed in practice. This capacity grows out of the daily task of translating not only between but within cultural communities. In fact, each interpretation or understanding is an act of translation (Ricoeur 2006). It follows that human existence itself is not only a ‘mode of interpretation’ or ‘hermeneia’ (Ricoeur 2006) but a mode of translation which is at once linguistic, cultural, political and historical. This endless flow of ‘translation’ proceeds, as Walter Benjamin (1997, 117) puts it, ‘through continua of transformation, not abstract areas of identity and similarity’. By offering ‘cultural difference as an enunciative category’, Homi Bhabha (1994, 60) opens a hermeneutic terrain of cultural negotiation and contestation without resorting to the last bastion of binary oppositions, which are produced by the inherently essentialising concept of ‘a culture’. This throws open the door to cultural world-making, a process which always begins with an ‘act of interpretation’ (Schorch 2013a). By creating a theoretical and methodological synthesis of assemblage theory and hermeneutics, I draw both body and language into the moments and processes of world-making, thus shaping a refined analytical literacy of an often-impoverished language of agency (Schorch 2013b). Hermeneutics enables me to understand, explain and critique how the moments and processes of a particular assemblage, its critical junctures, are interpreted, negotiated and contested. The advantages of doing so are that the curatorial work with Pacific collections and their living cultural relationships with people can be analysed as a hermeneutic moment, or ‘act of interpretation’, in which meanings are made as part of the process in which assemblages are produced. Museums and cultural heritage provide concrete spaces, places and themes that are involved in the ongoing construction, deconstruction and reconstruction of meanings and the interpretive becoming, emerging and making of forms of life. That is, museums and cultural heritage play a significant role in the complex negotiations of a ‘flexible citizenship’ (Ong 1999) of Pacific actors, such as curators and the community members they engage with, who simultaneously constitute and are constituted by Indigenous connections, migration and new mobilities, political and economic relations and the (dis-)continuities of contemporary histories. Illuminating this complexity allows me to treat the hermeneutics of assemblages not only as ‘anthropological problems’ (Rabinow 2005) but as actually existing and thus lived and interpreted phenomena. The Figure of the Curator Scholars have begun to approach museums and their collections as relational, dynamic assemblages rather than static entities and sets of objects (Gosden and Larson 2007; Harrison et al 2013). Such an analytical perspective has importantly moved beyond a Euro-Americentric view on ethnographic collecting and knowledge practices by revealing the collaborative and contested processes which constitute the co-formation of ethnographic collections and knowledge through the involvement of a range of actors, such as European scientist–collectors and Indigenous subjects and objects (Bennett et al 2014; Harrison et al 2013). Such a focus has been aided by the so-called ‘material turn’ in museum studies, anthropology and other related disciplines, which has enabled researchers to liberate themselves from the confinement of textual sources and thus refine their understandings of ‘entangled objects’ exemplifying intertwined colonial histories (Thomas 1991) by looking at the ‘social life’ (Appadurai 1986) and ‘cultural biography of things’ (Kopytoff 1986), and the position of ‘museums in the material world’ (Knell 2007). Recent scholarship has



Curatorial Practices, Material Cultures and Meanings 35

expanded on these lines of enquiry by emphasising the material nature of experiences (Witcomb 2010) and the construction of meanings (Schorch 2014). Here I want to add a new dimension to these approaches by bringing museum objects into dialogue with curatorial practices, or the ‘figure of the curator’, and communities, thus entangling interpretive and material agency in an intricate web that enmeshes human and non-human actors. At ‘The Task of the Curator’ conference, held at the University of California Santa Cruz in 2010, James Clifford highlighted in his keynote that ‘the museum is an inventive, globally and locally translated form, no longer anchored to its modern origins in Europe. Contemporary curatorial work’, Clifford continued, ‘in the excessive times of decolonisation and globalisation … has the potential to open up common-sense, “given” histories’ and thus contribute to the further ‘decentering of the West’. Clifford’s perspective is significant on several levels. Firstly, he alludes to the practice of ‘translation’ at the heart of the cultural concept of ‘the museum’ and the cultural practice of ‘curatorship’, thus echoing the argument for hermeneutics which threads its way through this chapter.1 Secondly, Clifford suggests that contemporary curatorship – with its varied roles, skills, practices and audiences – is well placed to ‘decenter’ the predominant association of science with Western ways of thinking and being and ‘open up’ to Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies (Clifford 2010). In the case of Aotearoa New Zealand, for example, it can be observed how these major shifts have led to specific changes in the parameters of curatorial roles. As Conal McCarthy (2007, 168) concludes, there are two main developments visible in the care of Māori collections in New Zealand museums: a shift from a conventional ethnological framework to tikanga taonga, or traditional Māori protocols and practices; and the change from sole institutional control to kaitiakitanga, customary guardianship, reflected internally by employing kaitiaki Māori [guardians] and externally by co-management of taonga [treasures] in partnership with iwi [tribes].

Contemporary curatorial practices in Aotearoa New Zealand have thus been inflected by the ongoing indigenisation and decolonisation of knowledge production and the evolution of new models of the curator as facilitator, intermediary and even activist. Despite these developments, however, there is a paucity of historically informed ethnographic insights into Indigenous curatorial practices that operate as a form of both Indigenous knowledge production and community engagement (Ames and McKenzie 1996; Harrison et al 2013; McCarthy 2011; Kreps 1998; 2003; Phillips 2013). In another closely related project, I have collaborated with Conal McCarthy (Victoria University of Wellington) and Arapata Hakiwai (Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa) to shed light on global scientific entanglements through the history and contemporary legacy of the Cook/Forster collection, which is held at the Georg-August-University Göttingen, Germany. These objects – or, rather, taonga from a Māori perspective – embody the first material evidence of the remarkable encounter between Pacific and European peoples in the 1700s and materialise the moment when two worlds of meaning became entangled and mutually constitutive, thus emphasising the collec-

1

See the closely related discussions of Clifford (2013), on processes of ‘translation’ at the core of ‘Indigeneity’, and Amiria Salmond (2013), on the practice of ‘ethnographic translation’ and its implications for ethnographic theory and methodology.

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tion’s continued significance for Pacific people and European understanding (Schorch et al 2016). Importantly, we deployed the Māori concept mana taonga (living relationships between objects, people, places and knowledge or mātauranga Māori) (Hakiwai 2006; 2008; McCarthy 2007; 2011; Schorch and Hakiwai 2014) as conceptual frame and analytical tool. This enabled us to reconceptualise issues of engagement, knowledge and virtuality by exploring ways in which the mutual asymmetrical relations underpinning global scientific entanglements of the past can be transformed into reciprocal, symmetrical forms of cross-cultural curatorship and anthropology in the present. This collaborative approach allowed us to bring the histories of encounter, and their impact upon Europe, materialised in the Cook/Forster collection, into dialogue with the subsequent involvement of Māori people in scientific enterprises across the Pacific and their ultimate reconnection with the taonga, or treasures, through virtual initiatives that serve both cultural revitalisation and scientific advancement. Instead of perpetuating the totalising and dichotomising tendencies of colonial thought and its postcolonial critique, we showed how Indigenous and Western ways of thinking and being have always been mutually (albeit asymmetrically) constitutive. More specifically, we alluded to the process of ‘enlargement’ (Hau’ofa 1994) of the Māori and wider Pacific world initiated through the encounter with European people in the eighteenth century and continued through contemporary travel, museum and virtual practices. We emphasised that this ongoing process serves the rediscovery and development of both cultural identity and scientific knowledge. Given the globalised nature of the underpinning relationships, we insisted that Indigenous practices are never ‘only’ Indigenous in a localised sense. That is, mana taonga as a relational concept is created and becomes meaningful through networks of people, objects, places and knowledge across their global connections. At the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa), mana taonga as a historically grounded concept has been translated into concrete practices that underpin, for example, the development of iwi exhibitions2 and the repatriation of contested taonga (McCarthy 2011; 2014). In the process, the traditional role of the curator has been devolved and a variety of Māori people within and beyond Te Papa share the responsibilities of Māori curatorship as kaitiaki, or guardians (Smith 2009). These emerging Indigenous curatorial practices, however, are increasingly discussed but often remain to be analysed. I therefore expand on this line of enquiry through a collaborative ethnographic study, which will be outlined below and is supported by the following conceptual understanding of curatorial work. On the one hand, the curator is seen as a cultural actor and interpretive agent who imbues objects – and is imbued by objects – with meaning by drawing on interpretive resources provided in particular socio-cultural and historical contexts. On the other hand, the curator acts as a cultural intermediary, broker and translator who mediates between materialities and communities across multiple localities and thus fulfils political and economic tasks. In this context, it is crucial to note that museum objects are not ‘ethnographic’ a priori but become ‘ethnographic’ through curatorial interventions (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1991). It follows that with changing historical, socio-political and disciplinary contexts, ‘objects continuously change as well’ (Hauser-Schäublin 2

The Iwi Exhibition, or Māori tribal exhibition programme at Te Papa, is important and one of the most visible expressions of mana taonga. Te Papa acts as a dynamic facilitator and provides an opportunity for iwi (tribes) to work in partnership with Te Papa to tell their stories, histories and present their taonga to the world in their own way (see Schorch and Hakiwai 2014).



Curatorial Practices, Material Cultures and Meanings 37

1998, 11) and are awarded categories such as curiosity, specimen or art, among others. A curator thus enacts interpretive, scientific classifications of objects and people in and across specific situations. A museum, then, ‘is not only an institution or a collection’, as Nicholas Thomas (2010, 7) rightly argues, ‘but also a method – a kind of activity – [that] has its moments’. Thomas (2010, 7) further suggest that ‘the moments we might reflect on are those of the discovery, the caption, and the juxtaposition’. These integral dimensions of curatorial labour known to, and consciously performed by, any museum curator require theoretical and conceptual imagination, cross-cultural mediation and embodied engagements with materialities. Curatorial techniques and the associated processes of exploration and experimentation should therefore be seen as research endeavours in themselves (Herle 2013) and, as I stress throughout, cannot be reduced to Western notions of science and curatorship but are increasingly indigenised. Following this line of thought, I argue that curatorial practice is an interpretive or hermeneutic method through which the relationships between objects, communities and knowledge becomes assembled, disassembled and reassembled. Importantly, however, curatorial practice is not a subject-centred enterprise. Taonga or Māori treasures, for example, have been turned into ‘objects of ethnography’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1991), but, rather than seeing them merely as the products of social relations, it is vital to consider their active mediation of those relations through their own material and social agency (Gell 1998; Henare 2007; Latour 2005). That is, objects do not only reflect or embody but enact relationships. For Māori people, taonga are ancestors and therefore are people and instantiate relations (Henare 2007), which collapses the common dichotomy between subject and object. Importantly, then, the biography of an object should not be equated with, or reduced to, its socio-cultural life trajectory but should rather be understood through the biographies of relationships enacted as through taonga. It is therefore more precise to speak of webs of biographies that emerge through the inextricable entanglements of human life and the material world. Such awareness avoids the pitfall of another one-sided reduction to a sole object-centred focus. The Polynesian concept Vā (or Wā in Māori and Hawaiian), instead refers to a ‘space between’ (Mallon 2011; Wendt 1999), which relates and unites people and material treasures or interpretive and material agency. This shared space of reciprocal relations needs to be activated, nurtured and kept alive through curatorial practice, thus requiring curatorial responsibility and care for the physical, historical and political ‘weight’ of things as well as the associated relationships with Indigenous community groups (Harrison 2013). Meaning, then, arises out of this interpretive space in between objects and people, and vice versa. At the heart of this simultaneous, mutual constitution of human and non-human actors, which ‘bypasses-and not just dissolves-the subject-object distinction’ (Chakrabarty 2000, 175), lies interpretive practice in general and, within the context of the argument proposed here, curatorial practice in particular. How, then, can Community Engagement be Researched in New Ways? The framework of the ongoing collaborative study introduced in this section addresses this question by drawing on interpretation and assemblage theory to simultaneously entangle materiality and its embodied qualities with narrative interpretations of history and culture. It also connects specific localities with a transpacific space that emerges through the ubiquitous mobility of diasporic communities and objects (Basu 2011) and their increasingly ‘virtual repatriation’ (Bell et al 2013). As I have argued throughout, the South Pacific region particularly lends itself

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to an ethnographic exploration of Indigenous curatorial practices. The ongoing project entails a collaborative ethnographic study of curatorial work with Pacific collections and their living cultural relationships with mobile, transpacific communities at the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, Hawai’i, USA. This private institution, which is in part publicly funded, depends on a supportive public and has been a site of contestation for Hawai’i’s Indigenous population (Bishop Museum 2009; Foster 1993). From a Hawaiian perspective, so-called ethnographic museums are in a constant state of crisis. Hawaiians continue to face and contest the predominant reality of being Natives in Non-Native spaces, which reflects the broader and persistent struggle against illegal occupation and for political sovereignty (Beamer 2014; Goodyear-Ka’ōpua et al 2014). My research on contemporary Indigenous curatorial practices has begun to show, however, how the current ‘fundamental interpretive shift towards a Native perspective’ (Kahanu 2014) in knowledge production has reclaimed Indigenous spaces, and how the role of ‘the curator as guardian of portals and passageways’ (Kahanu 2014) embodied in the recently restored ‘Hawaiian Hall’ (2009) and ‘Pacific Hall’ (2013) has been negotiated in collaboration with the respective communities. Representatives from the arts, scholarly, spiritual and political communities, among others, all played important curatorial roles by participating in ceremonial protocol, exhibition design, interpretation and programming (Schorch and Kahanu 2015a; 2015b). This Hawaiian (re)capturing of interpretive authority at Bishop Museum is not, however, a new phenomenon, but the current manifestation of a continuum of Indigenous strategies contesting Western dominance in anthropological research and museological representation. There is a precedent of Indigenous scholars, such as Te Rangihīroa (Sir Peter Buck), former director of the Bishop Museum and one of the founding figures of Polynesian anthropology (Buck 1938; 1945) and curatorship. In this context, it is important to note that the divergence from material culture and museums characteristic of much Euro-American anthropology throughout the twentieth century (Förster 2013; Henare et al 2007; Phillips 2013) did not occur in Indigenous thought in the South Pacific (Buck 1938; 1945). The histories and contemporary practices of Indigenous curatorship and their transpacific dimensions, which are being investigated in this project, thus complicate the Euro- and Americentrism of much Pacific curatorship and anthropology, as well as alleged epochal breaks such as the ‘material turn’ announced and practised elsewhere. The emerging historically grounded ethnographic insights into Hawaiian material ontologies and Indigenous concepts and practices have significant implications for museums in Europe and North America, which continue to produce and represent Hawaiian visual and material culture through the separation and imposition of alien categories such as ‘art’ and ‘artefact’ (Schorch and Kahanu 2015a; 2015b). Conceptually, by approaching the curator as an interpretive mediator, mediated access has been gained to Indigenous constituencies who have played a significant role at the museum. Importantly, the project has been conducted with rather than about the participants, thus representing a collaborative ethnography (Clifford 1988; Marcus 1998) through which knowledge is interpretively negotiated and co-produced across cultural and linguistic boundaries. Since it is both impossible and undesirable to abandon one’s identity, I argue that collaboration is the methodological key to overcome the predicament of Euro-Americentric scholarship and enable deeper understandings. Collaboration means dialogue, which does not involve a gestural accommodation of a subaltern part for its eventual assimilation within the dominant whole but refers to conscious interpretive engagement and reflexivity (Schorch and Hakiwai 2014; Schorch et al 2016, Schorch and Kahanu 2015a; 2015b).



Curatorial Practices, Material Cultures and Meanings 39

Methodologically, I have deployed a mix of archival research, oral histories and narrative interviews, participant observation and photography aimed at eliciting the relations between curatorial agency, material cultures and communities and their political, cultural and economic dimensions. Oral histories and narrative-based interviews (Wengraf 2001), which support a hermeneutic approach, have been conducted with curators as well as staff in museum and collection management and the community representatives they work with in order to gain insights into the complex relations negotiated through curatorial work. Archival research on the development of Pacific collections at the Bishop Museum has generated historical understandings of these negotiations. The suggested collaborative ethnography through narrative–hermeneutic methodologies (interviews and oral histories) has thus revealed and enabled the analysis of ‘interpretive contests’ (Said 2003) and their various layers of translation and meaning. Certain cultural meanings, however, are felt and remain embodied meanings that resist verbal articulation and narrative expression (Schorch 2014). This calls for a further ethnographic method in the form of careful participant observations and photography, which have been triangulated with the archival research, oral histories and narrative interviews. Curators have been observed while working with material objects, museum staff and community members to understand how these relations are performed through multisensory, embodied interpretive practices. Participant observation is particularly necessary to observe, analyse and understand the agency of objects (see also Classen and Howes 2006; Dudley 2009; 2012) and the embodied registers of curatorial responses that are not opposed to, but rather are integral dimensions of, classificatory performances. The visual method of photography (Banks 2001; Canal 2004; Pink 2007) has added another ethnographic layer to document, co-interpret and represent the interpretive dynamics of the Vā or space in between objects and people, and vice versa, which gives rise to meaning beyond words. Even the most sensitive observation of such assemblages of people and materialities, however, cannot enter the hermeneutic world of the making of meanings. That is, any experience will somehow be entangled with narratives of biography, history and culture in its quest for meaning. The insights gained through the interpretive turn in anthropology, which aims at the interpretation of public or shared symbols and their meanings through subtle participant observation and ‘thick description’ (Geertz 1973), can thus be further enhanced through the narrative access to interpretive constructions in oral histories and narrative interviews (Schorch 2015). During the next stage of the project, the Bishop Museum will be compared with the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and the Museo Antropológico Padre Sebastián Englert in Rapanui (Easter Island), thus offering further contrasting and enriching ethnographic insights into contemporary transpacific relations negotiated through curatorial work. The choice of these case studies makes sense for several reasons. Hawai’i is located geographically above the Equator in the northern part of the Pacific, but it represents one of the three corners of the so-called Polynesian Triangle (the others being Aotearoa New Zealand and Rapanui, Chile) and its Indigenous inhabitants belong to the Polynesian ethnic and language family, with a common migratory origin in south-east Asia (Newton 1999).3 The Pacific Ocean, then, has always been a ‘sea 3

The author is aware of the modern and European origin of the categories ‘Polynesia’ and ‘Indigeneity’, both being examples of introduced concepts that have, however, been taken up with alacrity by the Pacific islands people, including Polynesian scholars such as Te Rangihīroa (Sir Peter Buck) (Buck 1938; 1945), former director of the Bishop Museum, and today serve widely as self-identifying labels (Schorch 2013b). For recent discussions on Indigeneity see Clifford (2013) and Harrison (2013).

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of islands’ (Hau’ofa 1994) to Polynesian people, a living web of social, cultural and economic relations instead of a vast empty space as conceived by Europeans during scientific and colonial expansion. European exploration and colonialism, however, dramatically changed the configuration of this cultural–geographical space (Herman 2011; Thomas 2011). Today, Hawai’i belongs politically to the USA but is still related to a Pan-Polynesian cultural identity that is also reflected in Polynesian anthropology and curatorship at Bishop Museum, which has always incorporated Hawai’i and its wider historical and cultural Polynesian connections to Aotearoa New Zealand and Rapanui (Buck 1938; 1945). The ongoing study of a museum institution and its curatorial practices in this setting, then, builds on common histories of Polynesian migration and European exploration and colonialism. It draws a contemporary Hawaiian picture of the Polynesian Triangle, which has evolved into a transpacific space that connects the Americas with the South Pacific (Dürr and Schorch 2016). In the next stage, the project expands into a multi-sited ethnography (Marcus 1995), an emerging ethnographic approach which is attuned to mobility through its multi-sited comparative perspective (Kokot 2002; Welz 1998). This stage will contrast the Bishop Museum with two museums located at the other corners of the Polynesian Triangle: the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and the Museo Antropológico Padre Sebastián Englert in Rapanui, Chile. By studying curatorial practices at all three Pacific museums, the project follows a multi-sited ethnographic approach to shed light on contemporary and historical transpacific assemblages and their entangled histories, practices and meanings. These case studies represent specific national places that are simultaneously enmeshed in transpacific negotiations involving travelling objects, people and knowledge for political, cultural and economic purposes owing to common historical and contemporary Polynesian migrations and relations. The project aims to illuminate the contested understandings of Pacific heritage and ‘messy entanglements’ (Talu and Quanchi 1995) of Pacific historiography, pointing to their significance for future political decolonisation, cultural revitalisation and economic development. The focus on cultural practices through curatorial agency within a transnational framework entails an approach to the institution of the ‘museum’ as a kind of practice that entangles curatorial work and material cultures, facilitating an exploration of the relations between local and transpacific realities. By studying transpacific phenomena through cultural practices, the project aims to tell a larger story through the experiences and lives negotiated by cultural actors in socio-political and historical contexts. That is, the project addresses questions of globalisation and transnationalism through particular theoretical and methodological orientations, such as interpretation and assemblage theory, which will generate specific empirical insights into how those involved in these processes produce meanings. By venturing beyond the limiting definition of local or national research questions, the project aims to dissect how the use and interpretation of material culture draws on multiple, mobile and intersecting influences from across the Pacific, thus unravelling the entanglements of transpacific historiography and heritage. Museum objects and curatorial practices are considered as ‘ships’ (Gilroy 1993) or mobile interpretive vessels that embody and navigate the material and discursive relations between different places across the Pacific. The project will offer empirical insights into transpacific museum practices, showing how a museum manages relationships with mobile and interrelated communities across the South Pacific. In the context of Aotearoa New Zealand I have argued above that, owing to the ubiquitous migration of people and objects, Indigenous concepts such as mana taonga and Indigeneity itself have become globalised. It follows that curatorial work engages increasingly with digital and virtual tools which evolve into tikanga, or Māori cultural practices, in their own right (Hogsden and Poulter 2012; Ngata et al 2012). Once again,



Curatorial Practices, Material Cultures and Meanings 41

however, these changing curatorial practices and concepts remain to be ethnographically studied and historicised to understand how Indigenous practices become modernised and globalised, as pursued in this ongoing project. Conclusion In this chapter I laid a theoretical, conceptual and methodological basis from which to find empirical answers to museologically topical questions such as ‘what is community?’ and ‘what is engagement?’ I suggested that communities do not exist as primordial, tidy and territorially confined socialities, but as dynamic networks that become interpretively assembled, disassembled and reassembled through the relations between individual actors, objects and curatorial practices. By synthesising assemblage theory and hermeneutics I approached community as assemblage and engagement through hermeneutics. This theoretical approach was based on a particular conceptual understanding of what I termed ‘the figure of the curator’. The curator performs the dual function of an interpretive or hermeneutic agent, who imprints objects – and is imprinted by objects – with meaning and creates knowledge in specific settings, as well as of a cultural, political and economic mediator, who facilitates relationships between often mobile or diasporic materialities and people across multiple localities. Importantly, objects are not only passive recipients of such interventions but enact both knowledge and relationships through their own social and cultural agency. I drew these two frequently separated poles together and argued that meaning emerges out of the spaces in between human and non-human actors and their simultaneous, mutual constitution through interpretive practices in general and curatorial practices in particular. The research project I described travels further towards empirical investigation by looking at curatorship ethnographically as a ‘hinge activity’4 within the South Pacific, a particularly vibrant region of contemporary Indigenous curatorial practices that operate as a form of both Indigenous knowledge production and community engagement. Recent scholarship has produced refined ethnographies, histories and theories of collecting and being collected. I want to slightly shift the analytical focus towards curatorship, and thus make some headway towards the production of much needed curatorial ethnographies, histories and theories. The associated focus on Indigenous actors and agency will reveal Indigenous influences upon historical and contemporary developments of curatorial and anthropological knowledge – both from the outside and from within. Bibliography and References Ames, M and McKenzie, M, eds, 1996 Curatorship: Indigenous Perspectives in Postcolonial Societies, Canadian Museum of Civilisation, Ottawa Appadurai, A, ed, 1986 The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Banks, M, 2001 Visual Methods in Social Research, Sage, London Basu, P, 2011 Object diasporas, resourcing communities: Sierra Leonean collections in the global museumscape, Museum Anthropology 34 (1), 28–42

4

I thank Ivan Gaskell for this apt description.

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Beamer, K, 2014 No mākou ka mana: Liberating the nation, Kamehameha Publishing, Honolulu Bell, J A, Christen, K and Turin, M, 2013 Introduction: after the return, Museum Anthropology Review 7 (1–2), 1–21 Benjamin, W, 1997 One-way Street (trans E Jephcott and K Shorter), Verso Classics, London, New York Bennett, T, 2013 Making Culture, Changing Society, Routledge, Oxford, New York Bennett, T and Healy, C, eds, 2011 Assembling Culture, Routledge, London, New York Bennett, T, Dibley, B and Harrison, R, 2014 Introduction: Anthropology, collecting and colonal governmentalities, History and Anthropology 25 (2), 137–49 Bhabha, H K, 1994 The Location of Culture, Routledge, London, New York Bishop Museum, 2009 Restoring Bishop Museum’s Hawaiian Hall. Ho’i Hou Ka Wena I Kaiwi’ula, Bishop Museum Press, Honolulu Buck, P (Te Rangihiroa), 1938 Vikings of the Sunrise, J B Lippincott Company, New York ——, 1945 An introduction to Polynesian anthropology, Bishop Museum Bulletin 187 Canal, G O, 2004 Photography in the field: Word and image in ethnographic research, in Working images: Visual research and representation in ethnography (eds S Pink, L Kürti and A S Afonso), Routledge, London, New York, 31–46 Chakrabarty, D, 2010 Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial thought and historical difference, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, Oxford Classen, C and Howes, D, 2006 The museum as sensescape: Western sensibilities and Indigenous artifacts, in Sensible objects: Colonialism, museums and material culture (eds E Edwards, C Gosden and R B Phillips), Berg, Oxford, New York, 199–222 Clifford, J, 1988 The Predicament of Culture, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA ——, 2010 The Times of the Curator: Keynote address, The Task of the Curator conference, 14–15 May, University of California, Santa Cruz ——, 2013 Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, London Colic-Peisker, V, 2010 Crisis of community in the era of mobility? Transnationals and belonging, in Migration, Belonging and the Nation State (eds A Babacan and S Singh), Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne, 63–84 Crooke, E, 2007 Museums and Community: Ideas, Issues and Challenges, Routledge, Oxford, New York DeLanda, M, 2006 A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity, Continuum, London, New York Deleuze, G and Guattari, F, 1987 A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (trans B Massumi), Continuum, London, New York Dudley, S H, 2009 Museum materialities: Objects, sense and feeling, in Museum Materialities: Objects, Engagements, Interpretations (ed S H Dudley), Routledge, London, 1–17 ——, ed, 2012 Museum Objects: Experiencing the Property of Things, Routledge, Oxford Dürr, E and Schorch, P, eds, 2016 Transpacific Americas: Encounters and Engagements between the Americas and the South Pacific, Routledge, London, New York Förster, L, 2013 Öffentliche Kulturinstitution, internationale Forschungsstätte und postkoloniale Kontaktzone: Was ist ethno am ethnologischen Museum? in Ethnologie im 21. Jahrhundert (eds T Bierschenk, M Krings and C Lentz), Dietrich Reimer Verlag, Berlin, 189–210



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Foster, N, 1993 Bishop Museum and the changing world of Hawaii, Bishop Museum Press, Honolulu Geertz, C, 1973 The Interpretation of Cultures, Fontana Press, London Gell, A, 1998 Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory, Clarendon Press, Oxford Gilroy, P, 1993 The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA Golding, V and Modest, W, 2013 Museums and Communities: Curators, Collections and Collaborations, Bloomsbury, London, New York Goodyear-Ka’ōpua, N, Hussey, I and Wright, E K, eds, 2014 A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land, and Sovereignty, Duke University Press, Durham NC, London Gosden, C and Larson, F, 2007 Knowing Things: Exploring the collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum 1884–1945, Oxford University Press, Oxford Hakiwai, A, 2006 Māori taonga: Māori identity, in Art and Cultural Heritage: Law, Policy and Practice (ed B T Hoffman), Cambridge University Press, New York, 409–12 ——, 2008 The Protection of taonga and Māori heritage in Aotearoa (New Zealand), in Decolonising Conservation: Caring for Māori Meeting Houses Outside New Zealand (ed D Sully), Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek CA, 45–58 Harrison, R, 2013 Reassembling ethnographic museum collections, in Reassembling the Collection: Ethnographic Museums and Indigenous Agency (eds R Harrison, S Byrne and A Clarke), SAR Press, Santa Fe NM, 3–35 Harrison, R, Byrne, S and Clarke, A, eds, 2013 Reassembling the Collection: Ethnographic Museums and Indigenous Agency, SAR Press, Santa Fe NM Hau’ofa, E, 1994 Our sea of islands, The Contemporary Pacific 6 (1), 147–61 Hauser-Schäublin, B, 1998 Exchanged value: The winding paths of the objects, in James Cook: Gifts and Treasures from the South Seas: The Cook/Forster Collection, Göttingen (eds B Hauser-Schäublin and G Krüger), Prestel, Munich, New York, 11–29 Healy, C and Witcomb, A, eds, 2006 South Pacific Museums: Experiments in Culture, Monash University ePress, Melbourne Henare, A, 2007 Taonga Māori: Encompassing rights and property in New Zealand, in Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically (eds A Henare, M Holbraad and S Wastell), Routledge, London, New York, 47–67 Henare, A, Holbraad, M and Wastell, S, eds, 2007 Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically, Routledge, London, New York Herle, A, 2013 Exhibitions as research: Displaying the technologies that make bodies visible, Museum Worlds: Advances in Research 1, 113–35 Herman, E, ed, 2011 Changing Contexts, Shifting Meanings: Transformations of Cultural Traditions in Oceania, University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu Hogsden, C and Poulter, E K, 2012 The real other? Museum objects in digital contact networks, Journal of Material Culture 17 (3), 265–86 Kahanu, N M K Y, 2014 Paper presented at the symposium ‘Exhibiting Concepts, Experiencing Meanings’, 15–17 May, University of East Anglia, Norwich Karp, I, Kreamer, C M and Lavine, S D, eds, 1992 Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B, 1991 Objects of ethnography, in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (eds I Karp and S D Lavine), Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, London, 386–443

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——, 1998 Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums and Heritage, University of California Press, Berkeley CA Knell, S J, ed, 2007 Museums in the Material World, Routledge, London Kokot, W, 2002 Diaspora and transnationale Verflechtungen, in Ethnologie der Globalisierung: Perspektiven kulturelleVerflechtungen (eds B Hauser-Schäublin and U Braukämpfer), Dietrich Reimer Verlag, Berlin, 95–110 Kopytoff, I, 1986 The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process, in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (ed A Appadurai), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 64–91 Kreps, C, 1998 Introduction: Indigenous Curation, Museum Anthropology 22 (1), 3–4 ——, 2003 Liberating Culture: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Museums, Curation and Heritage Preservation, Routledge, London, New York ——, 2007 The theoretical future of Indigenous museums: Concept and practice, in The Future of Indigenous Museums: Perspectives from the Southwest Pacific (ed N Stanley), Berghahn Books, Oxford, New York, 223–34 Latour, B, 2005 Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford University Press, Oxford Law, J, 2004 After Method: Mess in Social Science Research, Routledge, London, New York Lynch, B, 2011 Whose Cake is it Anyway? A collaborative investigation into engagement and participation in 12 museums and galleries in the UK, Paul Hamlyn Foundation, London McCarthy, C, 2007 Exhibiting Māori: A History of the Colonial Cultures of Display, Te Papa Press, Wellington ——, 2011 Museums and Māori: Heritage Professionals, Indigenous Collections, Current Practice, Te Papa Press, Wellington ——, 2014 The practice of repatriation: A case study from New Zealand, in Museums and Restitution: New Practices, New Approaches (eds L Tythacott and K Arvanitis), Ashgate, Aldershot Macdonald, S, 2009 Reassembling Nuremberg, reassembling heritage, Journal of Cultural Economy 2 (1), 117–34 Mallon, S, 2011 Afterword: Pacific voices in the bicultural museum, in Museums and Māori: Heritage Professionals, Indigenous Collections, Current Practice (ed C McCarthy), Te Papa Press, Wellington Marcus, G E, 1995 Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography, Annual Review of Anthropology 24, 95–117 ——, 1998 Ethnography Through Thick and Thin, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ Matsuda, M K, 2012 Pacific Worlds: A History of Seas, Peoples, and Cultures, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Message, K, 2006 New Museums and the Making of Culture, Berg, Oxford Newton, D, ed, 1999 Arts of the South Seas: Island Southeast Asia, Melanesia, Polynesia, Micronesia, Prestel, Munich Ngata, W, Ngata-Gibson, H and Salmond, A, 2012 Te Ataakura: Digital taonga and cultural innovation, Journal of Material Culture 17 (3), 229–44 Onciul, B, 2013 Community engagement, curatorial practice, and museum ethos in Alberta, Canada, in Museums and Communities: Curators, Collections and Collaboration (eds V Golding and W Modest), Bloomsbury, London, New York Ong, A, 1999 Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, Duke University Press, Durham NC, London



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Ong, A and Collier, S J, eds, 2005 Global Assemblages, Blackwell, Malden MA Peers, L and Brown, A K, 2007 Museums and source communities, in Museums and their Communities (ed S Watson), Routledge, Oxford, New York, 519–37 Phillips, R, 2013 Museum pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal and Kingston Pink, S, 2007 Doing Visual Ethnography, Sage, London Rabinow, P, 2005 Midst anthropology’s problems, in Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems (eds A Ong and S J Collier), Blackwell, Malden MA, 40–53 Ricoeur, P, 2006 On Translation (trans E Brennan), Routledge, London, New York Said, E W, 2003 Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, 25th anniversary edn, Penguin Classics, London Salmond, A, 2013 Transforming translations (part I): The owner of these bones, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3 (3), 1–32 Schorch, P, 2013a Contact zones, Third spaces, and the Act of Interpretation, Museum and Society 11 (1), 68–81 ——, 2013b The hermeneutics of transpacific assemblages, Alfred Deakin Research Institute Working Paper Series 2 (41) ——, 2014 Cultural feelings and the making of meaning, International Journal of Heritage Studies 20 (1), 22–35 ——, 2015 Museum encounters and narrative engagements, in Museum theory (eds A Witcomb and K Message), Blackwell Publishing, Malden MA, Oxford, 437–57 Schorch, P and Dürr, E, 2016 Transpacific Americas as relational space, in Transpacific Americas: Encounters and Engagements between the Americas and the South Pacific (eds E Dürr and P Schorch), Routledge, London, New York Schorch, P and Hakiwai, A, 2014 Mana Taonga and the public sphere: A dialogue between Indigenous pratice and Western theory, International Journal of Cultural Studies 17 (2), 191–205 Schorch, P and Kahanu, N M K Y, 2015a Anthropology’s interlocutors: Hawai’i speaking back to Ethnographic Museums in Europe, Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften 1, 114–17 ——, 2015b Forum as laboratory: The cross-cultural infrastructure of ethnographic knowledge and material potentialities, in Prinzip Labor: Museumsexperimente im Humboldt Lab Dahlem, Berlin, Nicolai, 241–8 Schorch, P, McCarthy, C and Hakiwai, A, 2016 Globalizing Māori museology: Reconceptualising engagement, knowledge and virtuality through mana taonga, Museum Anthropology 39 (1), 48–69. Smith, H, 2009 Mana taonga and the micro world of intricate research and findings around taonga Māori at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, SITES: A Journal of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies. Special Issue: Matter in Place 6 (2), 7–31 Stanley, N, ed, 2007 The Future of Indigenous Museums: Perspectives from the Southwest Pacific, Berghahn Books, Oxford, New York Talu and Quanchi 1995. Messy Entanglements: The Papers of the 10th Pacific History Association Conference. Tarawa: Kiribati Thomas, N, 1991 Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, London ——, 2010 The museum as method, Museum Anthropology 33 (1), 6–10 ——, 2011 Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire, Yale University Press, New Haven CT

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Waterton, E and Watson, S, eds, 2011 Heritage and Community Engagement: Collaboration or Contestation? Routledge, Oxford, New York Watson, S, ed, 2007 Museums and their Communities, Routledge, Oxford, New York Welz, G, 1998 Moving targets: Feldforschung unter Mobilitaetsdruck, Zeitschrift für Völkerkunde 94 (2), 177–94 Wendt, A, 1999 Afterword: Tatauing the post-colonial body, in Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific (eds V Hereniko and R Wilson), Rowman and Littlefield, New York, Oxford, 399–412 Wengraf, T, 2001 Qualitative Research Interviewing: Biographical Narrative and Semi-structured Methods, Sage, London Witcomb, A, 2010 Using objects to remember the dead and affect the living: The case of a miniature model of Treblinka, in Museum materialities: Objects, Engagements, Interpretations (ed S Dudley), Routledge, London, New York, 39–52

3

Interview – John Tunbridge

Could you say something about your career so far, focusing on community engagement with heritage? My research commitment to heritage began 40 years ago, when I realised that this then rather novel concept had important practical implications for differing valuations of places and was accordingly emerging as a very significant variable in geography, my home discipline. My first heritage publications concerned the geographical impact of conservation trusts, notably the British National Trusts, for which community engagement was implicitly at the national level – though in those days that meant primarily the white middle-class community. Before long, however, it became clear that communities identifying with a heritage not only existed at every scale from global to local but were liable to be divided on one or another parameter at every scale, so that the real issue was plural – that is, communities’ engagement with heritages. My little paper on ‘Whose heritage to conserve?’ (Tunbridge 1984) was among the first recognitions of divided heritages in divided communities and has acquired a landmark status, having been republished many years later (somewhat to my embarrassment). Dissonant Heritage (Tunbridge and Ashworth 1996) has a stronger claim on landmark status, and is largely concerned with the depressingly wide range of variables which give rise to heritage dissonance by dividing what we loosely term communities. This theme is further developed in A Geography of Heritage (Graham et al 2000) and arguably climaxes in Pluralising Pasts (Ashworth et al 2007), which recognises not only the ethnic and related plurality of so many societies and their heritage values in the contemporary world but also the concomitant spectrum of official degrees of heritage recognition that exists – of which the multicultural ideal is merely the most generously inclusive extreme case. How would you define heritage? The crucial question! Heritage is the selective use of historical resources for contemporary purposes, be they economic, social or political. As such it is fluid, volatile and typically plural – even to the point of being specific in detail to every individual. It is about meanings – NOT about tangible or intangible relics from the past, which are the prime resources from which heritages are derived but are not in themselves ‘heritage’. Unfortunately there remains a schism in heritage literature and practice, whereby those who are most directly concerned with the preservation of past relics (undoubtedly a worthy pursuit in itself ) persist in calling their charges ‘heritage’ – thus using the term for the ‘stuff’ rather than the ‘meaning of the stuff’ (Warren-Findley 2013). UNESCO and the various national-level proponents of Authorised Heritage Discourses (AHD) (Smith 2006) are the principal culprits in perpetuating this misunderstanding. Recent discussion (Holtorf and Kristensen 2015) of the heritage meanings associated with, even generated by, the destruction/erasure of past relics underlines how unfortunate it is that so many still equate ‘heritage’ with the continued existence of such relics; since their attrition by natural forces or human agency is ultimately inevi-

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table, despite delay by worthy conservation and restoration efforts, such an equation is not only inaccurate but demoralising. Nevertheless, the terminological schism persists and those who write about heritage are well advised to clarify their use of the term in their opening paragraph; this is the more important because ‘heritage’ has been confused if not debased by countless appropriations of the word for economic or political purposes, some of them decidedly unsavoury. Can you comment on what community engagement means to you in your work? In my academic context I am not immediately concerned with community engagement. This is particularly so since I have to question the existence of single cohesive communities, except perhaps in the more traditional small town and rural milieus which are most insulated from the plural ebbs and flows of contemporary societies. This is not, however, to minimise the importance of community engagement. Rather, I would emphasise the need for heritage professionals to be constantly aware that their communities of engagement may well be plural even in small, apparently cohesive, situations – especially where both local and tourist ‘communities’ exist and may be mutually at variance – and are almost certainly plural in complex urban settings. Moreover, community engagement is a constantly moving target as communities and their values evolve, even in the ostensibly most traditional and cohesive cases. To what extent does the Association of Critical Heritage Studies (ACHS) mark a shift in current approaches to heritage? Some of us have been promoting ‘critical heritage studies’ for 40 years! Literally interpreting CHS, therefore, there should be no such shift. However, to the extent that ACHS is specifically targeting insufficiently critical heritage concepts and practices emanating from the official international and national agencies, ACHS marks a bravely attempted shift. Whether or not it will achieve a shift in practical approaches to heritage – in particular, secure the recognition that heritage is about meanings and not directly about ‘stuff’, thus is not closely dependent upon either the preservation or the destruction of the ‘stuff’ – remains to be seen. As is now well known, Asian values often align with heritage-as-meaning, but whether the powerful vested interests in Western heritage officialdom can be induced to modify their long-cherished Authorised Heritage Discourses sufficiently is a thorny question indeed. How do you persuade UNESCO, which has only relatively recently acknowledged intangible heritage in a dichotomy with the tangible, that all heritage is meaning and therefore intangible? ACHS will presumably promote this understanding (if indeed all its members from their diversity of disciplines accept it) along with an academic awareness of the alternative heritages challenging the AHD that may accordingly be derived from any particular historical resource. But how far it can shift current approaches to heritage outside of the academy … now that’s a moot point. A word of caution: it seems to me that the academic critics of Authorised Heritage Discourses do not sufficiently acknowledge the evolution of AHDs, which have become more socially inclusive since vernacular heritage first entered the heritage mainstream some 30 years ago; implications that they are excessively elitist may well be unjust. Take the British National Trusts: the Scottish Trust has promoted the values of its ‘Little Houses’ for decades, and its southern neighbour has done much since the millennium to counterpoint ‘upstairs–downstairs’ heritages and promote multi-ethnic relevance (including the dark heritages of slavery and exploitation). The impact of ACHS on current approaches to heritage will depend in part on the accuracy of its critique of those approaches.



Interview: John Tunbridge 49

Moreover, the impact of ACHS upon current heritage approaches will depend in part, as implied above, on how far its members can speak with broadly consonant voices – not easy to achieve in the academic ‘broad church’ that is contemporary heritage studies. Its ability to effect shifting approaches in practice will inevitably reflect the consistency of its message. Do you feel that we have reached a point where community engagement is an essential component when thinking about the roles of museums and heritages? We need to remember that heritage studies represent the convergence of related interests at the margins of many traditional academic disciplines; as a ‘heritage geographer’ I’m not sure about the implied identification of heritage with museum studies – even if I may be a museum piece myself! Certainly community engagement with museums implies, to me at least, specific practical management issues that might well resonate in the kind of commercial heritage attractions that proliferated in 1980s Britain. However, I think that community engagements with heritage are a much broader and less specific issue than museum-related contexts, reflecting the typically plural and sometimes nebulous or evanescent nature of the meanings which actually constitute heritage – as I have discussed above. In your opinion, is ‘community engagement’ still meaningful and has it achieved its goals? This question also points to a specific context in museum studies on which I cannot easily comment. More generally, community – or rather communities – engagement is certainly still meaningful, since without communities to embrace heritage meanings they would not exist or at least remain unknown, other than in the minds of individuals who might never choose to disclose them in the public domain. (I should note that such individual heritages may be the most important to many people – myself probably included – but they cannot foster shared community identities and promote social cohesion, which I see as a key continuing challenge for museums.) Where do the priorities lie in the heritage/museums profession? Where do we go from here? I cannot comment on the museum profession or its future direction, other than to acknowledge that it is the custodian of many of the most important historical artefacts and the creator of many of the most significant historical narratives (albeit often debatable) constituting key resources from which heritages may be derived. As I have already indicated, however, museums do not ‘own’ heritage; it is important that those working in the broad heritage field recognise its various constituent solitudes, museum studies being one, and seek to promote their mutual understanding – not least through mutually intelligible terminology, which is sometimes lacking at present. What does the future hold for heritage and community engagement? Let me play devil’s advocate here: we risk heritage overkill and community disengagement. Heritage has proven a remarkably robust concept over the past four decades. To be sure, we have nuanced its meaning – if contentiously – and greatly expanded the field of phenomena we think it should embrace, but this has only increased its omnipresence in our lives and worldview. Thus coming generations cannot dismiss it as ‘so seventies’ or ‘so nineties’. However they might still dismiss it as time-expired if they look back on a half century or more of restrictive attitudes to new developments in the built environment, reflecting excessive or discredited

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heritage loadings on older structures; or of social conflict reflecting mutually dissonant heritage meanings, if not outright disinheritances by one community claiming heritage ‘ownership’ at the expense of another; or of commercial or political overexploitation of heritage; or simply of failure to agree on the nature of the beast. One thing is certain: we can pass on historical resources to posterity but we absolutely cannot predetermine the heritage meanings, if any, that posterity will derive from them. The more we give succeeding generations reasons – like those above – to look askance at heritage as we have shaped it, the more likely they may be to regard the concept as discredited and disengage themselves from it both individually and as communities. We are perhaps most likely to influence posterity to sustain the concept of heritage if we disavow rigid attitudes in favour of an open-mindedness to evolving ideas. I return to the notion of ‘heritage erasure’ recently discussed (Holtorf and Kristensen 2015): since we cannot ultimately prevent environmental decay or (however regrettably) willful destruction of tangible historical resources, and might wind up designating too many of them as ‘heritage’ anyway, perhaps we should accept – and better plan for – an ongoing erasure of some of them; recognising that new heritages are being created thereby – and in the process accepting the detachment of heritages from the material survival of resources that commonly inspired them. It is at least arguable that future communities are more likely to maintain engagement with a future heritage if they recognise it as flexibly and realistically still relevant to their evolving circumstances, rather than laden with inherited morphological, social, economic or ideological baggage – in itself an unwelcome heritage from preceding generations. References Ashworth, G J, Graham, B J and Tunbridge, J E, 2007 Pluralising Pasts: Heritage, Identity and Place in Multicultural Societies, Pluto, London Graham, B J, Ashworth, G J and Tunbridge, J E, 2000 A Geography of Heritage: Power, Culture and Economy, Arnold, London Holtorf, C and Kristensen, T M, eds, 2015 Special Issue: Heritage erasure, International Journal of Heritage Studies 21 (4), 313–421 Smith, L, 2006 Uses of Heritage, Routledge, London Tunbridge, J E, 1984 Whose heritage to conserve? Cross-cultural reflections upon political dominance and urban heritage conservation, Canadian Geographer 28 (2), 171–80 Tunbridge, J E and Ashworth, G J, 1996 Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict, Wiley, Chichester Warren-Findley, J, 2013 Rethinking heritage theory and practice: the US experience, International Journal of Heritage Studies 19 (4), 380–3

4

Interview – Gregory Ashworth

Please could you reflect on your career so far, focusing on your work in relation to how communities engage with heritage? I have a disciplinary background in Geography and a PhD in the geography of tourism from as early as 1974. From 1979 I taught urban geography at Groningen, where geography is closely linked to planning. While writing a book on the West European city (1980), I became aware of the extent of the preservation of monuments and the conservation of historic areas in cities, which at a simple level were disturbing the urban geography models and complicating utopian urban planning. I developed this interest in the course of the 1980s, building up an expertise on how, and to an extent why, different countries and cities used the past in the present. This culminated in the ‘tourist-historic city’ (1990) beginning a writing partnership with John Tunbridge on these themes that is still continuing 25 years, and five major books on heritage, later. How would you define heritage? I first used the word ‘heritage’ in a publication in 1992. Before that I would have used the term ‘conservation’, which was popular in town planning from the 1960s. I wrote a book in 1992 with the provisional title of ‘urban conservation planning’ but at the last minute changed the title to ‘heritage planning’ with a hurried justification of what I meant by the term ‘heritage’, which for me was ‘the contemporary uses of pasts’. This quite fundamental paradigm shift occurred in my own thinking largely uninfluenced by other academics, as none, with the possible exception of Lowenthal and some early Bourdieu, were thinking outside the fundamentalist dogmas of preservationism, which still dominate most government agencies, nationally and internationally. What does community engagement mean to you in your work? I tend to be suspicious of the term ‘community’, as it not only has multiple meanings but has acquired a sanctity, especially in the US, which renders it indisputable and unchallengeable. I belong to and engage with many communities, some of which have a spatial dimension but most of which do not. Having expressed my caution with the term, there is, however, one type of ‘community’ that has had a persistent presence not only in my work but in my life: that is, the reactions of localities to the actions of governments that they perceive to be threatening. If those involved in heritage can be divided into those who do it and those who oppose it, then I have spent almost all my life in the opposition. In the UK I worked in the local civic trust and local politics, opposing the threatened actions of largely local governments, which in the first half of the 1970s seemed committed, throughout Europe and North America, to the total destruction of the historic built environment in favour of ‘modernisation’ and ‘redevelopment’. In the Netherlands I have continued to be involved at the city, district and neighbourhood levels with

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local groups and individuals who are endeavouring to resist government policies and actions that impact negatively upon their environments. In 2012 the Association of Critical Heritage Studies was launched at an inaugural conference in Gothenburg. To what extent does this mark a shift in current approaches to heritage? I do not see this as a shift in approach but rather as a reflection of an existing state of affairs that was becoming increasingly apparent in heritage studies, namely the widening gap between theory and practice, the thinkers and the doers. As the ‘heritage industry’ expanded and widened its scope it created a very large group of people who worked mostly but not exclusively in the public sector, committed to the creation, management and interpretation of an ever expanding activity. These doers had no interest in posing the questions ‘why are we doing what we are doing and what are the consequences of doing it?’ These questions were left to a handful of academics to pose and attempt to answer. This schism among those involved in heritage has led to two mutually incomprehensible solitudes. An association of ‘critical’ heritage raises the immediate question of what or who is being criticised. The answer is simple: the association is the platform (or shelter) for the thinkers critical of the doers in government and elsewhere, who peddle the official authorised heritage discourse in pursuit of official objectives. It is the resistance but, as there is little communication or comprehension between the two groups, the association of critical heritage is basically a small group of likeminded academics, including myself, talking to each other. Community engagement seems to be becoming ubiquitous in museology and heritage. From your perspective, what has marked key moments of change in this concept and practice over the years in your area of the field? I have very little knowledge or experience of museums. I am a part of that small educated elite that actually visits museums; most people, despite the seemingly astronomical visitation statistics, never visit museums, unless forced to do so in school, and do not regard them as having any relevance to their communities. I know this is not the conventional wisdom, not least propagated by the museums themselves, who need to demonstrate community outreach to obtain their state funding, which is in itself revealing. Museums, and probably almost all official heritage and indeed official culture, is an interest of a minority. This does not bother me much, as it has always been the case, and the majority has its own counter-culture and even counter-heritage. Do you think the term ‘community engagement’ is still meaningful, and as a concept in practice has it achieved its goals? I have never used the term. I do not know what it means so it still has no meaning to me and I do not know if it has achieved its, to me, unknown goals. Given the recent shifts in heritage and museums over the past few decades, where do you think the priorities in the profession should now lie? Where should we go from here? To return to what I argued above, I think the problem lies with that term ‘profession’. I do not think that those who work in heritage fields have enough in common to constitute a profession or indeed an academic discipline. There are, of course, many respectable and established ‘professions’ with interests in heritage (museum curators and conservators, museum interpreters, building historians, archivists and many more), but heritage as such is not a profession nor



Interview: Gregory Ashworth 53

should it aspire to be one. A profession is a conspiracy against the laity (to misquote G B Shaw) and I see heritage as the property of those who claim it and use it. I do not wish it to be appropriated by self-justifying gatekeeper ‘professionals’. What does the future hold for heritage and community engagement? There are two main streams of thought about the future of heritage. There are the eternal optimists, who see an ever expanding, ever widening production and consumption of heritage experiences. Then there are the pessimists, who would argue historically and note that the current interests in heritage are a very recent episode, much of it dating to the post-war period. This sudden and historically bizarre interest in reconstructed pasts was a reaction to events and trends in the rapidly changing post-war world. All historical episodes end and this one has largely run its course. My own position is one of ambivalent oscillation between the two streams.

5

Engaging with Māori and Archaeologists: Heritage Theory and Practice in Āotearoa New Zealand Elizabeth Pishief

U

nderstanding what heritage means to community groups is an essential prerequisite for active, creative and successful engagement with them. Heritage is a cultural construct comprising different ideological and material phenomena for diverse groups of people, which means there are innumerable possible heritages, each shaped for the specific user group. However, although there may be an infinite variety of possible heritages, in New Zealand, for example, the dominant Western discourse controls the development of independent heritages. This chapter provides evidence of two different ‘heritages’ and identifies key principles about heritage. A view of heritage has emerged since 2011 that reflects the Māori world, but which is equally applicable to the archaeological world, and can be extrapolated to wider society and other communities. The Iwi Heritage Discourse describes the practice of heritage as ‘ahi kā’ – in other words, keeping the home fires burning or keeping a place warm through the many ways of using it: visiting, farming, ‘being there’, making the Connect, kaitiakitanga (Royal 2015).1 Community

A warning must be given against the uncritical and undefined use of the word ‘community’, which is endemic in the heritage sector to the point that it has been described as ‘the cult of the community’ (McClanagan 2007, cited in Smith and Waterton 2009, 21). Communities are not homogeneous but heterogeneous, and often not even geographically bound; there are ‘communities’ of archaeologists just as there are village ‘communities’. The ‘community’ is, however, relegated to a role in relation to its perceived identity as ‘not expert’, and many of the tensions that arise between expert and community arise from their respective abilities to define and influence heritage values, meanings and experiences (Smith and Waterton 2009, 21–2). Methodology This research used an interdisciplinary theoretical framework developed from the literature of heritage studies and related fields. It builds on Laurajane Smith’s work on archaeology and the authorised heritage discourse but includes writing on governmentality, phenomenology, kinaes1

Traditionally, Māori believe there is a deep kinship between humans and the natural world. This connection is expressed through kaitiakitanga – a way of managing the environment. Today, there is growing interest in kaitiakitanga as tribes restore their environment and their culture.

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thesia, agency and material culture. A qualitative, interpretivist methodology was used which involved discourse analysis of evidence gathered from secondary sources including legislation and policy and an ethnography of current practice in the form of interviews and participant observation to produce rich findings about heritage, place and practice. Research into the practices and discourses of archaeologists and Māori in New Zealand used a multidisciplinary theoretical framework to analyse what heritage is and to better understand both the phenomenon of heritage and how people interact with places that are termed ‘heritage’. The research produced an understanding of heritage and its practices that assists when engaging with both Indigenous and ‘expert’ communities, as well as other communities. A Definition of Heritage My understanding of heritage is based on Laurajane Smith’s conception of heritage as a cultural and historical practice or performance concerned with memory, social and cultural values and the production and negotiation of identity (Smith 2007, 2). The cultural process or performance is the visible sign of the need people feel to physically connect with place as part of their production and negotiation of cultural identity. The emergence of the class of intangible heritage2 within the UNESCO model of heritage recognises the importance of performances in the production of identity, whether cultural, group or individual. These performances express memories and produce new ones (shared or individual), and determine or confirm social and cultural values, but they are always related to body and place (or object). There is tension between body and place, spiritual and physical, imagination and fabric, past and present. I have retheorised the idea of place and wish to rehabilitate the concept that place itself is an essential element in the performative discourse of heritage. What is important is the physicality of place that matches the physicality of the body (Pishief 2012, 178). The performances of the body and the reality of the place give people a sense of ‘being-in-theworld’, to know who they are and where they belong, and by these means to create their identity. The key is the indefinable, fragile, elusive, emotional response to a place from the past that arises from the physical connection with it. I have termed this response ‘the Connect’ in order to emphasise its physicality and its cognitive attributes. Although the past and the people who inhabited the past are no longer here, the physical presence of the place provides the tangibility that helps to make the past seem real. The Connect is elusive but bridges the distance between person and place, being and being-in-the-world, self and that which is beyond (Richardson 2003, 74–91). It needs to be made and remade by various means to be kept alive – or, as Tilley puts it, ‘through perception (seeing, hearing, touching), bodily action and movements, intentionality, emotion and awareness residing in systems of belief and decision-making: remembrance and evaluation’ (Tilley 1994, 12). Archaeology Archaeology is fundamentally about the material remains of people’s past activities. Archaeologists use these fragments to recreate ‘scientific’ ideas of a past world, thereby bringing an essential

2

In March 2001 UNESCO met to consider a working definition of intangible cultural heritage. See http:// www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?lg=enandpg=00002 [30 November 2015].



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tangibility to the past and enabling people to interact with it on both factual and fictional levels. Archaeological discourse has been constructed through the development of the academic discipline of archaeology, reinforced by the interactions archaeologists have with their colleagues and with places. The professional discourse influences their interpretations of the material evidence and affects the understandings they pass on to people. Maurice Halbwachs, who developed the concept of collective memory, considers that the collective memory is ‘not a metaphor, but a social reality transmitted and sustained through the conscious efforts and institutions of groups’ (Climo and Cattell 2002, 4). The practice of archaeology involves archaeologists moving over the land, surveying, mapping, managing and viewing places of interest to them; or they excavate, monitor, assess or record places as ‘archaeological sites’. These places produce information, such as midden,3 stratification, context, artefacts and kōiwi.4 This material is revered as ‘scientific data’ and its collection (as an activity) takes precedence over other aspects of the place, such as its sacredness if it is a wahi tapu.5 It has been argued that ‘anthropologists have noted the importance of bodily movement in the creation of place, conceptualising space as movement rather than as a container’ (Low and Lawrence-Zuniga 2003, 5). Archaeologists move over the landscape constructing archaeological sites, thereby creating and claiming places where they are able to use the techniques and methods of their discipline to control the land and construct their own identities as archaeologists. Archaeology is bound up with the senses – particularly seeing, feeling and touching – as well as movement. Memory, the senses and kinaesthetic experiences create emotion, which are extrapolated into ideas and judgments. Sight was originally only one of the senses used to understand objects (feel/touch and smell were also commonly used in eighteenth-century museums), but, by the mid-nineteenth century, sight was considered the pre-eminent and most ‘civilised’ sense, closest to reason in the Western hierarchy of sensory symbolism (Classen and Howes 2006, 206). Sight has been closely allied with scientific practice and ideology, the social importance of which grew immensely during the period of colonial expansion (Classen and Howes 2006, 206). But sight is also a cultural construct (McCarthy 2007, 5–6). Looking at or interpreting the land to identify archaeological sites has to be learnt; it is not an innate skill. A constant theme in archaeological discourse is that people need to be ‘educated’ to understand what an archaeological site is so that they can grasp its (scientific) importance (Pishief 2012, 84). Seeing is considered a crucial skill in the New Zealand archaeological discourse and having a ‘good eye’ is the sign of an expert. Department of Conservation archaeologist Kevin Jones explained the importance of seeing when he discussed the purchase of land from a European farmer which later became Heipipi Pā Historic Reserve.6 It was on visual grounds alone that Jones discounted Heipipi; it had been ploughed and the surface features were hard to see. He further emphasised the visuality of archaeology during this discussion about Heipipi Pā when he noted that the central defence transverse ditches and banks are heavily eroded, but commented: 3

Midden is rubbish – the physical remains of domestic waste resulting from human activity, such as areas associated with living sites or temporary occupation. Middens include faunal material, such as bone and shell, and, in the New Zealand context, prehistoric middens will often be dominated by shellfish remains. 4 Human bone, corpse. 5 Sacred place, historic place. 6 The reserve was purchased by the Department of Conservation for its cultural importance although the archaeologists had discounted its value on archaeological grounds.

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Fig 5.1 Places mentioned in the text in the North Island New Zealand. Map prepared by Justin Pishief from Google Earth



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‘They can still be detected or recognised if you’ve got the right eye [my italics].’ Being able to see the site is important for people visiting the place, and is consequently a major management issue, because poorly defined archaeological features, or ground cover that obscures the visibility of the site, impairs the public’s view of it (Jones 2009, pers comm). The visual aspect includes another important theme running through New Zealand archaeology: ‘surveying’ – that is, discovering new sites and identifying places to record and list. It also shows the underlying land management systems inherent in a settler society. The land is surveyed and mapped and then can be recorded in the New Zealand Archaeological Association site record scheme ArchSite. This is a form of appropriation that reflects the underlying colonial discourse inherent in the legal, educational, social and religious structures in Āotearoa New Zealand, which were brought to New Zealand in the mid-nineteenth century by British colonists. New Zealand historian Giselle Byrnes suggests that ‘the surveyors’ naming, taming, marking out and mapping of the land were assertions of colonising power’ (Byrnes 2001, 4). This idea is reinforced by the suggestion that ‘collecting is a form of conquest and collected artifacts [or sites] are material signs of victory over their former owners and places of origin’ (Classen and Howes 2006, 209). The essence of archaeology is about people physically interacting with places. Archaeology is about movement and the senses and whether the action is surveying, excavating, researching, analysing or managing, doing is the core attribute of an archaeologist. Nevertheless, it is the connections developed through the bodily practice or performance of archaeology at a place that creates the place as heritage, or, in archaeological terms, as an archaeological site. Kiri Sharpe was one of my interviewees. She is a trained archaeologist but one who has an understanding of different cultural perspectives, particularly the spirituality of Māori. She recognised that archaeology is more than excavation but that ‘at its core it’s the physical excavation of the past’ (Sharpe 2010, pers comm). She thought of archaeology in terms of the visual and physical acts of excavating a site, noting that seeing and touching an artefact brings her closer to the past. She emphasised that there is an emotional involvement with excavating and the material excavated, and going onto a site is always very exciting because people were there ‘just where you are standing’. She thinks about where the people had their houses and what they were doing or who used the artefacts she finds and why they left them where they did. She has an emotional attachment to archaeology, which she finds is hard emotional work, but she would not do it otherwise. This illustrates the importance of the senses in the construction of connection, intimacy and emotion, for ‘emotion links all human experience including the high flights of thought’ (Tuan 1977, 8). Sharpe, although traditionally trained, is particularly sensitive to other people’s feelings. She suggested that the emotional and spiritual aspects of heritage places may be why many archaeologists ‘tune out and are clinical’ (as she described the archaeological response) when working on archaeological sites, recalling an experience associated with a place at Pukenamu on the Kapiti Coast, Wellington, to illustrate this view. The Pukenamu Estate is a large area of coastal sand dunes between Te Horo and Waikanae where many early Māori settlements have been found; it has now been subdivided for housing, so those early places have been destroyed. Destruction of pre-1900 places requires work to be carried out in accordance with the conditions of the authority granted by Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga. In addition to the monitoring and excavating of the earthworks by archaeologists, it is common for the relevant hapū or iwi group to participate in the process. The elders may visit the site to

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bless it and the hapū may provide a person (an iwi7 monitor) or people to culturally monitor the site to ensure that the correct tikanga or Māori protocols and way of doing things are being followed. The iwi monitor told Sharpe that the kuia8 had gone onto the site before the archaeologists started work and had seen spirits coming out of the ground and walking around but that they were not angry about what was going on. This incident changed Sharpe’s view – she realised that it was not only an archaeological site but a place of importance to the descendants of the people who had lived there, which helped her appreciate the site more (Sharpe 2010, pers comm). The senior archaeologist of the New Zealand Historic Places Trust9 in 2010, Dr Rick McGovernWilson, considered that differences in people’s psychological make-up affect how they look at heritage places (McGovern-Wilson 2010, pers comm). In his experience, some people look at heritage places in a scientific, pragmatic way, while others are more in touch with their emotional side, so personality traits make a difference to how people appreciate places (McGovern-Wilson 2010, pers comm). He has seen some archaeologists become emotional when looking at midden – a response he finds alien – but he suggested this demonstrates that common training cannot diminish individual personalities and their personal reactions to places and objects (McGovernWilson 2010, pers comm). Many archaeologists ignore the spiritual and emotional connections with heritage places. They distance themselves from the connections that are part of the worldview of many Māori, who think of places in terms of the ancestors and interconnections between all things. Some archaeologists do not have the skills or training to understand Māori culture or history and it is also contrary to legislation for an archaeologist to speak on behalf of Māori.10 The consultant archaeologist Cathryn Barr (2010, pers comm) explained a common technique whereby the place’s tangible and intangible aspects are separated by passing the intangible – understood as the cultural or historical associations with the place – over to tangata whenua11 as their ‘bundle’ of heritage. Yet she does not think it possible to distinguish between tangible and intangible heritage because they overlap. She recalled an occasion when talking to kaumātua12 about the different roles held by archaeologists and Māori, and trying to explain what she did as an archaeologist ‘because they wanted me to say things that I felt I couldn’t say’ (Barr 2010, pers comm). Eventually she told them that heritage is like two parts of a book: the physical evidence that archaeologists see on the land and the spiritual or emotive associations. Archaeologists cannot comment on the cultural associations that Māori have because the cultural associations are the domain of hapū and iwi, no-one else can speak for them; it is inappropriate for archaeologists, or anyone else, to speak for Māori, who are the people with the cultural connections. But the physical and the cultural overlap and, together, tell the full story (Barr 2010, pers comm).

7 8 9

Tribe, tribal. Elderly woman, grandmother, female elder. This organisation was called New Zealand Historic Places Trust until 2014, when it became Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga. 10 The Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga Act 2014 clearly identifies that the hapū or iwi must be consulted about the importance of the place to them. 11 People of the land, original inhabitants. 12 Elders.



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Similar understandings were expressed by other informants. McGovern-Wilson has a very strong emotional connection with Toki Toki (W15/582)13 on the Ohiwa Harbour, which is an extremely important and complex shell midden site on the coast. It is the earliest known site in the Bay of Plenty14 and now a historic reserve. He had worked very closely with the community when working for the Department of Conservation in the mid-1990s and felt much of the emotional connection came not from the work itself but from the connections he established with the people who whakapapa15 to the place (McGovern-Wilson 2010, pers comm). It had taken over two years to get permission to excavate there, which required him to engage with the kaumātua at a very personal level, and during the excavation he had lived at the marae16 at Roimata17 for nearly six weeks. ‘It’s not so much connecting with the site, the site is there you know,’ he said. ‘I’m an archaeologist. I operate in a scientific, pragmatic approach and I dig my holes and I recover the material, I do the analysis and I write it up.’ But he did acknowledge that his attitude often changes depending on his interaction with the community who connect to the site (McGovern-Wilson 2010, pers comm). Barr said she approaches places with an almost professional detachment, although occasionally her original enthusiasm is reignited by talking to people who are interested in the place. Despite her studied pragmatism, she too can find herself forming attachments to some places. One is Ruapekapeka, where she spent a lot of time and which is a very special site to her. Middens, on the other hand, she does not respond to emotionally but she conceded that occasionally she has come upon one that was stunning or amazing, such as ‘The shell middens at Porangahau, or Ocean Beach, or up the East Coast18 where you can wander along and get a midden with moa bone and egg shell in it.’ She was responding, as an archaeologist, to the contents of the midden, a reaction to the data, but also to the rarity and age of the material. Barr acknowledged that the stories associated with a place make a difference to her understanding and engagement with the place; the Māori perspective, learning who lived there and what it was called, ‘dramatically’ changed her attitude towards it (Barr 2010, pers comm). Archaeologists in New Zealand are not concerned with the original name for a place; instead a number, such as V21/7 (pits), stands in for a name and provides a neat sense of objectivity and scientific order. Archaeological skills do enable the discovery of places that ‘were not there’; that did not exist in any way because their physical features were buried or unidentified and their former names no longer known or used. When the place has a well-documented name, the archaeological attitude to the place shifts because the site is more clearly identified as a place where people once lived or had important connections and it is no longer just a source of archaeological data. Places with names allow for further investigation and, once the history is known, the site takes on another dimension and is understood as a place where people (who may be identifiable) lived.

13

14 15 16 17 18

All archaeological sites in New Zealand are given a site record number when they are recorded in the New Zealand Archaeological Association’s national database, ArchSite. W15/582 is the number for the Toki Toki occupation site. c. AD 1300. Have genealogical links to the area. The courtyard in front of a meeting house; but often the complex of buildings around the marae are included. Across the Ohiwa harbour from Toki Toki. The coast line and inland areas between Mahia and East Cape.

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Fig 5.2 Map of heritage places in Hawke’s Bay mentioned in the text. Map prepared by Justin Pishief from Google Earth



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A place that shows how history enriches archaeological evidence is Poraiti Pā, a small pā19 on a headland overlooking Te Whanganui a Orotu. The information about Poraiti Pā in ArchSite is limited to a brief description of the main visible features and a sketch of the site (Fox and Jeal 1977). Ngāti Hinepare reoccupied their ancestral lands at Wharerangi and Te Poraiti when they returned from exile in the early 1840s after the end of the Musket Wars (Watters and Green 2014). A local historian who is an expert in Māori history and genealogy, Patrick Parsons, wrote that the missionary William Colenso visited Te Poraiti in 1847, when he recorded: ‘A short two miles took us to Te Poraiti … where we found old Mapu, the principal man of the tribe, but utterly careless as to religion’ (Colenso quoted in Parsons 1997, 107–8).20 Mapu was Poroporu Mapu, the eldest son of Tareahi and the brother of Pāora Kaiwhata; these two buried Tareahi at Te Rere a Tuwhaki urupā21 in 1855. Colenso met the aged Tareahi, whom he had previously baptised Rawiri or David, at Te Poraiti in 1850. Colenso’s comments provide insight into the composition of the hapū,22 the everyday activities of an elderly chief, and they enliven the place with the presence of the original inhabitants – ancestors of the present hapū: ‘We soon reached Te Poraiti, where were the two chiefs Mapu and the venerable old David, whose children and grandchildren compose the majority of this tribe’ (Parsons 1997, 108). Colenso was unable to cross the harbour because the sea was too rough for a small canoe, so ‘sat and talked with the old man who was busily employed in making ropes for his fishing nets’ and who said ‘he always prayed at evening and at morning even when alone’ (Parsons 1997, 108). Poraiti Pā sits on the neighbouring ridge to Te Rere a Tawhaki. Poraiti Pā, Tiheruheru and Te Rere a Tawhaki are all areas within the landscape associated with Tareahi and Ngāti Hinepare. This brief example shows that a cultural landscape framework combined with a little historic research and consultation with the hapū increases the understandings of the place, helps people appreciate it and confirms the connections and sense of belonging that are essential attributes of heritage places. This additional information also highlights the weaknesses in an archaeology that professes to be scientific and objective: it is history without people (Pishief 2012, 117). But a Pākehā23 ‘expert’s’ understanding of a place and what is needed when identifying ‘cultural landscapes’ is only one viewpoint. A twist to my understanding was provided by a kaumatua who said that the hapū had asked a well-known matakite24 from the East Coast to undertake some cultural work for them. When he was taken to Poraiti Pā he said that Tareahi was actually buried on the pā and showed hapū members the burial place, which was not in the area known as Te Rere a Tuwhaki but on the side of Poraiti Pā itself, even closer to the sea that Tareahi had wished to be buried beside. This understanding is embraced by those hapū members who are privy to it, rather than the older understanding that comes from the evidence given by kaumātua in the nineteenth century and recorded in the Māori Land Court minute books. The preference for this perspective indicates that the use of matakite is a significant cultural practice

19 20

21 22 23 24

Fortified village. Patrick Parsons is here quoting directly from the photocopies of diaries of William Colenso in MTG Hawke’s Bay. The originals are held by the Hocken Library, University of Otago, Dunedin: Collected papers of and relating to William Colenso (1834–1903), Reference No: ARC-0033. Cemetery. Sub-tribe. European New Zealander. Prophet, seer, clairvoyant.

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that is more important than historical ‘accuracy’; it is about identity – cultural ownership and empowerment – and is deeply political, linked to the post-colonial renaissance and reinvigoration of Māori society since the establishment of the Waitangi Tribunal in the 1970s. It also indicates that Māori have their own ways of practising heritage within their own framework, which, although less visible and harder to identify because it is less structured and more intangible, is no less relevant than archaeological practice. I have termed this the Iwi Heritage Discourse. It is based on many traditional Māori concepts and cosmological understandings of a spiritual reality that pervades and operates in the world of human experience but yet transcends the limitations of time, space and the human senses. These understandings are being reinterpreted in new ways because of associations with Western ideas. But the spiritual values of a place are less important than the other tangible values. Writing in 1998 Allen argued that ‘case law indicates that “spiritual” values are still no match for economic and legal values’ (Allen 1998, 5). That is still the case. In March 2010, for example, the two-storeyhigh outcrop of rock in Marakopa valley named Te Rongomai o Te Karaka was blown up to enable a hydropower scheme to be constructed on Marokopa River. The local Maniopoto subtribes Ngāti Peehi, Ngāti Te Kanawa and Ngāti Kinohaku had revered Te Rongomai for centuries as a wāhi tapu. To them it was a place of power, a place for tribal gatherings and a rallying point for warriors. When a temporary court injunction preventing demolition of the rock expired, police forcibly removed the 35 local people who were attempting to protect their wāhi tapu. The next morning Te Rongomai was dynamited amid cheering from the company managers and local landowners. Māori and Pākehā were represented on both sides of the confrontation, which highlights ‘the tension between saving what is sacred, or in the name of progress and prosperity, damming it, digging it up, or blowing it to pieces’ (Trotter 2010). Māori Heritage The following is a brief introduction to some Māori customary concepts from the perspective of a Pākehā outsider obtained from documentary sources. It is given to contextualise contemporary Māori perspectives and to provide a comparison with the archaeological perspectives described earlier. It does not represent Māori culture itself. The Māori world (Te Āo Māori) comprises four elements: the physical, the social, the intellectual and the spiritual, interwoven with a cosmological understanding of the interconnections and interdependence of all things through whakapapa and ethics of kinship. The world is described through whakapapa and whānaungatanga,25 influenced by means of ancestral power. Genealogical networks join people to one another and other forms of being, including the natural world, by relations such as utu,26 tapu,27 mana,28 mate29 and ora.30 Land is valued for its contribution to iwi or hapū identity. For some people land is the basis of their ‘belonging’ because it is visible evidence of their descent and of their links with the ancestors. 25 26 27 28 29 30

Kinship. Reciprocity. Sacred, prohibited, restricted, set apart, forbidden, under atua (gods’) protection. Prestige, authority, control, power, influence, status, spiritual power, charisma. Misfortune, problem, defect, death, trouble, desire, want, sickness, defeat, calamity. Life, health, vitality.



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One of my informants, Robert MacDonald, is a kaumatua and trustee of his family’s farm, Pouhokio Station, Waimarama, Hawke’s Bay, where a pā named Hakikino is located. This place is recorded in the New Zealand Archaeological Association’s database ArchSite as V22/91. In the early 1990s an archaeological survey indicated that Reuben’s Spur, as it was called, also had the name Hakikino. MacDonald had been brought up immersed in Māori history, culture and traditions, but, ‘like everyone else’, he recalled, ‘I had no idea of Hakikino except from the stories’ his parents had told him about the history of Hakikino (MacDonald 2009, pers comm). The hapū of Waimarama are descended from Hinengatiira of Ngāti Ira and Rongomaipureora, the youngest son of Te Aomatarahi of Ngāti Kahungunu. In the sixteenth century Ngāti Kahungunu invaded Hawke’s Bay, defeating most of the local people and then intermarrying with them to ensure peace. Hinengatiira was one of the survivors found hiding in a cave in the bush after Te Aomatarahi took Hakikino Pā. Her union with Rongomaipureora cemented the peace between the two tribes (Buchanan 1973, 75–6). When MacDonald connected the name with the place he realised that this was a very special splace and began taking the hapū to visit it. Then visitors began to arrive and deeply appreciated the place, which Robert had not expected, although he realised that this, too, was important. He developed the idea of Māori cultural tourism as a method of creating viable local employment opportunities. There were cultural difficulties with commercialising Māori heritage or putting it on display, but Robert argued: ‘The more people we tell about this, the safer it’s going to be. If we get far enough along this track, Hakikino will remain a heritage site, instead of falling back into paddocks. We could develop tourism and we could all win’ (Belford 2009). Jobs would be created by a tourism industry, the heritage place would be remembered and protected and the past history and culture would be elevated through the sharing of Hakikino with other people. MacDonald explained that archaeological expertise was useful to him because it was through archaeology, when he was walking around the farm with archaeologists, that he began to realise the connection between the paddocks and his history. He grew up with the oral half of heritage but learnt that the physical is the other half. By knowing who lived there he was able to make a spiritual connection as he walked around the place. He said that this happens with the children too: ‘We can tell them as much as we can about who they are and where they come from, but when you bring them here and stand them up here then they get a real appreciation that it’s [true]’ (MacDonald 2009, pers comm). MacDonald said that he had an aunt who came up to Hakikino when she was 98. She cried because she had never been there before, although she knew the name Hakikino. It was very much part of her growing up and who she was but there was a very real disconnect … for all sorts of reasons, land sales, land alienation, all that sort of thing. But they held tight to the part that couldn’t be taken away and, very much like my own parents, what they were telling me was the bits that they could still retain, which is the oral intangible stuff. (MacDonald 2009, pers comm)

He continued with this idea of disconnection in relation to his aunt, but also the idea of strong emotion when the reconnection is made, revealed in this instance by the tears. ‘She came here and just cried because she hadn’t, in a hundred years almost, she had never had a physical connect with the stories she had been told. And that was why places like these are heritage.’ He explained

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that ‘for a lot of our people there has always been just one side, they’ve never been able … time has not been kind in terms of keeping the Connect, the physical connect, in place’ (MacDonald 2009, pers comm). The family was persuaded to sell Hakikino Pā and the surrounding land to the government for soldier resettlement farms after World War I, with the result that MacDonald’s mother, too, did not have the Connect. She knew the name Hakikino and why it was important but she ‘didn’t even know where it was’ (MacDonald 2009, pers comm). Although the land had been alienated for only a generation, during that time the people who knew the land well, such as Morehu (an ancestress), had died. Consequently, although his mother lived nearby, she had lost her own connection with the land itself, ‘so that was the beginning of the actual divide’ (MacDonald 2009, pers comm). Another informant, Rose Mohi, explained that it is the Māori way that ‘when something is lost like land, or whatever, they then stop talking about it’ (Mohi 2009, pers comm). This view was supported by statements by elders in another region captured in a museum exhibition. The kaumātua of Ngāti Mutunga in the Te Ahi Ka Roa Te Ahi Katoro Taranaki War 1860–2010 exhibition (Puke Ariki, New Plymouth) emphasised the same idea of connection, explaining that, ‘Wāhi tapu are the connections with the important landmarks, not the tangible place itself as Pākehā usually interpret it, but the connections between the place and people’ (Puke Ariki Museum 2010, Kaumatua (3)). Another kaumatua made the same point: ‘When we talk about wāhi tapu we are not just talking about the physical layout of the pā, we are not just talking about what you can see, we are also talking about those relationships, we are talking about the spiritual side, we are talking about the events that happened here, so all those, all those concepts we see as the wāhi tapu’ (Puke Ariki Museum 2010, Kaumatua (2)). One of the kuia explained that it is the inter-relationship between stories, place and kin that is important. ‘The wāhi tapu to me is the histories, it holds the histories of the past and I think without it, without the knowledge of having wāhi tapu for us it’s to be able to give that history to our whānau’ (Puke Ariki Museum 2010, Kuia (1)). There is further evidence of this concept in Māori reports to the Waitangi Tribunal.31 A comment in the report on the Te Urewera claim says that although 85 per cent of Tūhoe live outside the area for historical and economic reasons, they return regularly to their home. These people explicitly state that the source of their identity is the place where they meet for events, holidays and other occasions, and that it is the process of going there and interacting with that place and those people that is the source of their culture, which is located in the land, the places, the people and the connections between them and that land. The original cosmological understandings of whakapapa networks and connections between people, things, time and space are deeply embedded in these descriptions of the meaning of wāhi tapu, which is used in quite a different way by many heritage managers, who think of it in terms of tangible ‘place’, the place alone, not spiritual ‘space–time’ and the connections between people and place.

31

The Waitangi Tribunal was established in 1975 by the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975. The Tribunal is a permanent commission of inquiry charged with making recommendations on claims brought by Māori relating to actions or omissions of the Crown that potentially breach the promises made in the Treaty of Waitangi.



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The Connect A major theme that runs through both the archaeological and the Māori discourses is the idea of connections with place. I developed a concept I call ‘the Connect’, which was identified by Robert MacDonald of Hakikino and confirmed by other Māori informants and writers, who use a number of different words for the concept. It is often used by Europeans, who call it ‘connection’. However, I have retained MacDonald’s use of the Connect to emphasise the importance of this concept in understanding contemporary Māori ideas of heritage and to mark it as a core element in all place-based identity making. I think it is likely that the idea of the Connect is related to the old cosmological world of Māori and is a continuation of traditional ideas. What I call the Connect, Te Awekotuku and Nikora refer to as ‘the betweenness’, the relationship between people and places, commenting: ‘People make places just as much as places make people. People and places derive their identities from each other to a significant extent. It is the betweenness that is important – the relationship that is created and sustained’ (Te Awekotuku and Nikora 2003, 22). They elaborate on this idea when explaining the unique Tūhoe conceptual framework of matemateaone (Te Awekotuku and Nikora 2003, 21),32 which has metaphysical origins and is about the essential frailty of humankind and people’s need for one another, but is also about their values and the way they live those values. A crucial element is the role of kinship between people and people and place. The Connect unites person and place in intangible networks of emotion and meaning, from physical to spiritual and back again. The Connect is an intangible entity floating over the physical/material world between places and people that emerges through the physical presence of people at places. It is the result of physical action and is the binding between people and place. The Connect empowers by creating place-based identity, a sense of belonging and a purpose to life. The Connect is a core concept in the Iwi Heritage Discourse, a contemporary heritage practice related to customary concepts, but not recognised in the Authorised Heritage Discourse. The Iwi Heritage Discourse describes the practice of heritage as ahi kā;33 in other words, keeping the home fires burning or keeping a place warm through the many ways of using it: visiting, farming, ‘being there’, making the Connect, caring for the land – kaitiakitanga34 –whether the land is still ‘owned’ by them or not. This view of heritage also assimilates the discipline and practice of archaeology through the various uses Māori themselves make of archaeology. Archaeological practice, too, has the same effect on performers as Māori practice does, despite archaeologists’ understanding of archaeology as an objective, scientific, unemotional, practical occupation. The kinaesthetic experiences of excavating or surveying, the sensory experiences of ‘being there’, the emotional effects of ‘flights of higher thought’ (research, writing a report), produce an affective response and create physical connections with place. These phenomenological archaeological practices, or performances, forge and maintain emotions and memories and create the Connect with the place. Yet the archaeological discourse denies this subjective response and frames the places as emotionally neutral, objective, scientific resources, or ‘archaeological’

32

Matemateaone has many definitions but each one has a persistent theme: nurturing relationships, between people, and with the environment which nurtures them. 33 Burning fires of occupation – title to land through occupation by a group, generally over a long period of time. 34 Guardianship, stewardship, trustee.

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sites. In this way they are claimed, which empowers and confirms the identity of the archaeologists, but estranges other claimants (Pishief 2013, 3). The performances of the body and the reality of the place give people a sense of ‘being-in-theworld’ (Richardson 2003, 74), to know who they are, where they belong, and, by these means, to create their identity. The key is the indefinable, fragile, elusive, emotional response to a place from the past that arises with the physical connection with it. The term ‘the Connect’ emphasises the physicality and cognitive attributes of this key element of heritage. Although the past and the people who inhabited it are no longer there, the physical presence of the place provides the tangibility that helps to make the past seem real and connects it to living communities in the present. The Connect is elusive but bridges the distance between person and place, being and being-in-the-world, self and that which is beyond. It needs to be made and remade by bodily responses to place. The body includes the senses, emotion, cognition and the corporeal body itself. It is the body that enables performances to be made at places, creating the connections that are the core of heritage. The need for physical connection with the places of the past is essential, inherent and human. Heritage is expressed in many different ways but ultimately it is about the connection people have with places (or things) of the past. It is associated with very important questions about identity: Who am I? Where do I come from? Where do I belong? The Connect is the emotional yet physical connection between the spiritual and the physical: performance (embodied intangibility) and place (tangible imagination). The Connect is the third dimension of heritage, the union between the two worlds. The dissonance that is a fundamental element of heritage is created in the Connect; dissonance resulting from tension between the Connect of one identity and that of another expressed through a discourse that constructs the place as, for example, either an archaeological site or a wāhi tapu (Pishief 2012, 179). The Connect is the result of physical action and is the binding between people and place. People die, fabric decays, but people are born, places are remade and the land remains. The following pepeha35 illustrates this point: Whatungarongaro he tāngata, toitū he whenua hoki – people disappear, the land remains (Mead and Grove 2001, 425). The Connect links people to places of the past and people to places now, and it is formed of intangible heritage (emotions, senses, ideas, stories and art, mediated through performances, agency and culture). Engagement It is essential for heritage practitioners to communicate effectively: to enable them to understand and follow local customs; to be aware that their knowledge of a place can be lacking in comparison to the expertise of the communities they work with; and finally, to be critically self-aware. People connect with places in quite specific individual ways that are related strongly to their cultural understandings. It is important to understand and feel comfortable with the worldview of the community you are engaging with, which necessitates a willingness not only to connect with the place but to engage with other cultural perspectives. An example of the problem of disengagement occurred when I was visiting sites with an iwi member and two archaeologists, one from a council and the other a consultant. The purpose 35

Tribal saying, proverb.



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of the visit was for the council archaeologist to show us where various sites were in a particular reserve. We started together as a group looking at the general area and having places pointed out to us; then, imperceptibly but very definitely, the two archaeologists broke away and strode ahead, talking seriously in archaeological terms about the places. Meanwhile, my Māori companion and I wandered on behind talking of his connections with the area in a much more traditional way. He was invoking sensations of spirituality through his ancestral connections. When we discussed the more important site, it became apparent to me that for him the place was laden with meaning and the presence of people from the past; he began talking about the burials across the creek and emphasising the sacred and the surreal values of the place. This conversation ceased when we rejoined the archaeologists, who were looking at the site from a pragmatic scientific perspective, describing it as a possible fishing village and evaluating it for its potential archaeological information. The heritage place comprised several pits located on a knoll beside a creek in which there are the remains of a 1930s fish trap built out of rocks from the creek. Many of the sites in this reserve are eroding or being damaged by land management practices such as cattle grazing. This damage provided opportunities for the archaeologists to promote investigation to obtain information about the former economic lifestyles of the inhabitants, a conversation which my Māori companion did not participate in. This story demonstrates one of the ways in which disengagement between archaeologists and communities can occur, and yet they can each be oblivious to it. It also provides a succinct example of how the Connect is formed as people with different discourses move over the land interacting (or not) with one another and the place and constructing their identities, thereby constructing the place as a wāhi tapu or an archaeological site. Engagement in Māori terms is not a casual one-off experience. It is a long-term relationship that develops slowly through nurture and meetings, not only in formal hui36 but through simple everyday occasions such as visiting and having a cup of tea. Engagement is about creating, respecting and valuing the bonds of a community through shared experiences, places and connections. Engagement is the process by which we gain insight into the cultural practices of others and ourselves. Engagement requires time, dedication, critical self-awareness, empathy, a commitment to understanding the views and cultural perspectives of others and, finally, a willingness to adapt and change. The opportunity for different communities to work together enhances self-reflection, adaptability and innovation. Engagement is the result of understanding what heritage means to different groups and responding sensitively and creatively to those differences. For ‘heritage is too important a field of enquiry to be left to “experts” who wish to fix it (and thereby kill it stone dead)!’ (Carman and Sørensen 2009, 27). Heritage places are constructed by the discourses around them and by their material and spiritual dimensions; heritage is the intangible connection people have with place created through their performances at those places. There are three tangible elements of heritage: person, performance and place, which are bound together by the elusive, fragile, emotional response that Māori respondents call the Connect – a contemporary heritage practice related to customary concepts – which has been appropriated to explain this important concept. The Connect is intangible, yet paradoxically dependent on physicality. Each facet of heritage has intangible elements: a place has agency, a person has memory, a 36

Meeting.

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performance is fleeting, but all are tangible; all essential attributes of heritage. It is the intangible quickening of the Connect between these real things – from person flowing through performance to place and back again – that constitutes heritage and enables people to use that understanding and relationship with places to construct their identities. In turn, each protagonist constructs the place from his or her perspective through his or her own discursive formations – through his or her own Connect. Bibliography and References Allen, H, 1998 Protecting Historic Places in New Zealand, in Research in Anthropology and Linguistics 1, University of Auckland, Auckland Barr, C, 2010 Personal communication (interview with the author), 24 May, Napier Belford, T, 2009 Brooks Belford – Making History: Bay Buzz [online], 7 October, Hastings, available from: http://www.baybuzz.co.nz/archives/1678 [13 May 2014] Buchanan, J D H, edited by D R Simmons, 1973 The Maori History and Place Names of Hawke’s Bay, A H and A W Reed, Wellington Byrnes, G, 2001 Boundary Markers: Land Surveying and the Colonisation of New Zealand, Bridget Williams Books, Wellington Carman, J and Sørensen, M L S, 2009 Heritage Studies: an Outline, in Heritage Studies Methods and Approaches (eds M L S Sørensen and J Carman), Routledge, London, New York Classen, C and Howes, D, 2006 The Museum as Sensescape: Western Sensibilities and Indigenous Artifacts, in Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture (eds E Edwards, C Gosden and R B Phillips), Berg, Oxford Climo, J J and Cattell, M G, 2002 Introduction, in Social Memory and History: Anthropological Perspectives (eds J J Climo and M G Cattell), Altamira Press, Walnut Creek CA Fox, A and Jeal, M, 1977 Site Record Form V21/9, New Zealand Archaeological Association, Wellington Jones, K, 2009 Personal communication (interview with the author), 14 September, Wellington Low, S M and Lawrence-Zuniga, D, 2003 The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture, Blackwell Readers in Anthropology 4, Blackwell, Malden MA McCarthy, C, 2007 Exhibiting Maori: A History of Colonial Cultures of Display, Berg, Oxford, New York. McClanagan, A, 2007 The cult of community: defining the ‘local’ in public archaeology and heritage discourse, in Which Past, Whose Future? The Past at the Start of the 21st Century (eds S Grabow, D Hull and E Waterton), Archaeopress, Oxford, 51–7 MacDonald, R, 2009 Personal communication (interview with the author), 24 November, Hakikino, Waimarama, Hawke’s Bay McGovern-Wilson, R, 2010 Personal communication (interview with the author), 26 May, Wellington Mead, H M and Grove, N, 2001 Ngā Pepeha a Ngā Tīpuna, The Sayings of the Ancestors, Victoria University Press, Wellington Mohi, R, 2009 Personal communication (interview with the author), 24 November, Hastings Parsons, P, 1997 WAI 400: The Ahuriri Block Maori Customary Interests, Waitangi Tribunal Reports, Waitangi Tribunal, Wellington Pishief, E D, 2012 Constructing the Identities of Place: An Exploration of Māori and Archaeological Heritage Practices in Aotearoa New Zealand, unpublished PhD thesis, Victoria University of Wellington



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——, 2013 On the cusp of change: Maori participation, reciprocity and authority in heritage management in Aotearoa New Zealand, paper in panel: ‘Whose Public? Who speaks for Cultural Landscapes?’ presented at National Council on Public History annual meeting Knowing your Public(s) – The Significance of Audiences in Public History, 17–20 April, Ottawa Puke Ariki Museum, 2010 Te Ahi Ka Roa Te Ahi Katoro Taranaki War 1860–2010, Kaumatua (2), Kaumatua (3) and Kuia (1) speaking in movie shown in exhibition [CD/DVD ROM], Puke Ariki Museum, New Plymouth [19 March 2010] Richardson, M, 2003 Being-in-the-Market Versus Being-in-the-Plaza: Material Culture and the Construction of Social Reality in Spanish America, in The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture (eds S M Low and D Lawrence-Zuniga), Blackwell Publishing, Malden MA, 74–91 Royal, T A C, 2015 Kaitiakitanga – guardianship and conservation, Te Ara: the Encyclopedia of New Zealand [online], available from: http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/kaitiakitanga-guardianship-and-conservation [7 December 2015] Sharpe, K, 2010 Personal communication (interview with the author), 28 May, Wellington Smith, L, 2007 Cultural Heritage Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, in History and Concepts (ed L Smith), vol 1, Routledge, London, New York Smith, L and Waterton, E, 2009 Heritage, Communities and Archaeology, in Duckworth Debates in Archaeology (ed R Hodges), Duckworth, London Te Awekotuku, N and Nikora, L W, 2003 Nga Taonga a Te Urewera, Wai 894, doc B6, Waitangi Tribunal, Wellington Tilley, C, 1994 A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments, in Explorations in Anthropology (eds B Bender, J Gledhill and B Kapferer), Berg, Oxford, Providence Trotter, C, 2010 A small tragedy unnoticed in the larger death 19 March, in Comment, Dominion Post [online], available from: http://www.stuff.co.nz/blogs/opinion/3475311/A-small-tragedy-unnoticed-in-thelarger-death [18 June 2016] Tuan, Y, 1977 Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis Watters, S and Green, D, 2014 Overview – Musket Wars, Ministry for Culture and Heritage [online], available from: http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/war/musket-wars/overview [7 December 2015]

6

Horizontality: Tactical Politics for Participation and Museums Helen Graham … you were the first – in your books and in the practical sphere – to teach us something absolutely fundamental: the indignity of speaking for others. We ridiculed representation and said it was finished, but we failed to draw the consequences of this ‘theoretical’ conversion. To appreciate the theoretical fact that only those directly concerned can speak in a practical way on their own behalf. (Gilles Deleuze in conversation with Michel Foucault, 1972) …an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries, and responsibility in their construction. (Donna Haraway, The Cyborg Manifesto, 1991)

T

his book is questioningly titled ‘Engaging Heritage, Engaging Communities’. Let us think about some of the everyday meanings of ‘engagement’ for a moment.1 If a toilet is engaged, then it means someone is using it and you cannot; you must wait your turn. If you are engaged to be married, you cannot marry anyone else, and you wear a ring to show this exclusiveness to others. An engaged person is not open to others, or other romantic or sexual possibilities. To want to engage someone or something is not, therefore, a neutral act; it is claiming something totally. It is a monogamous kind of claim. In contrast, this chapter will explore a more plural and open approach to the relationships between museums, ‘heritage’ and people. That is, participation instead of engagement: a nonexclusive, non-deferential and non-loyalty-based politics of self-determination, affinity and collectivism. To begin – and throughout – I want to share particular stories of my own. I also want to offer some critical interventions. The one leads to the other and then back again. Here is the first: I am coming back from another event on museums and communities. I am on the train. The day has left a knot in my stomach. The knot is all too familiar. It is the knot of knowing things are not right. All day, being yet again in that schizo-frame of any institutional space focused on participation and community engagement, we have either not asked enough questions, celebrating projects that have been ‘good’, or we have worried, we have confessed and we have talked about failures ‘to empower’.

1

For a much more developed and worked throughout critique of the ‘engagement’ idea, see the PhD research of Joanne Williams (School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds).

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Both are somehow awful. We seem to pass over the political challenges too quickly. Or – almost as prevalent now – we hold on too tightly to specific ways of thinking about power and use them to interpret and explain too readily. Either way, we live with an almost impossible weight – the weight of trying to remake Victorian institutions (whether museums, heritage organisations or universities) founded on hierarchy and the desire to represent, classify or ‘act on’ others. Through all this unresolved shuttling between celebration and anxiety, do we even know what we need? Does part of us not want to just shrug it off? Do we not just want to somehow be free to just be, and be with, others – to become free and equal in an unequal world?

I have spoken and written elsewhere about museums and a politics of horizontality (Graham 2014). When I suggest horizontality, what I am suggesting, to be explicit, is that museums become more influenced by libertarian/anarchist readings of power and forms of political practice. There is no question that post-structuralist philosophies have often been drawn on in museum and heritage studies (eg Hooper-Greenhill 1992). Yet, as Saul Newman (2010, 87) has argued, certain forms of libertarian and anarchist politics of Mai ’68 are the ‘missing link’ of many theoretical mobilisations of post-structuralism. Museum and heritage studies have been quick to take up the critique offered by post-structuralism, but slow to register the full implications for practice. Here, I want to explore how anarchist-inflected, post-structuralist approaches to power and change offer ways of thinking and acting, which see politics growing from the here and now, and the spaces and potentials arising from what already is. From this, ‘community engagement’ might be otherwise. The Political Problem of Museums and Heritage I have been worrying about community engagement in museums for a long time now, caught up in, and between, various projects, social relationships, literatures and theories. Yet, it has become more visible over the years – as I have read more, got myself into more than a few scrapes and become involved in research projects exploring these type of questions2 – that it is no accident that museums and heritage organisations find participation difficult to realise. It is a problem generated by their very political logics, logics that assume that decisions about museums and heritage need to be made ‘on behalf of ’ everyone now, as well as everyone of the future. Or, as is still framed so clearly in the slogan of the UK National Trust: museums and heritage need to be managed so that they are ‘forever’ and ‘for everyone’ (National Trust nd). I am by no means the first to make this argument. In their writing, separately and together, Laurajane Smith and Emma Waterton (Smith and Waterton 2009; Waterton and Smith 2010) draw attention to the power dynamics of ‘heritage’. Smith and Waterton have tended to approach this through a critical analysis mode that seeks to unmask power, an approach summed up through Smith’s (2006, 29) widely cited idea of ‘authorised heritage discourse’: The authorised heritage discourse (AHD) focuses attention on aesthetically pleasing material objects, sites, places and/or landscapes that current generations ‘must’ care for, project and

2

A key context for my thinking is provided by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK)-funded project ‘How should heritage decisions be made?’ See http://heritagedecisions.leeds.ac.uk/ [8 December 2015].



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revere so that they may be passed on to nebulous future generations for their ‘education’, and to forge a sense of community identity based on the past.

In the formulation of AHD, the role of the professional who designates, decides and manages is key: ‘Essentially, the AHD is characterized by the privileging of expertise and efficiency. Heritage is imagined as something old, beautiful, tangible and of relevance to the nation, selected by experts and made to matter’ (Smith and Waterton 2009, 29).3 Here, Smith and Waterton argue that it is this particular relationship between the past and future that places an enormous amount of power in the hands of professional heritage ‘stewards’. Nonetheless, the reason why this formulation has proved so compelling and enduring in museums and heritage is worth examining. To do so, I will draw on a talk I gave at the 2013 Group for Education in Museums Conference in Leeds as a way of evoking specific issues that have arisen in my own working life; each are tangible moments when the questions of the political logics of museums and participation have become visible (see Graham 2014). The three examples are: •

In terms of collections: the museum wanting to value personal contributions (such as oral histories or other stories) by accessioning them into the collection, but then requiring ‘ownership’ over the oral history or story to pass from the individual to the museum;

•

In terms of co-curation: working with a group to co-curate aspects of an exhibition, but under the assumption that key interpretative decisions will be made by professionals; and

•

In terms of inclusion: in-depth work with a small group on a co-collecting project while concerned with not involving enough or the ‘right’ people.

You could easily read each of these examples via the critical mode deployed so powerfully by Smith and Waterton (2009) and view museums as manipulative, acting in tokenistic ways and retaining power illegitimately. Here, you could say about each: •

Collecting: museums appropriate people’s personal histories;

•

Co-curation: museums take control behind people’s back; and

•

Inclusion: museums dismiss individual people’s contributions.

While there might be some truth to all of these critical interpretations, I wonder whether it might be possible to see the political logics of these resistances to participation if these examples are viewed from a more sympathetic standpoint (for a moment, at least): •

3

Collecting: rather than seeing the museum as appropriating people’s personal stories, it could be viewed that the museum needs to ask individuals who donate their stories to sign

Smith and Waterton (2009, 27) trace this back to John Ruskin and William Morris and their enshrining of a logic of stewardship in early preservation movements, but I would also argue that contextualising Morris’ conservation politics within his contributions towards early libertarian communism is also crucial here.

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transfer of title/copyright forms to ensure that the institution can make collected items available to everyone for posterity; •

Co-curation: rather than seeing the museum as making decisions behind community members’ backs, it can be viewed that museums draw on professional standards to ensure high-quality and accessible visitor-focused exhibitions; and

•

Inclusion: rather than viewing the questioning of small group work as failing to value individuals’ contributions, museums can ask whether they are working fairly, equally and inclusively with the widest range of individuals and groups in their local area.

In other words, the three examples may be understood not only in terms of control, or exertion of power but also by those involved as reflecting their civic responsibilities to offer public services. Through discussions with one of my recent research teams as part of the ‘How should heritage decisions be made?’ project (see Heritage Decisions 2015), it has become evident that many of the frustrations I have encountered in working with participative approaches in museums have a shared political logic that echoes Smith and Waterton’s (2009) frustrations with stewardship. In particular, this political logic is based on the fact that museums are explicitly ‘public’ organisations, and are organised by the powerful idea that they should work ‘on behalf of … ’. In this light, the ‘on behalf of … ’ notion shapes museum efforts in ways that can be reflected through the three examples: •

Collecting: collect on behalf of everyone of the present and future;

•

Co-curation: curate and display objects, ideas and experiences on behalf of all visitors; and

•

Inclusion: inclusively use public resources on behalf of all in a way that is mindful of who is not represented, and who is and is not visiting.

‘On behalf of … ’ is one version of public service, and it echoes the idea of striving for the ‘greater good’. Moreover, it is born from the notion of delegated authority to professionals (Marquand 2004, 77). It is an idea with which we are all familiar – whether in relation to town planners in local authorities, or the role of National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence in deciding which drugs to use in the UK’s National Health Service. In other words, it is the act of making decisions about the use of public money for the good of all. However, the legitimacy of this process – of delegated authority via representational democracy – is currently under pressure across the UK and beyond. Today there is less trust of both elected officials and professionals (Marquand 2004, 75–9). In addition, there is a wider sense of ‘democratic deficit’, which has led to all sorts of participative movements (Cornwall 2008, 11). Yet simply adding participation into existing ‘on behalf of ’ public service logics has caused enormous problems for ‘community engagement’ and ‘participation’. Every time participation is just ‘added in’ then the criticism comes back, a criticism always motivated by the best public service intention: ‘why these people and not other people?’ Or, ‘if you cannot involve everyone, then how can you justify involving anyone?’ Questions like these have been used to dismiss many ‘community engagement’ efforts. They are serious questions coming from political logics that have defined public services in the late twentieth century. Nevertheless, they fail to acknowledge that ‘participation’ is derived from a different political tradition; instead of being served by those working on our behalf, participation is ‘those directly concerned’ (as Deleuze put it to Foucault,



Tactical Politics for Participation and Museums 77

1972) speaking for themselves. As discussed in the following section, one tradition from which ‘participation’ is derived is anarchism. Anarchism: A Politics of Horizontality Anarchism is a form of politics that began to emerge, and was given its name, in the late nineteenth century. While interpreted differently by various groups and individuals, a point of connection is its critique of the State, of government and, indeed, of the idea of ‘public’ and ‘public service’.4 As Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, purportedly the first person to declare themselves an anarchist, states: To be ruled is, at every operation, transaction, movement, to be noted, registered, counted, priced, admonished, prevented, reformed, redressed, corrected. It is, on the pretext of public utility and in the name of the common good, to be put under contribution, exercised, monopolized, concussed, pressured […] Such is government! And to think that there are democrats among us who claim there’s some good in government! (Proudhon quoted in Ward 1973, 11)

Here, two processes are brought together. Firstly, there is the process of ‘knowing about’ those ruled; the ruled in Proudhon’s account are ‘noted’ and ‘counted’. Secondly, through being ‘known about’, the ruled can be ‘admonished’ and ‘prevented’, both constituting familiar evocations of State power via the law and police, but also, interestingly, ‘monopolised’. Echoing our opening exploration of ‘engagement’, the Oxford English Dictionary definition of ‘monopolised’ includes: ‘to take exclusive possession of ’, ‘control’ and ‘keep exclusive to oneself ’. Proudhon also draws attention to what is, in a museum and heritage context, a familiar justification for knowing about and managing visitors on the ‘pretext of public utility and in the name of the common good’. Applying Proudhon’s characterisation directly to the three previous examples gives the following: •

Collecting: museums require formal and legal documentation to ensure that a personal story can be made publicly available;

•

Co-curation and display: individual involvement in a display is regulated with the belief that this will create wider public appeal; and

•

Inclusion: museums require people to classify themselves as coming from a specific socioeconomic or ethnic background so the museum can ensure it is working with people often excluded, or deprived of public resources.

If you take out Proudhon’s tone, you can see just how familiar these arguments are: people are known about through visitor research and collections, and sites are regulated by museum practitioners on behalf of everyone else and for the sake of a common good. In place of Proudhon’s (in Ward 1981) account of ‘State’ and ‘government’, alternatives have emerged from libertarian and anarchist thinking and practice. Perhaps the clearest and most compelling articulation of anarchism is the significance of interpersonal relationships, a ‘kind of 4

For a libertarian Marxist critique of the logics of ‘public’ see: Hardt and Negri 2009, 282; 2012, 78–80.

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ethics of relationships, as advocating and practicing very different relations of power than those of involved in the state, capitalism, white supremacy and patriarchy’ (Heckert and Cleminson 2011, 3). Two principles can be viewed as enabling an ‘ethics of relationships’. The first concerns the fact that the ends do not justify the means. In this light, the means are the ends: how we live together is what we have – it is the fertile ground we have for change – and the future will emerge from how we work together. As Emma Goldman states in her essay ‘Anarchism: What It Really Stands For?’ (2008, 29): Anarchism is not, as some may suppose, a theory of the future to be realized through divine inspiration. It is a living force in the affairs of our life, constantly creating new conditions. The methods of Anarchism therefore do not comprise an iron-clad program to be carried out under all circumstances. Methods must grow out of the economic needs of each place and clime, and of the intellectual and temperamental requirements of the individual.

Colin Ward (1973, 23), writing 60 years later, reinforced Goldman’s point very practically in Anarchy in Action: ‘Far from being a speculative vision of a future society, [anarchism] is a description of a mode of human organisation, rooted in the experience of everyday life, which operates side by side with, and in spite of, the dominant authoritarian trends of our society.’ A second principle guides us not only to view this pre-existing potential within everyday life but also to actively cultivate it through decentralised and direct decision-making processes. This is sometimes understood as ‘federated’ or ‘syndicalist’ decision-making, or the principle of ‘subsidiarity’ (Graeber 2013), where decisions should be made by the people the decisions affect. A strong feature of anarchist and feminist writings of the late twentieth century has been the development of processes of collective working that enable equality and consensus-seeking decisionmaking. In this line of thought it has been recognised that some forms of structure, rather than reducing freedom, can be developed in ways that increase equality and, from that, support a form of freedom that disadvantages no one.5 Linked to ideas of federation are notions of ‘affinity’ – finding groups of people with whom you want to live, be and work, and with whom you can collectively decide and plan. Part of this, crucially, is the provision for ‘exit’, or to leave (to not be ‘monopolised’). This is expressed very well in one of the ground rules – the ‘law of two feet/wheels’ – for Open Space Technology, which is commonly used in environmental movements as a method for developing agendas and affinity discussions within large-scale meetings. The law follows the logic that ‘if you find yourself in a situation where you aren’t contributing, or learning, move somewhere where you can’ (Starhawk 2011, 9). These principles help to open up some of the specific locks that the ‘on behalf of ’ and ‘forever, for everyone’ thinking has within museums and heritage. The first is to look at the practices of ‘community engagement’ as fertile ground for ‘ethics of relationships’ now. This offers a crucial riposte to the critical claims of participation in museums and heritage as already ‘co-opted’ by power structures. What matter, and offer potential, are the relationships that can be built through museums and community engagement. The second is to look carefully at direct democratic models of decision-making and also affinity models, where groups of people who have a shared interest are enabled to make decisions and act. The third concerns the idea that if the ends do not justify 5

This is an argument outlined well in Jo Freeman’s famous essay ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’ (1972).



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the means, then the temporal logics of ‘posterity’ and of a future ‘common good’ also need to be rethought. Instead of ‘preservation’ being used to institutionally manage ‘heritage’, and to keep it from dynamic use in the present, a ‘future’ might be best imagined as one that is always emerging from, and cultivated by, a politically legitimate present. Of course I have known for a while that the knot in my stomach represents the messy anxieties that come from trying to be with people and to work from these encounters, and to manage the political logics of ‘on behalf of ’ at the same time. Is this knot a political necessity – a productive sense of being caught between the political logics that drive the work? Or does the very attempt to navigate ‘on behalf of ’ and ‘being with’ hold only the constant danger of indignity?

Post-structuralist Critique/Post-structuralist Politics As pointed out by the work of Smith and Waterton (2009), Proudhon’s anarchist account of the State and government, far from being an unthinkable critical lens, is actually well established and well rehearsed in the museum and heritage studies literature, and is one way in which post-structuralist theorisations have been pulled into the discipline. In The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism Todd May (1994, 1) opens with the idea that ‘political philosophy, especially in the continental tradition, is a project perpetually haunted by crisis, because it inhabits that shifting space between what is and what ought to be’. With this in mind, you could say that museums are institutions that live precisely in this crisis. A key tendency in museum and heritage studies has been to focus on ‘what is’, to diagnose the politics of museums/heritage and to seek to unveil how museum/ heritage processes fail to live up to their claims and instead operate to control, limit and exclude. I can never explore these points without quoting Tony Bennett’s The Birth of the Museum (1995). Looking at the logics of the late nineteenth-century museum, Bennett (1995, 90) argues that the politics of museums and heritage set off an insatiable demand because of their rhetorical claims to be ‘equally open and accessible to all’, and to meet the ‘principle of representative adequacy sustaining the demand that museums should adequately represent the cultures and values of different sections of the public’. What is will forever not quite meet the desires for what museums ought to be. As such, it could be said, that museum logic causes its own perpetual crisis and sense of failure. Museums are never inclusive enough. Yet, a key danger is that in the critical movement towards what ought to be, the political centrality of museums/heritage remains intact. May (1994, 10) describes this as a difference in emphasis between ‘strategic political philosophy’ and ‘tactical political philosophy’. Strategic political philosophy imagines a certain immediate relationship between what is and what ought to be precisely because of how power is imagined and where it is located; both ‘power’ and thinking ‘proceed concentrically’. May (1994, 11) states: ‘strategic political philosophy, in arguing for or assuming a central problematic within the purview of which all injustices can be accounted for, carries with it the implication that power derives essentially, or for the most part from, the site upon which the problematic focuses’. Hence, the insatiability of the claims that museums are ‘always failing’; museums/heritage exclude and, therefore, museums must be made to not exclude. It is assumed that the site of the critique carries the solution. As May (1994, 12) articulates: Tactical thought opposes strategic thought at another crucial point. If there is a central problematic and a central site of power, then it is possible that there are those who are peculiarly well placed to analyze and to lead the resistance against the power relationships of that site. Their

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well-placed position may derive from their knowledge of that site, or from their involvement with it, or from their place within the social order which allows them effective access to means of pressure.

One of the issues May (1994) draws attention to concerns the way in which the strategic critique distributes insight, and then responsibility and agency, to specific people and not others (the idea of the vanguard in Marxist theory).6 Here, the tension between ‘on behalf of ’ and ‘participation’ is, in fact, a consequence of competing explanations of power. If power is conceived of as centralised, then participation cannot maintain direct or affinity models of decision-making, which in turn leads to the critique: ‘if we cannot involve “everyone” and “future generations” in decision-making, then what is the point?’ Participation can be viewed as a political response to the more diffuse and complex way power is often experienced. To flourish, participation needs to be tactical. While critique has dominated museum and heritage studies, an intriguing shift is currently underway in the field as theories from other disciplines make their way in increasingly quickly. Specifically, theories that describe the world as networks or ‘assemblages’ are being applied to museum and heritage (see Macdonald 2002; Morris 2003; Bennett 2013; Byrne et al 2011). A crucial contribution of these approaches is that they not only utilise the same types of practices, collections and displays often described through a hegemonic lens in museum and heritage studies but push further to show how they are comprised of specific interactions and connections. This theoretical shift has a key point of reference: science and technology studies and, specifically, Actor Network Theory (ANT) (see Latour 2005). The main conceptual shift offered by ANT is to not assume anything about ‘what is going on’ in any given assemblage but instead to trace connections. For instance, in an early example of deploying ANT in a museum studies context, Andy Morris (2003) shows how Tate Britain creates itself as a ‘centre of calculation’ both for ‘art’ and ‘Britishness’ by drawing certain paintings and ideas of nation together. Tony Bennett (2013) has also used assemblage theory and ANT to develop his 1995 notion of the ‘exhibitionary complex’ into the ‘culture complex’. While Bennett’s (2013, 26) interest has always concerned the ‘role played by epistemological authorities of various kinds in producing new collectivities of actors and endowing them with specific capacities for acting on and changing conduct’, he argues that ‘the advantages of assemblage theory […] consist in the pliability it brings to the analysis of such networks, flows and relations’ (2013, 39). The most prevalent use of ANT has offered accounts of museums and heritage as they are, or what is. Here, the question for us is what this might mean for a reimagined politics of participation that works as ‘a living force in the affairs of our life’, in the words of Goldman (2008, 29). Tactical Practices of ‘Participation’ When I feel less attached to the question of who I really am – activist or scholar, homosexual or bisexual – I find myself experiencing a deeper sense of connection with others. Whether that’s through the writing I do, in meetings of shared projects, in talking with friends, family

6

May’s target here is the idea of the vanguard, associated with Leninist strands of Marxist politics. For a satirical take on vanguardist politics, see Shelia Rowbotham’s (1983) ‘The Little Vanguard’s Tale’, in her collection Dreams and Dilemmas.



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and neighbours or with strangers on trains or in parks, possibilities arise that have been closed off when I want them to know, or want to keep secret, what I might imagine to be the truth of myself. (Heckert 2011, 205)

Jamie Heckert (2011, 201) writes about ‘sexuality as state form’: that the State is not only that which operates though laws, police, schools and asylums; it also works through social and cultural forms and norms. Drawing on the idea of ‘overcoding’ from Deleuze and Guattari (2004), Heckert (2011, 201) extends a reading of ‘state form’ to be the ‘colonizing strategy of declaring, with authority not to be questioned, both how things are and how they should be, regardless of the local and particular knowledge of those who are always, already living with these questions’. Heckert’s (2011) approach and tone – open and committed to what might emerge through being with others – will be our guide. Yet, as one of the recurring issues faced by those facilitating ‘community engagement’ and ‘participation’ in museums and heritage, we also need to engage with the impetus behind the nagging question, ‘why these people and not other people?’ which represents the well-intentioned public service desire to manage equality and diversity. As such, I will suggest that more horizontal, decentralised and non-representational ways of working might open up this political logic of ‘on behalf of ’ while still recognising some of the serious concerns of inclusion, equality, diversity and legitimacy that ideals of public service and the ethos of ‘on behalf of ’ have been used to address. To accomplish this, I take cues from two places that offer different visions of horizontality. The first, interested in the fertile ground of relationships, is current thinking on networking approaches to community development, which emphasises developing communities by working within these existing networks, working to cultivate connections and interactions and to link networks together (Gilchrist 2009, 14). This approach, which most of us will recognise, is likely to be more effective than convening meetings and expecting people to act as if they do represent others. However, with these benefits also comes the danger of working only with people whom you know and who know each other; thus, there is a risk of not addressing the question: ‘who is not a part of this network?’ As a result, the important understanding of horizontality as working through networks and interpersonal relationships also needs some kind of self-awareness about who is there and how decisions are made. The second form of horizontality we will draw on is from the Alterglobalisation Movement, which has developed horizontality as a way of referring to participatory and non-representational decision-making processes (see Maeckelbergh 2009). What is so relevant about these approaches, as explained, is that they suggest ways around the sticking points of ‘on behalf of … ’ while also keeping equality and diversity fully in mind. The following sections provide some ways of thinking and acting that might help. Not Black Box ‘Community Engagement’ To begin with, and in keeping with the descriptive approach to ANT and assemblage theory, what we might show – to bring ‘ethics of relationships’ to the fore – is that ‘community engagement’ is not one entity, and that ‘it’ should not be black boxed. Even if you accept, in Tony Bennett’s (1998, 212) terms, that community engagement is ‘a programme of the same type’ as nineteenth-century forms of shaping people’s conduct and behaviour, then the variability within

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‘the same type’ matters, as I’ve argued elsewhere (see Graham 2012). In contrast, the critical readings of community engagement that have circulated have tended to gather all community engagement practices together and black boxed them so that it might become possible to reveal/ unmask their politics. To give one example, Waterton and Smith (2010, 11) describe what they see as the assimilationist tendencies of ‘engagement’ produced by a too narrow and cosy reading of ‘community’: Indeed, the way that ideas of community have become intertwined with heritage discourses and practice has rendered communities, as much as their heritage, as subject to management and preservation. That is, community or group identity becomes the object of regulation through the heritage management process, not only reinforcing the power differentials in communityexpert relations, but also ensuring the legitimacy of essentialist notions of ‘community’ and their continual misrecognition.

In effect, Waterton and Smith argue that ‘community’ has been too ‘black boxed’. Nevertheless, they return their critique of the oversimplified evocation of community with an almost equally ‘black boxed’ evocation of practices. Smith and Waterton (2009, 139) suggest that, for professional practice, this means: ‘honesty, dialogue, recognition of power, a holistic and integrated approach, and a critical regard for the political and social context of community engagement’. This is all fine as a shorthand, but if we think of politics as ‘networks of intersecting lines’, then it has to be the tone, texture, subtlety and ethos of these practices that need to be illuminated. As I hope is clear by now, a commitment to specificity of practices is not simply about the type of knowledge produced. Rather, allowing any practice to be thought of in only an abstract way also simplifies and centralises ‘power’, leads to strategic thinking and limits the political potential of the everyday encounter, as evoked by Goldman (2008) and Ward (1973). Latour summarises this by stating: ‘if there is a society then no politics is possible’ (2005, 251), by which he meant: Of course, appealing to ‘social domination’ might be useful as shorthand, but then it is much too tempting to use power instead of explaining it and that is exactly the problem with most ‘social-explainers’: in their search for powerful explanations, is it not their lust for power that shines through? If, as the saying goes, absolute power corrupts absolutely, then gratuitous use of the concept of power by so many critical theorists has corrupted them absolutely – or at least rendered their discipline redundant and their politics impotent. (Latour 2005, 85, his italics) Years ago now, I first walked into a Resource Base that was one of many sites for a two-year oral history project with people with learning difficulties, exploring the histories of recently closed day centres. Somewhere, back in the new office that I had taken up as part of that job, was a document with deliverables agreed with the project’s funders: numbers of interviews conducted, an archive to be made, a booklet to be written and a simple Gantt chart of its timeframe. I remember meeting the member of staff with whom I initially had contact, but then he just left me to get on with it … to somehow ‘begin the project’ within the ongoing daily life of the centre. So I began to introduce myself to people who were service users at the Resource Base. I brandished a piece of paper that,



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I had hoped, set out the project as clearly as possible. I tried to explain the project and see if I could ‘get them involved’. But our worlds could not mesh. They spoke of the day centres, but I understood almost nothing: names, connections, memories … this happened, then that, and someone had left and they had seen them recently somewhere I did not know and someone else had said something about something. Nothing could come into meaning for me. Equally, my words – Project, Archive, Exhibition – could not come into meaning for them. Slowly, over months and months, one conversation and cup of tea at a time, I was shown that we needed to begin in the middle of where it matters and build a new project both like and unlike the one on the funding bid. I needed to slowly, carefully and gratefully become part of their world first. They needed to engage me and involve me before I could ‘involve them’ in any way the funder would recognise. The ‘someones’ I did not know became specific people; people’s names started to have faces. And places that were only ‘somewhere’ for me at first became places I knew, too.

See Museums from the Outside In May’s (1994) terms we often see museums as a ‘centre’, as the centre that needs to be critiqued and changed, but museums are not the centre of most people’s lives. Yet in thinking ‘on behalf of … ’ we are in danger of placing the museum right at the centre of our thinking in a way that can lead to seeing the world from the museum out, or ‘museocentrically’.7 Nonetheless, it is necessary to view the museum from the outside in, and the museum, through other people’s eyes, will only be one place and organisation among many they are in contact with. There is No Such Thing as ‘Everybody’, but There is ‘Anyone’ The idea of networking is quite different from the idea that museums need to work ‘on behalf of … ’. A characteristic of the ‘on behalf of … ’ logic is its vertical view (as if from up high) that assumes differences between people are known, such as ‘lower socio-economic group’ or ‘Black and Minority Ethnic’, and then strives to balance out their various interests and needs fairly. There is no doubt that the desire to balance out resources fairly and to always address ‘who is not here’ comes from a place of fairness and equality, the typical aims of professional public service. However, to build up towards this idea of ‘everyone’, successive groups tend to be worked with one after another in a one-at-a-time fashion. This solution to the problem of ‘everyone’ leads to a participative ‘catch 22’, where ‘participation’ is often criticised as being a box to tick, rather than being sustainable (because relationships are eventually left behind). In her book on community development, The Well-Connected Community, Alison Gilchrist (2009, 76) outlines the benefits of networking: Networks are generally able to accommodate divergence and dissent, rather than attempt to impose either unity in action or a spurious (and often fragile) consensus. Networks are particularly adept at managing contradiction and are useful organisational tools for promoting genuine understanding […] Diversity challenges dogma and orthodoxy by generating alternatives.

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With thanks to the volume’s co-editor, Michelle Stefano.

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Yet Gilchrist (2009, 145) also recognises the dangers, by stating: Networking is easier and more enjoyable where there are common interests and mutual affinity. People tend to associate with people who are like themselves, and this dimension of networking militates against inclusion and equality of opportunity […] Personal affiliations and antipathies are endemic in community networks and this creates a quandary for people who are committed to principles of equal opportunity and democracy.

One of the ways she reconciles networking with equality and inclusivity is to draw attention to the spirit in which networking is conducted and to advise the constant diversification of networks. She outlines some of the tactics used by community development workers, such as hanging out in places where you will bump into people and more formally developing a working picture of the locality and mapping where your networks are strong, weak or non-existent (Gilchrist 2009). While ‘everyone’ cannot really exist, individuals, groups, friendship networks and local networks do. Investment in the type of small group work that has defined participation in museum and heritage contexts becomes a lot less problematic if, rather than seen successively (one group after another), it is seen as adding new nodes into a wider network. And rather than viewing these participants as facing into the museum-as-centre, and as making a contribution that is then managed on behalf of ‘everyone’, community development can be better conceptualised in a multilateral way: people developing relationships with each other through, in and with the museum/heritage organisation. It is About how Decisions are Made, not (only) Who Makes Decisions A significant question is not only who makes decisions but how they are made, and by what processes. While museums have often consulted with partners about what to do to engage communities, there are fewer examples of approaches that openly and transparently explore how decisions should be made about engaging communities, as well as other museum functions. How should museums decide what to collect? How should they decide on exhibitions? How should they decide which groups to work with? In other words, there are few examples of museums attempting to build shared understanding around the processes of decision-making, and the legitimacy of such decisions. Marianne Maeckelbergh, who has written an ethnography of the Alterglobalisation Movement, describes horizontality as working with conflict and difference, but without the use of hierarchy: Horizontality is about creating equality […] The practices of the collective space of movement organizing show that equality is not assumed to be born into human beings but rather created through active construction of non-hierarchical relationships by challenging inequalities between people (gender, sexuality, language, skills, etc) […] Within a diverse community, horizontality is a means of limiting the abuse of power to avoid the exclusion that many actors presume to result from hierarchy. Consequently, it is a method for turning adversarial conflict into constructive conflict. Horizontality is where diversity meets equality; it is the means through which movement actors break the mental link between equality and sameness, and challenge the political project of homogenization implicit in liberal democracy. (Maeckelbergh 2009, 108)



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David Graeber, an activist and anthropologist, describes two key principles of horizontality linked to ‘subsidiarity’ in the 2011 Occupy Wall Street Movement (2013). In the first, everyone involved in a particular project, or piece of work, should be involved in decisions relating to it. As such, in a museum context this might mean that people involved in contributing to an exhibition should be actively involved in all decisions relating to it. This does not mean jettisoning professional insights, experience, display standards or ideas about audience engagement; however, it does mean opening them up for discussion and scrutiny. In other words, there needs to be space for affinity groups – people who want to get together to make things happen – and small-scale collective decision-making. Graeber’s (2013) second principle is to make it possible for anyone who might be affected by a decision to get involved. During Occupy Wall Street, working groups went off and took the initiative for various protest components, from food to setting up libraries and entertainment (the principle of subsidiarity). Moreover, there was a General Assembly each day where anyone could bring an agenda item, and working groups could shelve issues which they felt needed wider discussion. The second principle’s notion of including anyone who is affected by a particular decision in the making of it may, in the museological context, take us back to the problematic issue of engaging ‘everyone’. Yet, one interpretation of the horizontal aspects of the Alterglobalisation Movement would be that they were explicitly not concerned with manifesting ‘everyone’, or the ‘public’. Rather, and in line with the equality component of horizontality, the movement was more concerned with the potential for anyone who wanted to get involved and, thus, granting them an equality of entry into the process of decision-making. Anyone could take part in the process directly and equally, rather than upholding the ethos that decisions are made on behalf of an imagined everyone. It is critical to examine how ‘anyone’ who wants to can get involved in making decisions about museums and heritage, because the small group collaborations through which participation seems to work best become less problematic if the burdens of ‘representation’ (in both its ‘cultural’ and ‘political’ meanings) are completely and openly removed. Instead, small group work can be complemented by a variety of open pathways to be used for sharing, discussing and deciding what the museum does and how it uses its resources. For example, practical ways of creating open pathways include: making available the contact details for specific members of staff on a website; transparent processes for deciding on exhibitions; and clear guidelines on how to propose an object for collection by the museum. The capacities for people to then be proactive and use these open pathways, in turn, need to be developed using networking approaches. In essence, what the networking approach to community engagement in museums can offer is a view of the museum not as the centre but as a node in a wider network of places, and as active in building a network in, and through, the museum and its localities. The Future will Take Care of Itself ‘On behalf of everyone’ is directly linked in museum contexts to ‘on behalf of the future’. The future is often imagined implicitly in heritage contexts as linear, stable and predictable, a bit like a timeline stretching onwards. In its current iteration, as we have explored, it is as if the ends of preservation ‘for the future’ can be balanced with access in the present only though the delegated authority of professionals. Yet, if we focus on the ethics of working together, then the question

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of the future can be openly debated and decisions that are made now and will affect the future might be properly earned. The future can unfold from the present. Conclusion I am meeting up with someone with whom I have been working on a participatory research project. Elsewhere in the funding paperwork, when we are explaining the project at the university and when he is acting as a self-advocate he describes himself as a mental health service user. We have been starting to try to write together, something that I have not been finding easy. We are meeting in a cafe. I am late, falling through the door exhausted after teaching and other meetings, not quite knowing, as I rushed down the hill, that I did not have the physical and emotional resources to be able to take responsibility for the encounter; almost knowing, as I rushed down the hill feeling guilty and fraught, how fragile all of our well-being is. Yet, my professional failure opened up something else – a mutual care, a listening ear that is paving the way – not for me ‘to engage’ him in research and writing, but for two people to now more fully choose to collaborate.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank the editors of this volume for their comments. Thanks to the Heritage Decisions team and the Connected Communities programme of the Arts and Humanities Research Council for creating the contexts within which these ideas were shaped – not least discussions about Do-It-Yourself approaches with Danny Callaghan and ‘freedom of self ’ with Kathy Cremin, Mike Benson and John Lawson. Thanks especially to my networks in York, which have, for a very long time now, included more than a few anarchists. Bibliography and References Bennett, T, 1995 The Birth of the Museum, Routledge, London ——, 1998 Culture: A Reformer’s Science, Sage, London ——, 2013 Making Culture, Making Society, Routledge, London Byrne, S, Clarke, A, Harrison, R and Torrence, R, 2011 Introduction, in Unpacking the Collection, Networks of Material and Social Agency in the Museum (eds S Byrne, A Clarke, R Harrison and R Torrence), Springer Verlag, New York Cornwall, A, 2008 Democratising Engagement, Demos, London Deleuze, G and Foucault, M, 1972 Intellectuals and power: A conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze [online], available from: https://libcom.org/library/intellectuals-power-a-conversation-betweenmichel-foucault-and-gilles-deleuze [21 January 2015] Deleuze, G and Guattari, F, 2004 A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans B Massumi, Continuum, London and New York Freeman, J, 1972 The Tyranny of Structurelessness [online], available from: http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/ tyranny.htm [22 August 2015] Gilchrist, A, 2009 The Well-Connected Community: A networking approach to community development, Policy Press, Bristol Goldman, E, 2008 Anarchism and Other Essays, Digireads, New York



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Graeber, D, 2013 The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement, Spiegel and Grau, New York Graham, H, 2012 Scaling Governmentality: Museums, co-production and re-calibrations of the ‘Logic of Culture’, Cultural Studies 26 (4), 565–92 ——, 2014 Horizontal Museums: Opening up by imagining differently, Journal for Museum Education 34, 23–31 Haraway, D, 1991 Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Routledge, London, New York Hardt, M and Negri, A, 2009 Commonwealth, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA ——, 2012 Declaration, Argo Navis Author Services, New York Heckert, J, 2011 Sexuality as State Form, in Post-Anarchism: A Reader (eds D Rousselle and S Evren), Pluto Press, London, 195–207 Heckert, J and Cleminson, R, 2011 Introduction, in Anarchism and Sexuality: Ethics, Relationships and Power (eds J Heckert and R Cleminson), Routledge, London Heritage Decisions, 2015 How should heritage decisions be made? Increasing participation from where you are [online], available from: http://heritagedecisions.leeds.ac.uk/ [22 August 2015] Hooper-Greenhill, E, 1992 Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, Routledge, London Latour, B, 2005 Reassembling the Society: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford University Press, Oxford Macdonald, S, 2002 Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum, Berg, London Maeckelbergh, M, 2009 The Will of the Many: How the Alterglobalisation Movement is Changing the Face of Democracy, Pluto Press, London Marquand, D, 2004 Decline of the Public, Polity Press, Cambridge May, T, 1994 The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism, The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park PA Morris, A, 2003 Redrawing the Boundaries: Questioning the Geographies of Britishness at Tate Britain, Museum and Society 1 (3), 170–82 National Trust, nd Our cause [online], available from: http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/our-cause [8 December 2015] Newman, S, 2010 The Politics of Postanarchism, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh Rowbotham, S, 1983 Dreams and Dilemmas: Collected Writings, Virago, London Smith, L, 2006 The Uses of Heritage, Routledge, London Smith, L and Waterton, E, 2009 Heritage, Communities and Archaeology, Duckworth, London Starhawk, 2011 The Five Fold Path of Productive Meetings [online], available from: http://starhawk.org/pdfs/ Empowerment_Five-Fold-Path.pdf [21 January 2015] Ward, C, 1973 Anarchy in Action, Freedom Press, London Waterton, E and Smith, L, 2010 The Recognition and Misrecognition of Community Heritage, The International Journal of Heritage Studies 16 (1), 4–15

Engaging Creatively

7

Re-imagining Egypt: Artefacts, Contemporary Art and Community Engagement in the Museum Gemma Tully

W

hat does Egypt conjure up in your imagination? Powerful pharaohs, towering pyramids, arid deserts, modern revolutions? Egypt has experienced many different cultural influences stretching back over 300,000 years. All eras of Egypt’s past have helped shape the country today, yet the majority of the world is only familiar with one small part of the Egyptian story: the ‘Golden Age’ of the pharaohs. The exhibition Re-imagining Egypt, held at Saffron Walden Museum in the UK between 26 November 2013 and 23 February 2014, aimed to challenge this narrow view. Community engagement was central to this process, as almost 100 local school-age children were involved in a series of workshops at the museum that explored artefacts spanning the breadth of Egypt’s past, from prehistory to present. Encouraging participants to make connections between different eras and themes, the workshops sparked creative ideas which moved beyond traditional representations of Egypt. The result was multiple artistic creations that were curated collaboratively alongside the historical objects and new artworks by the contemporary Egyptian artist Khaled Hafez, who was invited for a residency. The combination of art and artefact, ancient and modern, Egyptian and local (north-west Essex) perspectives in the exhibition set out to create a fresh vision of Egypt, both personal and historical. This chapter will discuss the theory, practice and outcomes of this process, analyse Re-imagining Egypt as a model for future community engagement in museums and ask whether the exhibition achieved its goal of representing Egypt as the sum of its many parts. The Legacy of Ancient Egypt The study and presentation of the ancient Egyptian past is affected by over 500 years of Western tradition. Excluding accounts from ancient Greece and Rome (Strassler 2007), sources as early as the sixteenth century reveal the collection and use of ancient Egyptian artefacts in the West. From the ingestion of mummia (ground mummy powder) for health (Dodson and Ikram 1998, 64) to pride of place in cabinets of curiosity (Impey and MacGregor 1985; MacGregor 1994; Bredekamp 1995) and later in the first museums, ancient Egyptian items offered a source of mysticism and grandeur on a previously unparalleled scale. This was important at a time when Western nations were building the foundations of modern science and struggling to establish their place in the world. Ancient Egypt provided a source of both intellectual challenge and national competition. However, by claiming the world’s ‘greatest’ ancient civilisation for its own, the West divorced living Egyptians from this heritage. Powerful Orientalising discourse (Reid 1985; 2002) divided

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ancient and modern populations with the coming of Islam. Disenfranchising ancient history from the modern population, this process appeared to justify European excavation, collecting and control (Wood 1998). Yet an inability to translate the hieroglyphs until 1822 meant that, for the first three centuries in which ancient Egypt was slowly entering Western consciousness, audiences and ‘experts’ could do little more than stare in wonder and speculate about their ‘rediscovered’ ancestors. As a result, collecting focused on the ‘magnificent and the monstrous’: monumental sculptures, mummies, sarcophagi and temple reliefs (Moser 2006). Without access to the true meaning of the ancient texts, concepts of ‘divine wisdom’ (ACTS 7, 22 [New Revised Standard Version])1 accompanied by classical, patristic, hermetic, gnostic and alchemistic traditions came to form lasting impressions of ancient Egypt in popular and scholarly doctrines (Assman 2003, 427). Establishing a narrow set of understandings of ancient Egypt focused on elite individuals, death and religious practices, the power of these first associations endures in twenty-first-century representations of Egypt’s past. While our understanding of Egyptian society and culture has moved on, it is inevitably morbid curiosity that still dominates popular visions of Egypt and continues to drive much Egyptological research. From historical fiction to films and archaeology exhibits,2 Western ‘Egyptomania’ (Curl 1982; 1994) is still very much alive. The implications today are that historical awe eclipses more accessible daily life narratives and, perhaps more significantly, positions modern Egypt as a nation disconnected from, yet living in the shadow of, its past. As a result, exhibitions about Egypt rarely live up to the aims of contemporary museum practice, which acknowledges that, while institutions are important in inspiring wonder, they also have a social and ethical role to play in contextualising cultural and temporal differences, challenging stereotypes and diversifying the voices involved in the interpretation process (Peers and Brown 2003). Across the world, the majority of ‘Egyptian’ exhibitions focus primarily on the dynastic era. The Roman, Coptic and Predynastic periods are generally found in annex rooms, or tacked on to the end of exhibits, marginalising them in relation to the wider ‘Pharaonic’ chronology. The Islamic period, if present, is usually distanced spatially from traditional Egyptian galleries and is predominantly integrated within a general Arab–Islamic history. Similarly, when the prehistoric period is represented, artefacts are normally included in wider evolutionary ‘Out of Africa’ narratives. In terms of representing modern Egypt in Western museums, sixteenth- to twentyfirst-century artefacts make occasional appearances in ethnographic displays but these tend to focus on often nomadic Nubian and Bedouin lifestyles. Such exhibits do not reflect the diversity of modern Egyptian life and instead reinforce the apparent chasm of difference between Egypt’s ancient and modern populations as established by Orientalism (Tully 2010). Interestingly, some Egyptian museums are beginning to promote a different vision of Egypt’s past compared with the Orientalist rhetoric of the West. While the first museums within Egypt were initiated by Westerners, predominantly to house Egyptology collections, and thus segregated Pharaonic, Coptic and Muslim culture (see also Mitchell 1991; Reid 1997), many of today’s 1

A great deal of scholarship developed from the biblical notion of ancient Egyptian divine wisdom. One such example is William Warburton’s Hebraist study The Divine Legation of Moses (1738–41). 2 The influence of modern Egyptomania is evident in historical fiction, such as the Ramses series by Christian Jacq (1997; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 1999), films such as The Mummy (both 1932 (Freund) and 1999 (Sommers) versions) and exhibitions such as Tutankhamun and The Golden Age of the Pharaohs at London’s O2 arena (2007–8).



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Egyptian curators are beginning to focus on more encompassing accounts of Egyptian history that challenge the Western view.3 By using similar styles of display technique and by integrating various eras of history together through a more thematic focus, a unified history is being created that positions ‘indigenous’ eras of Egyptian heritage alongside the present. This approach aids the legibility of Egyptian history by superimposing a clear ‘material relationship between native cultures over the episodic expression of each individual period’ (Doyon 2008, 13 –14). Reflecting cultural palimpsest in this way, ancient Egyptian history can be reclaimed for contemporary Egypt while maintaining a positive place within other cultural dialogues, such as the development of Western civilisation. Providing a narrative of continuous cultural exchange and overlap (see Doyon 2007; 2008), this approach finds parallels with an emergent trend in anthropology which promotes the reconsideration of artefacts from final products – ‘objects’ (Gell 1998) – to ‘things’ caught up in a number of processes which gather together the ‘threads of life’ in diverse ways (see Heidegger 2001; Miller 2005; Henare et al 2007). By viewing past items as part of a continuing process of meaning-making which remains relevant to modern life, it helps audiences to consider different ways of seeing the world. The idea of representing continuity and change, and allowing for multiple interpretations of a country’s past to co-exist, provided the central concept for Re-imagining Egypt. However, visitor research with audiences at existing European Egyptology displays has revealed how visitors tend to focus on objects that reinforce their existing knowledge, rather than seeking to challenge it, and that specially exhibited ‘star objects’4 win attention from other artefacts and new information (Tully 2010). This is a problem experienced with traditional museum display methods in general because, while they offer objects up for contemplation, they single them out from the general flow of life (Gosden 2004, 35). It was clear, therefore, that simply placing objects from all eras of Egypt’s history in a single gallery would struggle to challenge the traditional viewing process and our didactic programming which tends to isolate cultures into distinct hermetic units. Thus an approach was needed that would challenge expectations of an Egyptian museum display by taking audiences out of their comfort zone and encouraging them to stop and reconsider ‘taken for granted’ ideas regarding Egypt’s past. Working collaboratively to include contemporary Egyptian voices as well as local voices in the interpretation and curation process, rather than simply imposing a singular (albeit non-traditional) curatorial vision, provided half of the solution. Collaboration in the Museum Over the last two decades it has become increasingly accepted that archaeologists and museum curators have long been guilty of privileging their ‘specialised’ forms of knowledge and presentation over other interpretations of cultures and histories (Faulkner 2000; Peers and Brown 2003). This is problematic as academics and institutions are sanctioned ‘knowledge makers’ with the power to challenge or enforce commonly held beliefs. Collaborative archaeology and collaborative museology therefore aim to democratise the production of knowledge by working from the premise that ‘wherever material is housed, it has a history that is shared among many people who all have a stake in it’ (Curtis 2003, 31). While it would be impossible to consider the views

3 4

For example, the Nubia Museum, Aswan and plans for the new Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) in Cairo. For example, the Rosetta Stone at the British Museum or the bust of Nefertiti at the Neues Museum in Berlin.

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of every stakeholder, it is acknowledged that understanding can be enhanced and new questions asked when the voices and methods involved in interpretation move away from singular ‘authoritative’ perspectives. As part of ‘critical museology’ and notions of the ‘post-museum’ (Hooper-Greenhill 2000), collaborative museology engages with the moral, national, historical and ethical implications of display ‘to introduce a plurality of practice and develop new genres of exhibitions, which can engage with the panoply of wider cultural practices which have stimulated it’ (Shelton 2001, 146–7). Re-imagining Egypt developed from this belief with the aim of creating a multi-perspective, experimental display that would simultaneously inform the present as well as the past. However, if evidence suggests that artefacts would not ‘speak for themselves’ (Tully 2010), even if put in new collaboratively curated object groupings, it was also unlikely that simply adding alternative interpretative voices in the form of text would do justice to the aims or participants of the exhibition process; dramatic visual intervention was needed! Thus, contemporary art provided the second half of the solution. Contemporary Art and Archaeological Display Contemporary visual art, alongside collaborative curation, offers a powerful medium through which museums can engage with contemporary debate, incorporate multiple narratives and become more fluid spaces for cross-cultural and cross-temporal exchange. Colin Renfrew (2003, 7) describes the visual arts of today as an ‘uncoordinated yet somehow enormously effective research programme that looks critically at what we are and how we know what we are – at the foundations of knowledge and perception, and of the structures that modern societies have chosen to construct upon these foundations’. Art has agency (Gell 1998) and is therefore a useful facilitator for the generation of deeper understandings by its producers and consumers in terms of engagement with the past. Since the 1980s art has been breaking free from the art gallery as artists and Indigenous communities have challenged the way their work/culture is categorised and displayed (Stocking 1985). This has led to the development of numerous contemporary partnerships between art and the human past across various museum contexts: ethnographic, historical, artistic and archaeological.5 Art and archaeology, in fact, share much common ground. Both practices reflect an expression of society (Haskell 1993, 4), an attempt by the artist/curator/interpreter to make sense of their personal experiences as they come face-to-face with different aspects of the material world (Renfrew 2003, 21; Laneri 2003, 181). However, whereas archaeology achieves this through passive, often static, modes of academic engagement, which cannot help but classify and compartmentalise concepts, the visual arts can assimilate more fluidly many differing but equally complex ideas regarding people, places, objects and histories. This provides for a more emotive and imaginative experience, both for the producer and the audience, as it avoids the imposition of direct curatorial narratives and instead provides artistically ‘couched’ dialogue that can challenge ideas without appearing explicit (Dutton on Kant 2009, 58–9). As such, 5

Examples include: art in archaeological displays (see Edmonds and Evans 1991; Putnam 2001; Renfrew 2003; Renfrew et al 2004); ethnographic exhibits (see Shelton 2001; Herle 2003; Gunn 2005; Leach 2005; 2007; Raymond and Salmond 2008); dissecting the museum as an institution and attracting new audiences (see McShine et al 1999; Jameson Jr et al 2003; Tully 2010).



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artistic interpretation can both sit alongside and challenge Western institutionalised methods of historical/archaeological display and transform exhibition spaces. Anthony Shelton suggests that this process could convert museums into ‘a hive of creative activity which would open the way for interventions and reinterpretations that would proactively challenge received expectations and stereotypes and encourage an active viewing public, rather than simply reproducing more familiar tomb-like galleries which congeal meaning and demand only a passive voyeuristic gaze from its audiences’ (Shelton 1993, 15). It is exactly this form of ‘active viewing’ that is needed to rekindle Egyptian display and enable alternate narratives to gain visibility alongside knowledge of ‘the Age of the Pharaohs’. Thus, a collaborative approach bringing together multiple visions of Egypt’s past by Egyptians, locals and museum staff through art–artefact unions could help meet the needs of Egyptian and Western stakeholders who want to see ‘Egypt in context’ and find personal resonance in museum exhibitions. The importance for artists of an awareness of the past, and the art of the past, in the creation of meaningful works (Eliot 1997) was also significant to the Re-imagining Egypt exhibition. While heritage is internalised by many contemporary Western artists, explicit visual references are more commonly made by artists from the Middle East, where the loss and destruction of heritage is more prevalent. Acting as a means of preserving and reclaiming lost or appropriated heritage, it is the integration of wider cultural markers that makes contemporary art from nations such as Egypt particularly suited to the archaeological museum context (Tully 2010, 302–20). Khaled Hafez, for example – the artist who created new works inspired by the Saffron Walden collection – focuses on the assimilation of ancient and contemporary icons to reflect the culture of recycling and how aspects of Egyptian art, from various periods, have influenced today’s universal visual culture. The result is the splicing of ‘superheroes’, such as Anubis with Batman, and Catwoman with Bastet, added to the frames of magazine models and presented alongside Arab–Islamic, Mediterranean and Judeo-Christian motifs. The work reveals the palimpsest of Egyptian and more global identities, and uses repetition, irony and humour to bring into question the dichotomies of East/West, ancient/modern, sacred/profane, good/evil, war/peace. The use of collage within his work and the ‘dripping paint effect’ reinforce the message that these binaries, like his paintings and museum exhibitions, are all constructed and should therefore be challenged. Held together by a contemporary message that crosses cultures, Hafez’s use of pop-language, collage and vibrant colour was something I felt would appeal and be accessible to local school-age participants from Saffron Walden during workshops, as well as to visitors to the completed exhibition (see Fig 7.1). In terms of the artwork produced by local children, only a century ago the idea that children’s art could be of any use to the adult world, let alone that we could glean new meanings from their work, was inconceivable. However, research by developmental psychologists since the 1980s (Gardener 1980) has begun to highlight the importance of both children’s perceptions of the world and the accessibility of their thoughts through art. Creative methods of expression are one of the richest sources within teaching to access a child’s needs, thinking and emotion (Lowenfield 1959, vi). Art production is a useful way for young people to make sense of the world at a time when thoughts may be difficult to vocalise (Gardener 1980, 12). Art also allows for much greater levels of experimentation than traditional forms of learning, as there is not the same fear of being ‘wrong’ (Dalley 1984, 8). It is also suggested that ‘drawing liberates other thoughts and connections’ (Boulter et al 2002, 13). The potential for art, therefore, to reveal numerous shades of understanding is highly appropriate in terms of the

Fig 7.1 Khaled Hafez, Saffron 1, 2013. Reproduced by kind permission of Khaled Hafez (image owner)

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collaborative aims of Re-imagining Egypt. The approach would provide a unique insight into young participants’ understanding of Egypt, as well as helping them to clarify and expand upon their existing knowledge and share their ideas with visitors of all ages and backgrounds. However, for both Khaled Hafez and the school-aged participants’ artworks to achieve the goal of enhancing audiences’ understanding of the museum objects on display and creating a more dynamic viewing experience, from Egyptian prehistory to present, it was essential to ensure that art and artefact were placed in specific contextual dialogues linking to the exhibition’s central theme. Creating Contextual Dialogues When dealing with communication across time, culture and different representational media (art/ artefact), maintaining direct contextual links is essential to an exhibition’s success. As discussed by Dutton (2009, 53), the combination of art and artefact creates a layering of experience which ‘can be most effective when separable pleasures [archaeological item and contemporary artwork] are coherently related to each other or interact with each other’. It must not be forgotten that, while art can enhance understanding, aspects of contemporary art may appear illusive to some viewers. Thus artefacts’ relationships and traditional labels for artworks and objects can provide a sense of security for visitors who may not take naturally to an unexpected viewing context. Selectivity in terms of art and artefact is therefore essential in creating a balanced exhibition space which highlights the merits of integrating ‘art’ and ‘science’ to provide new insights on the world. Significantly, it is not only the artefacts and audiences who win in terms of an extended understanding through this form of display partnership. Through hands-on engagement with artefacts and the collaborative curation process, the artists/participants are also able to extend their artistic practice through new experiences and by carrying out their own form of ‘fieldwork’ within the museum and presenting their own ‘data’ (Durand 2008, 77). This balance and the resulting mutual benefits are important to overcoming curatorial concerns about exhibition rooms being transformed into ‘art shows’ and artists’ anxieties as to whether positioning work within non-art museums reduces them to ethnographic subjects (Elliott 2008, 93). These issues were all addressed in Re-imagining Egypt through a focus on the creation of site-specific artworks/installations developed during Khaled Hafez’s residency and workshops with children from the local community. Combined with continuous consultation on how art and artefact should be presented to maintain optimum communication, the approach aimed to highlight the artists’ messages and their ramifications for new historical interpretations, while providing gravitas for the artworks through their links with each other and significant items from over 300,000 years of Egyptian history. The Exhibition Process Preparation for Re-imagining Egypt took place over six months prior to the exhibition opening. Starting with Saffron Walden’s collection, every item from Egypt was catalogued. This involved working between our ethnographic, archaeological and ceramic collections and resulted in a huge haul of potential artefacts, from stone tools to ceramics and textiles. Gaps in our collection – classical period and early Islamic items – were then identified and kindly filled by object loans from the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. A basic timeline was then developed, illustrated with artefacts, where possible, from Stone Age to present-day Egypt, including modern tourist souvenirs, photographs and images from the recent political turmoil (see Table 7.1). The timeline provided

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the starting point for workshops with five different groups of school-age children local to Saffron Walden: St Mary’s School, Year 5/6 (29 9–11-year-olds); Friends’ School, Year 7 (31 11–12-year-olds); Friends’ School, Sixth Form A-Level Art students (15 16–18-year-olds); Home School, Art Club (15 7–13-year-olds); and Museum Regulars (8 7–10-year-olds). Each group looked at Egypt’s history chronologically, handling artefacts where appropriate before discussing similarities and differences across eras in design, language, technology, governance and so on. Handling artefacts was particularly important, especially for the younger children, as the physical experience of a subject is essential in developing understanding (Pearce 1997, 238). With a more contextual awareness in place of Egypt, its people and diverse cultural influences, each group began picking out objects and themes that particularly interested them. The artistic projects and artefact groupings to go on display evolved from there. Each group was able to dedicate different amounts of time to the project, which influenced the scale and scope of their final product and the level of curatorial input; artworks were produced from a single three-hour session up to six two-hour sessions over consecutive weeks. Time Period

Artefacts

Stone Age c. 300,000–4000 BC Stone tools Predynastic 4000–3100 BC Pottery, make-up palettes, stone blades Pharaonic/Dynastic 3100–332 BC

Amulets, shabtis, statuettes, inscriptions, alabaster containers, ceramics

Classical (Ptolemaic Egypt 332–30 BC, Lamps, coins, mummy portraits, statuettes, Roman & Byzantine Egypt 30 BC–AD 641) textiles, glass Middle Ages (Arab AD 641–969, Fatimid AD Lamps, calligraphy, textiles, stonework, 969–1171, AD Ayyubid AD 1171–1250, Mamluk jewellery, coins, tiles, woodwork, glass AD 1250–1517) Early Modern (Ottoman AD 1517–1867, Lamps, calligraphy, textiles, stonework, French AD 1798–1801, under Muhammad Ali jewellery, coins, tiles, woodwork, glass AD 1805–82, Khedivate of Egypt AD 1867–91) Photographs from the era, lamps, Modern Egypt (British occupation 1882– calligraphy, textiles, stonework, jewellery, 1953, Sultanate of Egypt 1914–22, Kingdom coins, tiles, woodwork, glass, tourist of Egypt 1922–53, Republic 1953–2011) souvenirs Graffiti, images of protests, landscapes and scenes of contemporary life, modern Revolution 25 January 2011 to present products such as clothes, toys, technology, souvenirs, daily life items Table 7.1: The simple timeline and artefacts used to demonstrate the history of Egypt during workshops.

The Human Figure St Mary’s School chose the human figure as their theme, with a particular focus on two very different types of ‘doll’: ancient Egyptian shabtis, created to work for the deceased in the afterlife, and modern-day arusa (Arabic for doll), made by children to sell to tourists. After learning about

Fig 7.2 Ancient and modern shabtis on display in the gallery. Photo by Gemma Tully

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shabtis in more detail the children began to design ‘twenty-first-century shabtis’ upon which they wrote ‘spells’ which would make their lives easier today; ‘do my homework’ and ‘tidy my room’ featured frequently! Crafted with felt and fabric pens, before being stuffed and stitched, the shabtis were then displayed together in a ‘shabti box’, as they would have been in a tomb, alongside a real shabti from the museum’s collection (see Fig 7.2). The art–artefact installation was explained by a label in the display, which included a translation of the genuine shabti’s hieroglyphic text to help link the ancient and modern requests. For the arusa, we thought about what life was like for children in Egypt today. The focus was on those from poor rural families on the West Bank of the Nile in Luxor, who try to make extra money by selling homemade dolls, along with other souvenirs, to tourists. Made from recycled clothes, as in Egypt, the children from St Mary’s fashioned their own arusa based on costumes from different eras of Egyptian history. Titled ‘It’s a small world’, the dolls were displayed on the wall in a ‘dancing formation’ next to two arusa recently purchased in Egypt, an image of a little girl who makes them and a brief explanatory text. The shabtis and the arusa were positioned in close proximity to each other and close to the display of statuettes from other eras of Egypt’s history. The inclusion of multiple artistic and archaeological representations of ‘people’ in the gallery was important to help repopulate visitors’ visions of Egypt, ancient and modern, compared with traditional images that tend to present the country as a sparsely populated agricultural land or as a barren desert inhabited only by monuments and camels. The vibrant colours used in both works added to their impact. Standing out from the plain gallery walls, they drew the eye and complemented both the colours of the artefacts and those used by Khaled Hafez and the other community groups. Creating a more cohesive unit between art and artefact, this colour symmetry helped reinforce the exhibition’s message that Egypt has an interconnected historical narrative. The humour of the shabti spells and the personal nature of each arusa were also important in the creation of a more emotive and relaxed viewing environment in which the identities and ideas of multiple artists/authors/curators provoked audiences to laugh, discuss and add their own thoughts to the mix. Signs and Symbols, Lines and Language The Home School group selected Egypt’s many languages as the focus of their project. Starting with the symbols of Predynastic Egypt known from Naqada pottery, we discussed the idea of written language evolving and changing with new cultural influences and invasions. Where possible we looked at real artefacts containing hieroglyphic, Coptic, Greek, Latin and Arabic script. The decorative side of written language was also addressed, from hieroglyphs on tomb and temple walls to Arabic calligraphy, before participants began to design their own new language inspired by one or a combination of Egypt’s alphabets. The final designs were drawn onto thin linen with fabric crayons, pens and paint before being transformed into a giant wall hanging which was positioned in the exhibition near artefacts incorporating numerous Egyptian symbols and languages. The work found resonance with the cross-temporal dialogue of the shabtis spells – ancient and modern – while enforcing the concept of Egyptian history as palimpsest through the literal layering of Egyptinspired icons.



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Gods and Goddesses Most children (and adults) are fascinated by the ancient Egyptian gods, especially their often hybrid nature: part human, part animal. The children from our Museum Regulars group wanted to create new gods and give them a modern twist. We began by studying the ancient Egyptian gods and goddess; printed images, statuettes and reliefs were used. We discussed the kinds of creatures represented, the way they are often drawn with their bodies facing forward and their heads side on, and the colours used in ancient times. Inspired by the surrealist game the exquisite corpse (more commonly known as picture consequences), each child was then given a sheet of paper folded into three parts for the different sections of the body (1. head and shoulders; 2. arms and body; 3. waist and legs). Each segment of their god or goddess had to be different (e.g. one part human, one part animal, one part sea-creature), thus pushing the boundaries set for ancient Egyptian gods.6 The ‘New Gods of the Nile’ were then transferred onto good-quality art paper and recreated with layers of colour produced by wax crayons and vibrant paints. Each god/goddess was individually framed and hung in the gallery near artefacts depicting various Egyptian religious icons and opposite the work of Khaled Hafez, who also incorporated interpretations of sacred characters and motifs into his new works. Once again, the colours helped draw the different areas of the exhibition together and the tongue-in-cheek ‘formula’ for creating a god offered a playful alternative to traditional Egyptological theories. Crowning Glory/Pots and Patterns Both groups from the Friends’ School decided to use the shapes and patterns found on artefacts spanning the breadth of Egypt’s history as inspiration for their artistic creations. The 11–13-yearolds recreated the crowns of ancient Egypt with card and papier mâché and decorated them with the motifs from multiple eras, including contemporary Egyptian culture. The Sixth Form group used the same approach to design and decorate Predynastic-style pots. The crowns were mounted in a niche in the exhibition space, surrounding a panel that made explicit the legacy of ancient Egypt. This was significant, as the crowns of ancient Egypt are known only from artistic depictions. They have never been found in artefact form, and may have been purely symbolic. The label for the new crowns explained this and offered up the modern creations as a representation of Egypt’s wider historical glories. The pots were placed in a museum vitrine alongside other ceramics and containers from Egypt, which dated from 5000 BC to the twenty-first century. The students’ contributions neatly summarised these 7000 years and, while they looked very much at home among the artefacts, they injected an element of surprise and encouraged viewers to look more closely at all the objects and question their provenance. In vitrines where artworks were not present the focus remained on a mix of religious and daily life objects, presented cross temporally and referencing both Khaled Hafez and the community art. These included stone tools, amulets, make-up paraphernalia, oil lamps, textiles and stonework depicting religious scenes. 6

Most of the ancient Egyptian gods are presented as fully human, fully animal or a combination of one part animal, one part human. The only common exception is Ammut, ‘the devourer’, a goddess who has the head of a crocodile, the mane and body of a lion and the rear end and legs of a hippopotamus.

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The Writing is on the Wall To add further Egyptian voices to the display, a number of quotes were added to the top of the gallery walls. Reinforcing the messages evident in Khaled Hafez’s art, the statements were extracted from interviews carried out in Egypt between 2007 and 2009 as part of my PhD research into Egyptian perceptions of identity and history (Tully 2010). The artistic presentation of the quotes in blue calligraphy, ‘floating’ above the display, along with their somewhat poetic nature, helped bridge the divide between the more factual text panels and labels and the vibrant colours and personal interpretation of the art and artefacts. At the same time, the excerpts continued to pursue the exhibition’s aims of challenging narrow visions of Egypt as a country with a single ‘great’ past and revealing the multiple layers which form Egyptian identity today: Egyptian religion, history, culture and art are like a ring, a chain of evolution and continuation … (Elham Salah Eldien, curator at the Coptic Museum, Cairo) All periods of history played a part in shaping the next and were shaped by what went before. In Egypt all history blends into one. (Myrium Gergis Hanna, student at the American University in Cairo) Current society is a culmination of all Egyptian civilisations and this is what is great about Egypt, you can see history everywhere. (Haitham Saeed, engineer, Luxor) The objects of the past and the narratives of both history and the present are twins … to separate them is to alienate them. (Amir Nasr, shopkeeper, al-Quseir, Red Sea coast) Egyptian identity is complex and multi-layered. It interweaves Islamic, Jewish, Christian and Ancient Egyptian influences. (Khaled Hafez, artist, Cairo)

Outcomes and Evaluation On a purely statistical level, the exhibition was a success. The museum’s visitor numbers for the quarter of the exhibition were the highest since 2009 (a time when the museum had a larger staff and budget). In terms of changing perceptions of Egypt, informal interviews with visitors and the monitoring of ‘dwell time’ within the temporary exhibition space show that Re-imagining Egypt held people’s attention. It was also clear that the exhibition got people talking within their social/ family groups a great deal more than usual, as they discussed artworks and objects and what they liked and disliked, explained things to one another and often confessed that they had not thought about Egypt in this way before. There was also more frequent laughter, often provoked by the shabti spells or people’s comments on the art. However, the most important outcome



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from my perspective as the project’s coordinator, as well as the museum’s Learning Officer, was the impact of involvement on local participants. Putting the children in control, letting them act as the creators of knowledge, valuing their unique opinions and exhibiting their work with an equal status to that of important artefacts and creations by a famous Egyptian artist was clearly transformative. Some participants came back almost every week with a different family member to show them their artwork and to ‘talk them through’ the exhibition. Young people’s attitudes and patterns of behaviour are much less ‘fixed’ than those of adults, meaning that they are more willing to synthesise new knowledge within their existing frames of reference (Anderson 1997, 36). At the same time, children are an incredibly powerful source in the dissemination of new ideas to adults. Thus, the quality of the exhibition’s communication was undeniably enhanced, at least at local level, through the recognition of participants’ achievements, which prompted them to act as ambassadors of new understandings about Egypt and to challenge and extend others’ perceptions of the past. On a more general note, the concept underlying Re-imagining Egypt is significant, as it caters for numerous narratives rather than merely representing a single form of knowledge. The collaborative aspect, crossing generations, cultures and forms of communication – art and artefact – supports the argument that new methods of display can catalyse active meaning-making in the museum (Roberts 1997, 3) to cut through century-old stereotypes and traditional ‘ways of seeing’ (Berger 1972). Engaging with communities, putting cultures into context and making connections with modern life are essential if museums are to survive and maintain relevance in the twenty-first century. Re-imagining Egypt is proof that museums can do more than inspire wonder in the case of Egypt and I am confident that multiple cultures and histories from around the globe could be equally successfully ‘re-imagined’. Bibliography and References ACTS 7, 22 The Bible, New Revised Standard Version Anderson, D A, 1997 A Common Wealth: Museums in the Learning Age, Department for Culture, Media and Sport, London Assman, J, 2003 The Mind of Egypt: History and Meaning in the Time of the Pharaohs, Metropolitan Books, New York Berger, J, 1972 Ways of seeing, BBD & Penguin, London Boulter, C, Tunnicliffe, S and Reiss, M, 2002 Probing Children’s Understandings of the Natural World, paper presented at the Institute of Education, University of London, October 2002 Bredekamp, H, 1995 The lure of antiquity and the cult of the machine: The kunstkammer and the evolution of nature, art and technology, trans A Brown, Markus Weiner, Princeton NJ Curl, J S, 1982 Egyptomania: The Egyptian Revival: An Introductory Study of a Recurring Theme in the History of Taste, George Allen and Unwin, London ——, 1994 Egyptomania: The Egyptian Revival: A Recurring Theme in the History of Taste, 2 edn, Manchester University Press, Manchester Curtis, G W N, 2003 Human remains: The sacred, museums and archaeology, Public Archaeology 3 (1), 21–32 Dalley, T, 1984 Art as Therapy: An Introduction to the use of Art as a Therapeutic Technique, Routledge, London

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Dodson, A and Ikram, S, 1998 The Mummy in Ancient Egypt: Equipping the Dead for Eternity, Thames and Hudson, London Doyon, W, 2007 Representing Egypt’s past: Archaeology and identity in Egyptian museum practice, unpublished Masters of Art, University of Washington ——, 2008 The poetics of Egyptian museum practice, British Museum Studies in Ancient Egypt and the Sudan 10, 1–37 Durand, C A, 2008 Fieldwork in a glass case: Artistic practice and museum ethnography, in Pasifika Styles: Artists Inside the Museum (eds R Raymond and A Salmond), Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge, 75–80 Dutton, D, 2009 The Art Instinct, Oxford University Press, Oxford Edmonds, M R and Evans, C, 1991 The place of the past: art and archaeology in Britain, Kettles Yard, Cambridge Eliot, T S, 1997 (1920) The sacred wood. Essays on poetry and criticism, Faber & Faber, London Elliott, M, 2008 Some anxious moments: The mechanisms and pragmatisms of a collaborative exhibition, in Pasifika Styles: Artists Inside the Museum (eds R Raymond and A Salmond), Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge, 89–95 Faulkner, N, 2000 Archaeology from below, Public Archaeology 1, 21–33 Freund, K (dir), 1932 The Mummy, Universal Studios, 73 mins Gardener, H, 1980 Artful Scribbles. The Significance of Children’s Drawings, Basic Books, New York Gell, A, 1998 Art and Agency: an anthropological theory, Oxford University Press, Oxford Gosden, C, 2004 Making and display: Our aesthetic appreciation of things and objects, in Substance, Memory, Display: Archaeology and Art (eds C Renfrew, C Gosden and E DeMarris), McDonald Institute Monographs, Cambridge, 35–45 Gunn, W, ed, 2005 Creativity and Practice Research Paper, Creativity and Practice Research Group, Visual Research Centre, University of Dundee, Dundee Haskell, F, 1993 History and its Image: Art and the Interpretation of the Past, Yale University Press, New Haven CT Heidegger, M, 2001 Poetry, Language, Thought, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, London Henare, A, Holbrand, M and Wastell, S, 2007 Introduction, in Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically (eds A Henare, M Holbrand and S Wastell), Routledge, New York, 1–31 Herle, A, 2003 Objects, Agency and Museums. Continuing dialogues between the Torres Strait Islanders and Cambridge, in Museums and Source Communities (eds L Peers and A K Brown), Routledge, London, 194–207 Hooper-Greenhill, E, 2000 Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture, Routledge, London Impey, O R and MacGregor, A, eds, 1985 The Origins of the Museum: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-century Europe, Clarendon Press, Oxford, New York Jacq, C, 1997 Ramses: The Son of Light, Warner Books, London ——, 1998a Ramses: The Eternal Temple, Warner Books, London ——, 1998b Ramses: The Battle of Kadesh, Warner Books, London ——, 1998c Ramses: The Lady of Abu Simbel, Warner Books, London ——, 1999 Ramses: Under the Western Acacia, Warner Books, London Jameson, J H Jr, Ehrenhard, J E and Finn, C A, eds, 2003 Ancient Muses: Archaeology and the Arts, The University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa AL



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Laneri, N, 2003 Is archaeology fiction? Some thoughts about experimental ways of communicating archaeological processes to the external world, in Ancient Muses: Archaeology and the Arts (eds J H Jameson, J E Ehrenhard and C A Finn), The University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa AL, 179–92 Leach, J, 2005 Disciplinary specialisation and collaborative endeavours: some challenges presented by sci-art projects, in Creativity and Practice Research Papers (ed W Gunn), Creativity and Practice Research Group, Visual Research Centre, University of Dundee, Dundee ——, 2007 Differentiation and Encompassment: A Critique of Alfred Gell’s Theory of the Abduction of Creativity, in Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically (eds A Henare, M Holbrand and S Wastell), Routledge, New York, 167–88 Lowenfield, V, 1959 The Nature of Creative Activity, Routledge, London MacGregor, A, ed, 1994 Sir Hans Sloane: Collector, Scientist, Antiquary: Founding Father of the British Museum, The British Museum in association with Alistair McAlpine, London McShine, K, Williams, C, Lowry, G and Arnold, E, 1999 The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect, Museum of Modern Art, New York Miller, D, 2005 Materiality, Duke University Press, Durham NC Mitchell, T, 1991 Colonising Egypt, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Moser, S, 2006 Wondrous Curiosities: Ancient Egypt at the British Museum, Chicago University Press, Chicago Pearce, S, 1997 Experiencing Material Culture in the Western World, Leicester University Press, Leicester Peers, L and Brown, A K, eds, 2003 Museums and Source Communities: A Routledge Reader, Routledge, London Putnam, J, 2001 Art and Artefact: The Museum as Medium, Thames & Hudson, London Raymond, R and Salmond, A, eds, 2008 Pasifika Styles: Artists Inside the Museum, Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge Reid, D, 1985 Indigenous Egyptology: the decolonisation of a profession, Journal of the American Oriental Society 105, 233–46 ——, 1997 Nationalising the Pharaonic Past: Egyptology, Imperialism and Egyptian Nationalism 1922– 1952, in Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East (eds I Gershoni and J Jankowski), Columbia University Press, New York, 127–315 ——, 2002 Whose Pharaohs? Archaeology, Museums and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War One, University of California Press, London Renfrew, C, 2003 Figuring it out. What are we? Where do we come from? The Parallel Visions of Artists and Archaeologists, Thames & Hudson, London Renfrew, C, Gosden, C and Demarrais, E, eds, 2004 Substance, Memory, Display: Archaeology and Art, McDonald Institute Monographs, Cambridge Roberts, L C, 1997 From Knowledge to Narrative: Educators and the Changing Museum, Smithsonian Institute Press, Washington DC Shelton, A, 1993 Re-presenting non-western art and ethnography at Brighton, The Royal Pavilion and Museums Review 1, 1–14 ——, 2001 Unsettling the meaning: critical museology, art, and anthropological discourse, in Academic Anthropology and the Museum: Back to the Future (ed M Bouquet), 142–61 Sommers, S, 1999 The Mummy, Universal Pictures, 125 mins Stocking, G W, 1985 Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture, The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison WI

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Strassler, R B, ed, 2007 The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories, trans A L Purvis, Pantheon Books, New York Tully, G, 2010 Answering the calls of the living: collaborative practice in archaeology and ancient Egyptian daily life display in Western museums, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Southampton Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs, 2007–2008 The O2 (arena), London, 15 November 2007–30 August 2008 Warburton, W, 1738–41 The Divine Legation of Moses, T Cox, London Wood, M, 1998 The use of the Pharaonic past in modern Egyptian nationalism, Journal of the American Research Centre in Egypt 35, 179–96

8

Interview1 – Evita Buša

Could you reflect on your career so far, focusing on your work on community engagement? Since I started to work in the museum field in 1996, when simultaneously finishing my Bachelor studies in Art History at the Art Academy of Latvia, I have been looking for answers about how contemporary art and art museums are relevant to peoples’ lives. Through the years as a professional my attention always was drawn to community-based art projects. After completing an MA degree in International Museum Studies at Gothenburg University in 2004 I moved to Puerto Rico, a small island very far from my homeland of Latvia, a place with utterly different cultural traditions and customs. Everything was new: the language, the history of the country and the society. Nevertheless, what always inspired me were the people – generous, warmhearted and always welcoming. In Puerto Rico I began to volunteer at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (MAC) and soon after I was given an opportunity to work on a research project about the history of the Rafael M. de Labra Building, which had housed the Museum since 2002. Strategically located in one of the busiest areas in Santurce,2 it has served its community for almost 100 years, initially as a public intermediary school, a function it fulfilled until the late 1980s. It is a landmark of local cultural heritage and the island’s history, which blends North American and tropical architecture traditions. This historical monument holds a very special place in the memories of local people and plays an essential role in understanding the connections between the past, present and future of Santurce. For me the research project was a means to engage personally with the community – a real turning point; I could listen and look for new ways to create meaningful experiences through the arts which any person could relate to. Since November 2008, as Head of Public Programming and Education Department and together with the new Executive Director Marianne Ramirez Aponte, I embarked on the exciting journey of professional growth and fulfillment of my beliefs in the museum’s capacity to become a catalyst for social changes, a centre for empowering learning experiences using art as an extraordinary tool for raising awareness and promoting cross-disciplinary dialogues. Could you describe the Contemporary Art Museum of Puerto Rico, its history, mission and activities? The Contemporary Art Museum of Puerto Rico (MAC) was founded in 1984 as an initiative of 1

This conversation took place in August 2015; since then several of the future projects mentioned here have been started or completed. 2 Santurce is composed of 40 sub-neighborhoods and forms part of San Juan, the capital of Puerto Rico. Its population is about 75,317, of which 49% is below the poverty level (Reference PRCS, US Census Bureau). It is a rich multicultural zone, with marked contrasts between areas of opulence and poverty, massive urban deterioration and new businesses, a site of beautiful colonial and contemporary architectural monuments and building debris, a scene of constant violence and vibrant cultural life.

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a group of artists and community members supported by private companies and government entities. For the past 30 years it has been devoted to the study, documentation, collection, preservation and promotion of the art produced since the mid-twentieth century in Puerto Rico, the Caribbean and Latin America. Its mission is to foster an open view on contemporary art within the Puerto Rican context by encouraging a constant dialogue between artists and audiences, between the different art movements, between past and present and among art practice, theory and criticism by advancing curatorial work and by setting up strategies that make the Museum’s cultural diversity, exhibitions, activities and historical building available to all kinds of audiences. Since 2009 the MAC has experienced transformation under the direction of Marianne Ramírez Aponte, who envisions the Museum as a hybrid institution – a centre for the research of contemporary culture, a creative laboratory for artists and a cultural centre open to interdisciplinary activities and all social groups. The MAC has developed a wide range of programmes and educational services. These include the ‘Live Workshop’, an artist-in-residency programme in which the museum’s audience is invited to observe creation processes and interact and collaborate with artists; the ‘Education Program for General Public and School Groups’, a variety of complementary exhibition activities (guided and interactive tours, gallery talks, creative encounters, workshops and so on); the ‘Education Program for Specialized Public’, which focuses on activities such as symposia, professional training workshops, conferences and seminars offered by guest artists, art critics and guest curators; the ‘Teachers Club MAC’, a programme whose purpose is to enhance teaching and learning practices through workshops, talks, artists’ encounters and cross-curricular teaching lessons; and the ‘MAC LINKS Program: Museum/School’, which establishes and cultivates ongoing pedagogical and social liaison with education professionals and institutions by offering alternative and creative learning experiences to all members of the school community (grades K–12) inside and outside the museum’s walls. Through the arts and creative practices it provides new alternatives for children and young adults aimed at social transformation and higher intellectual performance. The programme also provides ongoing training experiences to teachers and educators, such as workshops, lectures and cross-curricular learning lessons, with the integration of the visual and performing arts into other academic subjects, such as science, maths, Spanish, English and social studies. The ‘Artistic Action for the Community Program’ responds to the needs of low-income communities who do not have regular access to educational and cultural activities. As part of the programme the MAC commissions artistic projects that directly engage community members in their creation. The content of the artworks produced in a variety of media, such as performance and installation art, is directly related to the history and cultural heritage of the city and its different barrios; the ‘Convivencia Creativa y Ciudadana’ is an afterschool programme offered parallel to the academic school year. Composed of series of workshops, it is designed to encourage talented teenagers from low-income families to express themselves through the arts and take action against violence and social injustice by becoming spokespersons of their peers and developing diverse skills as future leaders of their communities. How would you define cultural heritage? I consider that in terms of definitions, even though is a very wide subject, well formulated statements already exist, such as the one declared by UNESCO: ‘Cultural heritage is the legacy of physical artifacts and intangible attributes of a group of society that are inherited from past generation, maintained in the present and bestowed for the benefit of future generations’. Never-



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theless, when it comes to the act of choosing what (from myriads of elements of our material and immaterial culture) should be preserved as such, there is no pre-made formula which would always work, as it is connected to live and ongoing changing societal values systems. At the same time heritage can be seen as a debatable process circumscribed within political and economic domains. Can contemporary art be understood as heritage? Contemporary art, as with any other form of human expression, forms part of the legacy of its time and cultural richness. Contemporary art represents and reflects societal value systems, beliefs, traditions and lifestyles and therefore serves as a critical witness of its time. Both tangible and intangible in its expressions, contemporary art forms part of a museum’s collections and becomes itself part of our new traditions, present everywhere in our life through media, marketing, music, urban culture and commercial industries. What does ‘community engagement’ mean to you in your work? Community engagement should always be at the heart of the museum’s practice. However, it is huge challenge. How do we tackle the needs of different generations and social groups in an era of multiple technological media? How do we stay relevant and maintain live connections with an ever-changing and shifting society? For me it starts with bringing people together for dialogue, giving tools and opportunities to pursue deeper engagement with art, partnering with diverse community groups and organisations where the community is considered and respected as an equal team player. What is ‘community engagement’ with respect to museums in the Puerto Rican context? The programmes of ‘community engagement’ and community-based initiatives are very widespread, though mainly run by non-profit organisations delivering social care services and by independent culture activists. In the museum field it is mainly understood in terms of providing a variety of educational services, and when it comes to the inclusion of the voices of museums’ audiences and the public in general it is usually practised through dialogue and reciprocal learning between the educators and the public. However, it is not commonly reflected in the exhibition and collection areas. In Puerto Rico it hasn’t been common for local art museums to assume the role of engaging with communities in terms of social empowerment outside their walls, apart from the MAC. Could you please describe a project where communities are being engaged, including the history of the project, its aims, methods and outcomes. For the past five years the MAC has been among the leading organisations working on the regeneration of Santurce,3 constantly building up partnerships with different community groups and organisations, as well as with professional institutions and associations representing arts, science, environmental preservation and civil rights. As affirmed by the MAC Executive Director, the Museum has broadened its educational outreach to respond to the needs of its neighbouring

3

In 2009 the MAC was one of the leader organisations of the movement arteSanturce: De Barrio Obrero a la 15 and is currently an active member of the alliance Imagine Santurce.

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communities and to contribute towards the eradication of violence among youngsters, creating a sense of belonging to and admiration for our cultural heritage and the diversity that characterises the city of Santurce, the protection of our natural resources and the creation of opportunities for self-fulfilled projects. In 2014 the MAC launched ‘Proyecto Santurce: 30 años del MAC en el barrio’ as its main project to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the Museum, with an aspiration to enable deep reflection about urban culture and the local community and to provide continuity to the work the institution carries out towards the cultural rescue of Santurce by using art as a tool for social and urban transformation. ‘Proyecto Santurce’ comprised an exhibition, six commissioned art projects and on-site artistic actions that took place in public and community spaces, as well as an educational programme designed to establish pedagogical and social links with the different communities. Four of the commissioned projects in four different sectors were accomplished through the direct input of the community, including an education programme and an artists-in-residence programme. The invited artists and the MAC educators worked in a community for an extended period of time (six to eight months) to familiarise themselves with and critically interpret the convergence of historical, social, economical and political factors defining the current situation of each community. A commissioned project, ‘Maelo en el cuerpo’, conceived by the acknowledged local choreographer and artist Awilda Sterling and carried out in the Machuchal sector, explored the figure of the renowned composer and singer of salsa/bolero music, Ismael ‘Maelo’ Rivera. Rivera’s artistic oeuvre represents the cultural richness and complexity of Santurce, a cradle of the most celebrated percussion artists of Puerto Rico. It was initiated with a series of workshops and meetings at the Elderly Housing for Nurses, located in the neighbourhood of the house where the legendary musician once lived. In its final stage the project also involved the youth theatre group Jóvenes del 98. In May 2015 the artist Awilda Sterling presented the final artistic piece in front of Rivera’s house; it was inspired by Rivera’s musical legacy and the blend of popular cultural elements seen through the eyes and memories of the group of elderly people she had worked with for four months. As the result of this project the MAC established an alliance with the Ismael Rivera Foundation, setting as the future goal a renovation of his house in collaboration with community members and the creation of a new permanent exhibition. Sterling became a passionate investigator of Ismael Rivera’s legacy and decided to continue her work in the community through a new series of workshops for adolescents titled ‘De Maelo a Hip Hop’, in collaboration with DJ Velcro. Another project, entitled ‘Stop 16 ½’, aimed to empower and make visible Alto del Cabro, the small and forgotten sector of Santurce which had been marginalised in the processes of urban planning. During a six-month period four artists, José Pepe Alvarez, Nibia Pastrana, Karen Langevin and Karlo Ibarra, worked closely with the community members through regular meetings, interviews, collecting memorable objects and artistic improvisations as part of their daily visits to the streets and sidewalks of the community. Although at the beginning very resistant, the community members slowly accepted the artists’ ‘intrusion’ and towards the final stage of the project became actively involved in the revitalisation of their neighborhood, removing the accumulated garbage and rubble and initiating their own community garden project. The final artistic event evolved into a whole neighborhood celebration, in which the community members worked together hand in hand with the artists and the Museum’s staff and opened their houses and small



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businesses to receive both the Museum’s public and their neighbours; even the elderly people who were rarely seen outside their houses came out into the streets to share the experience with everybody. The streets of the barrio, considered dangerous at night, became alive, full of people enjoying the live improvisations by the artists, exploring video and sound installations such as the one by Pepe Alvarez – a jukebox with the voices of the community members through which, for 25 cents, one could choose to listen to the recording of the vivid stories of one’s neighbour – or rediscovering the vicinity through the audio tour created by Nibia Pastrana. ‘Proyecto Santurce’ permitted the Museum to connect with people who might never have visited an art museum and who might never have felt the power of art in their lives. The MAC, with this project, has taken another step towards the transformation of its practices of community engagement, which are still in a formative phase. Currently the MAC continues to work with all the communities involved in the project, together developing proposals to raise necessary funds for future initiatives. Community engagement seems to be increasingly common in museology and heritage; from your perspective, what would you consider as key moments of change in this concept and practice over the years in your area of the field? In art museums, towards the end of 1990s and at the beginning of 2000, there was a major movement to expand their vision as social platforms, to become active cultural centres connected with their communities. These phenomena have been summarised by Bonnie Pitman and Ellen Hirzy in ‘New Forums; Art Museums and Communities’: ‘As real and virtual destinations, museums are becoming less event-driven and more focused on providing opportunities for discovery, involvement and imaginative response. They invite contemplation and celebration, offering experiences with works of art that range from serene and intimate to spirited and communal’ (Pitman and Hirzy 2004, 7). Likewise, the social and economic circumstances and shifting societal values have pushed art museums’ limits towards reinvention of their scope and dynamics with their audiences to prove their role not as mere educational institutions and guardians of cultural heritage but also as the centres of social significance in people’s daily lives and the protagonists of cultural activism and artistic production. Do you think the term ‘community engagement’ is still meaningful, and as a concept in practice has it achieved its goals? Undoubtedly it is and will be always, as the community is the living organism that keeps the museums alive and shapes the museum’s practices. Community engagement cannot be defined as something that has final completion; it is ongoing work and a non-stop cumulative learning process. From your experience, what are the challenges and/or limitations to engaging with communities in the museological context? It is ever more difficult to draw the borders between where the museum’s work starts and ends when it comes to community empowerment. How do we balance the urgent need of empowering our communities to stand up for their cultural heritage and civil rights, but at the same time not undermine the professional standards of museological work? The practice shows ever-increasing numbers of community groups in need and very limited economic support for cultural and educational initiatives of this kind, especially if we talk about Puerto Rico. Even if the museum

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has an open-minded visionary direction and committed staff, the true obstacles to overcome are timing, human and financial resources. Given the recent shifts in heritage and museums over the past few decades, where do you think the priorities in the profession should now lie? Where should we go from here? This is a very difficult question to answer as it depends on the country’s cultural policy in the first place; each country has its particular conditions and museums’ situations vary greatly from each other. Nowadays the social and economic situation in Puerto Rico and in the world in general is very complex and very often it is a constant economic struggle for museums as well. It is an imperative of the museums to be able to constantly adjust to this reality and to be open and innovative in looking for new ways to tackle given circumstances, taking gradual steps in building and sustaining solid relationships with their communities. Without a true connection with people’s lives and needs, museums cannot justify their existence. Bibliography and References Pitman, B and Hirzy, E, 2004 New forums: Art museums and communities. American Association of Museums, Washington DC

9

Interview – Shatha Abu Khafajah Could you reflect on your career so far, focusing on your work on heritage? I work in the architecture department at the Hashemite University in Jordan. The department takes an interdisciplinary approach to architecture, and part of this approach is viewing material of the past, especially architecture, as a source of education, inspiration and creativity. Therefore, students, at their different learning stages, are strongly encouraged to critically examine and thoroughly analyse material of the past and use this analysis in their creations of new concepts, technologies and solutions in architectural design. This engagement qualifies material from the past to become heritage. The department provides two heritage specialised modules focusing on the basics of heritage conservation and management. They help the students to gain basic knowledge and decide if they want to pursue future degrees in heritage. We design the modules to help the students to harness their basic knowledge of heritage to approach certain local heritage sites. The approach is usually in two stages: the first is based on conventional identification and evaluation of the sites, and the second is based on creating material (we call it creative material, such as models, interpretation signs and 3-dimensional reconstruction animated videos) out of this engagement. The first time we taught a heritage specialised module the students noted that they used the creative material to communicate with their families about the heritage sites, and reported the excitement and knowledge the material initiated among their families. This inspired us to alter the second stage in the coming courses to include a presentation day in which the students presented the creative material to other students in the university. The students organised an exhibition for this in the available open spaces there. They then used the feedback they received from this communication to improve the creative material they generated in the first stage of the project, and made it reflect local communities’ knowledge, feelings, imagination and attachment to the sites in question. The presentation day provided an opportunity to create a supportive audience of heritage within the university not only among the department students but also among other students. In addition, the experience was an enjoyable activity through which our students gained skills in communicating heritage to others. In fact, many students decided after the presentation day that they were seriously considering heritage for their postgraduate studies. How would you define ‘heritage’? My understanding of heritage has gone through changes that resonate with the different stages of my education. While studying architecture I tended to define heritage as something colourful, engaging, spiritual and inspired by the past. This changed when archaeology became my field of interest. At that stage a small pottery sherd, no matter how insignificant, was a masterpiece for me that was worthy of investigation, celebration and exhibition. While doing my doctoral thesis I became interested in how states and peoples define heritage (official and public definitions of

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heritage). I was specifically interested in definitions constructed by voiceless people of the past and the present. Finally, I grew to understand heritage as anything that affects us. The effect could be positive or negative, minor or major, temporary or permanent, individual or collective. Heritage could be tangible or intangible, monumental or mediocre, celebrated or oppressed. This does not mean that everything has to be celebrated as heritage. In this matter heritage is like memory; we cannot remember everything, but we have to remember enough in order to effectively move forward. How is ‘heritage’ commonly understood in the Jordanian context? For the sake of clarity I will speak about how material of the past is understood. Heritage as a term is embedded in this understanding. Officially, material of the past in Jordan is split into two categories: Antiquities and Heritage. The Antiquity Law was formulated during the British mandate, which extended between 1921 and 1946, to protect material of the past, both portable and immovable, dated before 1700. The term heritage or turath (the Arabic word for heritage) is officially defined by the Heritage Law, issued in 2003, to include material of the past dated after AD 1750. The informal definition of heritage, or heritage as understood by people, tends to include anything that people are emotionally attached to, regardless of its date. For example, a Roman coin is someone’s heritage not because it is Roman but because her/his grandfather inherited it from his father, and it came down to her/him through her/his father. In this case ancestors created the link between people and the Roman coin, and transformed it into heritage. Similarly, an Islamic transcript dated to the seventh century AD, or a Byzantine church dated to the fourth century AD, is also someone’s heritage because it represents her/his religion. As heritage is generally referred to in a positive sense, ‘black’ or ‘bad’ heritage is hardly spoken of at either the official or the local level. Very few people tend to emphasise the importance of highlighting the troubled times in history, especially the recent ones, as heritage in order to learn from it. What does ‘community engagement’ mean to you in your work? Engaging with people has always been essential for my work as a scholar. When I started doing my PhD in 2003 I realised that any real contribution on my part could be achievable only if I approached the local community and engaged with it about the topic that I was, and still am, researching: material of the past. I first did it because I wanted to add value to my research, but then I realised that community engagement is far more important than that. Besides empowering people by giving them a voice and making their views valid, community engagement in academia can open researchers’ minds, reorient their interests and challenge assumptions, not only in the field of heritage studies but in any discipline. This is especially important in postcolonial contexts in general and in the Arab world in particular. Scholars in such contexts tend to follow the official assumptions without critical engagement. Community engagement allows them to break away from the official scenarios and be rooted in the local context. Heritage-related projects can make essential contributions to local communities, especially in developing countries. They can empower local communities. This empowerment can lead to community development and project sustainability. An example of this empowerment comes from Petra, where the Winged Lions Temple Project entailed training members of the local community to help in documentation and restoration work. Many female members of this



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conservative community had their first ever paid job through this project that enabled them to support their families (see Tuttle 2013). Another example comes from the ancient site of Umm el-Jimal, where the quality of the local community’s social and financial life is enhanced by heritage-related projects designed and managed by American–Jordanian collaboration (de Vries 2013). How is ‘community engagement’ usually defined in Jordan? Can you describe and evaluate a project where communities are being engaged? Although material of the past has always been a subject of interest and investigation in Arab culture, local communities experienced modern interest in material of the past as part of Western colonialism in the region. Archaeological institutes and foreign agencies representing the colonial powers in the region, such as Britain, France, Germany, Italy and the USA, were established in the main cities as early as the second half of the nineteenth century. For example, the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) was established in 1865 to support archaeological work in the region. The British School for Oriental Research (BASOR), the American School for Oriental Research (ASOR), the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft and the French Dominican Ecole Biblique were established in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Egypt, with special interest in biblical archaeology as early as the late nineteenth century. The Arab local communities have always been associated with work and literature related to the exploration and interpretation of material of the past. Since the early expeditions to the region, dated to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Western explorers relied on the local communities to guide them. Local communities constituted the majority of archaeological excavations’ workforces. They were strongly present in literature that documented expeditions in the region. Their presentation in anthropological/archaeological accounts as being primitive, passive and irrelevant to the distant pasts of the famous ancient cultures that evolved in the region shaped the literature of orientalism theory and thus provided an explanation of the way the West perceived, created or invented the East. Archaeology in Jordan was institutionalised even before the country itself was established in 1946, as the British Mandate in the region founded the Department of Antiquities in 1924. The local communities are viewed by this institution and other relevant ones as being unaware of the importance of the past and as a hazard to archaeological sites. Consequently, most of the archaeological sites within urban contexts were seized. People who lived within designated sites were evacuated and displaced. Thus, the alleged irrelevance and hostility of local communities to material of the past, which is constructed by orientalists and fostered in the postcolonial context, still dominates governmental perceptions and actions concerned with local communities and material of the past, thus preventing community engagement. However, this is different when it comes to foreign agencies operating in Jordan, as their heritage-related projects are increasingly geared towards community development and sustainability. Increasingly, foreign scholars and project directors are engaging with the local communities and incorporating them within their projects. The nature of engagement varies according to project agendas and approaches, sites’ histories and conditions, and people’s socio-cultural and economic contexts. The diverse initiatives of engagement with the local communities in heritage projects were brought together under the initiative of SCHEP: Sustainable Cultural Heritage through Engagement of Local Communities Project. Funded by the USAID, the initiative was signed to be implemented by the American Center for Oriental Research (ACOR) in November 2014. The

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goal of the project is to establish effective networks between the diverse communities directly and indirectly involved in heritage sites, the involved teams and professionals, the related institutes and governmental agencies, and the local communities, in order to make the sites part of the communities’ empowerment and socio-cultural and economic development.1 The archaeological sites that entail the most prominent community engagement projects are Tall Hesban, Petra and Umm el-Jimal. The three of them are interesting and worthy of exploration. I have chosen to elaborate on the history of engagement with the local community in Tall Hesban to show how engagement there has changed since the archaeological excavation started in the 1960s. The Andrews University team, which has been exploring the site since 1968, divides the work in Tall Hesban into two stages: the Heshbon Expedition stage dated from 1968 to 1976, and the Hesban cultural heritage project that started in 1996 and is still active. As the names of the stages indicate, the first stage was concerned with finding the connection between Tall Hesban and the biblical site of Heshbon, while the current stage is concerned with the maintenance and representation of the site.2 Engagement with the local community of Hesban differed in each stage. In the first stage the team included members of the local community as workers. But, unlike most of the expeditions, the heads of the main families were in continuous communication with the directors of the expeditions in Tall Hesban from the start. In the second stage the interest of the Andrews University team in the site was expanded to include historical periods more relevant to the current socio-cultural context and the local community of Hesban: the Islamic periods. The team implemented other levels of intervention besides excavation, such as consolidation and restoration of the physical remains in the Tall. The director of the team since 1996, Øystein LaBianca, has developed an anthropological approach that aims to explore the past and the present as part of a long-term life cycle in Hesban. This resulted in a developing interest in the contemporary local community of Hesban and their ways of life. The interaction that the team initiated in its approach to the local community of Hesban is not restricted to those who are directly engaged in a professional relationship with the team, such as the local workers or the mayor of Hesban. Every effort is made to benefit the local shops and small businesses during the time the team spends in Hesban by, for example, grocery shopping for the team in Hesban’s shops and depending on the local small restaurants to prepare the meals of the team; these actions have positive effects not only on the economic level of the Tall but also on the establishment and reinforcement of trust in the team. In addition, empowering people through emphasising their ownership of and responsibility for the Tall is vital for its preservation, especially during the absence of the Andrews University team from Hesban. The time and effort the team invests in communicating and interacting with and helping the local community is recognised and appreciated by the people of Hesban. This narrows the cultural gap between the two. In fact, the cultural difference generates interest and enriches communication between the two parties. It leads to active interaction in which mutual efforts are made to enhance the quality of communication between the two groups to benefit the Tall and its community.

1 2

See https://acorjordan.wordpress.com/2015/05/04/schep/ for further information. See http://www.madabaplains.org/Hesban/overview.htm



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Community engagement seems to be increasingly common in museology and heritage. From your perspective, what would you consider as key moments of change in this concept and practice over the years in your area of the field? I believe a key moment of change in engagement with material of the past occurred when the human factor and contexts were used to understand material of the past in the West. This moment, which is a result of vital and long changes in many aspects of life, liberated archaeology from the rigidity of scientific approaches and allowed for an interdisciplinary understanding of the past. Acknowledgment of the human factor in interpretations developed interpretive archaeology in the 1970s. This archaeology ‘released the past into public debates’ (Hodder 1991, 15) by transferring ‘archaeological knowledge into a more democratic structure’ (Hodder 1991, 9). This transformation was essential for establishing ‘community engagement’ as we know it today. When the human factor is considered in approaching the past, meanings develop and attachment occurs; thus community engagement evolves. Do you think the term ‘community engagement’ is still meaningful and, as a concept in practice, has it achieved its goals? Community engagement is the future of material of the past. I believe it is this engagement that turns this material into heritage; something people are attached to and affected by. It is still developing in theory and evolving through diverse and different practices related to heritage. Its application in non-Western contexts needs to be contextualised. In the Arab world most community engagement projects are carried out by foreign actors, mainly Western scholars and organisations. Despite the importance of their work, the projects are contingent on the presence of these actors; once they are gone the projects cease to exist. Theories and practices in such contexts need to look for the roots of community engagement in its culture and build on it to make community engagement sustainable and independent from ‘foreign’ help and intervention. From your experience, what are the challenges and/or limitations to engaging with communities in the archaeological context? The main challenges are the exclusion of communities by related governmental policies and practices and the belief among local scholars that local communities are a source of problems for archaeological sites. A prominent example of this is the government tendency to segregate archaeological sites from local contexts by erecting protective fences, evacuating local people and targeting only tourists in heritage interpretation and presentation. Given the recent shifts in heritage and museums over the past few decades, where do you think the priorities in the profession should now lie? Where should we go from here? I believe there is plenty of room for heritage in school curricula in Jordan. Material of the past is always approached in school curricula from the perspective of its use as a tourist destination and a source of tourism-related money. A different approach to heritage, based on its potential as a source of inspiration, education and creativity, will liberate heritage from the strictly touristic framework and allow for mental and emotional engagement. Engagement of students implies, most of the time, engagement of their families. Thus, a solid and wide base for community engagement can develop from schools. I believe this is where the future of heritage and community engagement lies.

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Bibliography and References Hodder, I, 1991 Interpretive archaeology and its role, American Antiquity 56 (1), 7–18. De Vries, B, 2013 Archaeology and Community in Jordan and Greater Syria: Traditional Patterns and New Directions, Near Eastern Archaeology 76 (3), 132–40. Tuttle, C A, 2013 Preserving Petra Sustainably (One Step at a Time): The Temple of the Winged Lions Cultural Resource Management Initiative as a Step Forward, Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies 1 (1), 1–23.

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Engaging Communities of De-industrialisation: The Mapping Baybrook and Mill Stories Projects of Baltimore, USA Michelle L. Stefano and Nicole King

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n newspapers and on television, and in museums and at heritage sites, the story of de-industrialisation in the USA is often represented through a simplistic historical lens: broad brushstrokes are used to paint the patterns of boom and bust with little interrogation of local-level, personal and shared experiences of it. This broad historical lens is rarely grounded in specific places, while simultaneously being connected to others with similar patterns of development and decline. Respecting and attempting to understand the people, places and intangible cultural heritage of industry’s rise and fall from the perspectives of those living these experiences is central. In the media and scholarly analysis statistics are frequently used to illustrate this increasingly common cycle, and the stories, memories and experiences of those affected by countless closures of manufacturing plants, mills and factories are neglected in favour of numbers. Nonetheless, how can the socio-cultural effects of bust be better conceptualised, shared and connected? Moreover, how can the complexities and nuances of the relationships between people and places of de-industrialisation be better revealed? As such, how can the human experiences of industrial decline be made more visible? This chapter combines different perspectives and corresponding methodological approaches through which the processes and impacts of de-industrialisation can be uncovered, examined and documented for the future. In particular, this article draws from the theories and toolkits of heritage studies and interdisciplinary place-based research to discuss two ongoing projects, each focused on the effects of industrial decline in the Baltimore, Maryland region: the Mapping Baybrook and Mill Stories projects. The Projects Mapping Baybrook is an interdisciplinary exploration of place that virtually maps research on the history and culture of an industrial community in the southernmost tip of Baltimore, referred to as Baybrook, a merging of the names of the two remaining residential neighbourhoods in the area: Brooklyn and Curtis Bay. The community was a mix of diverse and yet connected neighbourhoods located along the southern coastline of the city during the rise of industrialisation in the USA. In addition to Brooklyn and Curtis Bay, the Greater Baybrook area once included the neighbourhoods of Fairfield, Hawkin’s Point, Masonville and Wagner’s Point (all now demolished and lost from the landscape).

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The interactive Mapping Baybrook website (mappingbaybrook.org) highlights the importance of the spatial turn in digital humanities, which is partly a new way to look at the centrality of place in understanding culture. By mapping the stories (people and places) of neighbourhoods that have been lost as a result of both industrial development and its decline, such as the African American neighbourhoods of Fairfield and Hawkin’s Point, in addition to the Polish and later Appalachian neighbourhood of Wagner’s Point, and locating the stories of these places within the narrative of what remains (the residential neighbourhoods of Brooklyn and Curtis Bay), a more complex vision of the people, places and connections of industrial space are forged in the process. Beginning in 2012, the Mill Stories project focuses on the history and living heritage of the Sparrows Point Steel Mill (in Dundalk, Baltimore County), which closed in 2012 after operating as one of the largest steel production plants in the world for a significant period of its 125-year life. While the project is less place-based than Mapping Baybrook, it defines the ‘Sparrows Point community’ as the hundreds of thousands of people who worked at the mill since the late nineteenth century, as well as those whose lives have been shaped by it through living in its vicinity, the Dundalk region. The aim of the project is three-fold: first, to examine the importance of the mill from the perspectives of former workers and local community members; second, to document the stories and memories of its community for the future; and third, to connect these distinctive experiences to the larger narrative of industrial boom and bust via the project’s website (millstories.org), a longer documentary film, undergraduate student involvement and community discussion events. Before examining the theoretical and methodological frameworks used in these projects, it is first necessary to explore the historical links between Baybrook and Sparrows Point as the foundation upon which the projects are currently being connected. A Common Foundation: Boom and Bust It is argued that the theories and methods used within these two projects have helped to not only reveal the human face of industrial decline, such as exposing the unique relationships people have with industry, place and how they have shaped their lives, but also to create a collaborative space through which senses of ownership over the projects and pride in participating in them are strengthened. In this regard, the projects have sought to amplify the voices of those affected by de-industrialisation, to give greater context and weight to the statistical data and to promote stories, memories and experiences of it both online and through local community events (see also High 2010; 2011). Furthermore, this chapter argues that a focused combination of disciplinary (and interdisciplinary) methodologies can achieve an enhanced understanding of the commonly held experiences of industrial decline in the greater Baltimore region. One of the most recent aims of these projects is to connect them to each other: to identify common themes that can help foster greater dialogue and understanding between the two communities, as well as beyond. As noted earlier, the projects seek to ground broader narratives of industrial boom and bust in the USA through the distinctive, and yet similar, community-held experiences, stories and memories of Baybrook and the Sparrows Point Steel Mill. Beginning at the regional, Baltimore level can help accomplish this larger goal; a significant counterpoint is given to these broader narratives, one that helps to illuminate the real sociocultural impacts of industrial decline. The expansion of methodology and geographical focus increases the visibility of a project by offering new perspectives. Indeed, too narrow a focus and strict adherence to systematic and struc-



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tural methods do not allow for the space to unearth the complexities of de-industrialisation. Here, the collaboration between Mapping Baybrook and Mill Stories pushes the public (and scholars) to reckon with the ways similar but distinct theories and methods can work together to connect disparate stories and bridge different experiences of similar processes. A critical and reflexive analysis of research methods helps the overlooked and under-theorised become more visible. The industrial communities of Baybrook and Sparrows Point share deep connections and stark distinctions. The Baybrook area is located on the southern border of the city, annexed into Baltimore City in 1919 with the rise of industrial development following World War I. The Sparrows Point Steel Mill is just across the city’s harbour in Baltimore County. These two places became industrial areas because of their geographical location on rich land by deep waters. The once fertile soil in both communities reflects their shared agricultural roots before the rapid rise of industry in the late nineteenth century. The geographical qualities and timelines of industrial development are similar; however, the two communities developed under different industrial models that later converged during the peak period of industrial expansion during World War II. Sparrows Point was always a steel mill from the 1890s until it closed in 2012 (Reutter 1988; Rudacille 2010). In contrast, Baybrook was a diverse amalgamation of ever-changing industrial enterprises: chrome works, chemical and fertiliser plants, refineries, canneries, car shops, ship building, gravel and sand companies, oil companies and salvage yards, among others (King 2014). While Baybrook followed trends, Sparrows Point was essentially a one-company town throughout its existence. The rise and fall of these many industries do not require different methods of analysis, but rather a more flexible lens to view the different ways industrialisation, de-industrialisation and its aftermath unfolded. When analysed together, these different models of industrial development provide a deeper and more nuanced picture of industrial boom and bust in a north-eastern port city. Although the two communities differ in terms of the kinds of industries that flourished during World War II, they functioned as an integrated operation. The US government worked with the shipbuilding arm of Bethlehem Steel (the longstanding owner of Sparrows Point) and private industries in Baybrook once the country entered into the war. Sparrows Point, which had a shipbuilding facility on the harbour, and the area of Fairfield in Baybrook formed an integrated assembly-line operation producing the steel and building almost 500 jumbo cargo ships: the Liberty and Victory ships. During this period, the industrial peninsula of Baybrook became the home of the Bethlehem–Fairfield Shipyards, providing a strong link between the two communities (Reutter 1988, 317; Schulz 2013, 122–3). In addition, this period provided the biggest boom in industrial development for both places, which changed the fabric of the communities in many ways. One way was providing access to work for women and African Americans (Reutter 1988, 360). However, after the war both places suffered, both from pollution and from the decrease in job opportunities. The hundreds of ships built during the war boom were brought back to the Fairfield industrial peninsula, where shipbuilding shifted to shipbreaking and the surrounding water was further polluted by oil and chemicals. The steel used to win the war was disassembled in Baybrook and sent back to Sparrows Point to be used for other products. Before World War II people lived near to where they worked. With the rise of the post-war automobile culture, the company town model began to die and the development of superhighways cut through and isolated both communities (Olson 1980, 347–86). Masonville, a neighbourhood on the industrial peninsula of Baybrook, was destroyed with the expansion of

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the railroad in the early 1950s. Twenty years later the company town within Sparrows Point was torn down for the expansion of the mill (Reutter 1988, 430). In another 20 years, the Baybrook communities of Fairfield and Wagner’s Point were relocated because they were ‘engulfed by industry’ and neglected by the very government that integrated these places into the military– industrial complex of previous decades (Blom 2002). These comprehensive changes in the structure of life and work in the USA, combined with the shift of manufacturing to the South, where labour prices were cheaper and unions rare, and later to overseas plants and mills, allowed the once-flourishing communities to wither and recede from view. With the new superhighways, such as Route 895 in the Baltimore area, drivers would never actually visit, or rarely see, these industrial communities and their iconic centrepieces, such as the massive L-furnace of Sparrows Point or the coal piers in Baybrook. The unique stories of Baybrook and Sparrows Point influence the different and yet complementary methods used in both the Mapping Baybrook and Mill Stories projects, as discussed in the following section. The Frameworks In 2011 the last residents on the Fairfield industrial peninsula of Baybrook were relocated and, in 2012, the Sparrows Point Steel Mill was finally shuttered after a succession of several different owners since Bethlethem Steel’s bankruptcy in 2001. As a result, it can be argued that a certain sense of place was lost. However, use of the terms ‘lost’, to denote the disappearance of industrial neighbourhoods, and ‘post’, to distinguish a period after industrialisation, fail to reflect and address these highly complicated transitions. In other words, they are not simple breaks with the past. Throughout the USA and beyond, historic industrial places are declining, disappearing or being turned into corporate shopping centres, casinos and/or condominium complexes that evoke the generic placelessness of the twenty-first century. As Dolores Hayden (1986, 184) highlights, ‘despair about placelessness is as much a part of the American experience as pleasure in the sense of place’. Combining the Mapping Baybrook and Mill Stories projects traces the long arc of American industrialisation from different places and perspectives while exposing patterns and themes, such as power and resistance and continuity and change, to better understand the pasts of industrial landscapes and to develop a more comprehensive vision for urban spaces of the future. The following sections introduce the theoretical frameworks of the heritage discourse and the practices of interdisciplinary place-based historical research, situated within American studies, that have guided both projects. Mill Stories: The Heritage of De-industrialisation In general, the discipline of heritage studies pulls from a wide array of scholarly fields and related methodologies to understand how ‘heritage’ is defined, interpreted, disseminated and best safeguarded for the future. Traditionally, ‘heritage’ has been understood as tangible, monumental and/or human-made, generally represented by material culture, natural specimens, artefacts, archaeological sites and historic places such as battlefields and notable homes (Smith 2006). In more recent years, heritage is increasingly recognised as existing beyond these traditional categories, encompassing cultural and natural landscapes as well as the intangible cultural practices, knowledge sets, values, beliefs, expressions and memories that are embodied by people –whether



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on a communal or a more individualistic level (see UNESCO 2003). Moreover, a greater examination of ‘intangible cultural heritage’, or living heritage, can also bring to light the relationships people build between their cultural knowledge, expressions and memories and the places where they are transmitted and shared, and within which they develop. Here, it can be argued that at the core of ‘heritage’ are also the relationships people have to it, and the senses of place, belonging and pride that give it its significance. Accordingly, the theories and practices of heritage studies overlap greatly with those of American studies, history, anthropology, folklore studies, tourism studies, environmental studies and human geography, to name only a few. For instance, the use of ethnographic methods, a staple of anthropological research, can help to elucidate how heritage is defined and used at community levels, and what relationships, as noted earlier, give it its lifeblood. Nonetheless, what can set ‘heritage’ apart is that it is neither strictly history nor only culture. Heritage can be argued to be a construction and most often a product of the present, echoing the theories put forward by David Lowenthal (1985), Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998), Gary Edson (2004) and Laurajane Smith (2006), among others. As Lowenthal (1985, xvi–xvii) so aptly states: The past thus conjured up is, to be sure, largely an artifact of the present. However faithfully we preserve, however authentically we restore, however deeply we immerse ourselves in bygone times, life back then was based on ways that are incommensurable with our own. The past’s difference is, indeed, one of its charms: no one would yearn for it if it merely replicated the present. But we cannot help but view and celebrate it through present-day lenses […] The past is a foreign country whose features are shaped by today’s predilections, its strangeness domesticated by our own preservation of its vestiges.

Critical heritage studies, as promoted through the Association of Critical Heritage Studies (ACHS), seeks to highlight that there exist ‘authorised heritage discourses’ through to today that depend on highly political selection processes around what is given the ‘heritage’ label and why (Smith 2006; ACHS 2012). Historically, it was those who were in control of museums, preservation projects and heritage sites who decided what is valorised and preserved for future generations. Most pertinent to this chapter is the notion that, with any selection process, there will always be things that do not make it onto the list, or into the heritage enterprise (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2004; Hafstein 2009). Using the museum example, who decides what is collected and interpreted for visitors? Furthermore, what are the stories, memories and experiences – the intangible aspects of heritage – that are neglected in the process? The Mill Stories project frames the stories, memories and experiences of the Sparrows Point Steel Mill and its closure, from the perspectives of former workers, as living heritage. As the complex of mill buildings, remnants of the once-thriving company town and other facilities are dismantled and removed from the urban industrial landscape, the project’s overall aim is to uncover, in the clouds of settling dust, what remains. Indeed, much of what remains is intangible: not only stories and memories but also the ongoing relationships community members have to the mill site and its legacy. Aligned with the aims of critical heritage studies, the project also seeks to emphasise that the stories of the working class and of industry’s boom and bust are seldom told. For instance, at the Baltimore Museum of Industry (BMI), the story of Sparrows Point is missing.

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According to its mission statement, BMI ‘collects, preserves and interprets the industrial and technological heritage of the Baltimore region for the public by presenting educational programs and exhibitions that explore the stories of Maryland’s industries and the people who created and worked in them’ (BMI nd). Nonetheless, there is not one exhibit dedicated to one of the largest mills in the world, and one of the largest employers in the region for roughly a century.1 While it would be educational for the public, and beneficial to the mill’s community, to display mill relics with accompanying text, the museum space itself could also be used to explore the impacts of its closure in contemporary terms. As the project has unfolded it has become apparent that there is a need to talk about Sparrows Point and its rich history and significance, including the larger forces and effects of de-industrialisation. At its core, the project is based on a series of filmed ethnographic interviews with former mill workers and Dundalk area community members. Currently, the project resides online (millstories.org), and as a fine-cut film, with intermittent manifestations as actual community-based events, such as a series of film screenings with discussion panels comprising mill community members. It is important to note that Mill Stories is not just an oral history project: what is found on its website are not only oral testimonies of how the mill once was but also contemporary reflections and expressions of how it is now and what the future ought to look like in light of industrial decline and its impacts. The project frames its content as living heritage because there are selection processes involved; that is, the short ‘digital stories’ on millstories.org have been edited from longer raw footage of interviews by the project’s leaders and undergraduate students in corresponding ethnography and videography courses at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) (Fig 10.1). However, one of the project’s aims has been to make this a collaborative process so that the voices of informants, including their feedback at the various events, are given the highest priority. In this sense, the living heritage of Sparrows Point, as represented by Mill Stories, has been constructed through what community members want to share and through what they feel is most important to safeguard and promote. Reflecting on the project, Michael Lewis, former Sparrows Point worker, notes: ‘It’s up to the people at your university, and at all of the universities around this country, to be the difference makers. Because, right now I am not optimistic that if we continue shutting down factories and building fast food restaurants that we can sustain ourselves’ (Lewis 2013, pers comm). The following discussion examines particular themes that have emerged from the research in terms of the mill’s significance and its legacy through to today. What was lost, and what remains? The wound of Sparrows Point’s closure is still open and raw within the community; a large number of former workers are currently fighting for compensation they never received, especially in terms of health care coverage and/or pensions. Unfortunately, a small number of former workers have also committed suicide. While bitterness does exist, it is pinned on the larger forces of global capitalism and free trade, the negligence of the US government and local politicians, the greediness of unions and/or certain people higher up in the chains of command of Bethlehem 1

It should be noted, however, that the Mill Stories and Mapping Baybrook project teams are working more closely with BMI to plan promotional activities focused on these legacies, including community discussions on the impacts of industrial decline in the museum space.

Fig 10.1 UMBC students interviewing steelworker Randy Duncan at the Dundalk-Patapsco Neck Historical Society, Spring 2013. Photo by William Shewbridge

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Steel, which ran the mill for roughly a century, and the series of companies that owned it during the past decade. Moreover, at recent community events some steelworkers have also expressed the view that they are also to blame since they ‘never fought’ for keeping the mill open.2 Nevertheless, this bitterness, or anger in some cases, does not diminish the importance of the mill in the hearts and minds of those who knew it best. In fact, it serves to illuminate just how much love exists. Chris MacLarion (2012), who began working in the plate mill of Sparrows Point in 1996 and eventually became Vice President of the United Steel Workers Local Union 9477, articulates well this ‘love/hate’ relationship in an excerpt from a poem, Ode to Sparrows Point, that he wrote after its closure: Sometimes saying I miss you just isn’t enough. You were more than a woman, more than a friend, more than a companion through good times and bad. You were a creature of your own, a life of your own, with more passion inside of you than any man or woman could hope to understand […] I won’t lie. I hated you nearly as much as I loved you. The problem is that I didn’t know that I loved you until it was too late. Until you were taken out of my life, stolen from me, and given away to another I didn’t realize the passion you created in me. You were loved more than you’ll ever know. You provided to me, carried me, and made me the man I am today. You were my family and yet my enemy, the woman that moved me and the woman that inspired me.

In 2012 he posted the 1000-word poem to Facebook one night before going out to dinner. When he returned, he saw that it had ‘gone viral’, having been shared on Facebook, Twitter, blogs and in emails to friends-of-friends and steelworkers around the country. MacLarion’s personification of the mill, and his definition of it as more than a place of employment, is a theme that has also emerged within the project’s interviews. Since early 2013 semi-structured in-depth interviews with 30 community members have helped to uncover particular aspects of the mill’s significance, as well as components of its enduring legacy. Ranging from 20 minutes to well over an hour, the interviews explored life histories, both personal and shared memories, and responses to its 2012 closure, the reasons why it is believed to have happened and thoughts on what the future of the Sparrows Point peninsula and surrounding areas should look like, to name a few key topics. Overwhelmingly, it has been found that the mill is an extremely significant place for those interviewed, as well as for those not interviewed, but who commented and shared memories at the project’s series of community events. Indeed, as MacLarion’s poem illustrates, Sparrows Point was not simply a place of employment but a distinctive world that was thought of as a ‘second home’, as well as a ‘battlefield’ at times, by its community; a world that is now lost. The idea that Sparrows Point was a ‘home’ for those who worked there is mainly based on the fact that co-workers considered each other family, even if they did not get along. Darnell Hamlett, who worked at the mill for 39 years, emphasises the bond that was inevitably created on the job by saying: ‘You with someone for 21 days out of a month, 8 hours a day – sometimes 16 hours a day – you form a bond; you become best friends and a lot of time it carries on beyond the job’ (Hamlett 2013, pers comm). Noting the 2

Mill Stories screening at the Creative Alliance at the Patterson, Baltimore (10 April 2014).



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dangerous conditions of the mill, where fatal accidents were commonplace, Darlene Redemann, who worked there for 33 years and is a Dundalk resident, states: You knew everybody’s children, wives […] If you weren’t family down there and stuck together, you are gonna get hurt. So you had to watch out for one another. The saddest part about leaving Bethlehem Steel was that I had to leave all my friends behind. But I said, ‘oh, that’s no problem, you know we’ll all get together at Christmas parties’, but now that’s gone. How can you take a company that once had 39,000 people, the largest steel mill in the United States, and it’s all gone? (Redemann 2013, pers comm)

Troy Pritt started down at the mill in 1997, working a range of jobs from crane operator to quality control. Troy saw his fellow co-workers more as soldiers: ‘comrades in combat’. He recalls: We depended on one another; we supported one another. That was our battlefield. We marched in every day. And it wasn’t about the money, it wasn’t about the benefits, as much as it was who we were as a people […] we were steelworkers; we were a culture in our own. That’s the way that I have always seen it. (Pritt 2013, pers comm)

Joe-Ed Lawrence, a former Sparrows Point worker for over four decades, also speaks of this camaraderie: It was the same as the military; they were always backing you. A friend of mine would come up to me and say that he just got a call: a friend of his just got hurt and they need some blood. ‘Any of you guys O-negative?’ And just like that, four or five guys would go give blood. (Lawrence 2013, pers comm)

Among numerous themes that have emerged from the project’s research, this notion of ‘family’ brings to light the emotional relationships between people and place that were eventually severed. Moreover, it helps to paint a more nuanced picture of industry, one that is warmer, and also softer, than the more mainstream perceptions of steelmaking. Nevertheless, when the topic of Sparrows Point’s legacy was raised (such as ‘What do you want people to know about Sparrows Point?’), community members spoke in broader terms, drawing on lessons that they have been taught about US manufacturing and its all-too-hidden struggles by working there and experiencing them firsthand. For Michael Lewis, the story of Sparrows Point is one that everyone should learn. The fight for workers’ safety, greater compensation and equality all played out at the mill. He states: It made me realize that nothing was given freely; everything was born out of struggle. A lot of people today take for granted the fact that you get paid vacations – that was something born out of the labor movement. The fact that you get paid if you’re off sick, that you have workers compensation laws, that you have employer-provided health insurance, that you have many safeguards in place, all that were met with resistance when lobbied for, that we have in

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place today … that a lot of people think are etched into the fabric, and today I see them being eroded – not with an awl, but with a chisel. (Lewis 2013, pers comm)

In addition, community members also spoke of the struggles for racial and gender equality, echoing the larger social movements that were unfolding outside the mill’s gates. Addie Loretta Houston Smith, who started at the mill in the early 1970s, was one of the first women hired since the Rosie the Riveter generation of World War II. Fighting for gender equality, she was one of the co-founders of the Women of Steel organisation of the local union. She remembers: ‘There was discrimination against women […] and we fellowshipped a lot in the bathrooms, through tears. I was not a quiet person about it, and it got me in a lot of trouble, lots of times, because I wanted something done’ (Houston Smith 2013, pers comm). A younger-generation Sparrows Point worker, Lettice Sims, speaks of the road that Houston Smith and others paved for her: [The mill] was a male dominated thing and it was hard at first, but I adjusted and it became my family […] Loretta [Houston Smith] was a legend in her own right; she’s just like Rosa Parks. She was that stronger person that stood for us to make it easier for us coming in the door because everything was already paved there; I had it easy, believe me […] There were around sixty crane operators and there were two Afro-American crane operators and I was one of them. I thank Loretta and Darlene [Redemann] because they made the path for women like me to come along because that was a hard road that they had to go through and I couldn’t endure nothing like that. (Sims 2013, pers comm)

These examples provide insight into the seldom-told stories of the impacts of industry, how it shapes lives, and the living heritage of what remains when it disappears. These stories are made available, with the consent and feedback of each informant, on the project website, which serves as a virtual and ever-expanding ‘museum’ for community members, scholars and future publics. Mapping Baybrook: Interdisciplinary Place-based Research and De-industrialisation The field of American studies arose as one of the earliest interdisciplinary areas of study in the USA as (and partially because) it became an international power and the domestic economy flourished in the period following World War II. The early myth-symbol period of American studies examined, as it simultaneously created, the mythology of American exceptionalism through a search for the ‘American mind’ (Wise 1979). Blending the methods of literature and historical analysis, early American studies was an endeavour to not only study but also build a single narrative for a country that was a vast amalgamation of peoples and contradictions. Scholars came to recognise that history is indeed a ‘foreign country’ (Lowenthal 1985) and, in some ways, a fiction through which we filter our current perspectives and experiences (see Maddox 1999). As with heritage studies, American studies experienced increased reflexivity as it developed. Following the social and political instability of the 1960s, American studies scholarship became more inclusive and sought to challenge the very project of myth-building with which it once engaged. Like other disciplines in the humanities, American studies incorporated the linguistic

Fig 10.2 Mapping memories, stories and current issues in the Baybrook region at a community event at Benjamin Franklin High School, Fall 2015. Photo by William Shewbridge

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turn as post-structural, postmodern and postcolonial discourses complicated what and how the US is studied. American studies scholars now work to challenge the very metanarrative the field helped create during its rise in the 1950s (Lipsitz 2001; Castronovo and Gillman 2009). For example, interdisciplinary place-based research helps to elucidate the connections between people, the built environment and nature. History and cultural studies scholars, such as Donna Haraway (1991), William Cronon (1991; 1996), Hal Rothman (2002; 2004), Julie Sze (2006a; 2006b) and Steven High (2007), have pushed the humanities to challenge traditional oppositions – including technology/industry and nature, machine and human, urban and environmental history and local and global, among others – as a means of exposing the complexities of place. Theories and methods in the field are so varied that a discussion of the type of interdisciplinary methodology used in the analysis of de-industrialisation in general and Baybrook in particular is required (see Fig 10.2). One of the strengths of American studies is its resistance to developing a singular, structural methodology in response to the flexibility necessary to pose big questions, modify the research process and challenge the way of investigating both scholarship and the world. Andrew Ross  has framed the work of American studies as ‘scholarly reportage’, by which he means a ‘blend of ethnography and investigative journalism’ (in Williams 2009, 40; see also Ross 1999; 2003; 2004; 2006; 2009). In a sense, he challenges scholars to ask the critical questions of our time and use whatever methods and tools available to find answers. For instance, the main methodology for exploring de-industrialisation in Baybrook is the connection of the histories and contemporary existences of particular geographic locations, such as homes, streets, businesses and bodies of water, among others, to the larger spaces and more abstract concepts of industrialisation, immigration, racism and environmental justice. Essentially, the project leaders and students start out small, by identifying and documenting the stories of particular people and places, and gradually expand out to uncover the broader narratives and forces with which these people and places interact. Human geographer Yi-Fu Tuan (1977, 3) describes the complex relationship between place and space in the following terms: ‘Place is security, space is freedom; we are attached to one and long for the other’.3 For Tuan, these are integrative relationships; the pause of place only derives meaning in relation to the movement of space. Tuan’s (1974; 1977) work focuses mainly on general understandings of place and space. However, Mapping Baybrook seeks to ground these theories in specific landscapes of industrial development that are often framed by discourses of technology, capitalism and the rational science of the military–industrial complex, rather than humanities issues that deal with emotion, memory and resistance (Zukin 1991; Soja 1996; Soja 2010; Harvey 2000; 2010). In this light it is necessary for scholars and students alike to learn to see the industrial landscape through a complex interdisciplinary approach that identifies evidence in the landscape itself, as well as to learn how an interrogation of place adds to the scholarly toolkit. Pierce Lewis (1982, 182) explains this process in ‘Axioms for Reading the Landscape’: One can, however, quite literally teach oneself how to see, and that is something that most

3

Understanding senses of place also involves Tuan’s (1974) concept of ‘topophilia’, the complex emotional bond between people and places.



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Americans have not done and should do. To be sure, neither looking by itself, nor reading by itself is likely to give us very satisfactory answers to the basic cultural questions that landscape poses. But the alternation of looking, and reading, and thinking, and then looking and reading again, can yield remarkable results, if only to raise questions we had not asked before. Indeed, that alternation may also teach us more than we had ever dreamed: that there is order in the landscape where we had seen only bedlam before. That may not be the road to salvation, but it may be the road to sanity.

Significantly, there is no one formula for place-based interdisciplinary research. The theories and methods must come from (and respect) the people, places and practices that are at the heart of such studies. What remains in Baybrook? The last residential home in Fairfield, one of the ‘lost’ neighbourhoods of the area, was located at 3306 Weedon Street. In 2011 the Baltimore Development Company relocated the final Fairfield residents, Jimmy Drake and Debbie Mitchell, and tore down the house. Through place-based archival research into this one building’s past, complemented with oral history interviews, the senses of place in the neighbourhood over the past century have become visible. The deed records for the residence show the early migration patterns of Irish and German immigrants into the industrial peninsula (and Baltimore in general). In 1899 Oswald William Fleisher deeded the land to Ferdinand Kahl, a widower who in 1910 built the house at 3306 Weedon Street. In 1922 Kahl sold the house to John Henry and Isadora Jeffries. The Jeffries were an African American family who migrated to Baltimore from North Carolina. John Jeffries II was born in Fairfield at 3306 Weedon in 1924, and lived in the neighbourhood until his family decided to move to West Baltimore in 1943, when industry began to encroach on the community. Jeffries explains: In fact, Fairfield was very well populated. It was built up. But the shipyard during the war came and took just about everything east of Weedon Street. And that’s when my father and mother got the impression, nobody told us anything. It turned out that the people who lived there had to vacate. But when they came across the street from Weedon Street where we lived that’s when my father and mother got in a hurry and decided before they put us out, we’ll move out. That’s why we left and went to the city. (Jeffries 2011, pers comm)

In the 1940s the Jeffries sold the house to another family of African American migrants from North Carolina, James and Delia Ann Drake.4 In 1987, upon James Drake Sr’s death, the house went to the Drake heirs, including Fairfield’s final resident, Jimmy Drake. Drake Sr’s grandson 4

Jeffries remembers the family moving from Fairfield in 1943 during World War II; however, the deed shows that the Jeffries family sold the house in 1948. Since it was a tight-knit neighbourhood where residents were like family, it may be that the Jeffries and the Drakes worked out a rent-to-own option. The Jeffries and Drake families, like many of the African American migrants from the south to Baltimore who lived in Fairfield, were very close and still remain in touch today.

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lived in the house until the condemnation of the property by Baltimore City in the twenty-first century. When asked about the origins of the integrated dynamics of Fairfield, Jeffries replied: I heard it said that, to start off Fairfield was established by Germans, Polish and Dutch. When we were youngsters we had quite a few white neighbors, but my father bought that house. This is around the time that Fairfield, when blacks began to move into Fairfield. But the details I can’t help you ’cause I was too young to know about it. (Jeffries 2011, pers comm)

As a young boy, John Jeffries knew Reverend John Widgeon from attending his church. Jeffries explained that Fairfield residents referred to Widgeon as ‘Pap’.5 Widgeon moved to Fairfield in the early years of the twentieth century and built the First Baptist Church of Fairfield in 1908. Reverend John Widgeon was born in 1850 to enslaved parents on the Eastern Shore of Virginia and at the age of 20 moved to Baltimore. He was hired as a custodian at the Maryland Academy of Sciences, the state’s oldest scientific institution. Widgeon loved nature and became a valued scientific collector of various bones and fossils for the Academy. Widgeon resided downtown in the city, near the Academy, until he moved out to Fairfield and built the church in 1908. During his time in Fairfield Widgeon also wrote essays for the Baltimore Sun on the condition of civil rights in the guise of natural history, such as by using the raccoon (a play on the derogatory term ‘coon’ for African Americans) and the crow (a play on Jim Crow) as stand-ins for deeper commentary. Widgeon’s wife, Lucy, was also the postmaster of Fairfield for many years. In 1921 the Academy awarded Widgeon an honorary Master of Science degree at a ceremony in Fairfield. The rural character and natural environment, as well as the freedom afforded African Americans in such an out-of-the-way and isolated place surrounded by industry, drew Widgeon to Fairfield. The racial turnover in Fairfield was slow, and for much of the twentieth century the area functioned as a rare integrated neighbourhood, which was not without incident. Just down the street from 3306 Weedon Street the last lynching in the Baltimore area occurred following a contested billiards game in a Fairfield bar between King Johnson, an African American, and two white men on Christmas Eve in 1911. After an argument concerning the game Johnson shot one of the white men and was taken to the neighbouring Brooklyn jail. Later that night a group of men attempted to hang Johnson and then took him outside and shot him dead. No charges were brought in the incident. In 1911 an article in the Evening Sun described race relations in Fairfield: ‘The blacks call the whites by their first names and the whites, fraternally, greet the blacks in the same spirit. They eat together and live together. Fairfield makes its own laws, settles its own disputes, cleans up its own bloody sawdust and ignores civilization’ (in McGuire 1993).6

5

When Jeffries was asked if he knew Rev John Widgeon, he replied, ‘Yes indeed. Yes I knew John Widgeon. Everybody in Fairfield knew Reverend John Widgeon. Actually, I didn’t know much about his background, of course, at that time I was a youngster. When I first met Reverend Widgeons, I guess I was about three or four years old. And Reverend Widgeon not too long after; I can’t remember all the dates or the times. But when Reverend Widgeon became too old to perform, my father recommended Reverend Ernest Wesley Williams as the next pastor’ (Jeffries 2011, pers comm). 6 In 1993 Fairfield resident Jennie Fincher, who moved to Fairfield in 1914 from Virginia, stated: ‘It was a mixed neighborhood. Whites and blacks lived together, everybody got along, and there was no trouble at all’ (McGuire 1993).



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Nonetheless, Jeffries expressed the sentiment that life in Fairfield was indeed tough for African Americans. He referred to it as ‘Baltimore’s forgotten corner’. He stated that his fondest memory of the neighbourhood was ‘when my father and mother decided to leave Fairfield’. However, Jeffries did not really fit in with the city life in West Baltimore where his family settled in the 1940s, and he spent most of his leisure time returning to Fairfield to visit family and old friends. Jeffries describes the difficulties of life in Fairfield: Where the boys from Fairfield were concerned they got the unwanted jobs. Sort of like the last hired, the first fired. Most were never hired. But the fertilizer factories were dusty and dirty work. The coal pier, the scrap yards. The oil companies. You couldn’t work there. Ship yards. No. Where the ship building dry dock, when the ship was coming for repairs, they would hire the African American boys over to clean the doors of the ship to go in the hole and clean all, to get all the filthy oil out of the ship. Clean up the building room, and when that’s done, out they go. So it wasn’t easy. It wasn’t easy for us down there … . These are hardships we had to endure because of our race. So now I’m going to say this, we made the best of it. (Jeffries 2011, pers comm)

Jeffries recalled the impressive vegetable and flower gardens Fairfield residents maintained and that ‘Arabbers’, the produce vendors with horse-drawn carts who can still be seen working on the streets of Baltimore City today, often travelled out to Fairfield. He explained how geographic isolation and racism from surrounding communities also produced a strong network for residents: We lived so far from the real markets, like the closest market was in South Baltimore. And we wasn’t allowed too much shopping in Brooklyn, but they had a meat market in Brooklyn named Hawkin’s Meat Market … . But we didn’t do too much traveling in Brooklyn or Curtis Bay. We weren’t welcomed there. So, on the weekends those of us who had a little transportation would rally the neighbors … . They would pool neighbors and do their shopping in South Baltimore around Cross Street Market. Up and down Light Street or Cross Street and Charles Street … . We also had some of those merchants in South Baltimore would come to Fairfield and take orders and deliver them. Browns Meat Market was one that used to come to Fairfield. They would take orders and deliver them. Take orders and bring them to us. Like I said, not everybody was able to get there. Pooling their resources. (Jeffries 2011, pers comm)

This strong sense of community for African Americans out on the industrial peninsula endured for generations. Jimmy Drake has many fond memories of Fairfield, especially during the 1950s and 1960s when work was plentiful and Fairfield residents established community events, such as baseball games, carnivals and even Sunday afternoon drag races. Both Jeffries and Drake recall the community baseball games, festivals and parties that brought together generations of Fairfield residents. The area may have been ‘Baltimore’s forgotten corner’, but the neighbourhood had a strong sense of community and often functioned as ‘one big family’ out on the industrial peninsula, until jobs disappeared and it began its decline. All that remains of Fairfield today are a few

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crumbling structures and these enduring memories. Yet the stories of boom and bust, and the subsequent invisibility of residents on the peninsula, offer important lessons about urban industrial development, environmental justice and, most centrally, learning to see urban industrial communities as an important part of the fabric of urban space in the past, present and future. Looking at the histories and stories from one single house in a neighbourhood can make the complex social relationships within industrial places come alive. A Way Forward The drive in humanities scholarship to ‘illuminate the taken-for-granted groundwork of American culture, to grasp how space and place permeate the grand acts as well as the ordinary events of American life’, combined with critical heritage studies and its attention to living heritage, offer ways to see de-industrialisation from a new vantage point (Franklin and Steiner 1992, 3). Significantly, it also provides opportunities to amplify the voices of those who are often neglected in the more official, broad-sweeping and over-simplified narratives that tend to dominate the media and ‘heritagescape’. Cultures are a constantly changing amalgamation of social practices, practices that leave traces on the built environment – traces that are so often overlooked. For Mapping Baybrook and Mill Stories, this is the time to see those traces before they slip away, are bulldozed over or, as in the case of the Fairfield neighbourhood of Baybrook, are turned into a massive parking lot for a salvage company. Analysing place can often provide another level to the oral histories collected for Mapping Baybrook and the mining of the historical record. Mapping Baybrook pushes Ross’s (in Williams 2009) ‘scholarly reportage’ idea further and embraces what American studies (and other interdisciplinary fields) can help scholars and students to become: public–private investigators. Investigators seek knowledge and to approach, as much as possible, the truth by uncovering aspects, facts and details that relate to their subject. They aim to look below the surface, even in the dark and often-hidden landscapes. Investigators must read from various perspectives and always with a sceptical eye: the public–private eye. Primary sources – the maps, census documents, deeds, city directories and periodicals – are, of course, important to the investigation. Nevertheless, as helpful as archives and government documents can be, interdisciplinary place-based research must also involve looking at the living cultural landscape and talking to the people who know it best. The main strength of Mill Stories is its shifting of expertise from the researcher to the informant. To most effectively define, understand, interpret and safeguard living heritage, those who own its meanings and significance must be at the centre of the process. Indeed, researchers and students must be willing to take intellectual risks and ‘meet people where they are’, in the words of Ross (1991, 191).7 The stories of industrial workers and residents are often overlooked for sweeping tales of big business and big bucks, and to bring to light the human, sociocultural impacts of industrial decline, as these projects aim to do, requires local-level, community-driven work. 7

Ross pulls this idea from Stuart Hall’s introduction to the first edition of the New Left Review in 1960 (see Hall 1960). Ross (1991, 191) writes: ‘Much is to be gained from following the suggestion in the editorial of the first edition of New Left Review, which states that the task of socialism today is “to meet people where they are, where they are touched, bitten, moved, frustrated, and nauseated”, and not, we might add, to tell them where they should be’.



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The aims of the Mapping Baybrook and Mill Stories projects are to know what community members are saying in the bars, the living rooms, the backyards and on the streets. This desire to know what people are really thinking begins to blur the distinction between the public and the private, which is a good place for interdisciplinary place-based research to begin: the liminal space between. Interdisciplinary place-based research – whether drawn from American studies and/ or critical heritage studies – is project- and people-based as much as it is focused on ‘evidence’. Gaining insight into the connections between all the different aspects of histories, cultures and living heritages maximises good humanities research and helps to strengthen the much-needed counterpoints to the over-simplified narratives that dominate mainstream news and media. In essence, we are seeking to find de Certeau’s (1984) practice of everyday life by meeting people where they are; however, when the people and places are long gone, we rely as much on our imaginations as we do our research methods and evidence. Acknowledgments Stephen Bradley, Associate Professor of Visual Arts (UMBC), and William Shewbridge, Professor of the Practice in Media and Communication Studies and the Director of the New Media Studio (UMBC), also co-led the Mapping Baybrook and Mill Stories projects, respectively. Bibliography and References ACHS (Association of Critical Heritage Studies), 2012 Manifesto [online], available at: http://criticalheritagestudies.org/site-admin/site-content/about-achs [25 July 2015] BMI (Baltimore Museum of Industry), nd Collecting, preserving, and interpreting the industrial and technological heritage of the Baltimore region [online], available from: http://thebmi.org [25 July 2015] Blom, B B, 2002 How Close to Justice? A Case Study of the Relocation of Residents from Fairfield and Wagner’s Point, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Maryland, Baltimore County MD Castronovo, R and Gillman, S, eds, 2009 States of Emergency: The Object of American Studies, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill NC Cronon, W, 1991 Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, W W Norton, New York ——, 1996 The Trouble with Wilderness, or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature, Environmental History 1 (1), 7–55 De Certeau, M, 1984 The Practice of Everday Life, trans S Rendell, University of California Press, Berkeley CA Edson, G, 2004 Heritage: Pride or Passion, Product or Service? International Journal of Heritage Studies 10 (4), 333–48 Franklin, W and Steiner, M C, eds, 1992 Mapping American Culture, University of Iowa Press, Iowa City Hafstein, V, 2009 Intangible Heritage as a List: From Masterpieces to Representation, in Intangible Heritage (eds L Smith and Nakagawa), Routledge, London, New York, 93–111 Hall, S, 1960 Introducing New Left Review, New Left Review I (1) Hamlett, D, 2013 Personal communication (interview with Stefano), 16 April Haraway, D, 1991 Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Routledge, London, New York Harvey, D, 2000 Spaces of Hope, University of California Press, Berkeley CA

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——, 2010 Social Justice and the City, University of Georgia Press, Athens GA Hayden, D, 1986 The American Sense of Place and the Politics of Space, in American Architecture: Innovation and Traditions (eds R A M Stern, D G De Long and H Searing), Rizzoli, New York, 184–91 High, S, 2007 Corporate Wasteland: The Landscape and Memory of Deindustrialization, Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY ——, 2010 Placing the Displaced Worker: Narrating Place in Deindustrializing Sturgeon Falls, Ontario, in Placing Memory and Remembering Place in Canada (eds J Opp and J Walsh), University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver, 159–86 ——, 2011 Mapping Memories of Displacement: Oral History, Memoryscapes and Mobile Methodologies, in Place, Writing and Voice in Oral History (ed S Trower), Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 217–31 Houston Smith, L, 2013 Personal communication (interview with Stefano), 26 March, United Steel Workers Local 9477, Dundalk Jeffries, J, 2011 Personal communication (interview with King), 7 June, Jeffries’ home King, N, 2014 Preserving Places, Making Spaces in Baltimore: Seeing the Connections of Research, Teaching, and Service as Justice, Urban History 40 (3), 425–99 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B, 1998 Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage, University of California Press, Berkeley CA ——, 2004 Intangible Heritage as Metacultural Production, Museum International 56 (1–2), 52–65 Lawrence, J, 2013 Personal communication (interview with Stefano), 13 February, United Steel Workers Local 9477, Dundalk Lewis, M, 2013 Personal communication (interview with Stefano), 13 February, United Steel Workers Local 9477, Dundalk Lewis, P, 1982 Axioms for Reading the Landscape: Some Guides to the American Scene, in Material Culture Studies in America (ed T J Schlereth), American Association for State and Local History, Nashville, 175–82 Lipsitz, G, 2001 American Studies in a Moment of Danger, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis MN Lowenthal, D, 1985 The Past is a Foreign County, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge McGuire, P A, 1993 Miss Jennie’s Crusade, The Baltimore Sun, 28 March, 6 MacLarion, C, 2012 Ode to Sparrows Point [online], available from: https://ikegittlen.wordpress. com/2013/02/17/chris-maclarions-ode-to-sparrows-point/ [25 July 2015] Maddox, L, ed, 1999 Locating American Studies: The Evolution of a Discipline, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD Olson, S H, 1980 Baltimore: The Building of an American City, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD Pritt, T, 2013 Personal communication (interview with Stefano), 27 March, University of Baltimore Redemann, D, 2013 Personal communication (interview with Stefano), 26 March, United Steel Workers Local 9477, Dundalk Reutter, M, 1988 Sparrows Point Making Steel: The Rise and Ruin of American Industrial Might, Summit, New York Rothman, H, 2002 Conceptualizing the Real: Environmental History and American Studies, American Quarterly 54 (3), 485–97 ——, 2004 The New Urban Park: Golden Gate National Recreational Area and Civic Environmentalism, University Press of Kansas, Lawrence KS



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Ross, A, 1991 Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits, Verso, London, New York ——, 1999 The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney’s New Town, Ballantine, New York ——, 2003 No-Collar: The Humane Workplace and Its Hidden Costs, Basic, New York ——, 2004 Low Pay, High Profile: The Global Push for Fair Labor, The New Press, New York ——, 2006 Fast Boat to China: Corporate Flight and the Consequences of Free Trade—Lessons From Shanghai, Pantheon, New York ——, 2009 It’s Nice Work if You Can Get It: Life and Labor In Precarious Times, New York University Press, New York Rudacille, D, 2010 Roots of Steel: Boom and Bust in an American Steel Town, Pantheon, New York Schulz, C B, 2013 Maryland in Black and White: Documentary Photographs from the Great Depression and World War II, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD Sims, L, 2013 Personal communication (interview with Stefano), 26 March, United Steel Workers Local 9477, Dundalk Smith, L, 2006 The Uses of Heritage, Routledge, London, New York Soja, E, 1996 Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, Blackwell, Oxford Soja, W, 2010 Seeking Spatial Justice, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis MN Sze, J, 2006a Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice, MIT Press, Cambridge MA ——, 2006b Boundaries and Border Wars: DES, Technology, and Environmental Justice, American Quarterly 58 (3), 791–814 Tuan, Y, 1974 Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs NJ ——, 1977 Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis MN UNESCO, 2003 The Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage [online], available from: http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/en/convention [25 July 2015] Williams, J J, 2009 Scholarly Reporter: An Interview with Andrew Ross, Minnesota Review 73 (4), 37–52 Wise, G, 1979 ‘Paradigm Dramas’ in American Studies: A Cultural and Institutional History of the Movement, American Quarterly 31 (3), 293–337 Zukin, S, 1991 Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World, University of California Press, Berkeley CA

11

Interview – Ashley Minner

Could you describe the role ‘heritage’ plays in your life? Well, let me start by saying that I have a strong sense of ‘where I’m from’ and ‘who I’m from’. I am a native Baltimorean – as in, I was born and raised just across the Baltimore City line, in a neighborhood of Dundalk that was once called the ‘Royal Homes’. I grew up on one side of the block; now I live on the other side of the same block. All of the houses began as identical Cape Cod-style concrete bungalows. They were built as temporary housing for soldiers returning from World War II that were eventually occupied by workers of the Sparrows Point Steel Mill, located nearby. Many of the mill workers, and those working in other Baltimore-based industries, were transplants from southern states, like my grandparents, who came from North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia, respectively. My mother’s father was a Lumbee Indian; my mother’s mother was of Muscogee (Creek) and European descent. My father’s mother was of English descent and her family lived first in west Baltimore City, and then in the Sparrows Point area after moving up from Virginia. My father’s father is of Swiss (European) ancestry, and grew up in the town of Swiss, West Virginia. I was lucky enough to grow up with most of my grandparents nearby, as well as an aunt and uncle who were living only a few doors away. Other aunts, uncles and cousins often came to visit. Everyone brought accents, stories, recipes, songs, instruments, photographs and other treasures with them. They shared a lot with me as I was growing up. I was (and still am) proud of our family heritage and always interested in learning more about it. We also took trips back down south, to all four states. Being ‘mixed’ Lumbee and white, I looked different from most of my classmates, so that fact of my identity was not one I could really ignore, even if I wanted to. There were not too many Lumbee children at my schools because most of the Lumbee families in Baltimore lived in the city proper. My Lumbee aunt, who lived across the street from me, was in charge of the Title VII Indian Education Program in Baltimore City Public Schools. She always made it a point to invite me on Indian Education field trips, to take me with her to Lumbee community functions, such as church and pow wows, and to teach me about our culture as Lumbee people. I ended up being a community-based visual artist. I’m now in charge of the Title VII Indian Education Program of Baltimore City Public Schools, and I serve in a number of other capacities to represent the Indian community of Baltimore. My thinking and art making are informed by the people and places I come from and with whom I grew up, whether they were physically present or made present for me through stories and objects in our midst.

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Can you describe the work you are involved with respect to heritage? My day job, for the past ten years, has been to serve as the Liaison for the Title VII Indian Education Program of Baltimore City Public Schools. Our program began in 1973, during a time when there was a large influx of Lumbee Indians into Southeast Baltimore, which up until that point had mainly been home to African American and white residents. In those first couple of years, the Indian high school graduation rate was abysmal. Interventions on the part of the program included the placement of Indian people in advocacy positions, such as school support staff, where they were in daily contact with the students, their families, teachers and administrators. These advocates helped with attendance, behavior, school supplies, uniforms and Indian education for all. The program also stewarded a dedicated space within at least one school for Indian students to call their own. The program gave students permission to be proud of who they were as Indian people, especially in Baltimore, where they were the minority (Baltimore City is majority African American in terms of population). The graduation rate steadily rose over the years, and eventually reached 100 per cent. Like most Lumbee young people in Baltimore, I grew up spending time at the Baltimore American Indian Center and South Broadway Baptist Church, the Indian church of Baltimore. In my opinion, these are the two cornerstones of the Lumbee community, the places that our people gather together. I still participate in community functions and have brought my life’s work to both as an artist, and I am always bringing our narratives and cultural identities to other groups, because I believe that we are beautiful, important and responsible for tremendous accomplishments. We should be known and celebrated by everyone. In this way, my work seeks to debunk stereotypes that are most commonly expressed about Indians in the USA, and to promote empathy. In 2007 I founded the Native American After School Art Program (NAASAP) to provide a safe and structured environment for Baltimore’s Native youth to assemble themselves together. Today, NAASAP programming presents art as a vehicle for a core group of young Lumbee girls to address issues that are important to them. They are empowered to work creatively toward real goals. Their sense of purpose, efficacy and ownership of their community grows in this process. Through my work as an artist and activist I have had many opportunities to travel outside of Baltimore. This has fuelled my intense love and appreciation for my hometown inasmuch as it has caused me to realize similarities between my own community and others I have visited. This led to my current research scholarship on related communities of the US South and Global South. I believe that vernacular art making is a methodology of resistance that all of these communities practice. Knowledge that we hold in our bones goes into our art. It’s knowledge that can set us free. I should also mention that I often speak and act on behalf of the heritages of my Baltimore, which are threatened now, more than ever, by rampant gentrification. What does ‘community engagement’ mean to you? In my opinion, community engagement ‘done right’ involves an invitation from a community for an outsider to come in and work with its members. In the best-case scenario this happens after a significant commitment of time is spent listening and in service to the community on the part of the outsider. It involves what Alternate ROOTS has summed up in our five ‘Resources for Social Change Principles’: shared power, partnership, open dialogue, individual and community transformation and aesthetics of transparent process.



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Coming from a background in the arts, how has this helped you in the work you’ve described? Really, I was born into the arts. My mother’s mother was a visual artist. She shared her gifts with me. She was also her family’s historian, the keeper of all of the stories, photographs and treasures. My father is a musician. Many of my family members are artists in their way. I was born an artist, and my worldview has always been that of an artist. I approach everything as an artist and always have. Interestingly, I did not realize that many of my life practices were a part of my artistic practice until I participated in formal training through the – then new – Master of Fine Arts in Community Art program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). The dominant aesthetic discourse keeps many artists from identifying as such. However, my background in the arts, both informal and formal, has given me what some people might consider an almost irrational faith in creative problem solving and a really good sense of how things are made. So, I feel that I possess a sense of the worth of ‘things’ on several different levels, as well as a real appreciation for beauty wherever I find it, most often in everyday people. In the Maryland/Washington DC area, and/or beyond, what does ‘community engagement’ tend to mean? ‘Community engagement’ has been a ‘buzz word’ for the past few years in the funding game. I have seen community engagement done well in several projects this past year in the region and beyond, which involved the honoring of specific communities through exhibitions of their treasures (usually everyday items that hold stories) and opportunities for community members to tell their stories through the projects in different ways. When community members work as true partners with museums and galleries to bring projects to fruition, the projects are much more likely to be supported and cherished. Sometimes, they take place in the fanciest of venues, such as Masum Momaya’s Beyond Bollywood: Indian Americans Shape the Nation at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History; other times they take place in ‘alternative’ community settings, such as Michelle Gomez’s Devociones y Fe at the El Tesoro restaurant in Southeast Baltimore. Devociones y Fe (Devotions and Faith) was an exhibition that was produced by the curator Michelle Gomez in collaboration with members of the Latino/a communities of the Southeast Baltimore area. Participants shared objects that hold special spiritual meanings for them to be displayed in the community-based setting of a neighborhood Guatemalan restaurant, El Tesoro. Gomez provided visitors and restaurant patrons alike the opportunity to listen to exhibition participants speak about their objects and broader spiritual traditions through audio-visual technology (e.g. listening stations that were positioned on each of the restaurant’s tables) and in person during special events that were also part of the exhibition. Could you say a little more about the Baltimore American Indian Center? The first ‘organized effort’ to create an institution for Indian people in the Baltimore region was made in the 1950s by members of the Lumbee community, who wanted to establish an ‘Indian’ church. Up until this time, religious service was held in community members’ homes. The church was officially founded in 1967 and in 1978 it moved to its current facility in the heart of the original Indian neighborhood in Southeast Baltimore. Church is a prominent aspect of Lumbee culture. Thus, the Indian church in Baltimore has served as an important meeting place for Lumbee people of all ages. Young Lumbee people have grown up together through the Indian church. For those who live far from the neighborhood,

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church is one of the only opportunities they have for fellowship with other Indian youth. The church became a meeting place for Lumbees to address a variety of concerns, including that of maintaining cultural identity. Members of the Lumbee community who founded The Baltimore American Indian Center in 1968, which was originally named The American Indian Study Center, first hosted programming in the fellowship hall of the church. The Baltimore American Indian Center (BAIC) is an Urban American Indian Center that grew out of the need to assist and support American Indian and Alaskan Native families with moving into an urban environment and adjusting to the political, economic and socio-cultural changes that they experience. The BAIC became not only a ‘one-stop shop’ for Indian people in Baltimore but also the largest urban Indian centre in the mid-Atlantic region of the US. As well as offering cultural programming, it was able to help people find housing and work, pay utility bills and access health services. The Center has functioned as a hub for Indian community organization and resistance on the East Coast and has also served as a focal point for the Indian community for social and cultural activities and to educate the general public about the cultures of the North American Indian and Alaskan Native communities. A Native American daycare, the Vera Shank Daycare Center, and the Native American Senior Citizens Program were also established as part of the BAIC. In 1973 the BAIC partnered with Baltimore City Public Schools to apply for funding that would establish our Title VII Indian Education Program, one of the longest running in the nation. The BAIC thrived until the mid-1990s, when it lost funding. Since that time, community members, who are mostly volunteers, have struggled to keep it alive. Recent efforts have resulted in the restoration of the oldest part of our building, which is now the Baltimore American Indian Center Heritage Museum. The museum showcases artifacts of many Indigenous peoples, but the permanent display in the museum tells the stories of the Lumbees who came to Baltimore from North Carolina to work. The Center also hosts an annual pow-wow, as well as other events throughout the year. Who comprises the communities of the BAIC? The BAIC has been called ‘The Lumbee Center’, but truly, and according to our mission, the Center is there to serve all Indian people in the region. Locally, Indian people have always been concentrated in Southeast Baltimore, as noted earlier. Incidentally, this is the area of Baltimore where most immigrant populations, such as people from Poland, Germany, Greece, Ukraine and what was once known as Bohemia have also settled in their respective times. The Center is located in what is, by far, the most diverse part of Baltimore City. Most recently, Southeast Baltimore has become home to an increasing Latino/a population as well. Accordingly, our target audiences comprise, indeed, ‘our own people’. We are also increasingly aware of the need to reach out to our cousins from down South, the diverse Latino/a communities that are relatively new to the neighborhood. In my opinion, Indian identity has been shamed and subjugated in Latin America in ways that are arguably more insidious than in the US. Often there is a great disconnect between Indigenous peoples on either side of the USA and Mexican border. This is part of the legacy of settler colonialism that will not let us see that we are, indeed, related. Other neighbouring communities in Baltimore are often not even aware that we (Indian people) are here, too. There used to be a big Indian population all around the Indian Center. Due to both gentrification and the economic advancement of some of our people, our popula-



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tion has spread out into the surrounding Baltimore County region, across the city line. And, of course, there exist other Indian communities throughout the state of Maryland. There are tribes indigenous to the state who still live here, such as the Piscataway people of southern Maryland, the Accohannock on the Eastern Shore and others. It is important for us to connect and work together. This is ever an objective of the BAIC. What gaps do you see BAIC filling in Baltimore, in the USA and in the museum and heritage sector in general? The BAIC building itself tells a story of urban Indian experience. Most people don’t realize that the majority of Indians live in cities today. The Center is brick and concrete, evidence of the little-known participation of Indian people in ‘The Great Migration’. It grew out of the sacrifices, perseverance and prayers of the Lumbee people responsible for its founding. Lumbees are the reason we have Indian Education on the East Coast. They also founded what became the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. Lumbees were a force to be reckoned with during reconstruction, after the Civil War – and really, at all times. Lumbees famously ran the Ku Klux Klan out of Maxton, North Carolina – an event that was covered by Life Magazine (January, 1958). The BAIC is a part of that legacy. We are some tough people. Our stories highlight successful resistance, significant innovations and family ties that stretch across many generations. We defy stereotypes of what it means to be Indian. Because we live in an urban environment and because we do not look, or sound, like what Hollywood has cast us to be, our very existence defies strongly embedded notions of American Indigeneity. The BAIC recognizes the value of our ways of speaking and dancing, our innovation in urban styles, the food we cook and eat together and the phenomena that make us who we are. These things would not necessarily be included in a more traditional and secular museum or gallery. What challenges exist for the BAIC with respect to ‘community engagement’? Unfortunately, the BAIC is limited in its capacity due to a lack of funding and staff as a means of accomplishing all that it once did, and all that we would still like to do. And the needs of the community have changed over time. There aren’t as many Indian people moving to Baltimore on a regular basis anymore. Rather, the job now is more about helping people who were born here, or who have been here for generations, to maintain connections to culture and community. There are a lot of issues that come with living in big cities. It’s easy to forget who you are and where you came from. There is strength and help in remembering. With respect to Indigenous heritage representation and interpretation, what mistakes are usually made? Oh, where to begin! The representation and interpretation of only (distant) historical Indigenous figures and cultural artifacts tend to dominate exhibitions and heritage sites. This is a problem. This implies that Indigenous people are only of the past, have all died out, no longer exist. Such representations locate the figures and artifacts in a static context, with no connection to the present or to the heirs, their living legacies. Another common mistake concerns the lack of involvement of living Indigenous people in the heritage process. Often, even if Indigenous people are involved, they aren’t afforded the decision-making power that would be present in a truly collaborative process. People like to paint Indian identity as a pure thing that can only lose its purity as time goes on. I think that is a mistake. Rather, I see identity as also being living and fluid. It is able to

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adapt and adopt. Representations and interpretations of us and our cultures should strive to reflect the fullness of who we are. To that end, I ought to highlight that representations of Indigenous people continue to adhere to stereotypes born out of Hollywood and New Age movements. For instance, not all Indians have long, straight, flowing black hair, and not all Indians live (or even had ancestors who lived) in teepees. Any display that suggests otherwise is just factually wrong. Finally, I do not appreciate representations within heritage enterprises that paint Indigenous people only as victims of colonialism. Indigenous people have persevered. We are here and we are on the rise.

Engaging Challenges

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Embattled Legacies: Challenges in Community Engagement at Historic Battlefields in the UK Justin Sikora

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hen considering community engagement at historic battlefields, there are no clear-cut, easily definable parameters as to who or which entities could be considered the sole ‘community’ at this kind of heritage site. One of the key reasons for this is that many battlefields do not have easily defined boundaries, resulting in confusion not only over who is responsible for their care and management but also over who values unidentified, and sometimes misidentified, spaces. Compounded by the fact that these are often empty fields devoid of even cursory manifestations of memorialisation, one could conclude that these are forgotten sites buried under the vestige of a lost past. That being said, there are several distinct groups who have claimed a stake in the present and future management of battlefields, including, but not limited to: landowner(s), tourists, local residents, academics, non-profits and non-governmental organisations and government at the local, regional and national level. Each of these groups, or any conceivable combination of them, may be loosely defined as a ‘community’. Indeed, some have joined forces in the UK, such as Glasgow University’s Centre for Battlefield Archaeology, which provides research for Historic Scotland’s Inventory of Historic Battlefields since 2011. It is important to note that scholars in archaeology and history have had a profound and pervading influence on how political and civil service authorities have written legislation and considered battlefields in the planning process (Sikora 2013, 201–7). Their research and advice has largely been concerned with the importance of the archaeological record and the potential for the recovery of artefacts associated with a battle. Since the precise location of the vast majority of battlefields in the UK are unknown, and cannot therefore be delineated on a map, only non-statutory legislation has been granted in both England and Scotland (English Heritage 2010; Historic Scotland 2011a). Even so, there have been numerous efforts to protect and interpret these heritage resources. One such collaboration has developed between the government-sponsored charity English Heritage1 and the Battlefields Trust, a non-profit body concerned with the preservation and interpretation of historic battlefields in the UK. English Heritage aids the Battlefields Trust by providing the funding to secure a Development Officer, their only paid employee among a team of volunteers. The Battlefields Trust has been actively involved in numerous battlefield preservation efforts since the mid-1990s – including, notably, the 2009 discovery of the site of the Battle of Bosworth Field where Richard III was killed – and supporting other activities, such as coordinating battlefield walks and tours and lobbying against battlefield land development. Since the author has been an active 1

Note, since this was written, the duties of English Heritage have been split between two organisations: Historic England and the English Heritage Trust (which is now known as English Heritage).

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voluntary member of the Battlefields Trust since 2010, and has been involved in numerous projects, including working with various community groups, many of the examples presented here have been gathered through firsthand experience. This intimate knowledge of the way the organisation works, as well as links with other like-minded institutions and individuals, provides useful insight into community-run battlefield projects and, in particular, the Flodden 1513 Ecomuseum project (see Flodden 1513 2014b). Although the Battlefields Trust is the largest British organisation dedicated to battlefield preservation, with about 1,000 members, there are others that have been successful either independently or with their assistance. One such group is the volunteer-run Towton Battlefield Society, which has engaged in multiple efforts to protect the Towton battlefield area from being developed, as well as working with local law enforcement in Yorkshire to prevent and report illicit metal detecting (Towton Battlefield Society 2014a). The main goal of the Society is to ‘work with the community and promote education in medieval history to the general public, particularly in relation to the Battle of Towton’ (Towton Battlefield Society 2014b). This has included the development of interpretation panels at the site and the provision of guided tours. A unique example of battlefield engagement can be found at the site of the Battle of Shrewsbury, which is part of the private Albrighton Estate. The erstwhile battleground is principally utilised for agriculture today, though the battle does provide a focal element of their business model. Since 2008 there has been a ‘farm shop and butchery, café, battlefield exhibition and falconry centre’ that currently employs 35 local people (Battlefield 1403 2014). This integrated approach of involving the local community in a profitable business while still maintaining the integrity of the battlefield as a tourist destination and place of remembrance is arguably rare with respect to battlefield management. In contrast to the more ad hoc appearance of conservation and public efforts in the UK, there exists significant public support for fields of conflict in the USA in the form of, for example, the largest organisation working towards battlefield preservation, the Civil War Trust, which has more than 55,000 members and an annual revenue in 2013 of nearly $27 million (Civil War Trust 2014a). This non-profit body has been engaged in American Civil War battlefields since the early 1990s controversy over a proposed shopping development, and later attempts made by the Walt Disney Corporation, to build a theme park in close proximity to the site of the Battle of First and Second Manassas, also known as Bull Run (Synnott 1995; Craig 2000; National Park Service 2001). After the US government purchased the contested land the Civil War Trust was established in order to help raise funds for the acquisition of further battlefields threatened by land development (Lord 1991; Civil War Trust 2011; Civil War Trust 2012). To date, they have been extremely successful in their mission, purchasing and preserving land at 110 battlefields occupying more than 34,000 acres (Civil War Trust 2014b). Although there are many core actors in battlefield preservation and management efforts, including scholars, government agencies and non-profit organisations, differences as to how to work together, even towards the same vision, have created tensions. What is key to bear in mind is that while these organisations may have similar goals with respect to preservation, the components of the sites may be valued to differing degrees. This is perhaps most acutely understood in terms of what is valued by tourists and academics, and, by proxy, policymakers and related governmental heritage bodies. As previously mentioned, archaeologists have devoted innumerable resources to locating and recording the physical record of sites of conflict in concert with historians, who have focused on uncovering details from the written record. This devotion to the tangible remains has influenced not only which aspects of these



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sites should be considered for preservation but also which features are presented through on-site interpretation. The interpretive presentation at sites is important for understanding how tourists perceive their value and was the subject of a previous long-term investigation by the author (see Sikora 2013). From that research it was concluded that visitors did not value the exact location of the battlefield, the tangible remains or artefacts, or the historiographical meticulousness so valued by many in the academy. Instead, it was found that visitors value how the aftermath of certain battles still affect the world today, and the intangible ideas of nationhood and politics that they represent. The different perceptions of these two ‘communities’ (visitors and academics) creates a confusing situation; although they may be interested in, and even devoted to, the preservation of the same place, such a gap in values can actually exacerbate and worsen conservation efforts. In other words, it is difficult to engage in a mutually beneficial dialogue since the various groups are coming at the debate from widely divergent foundations of knowledge. Accordingly, two cases studies are examined in this chapter to illuminate modern ‘battles’ over the preservation and value of historic battlefields in the UK. The first concerns two distinct projects at Flodden battlefield which have come into conflict: one begun and managed by a local resident for over a decade, and the other concerning a recently developed ecomuseum driven by local authorities. This unique situation allows for the study and consideration of which actors ultimately determine a site’s values and frame the narrative of what a battle represents today. The second case study features interrelated issues at two battlefields in Scotland, Culloden and Dún Nechtain, both involving the authority of a government agency, Historic Scotland, and battlefield archaeologists, juxtaposed against numerous ‘communities’ including, most notably, local residents and non-governmental organisations. These examples highlight issues that arise with respect to site authenticity and what aspects of the known, and more often unknown, physical space are valued, versus the intangible ideas those battles represent to local residents and concerned groups. Remembering Flodden and 1513 Ecomuseum One of the most prominent and intriguing examples of community engagement, and the issues surrounding it, is the case of the 1513 Battle of Flodden in Northumberland, England, on the border with Scotland. This battle was one of the most important and devastating clashes in British history, resulting in the death of roughly 14,000 Scots, including James IV and other nobles (see Barr 2001; 2003; Reese 2003; Sadler 2006; Goodwin 2013; Sadler and Serdiville 2013). The conflict forever changed the trajectory of Scottish and ultimately British history, although today it is not well known outside the northern UK. Concerned about this lack of recognition, and understanding the potential of the site for local tourism development, a resident in the local village of Branxton, which abuts the battlefield, began work on what was to become the Remembering Flodden Project in 2003.2 According to the Director of Remembering Flodden, prior to his involvement there was very little effort to attract visitors or to provide on-site interpretation (Hallam-Baker 2014, pers comm). The only indication of any previous commemoration was a stone cross monument placed on Flodden Hill 2

See Remembering Flodden 2014 for additional information.

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in 1910 by the Berwickshire Naturalists’ Club, which features a plaque that states: ‘Flodden 1513 To the brave of both nations Erected 1910’. After receiving a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Director of Remembering Flodden was the first to establish an interpretive trail at the site, which features information panels, waymarked signage and leaflets (Heritage Lottery Fund 2014). In 2003 the site was host to approximately 600 visitors and by 2012 roughly 15,000 had visited (Hallam-Baker 2014, pers comm). Although there is no formal visitor centre as one usually finds at other British battlefields, such as Bannockburn, Bosworth, Culloden, Hastings or Shrewsbury, there is a red phone box that was purchased for £1 and contains leaflets and a map of the area (Remembering Flodden 2012). Interestingly, this phone box is believed to be the smallest visitor centre in the world (British Broadcasting Corporation 2014a). Despite these efforts, including the sustained support of the Battlefields Trust, a panel in the car park leading to the interpretative trail laments the absence of widespread recognition of the battle’s importance. Written by the Director, it states: Branxton is the small village that encompasses this hugely important, yet so far relatively unknown historical site. We hope that our efforts will inform and educate, and bring visitors to this part of the Borderlands, and help consolidate the bonds of friendship across the Border that are today, the hallmark of life hereabouts.

As the 500th anniversary of the battle would be celebrated in 2013 there was a push from other local actors – beginning in late 2009 – to develop activities and events both at the site and in conjunction with related locales in the region. These efforts were initially driven by the Northumberland county archaeologist, the Director of the Remembering Flodden Project and the enthusiastically supportive local landowner. After consulting with scholars at Newcastle University, they deemed the ecomuseum model, along with additional research and public engagement efforts, to be best suited for their quincentenary goals. The Flodden 1513 Ecomuseum3 was initially established by a team of people led by the Northumberland county archaeologist with the support of Lord James Joicey, who holds title over the battlefield’s land and the surrounding area. The main aim behind establishing this ecomuseum was to bring together disparate sites within the region, and eventually further afield, under an overarching theme that corresponds to the various events that transpired during the Battle of Flodden. Despite the local efforts of the Remembering Flodden Project at the battlefield itself since 2003, little attention had been paid to the role of other sites either from the campaign that culminated at Flodden Field, or from those that arose in its aftermath. Even though the ecomuseum model favours a grassroots approach to the management, preservation and valuation of diverse heritage sites (see Davis 2011; Corsane et al 2009), the Flodden 1513 Ecomuseum, despite holding several consultative meetings, has followed a largely top-down approach since its first conception. It is important to note that, although there were meetings at which local community members could voice their opinions and share ideas on what sites the ecomuseum should include, questioning the actual need for developing an ecomuseum seems not to have been allowed. Some commentators, such as Howard (2002; 2003), have been very critical of local authorities’ assuming control of ecomuseums in what is objectively supposed to 3

See Flodden 1513 2014a.



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be a community-driven endeavour (see Davis 2011). Interestingly, the Director of the Remembering Flodden Project in particular felt alienated by both the concept and, in his view, the heavy-handed management style of the ecomuseum (Hallam-Baker 2014, pers comm). There is also a problem with the terminology of ‘ecomuseum’, which the Director considers a ‘poorly understood term’ that ‘does not translate well into English’, and that ‘peoples [sic] eyes glaze over as one tries to explain the concept’ (Hallam-Baker 2014, pers comm). Ecomuseums usually consist of a collection of various sites that are linked by a common theme and that are run and managed by local communities (Davis 2011). For the Director, an ecomuseum is more than its physical locations; it should represent what makes the locality unique and tie them to the land and history, as well as promote tourism as a means of sharing their local heritage. He states: ‘community is a way of life, not a collection of random sites’ (Hallam-Baker 2014, pers comm). For him, the Flodden 1513 Ecomuseum project does not embody the ecomuseum ideal effectively, and indeed has been utilised to promote projects that are not necessarily beneficial for a wide variety of local residents. Having already established a presence at the site, the Remembering Flodden Director was initially brought into discussions with those who were planning the ecomuseum. His involvement with the ecomuseum was tenuous throughout the process; however, he began to distance himself when he became unsure of where portions of the Heritage Lottery Fund money would be allocated, despite initially sitting on the project’s steering committee. His dissatisfaction mostly stemmed from the fact that a large amount of funding was allocated for archaeological research at potential muster points of the Scottish army in the Borders and at castles that were under siege before the battle, but not at Flodden battlefield itself (Flodden 1513 2014a; iFlodden 2014). The Director believed that this allocation of funds was a ‘heck of a lot to spend on something so nebulous’, which otherwise could have been spent on long-term tourism infrastructure, such as basic access repairs to the battlefield trail (Hallam-Baker 2014, pers comm). Indeed, he believes that Flodden Ecomuseum was a great opportunity for projects that could directly assist the local communities that were unfortunately missed, and that the ‘ecomuseum was hijacked’ by the large allocation of funds in the budget for archaeological fieldwork (Hallam-Baker 2014, pers comm). Although the Director admits that there has been an increase in publicity for the battlefield as a result of the ecomuseum project, these benefits have been outweighed by the lack of an integrative and cohesive understanding of what Flodden means today. His mission has been to raise awareness of how local communities have been affected by the battle over the past 500 years, and not just for the one day it happened in 1513 (Hallam-Baker 2014, pers comm). Indeed, there were disagreements from the point of the development of the idea to expand research and engagement efforts for the 500th anniversary with respect to other groups, as well. When two separate Flodden funding projects were established by the Northumberland County Council (England) and the Scottish Borders Council (with the aid of the Battlefields Trust),4 the process became especially troubled. In the end these two projects were merged into the successful Heritage Lottery Fund grant of £887,300 in 2012, but not before there was considerable disagreement about what goals the project should aim to achieve (Heritage Lottery Fund 2012). In part, this was due to poor communication between each party, as well as friction about which organisations should take the lead in developing activities and projects for the quincentenary. 4

It is important to note that the author was a representative of the Battlefields Trust with this grant application.

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Politics aside, this example, which grew from a landowner looking to draw in more tourists, or avid locals, raises serious questions about who has the right to initiate engagement with heritage sites. Moreover, it also raises the question of ownership of heritage: who should have the most say? It can be argued that it is preferable to have passionate debates between those who ultimately share the same end goals: raising awareness of a site and ensuring its future preservation. However, the potential for conflict seems almost inevitable with different groups acting independently. Culloden Housing and Dún Nechtain There has been little or no incentive for scholars and government agencies to engage with, or concede to, concerns from local residents or tourists to battlefields, since there has been very little opposition to these ‘authorised’ agents’ research and policies.5 There are some notable exceptions, such as a housing estate development approved within the inventory boundary of Culloden battlefield (Historic Scotland 2014). The 1746 Battle of Culloden was the culminating battle of the last of the Jacobite risings, during which Prince Charles Stewart – better known as Bonnie Prince Charlie – attempted to usurp the British throne from the Hanoverians. Although losses were minimal (approximately 1500 deaths), the aftermath caused shockwaves, particularly in terms of the Conscription laws, which effectively destroyed Highland culture and the clan system.6 The battlefield land is owned by the National Trust for Scotland, a non-governmental body, and is one of the most iconic sites in the UK, having become an important symbol of Scottish nationalism and the diaspora caused by the Highland Clearances (Richards 2000; 2007; Gold and Gold 2007; Gouriévidis 2010). Roughly 400 yards away from the battlefield area is a longstanding group of agricultural buildings. A planning application to build 16 new homes on the area by Inverness Properties Ltd was originally declined by the Highland Council, but after challenging the ruling, consent was later granted in August 2013 (Highland Council 2013). A significant reason for the reversal of the original decision was that Historic Scotland, the body responsible for the maintenance of the Inventory of Historic Battlefields established in 2011, reviewed the petition for the housing developments from their offices in Edinburgh and judged that: […] the proposed housing would, in our view, have an overall neutral impact on the battlefield landscape … The proposed development site is a considerable distance (about 800m) from the battlefield ‘core’. We did not consider that development there would impact on any key views, landscape features or specific known events relating to the battle. (Historic Scotland 2014)

Ever since this proposal was granted in March 2014 sustained vocal resistance to this development has developed comprising protests against Historic Scotland, particularly relating to the fact that their judgment was made without visiting the site. Joining the opposition was Sir Kenneth Calman,

5

Here, I am drawing on the concept of the ‘authorised heritage discourse’; see Smith 2006; Waterton and Smith 2009. 6 For more information on the battle see Prebble 1961; Harrington 1991; Reid 1994; 1996; Szechi 1994; Pittock 1996; Black 2000; Duffy 2003; Allison 2007; Pollard 2009.



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the Chairman of the National Trust for Scotland, the organisation that owns the battlefield land and operates the visitor centre; the Battlefields Trust; and even Prince Charles, who is reportedly ‘very concerned’ about the proposed development (National Trust for Scotland 2014a; 2014b; Battlefields Trust 2014; The Scotsman 2014). An online petition was also created and signed by 17,763 people as of May 2014, including Calman, Diane Gabaldon – an American author who wrote the popular fictional novel series Outlander which centres around Culloden – and Tony Pollard, Director of the Centre for Battlefield Archaeology at Glasgow University, who decided after ‘some soul searching’ to come out against the proposed plan (National Trust for Scotland 2014a; Jedrzejewski 2014; BBC News 2014). His initial reluctance may have been related to his intimate involvement with Historic Scotland in developing the Inventory of Historic Battlefields, as well as the potential rift that his vocal opposition to these plans may have caused between the two organisations. To be sure, it is questionable if Pollard’s position was taken because of concern for local communities and other stakeholders, but rather because of his belief that archaeological remains might be found within that area. This was evidenced when Pollard’s colleague, Iain Banks, Executive Director of the Centre for Battlefield Archaeology, concurred with Historic Scotland that another significant battle, Dún Nechtain, could not be considered for the Inventory of Historic Battlefields because there were two competing sites and, as a result, the correct site could not be precisely located within the landscape (Historic Scotland 2012; Historic Scotland 2013a). Dún Nechtain is understood as a seminal political and military event in Scottish history, but it was not included in the Inventory because of a perceived lack of archaeological finds, or the potential for them. This decision appears to have been made despite the inclusion of other battles whose precise locations are yet to be identified, such as the well-known 1314 Battle of Bannockburn (which has between five and eight possible locations), despite the fact that even Pollard acknowledges that no archaeological evidence has been found anywhere (Historic Scotland 2013b; Foard and Partida 2005; Pollard and Banks 2009). Yet, tangibility is not the main reason for recognising and memorialising these sites. Although no artefacts have been found from Bannockburn, this has not stopped Historic Scotland from opening, in 2014, a new visitor centre for the battle at a cost of £9 million (Historic Scotland 2011b). The 1314 battle was one of the most important battles in the Wars of Scottish Independence, which resulted in Scotland’s freedom from English rule until the Acts of Union in 1707. The fact that Scotland voted on independence 700 years after this pivotal battle of Scottish nationalism is not a coincidence, nor was the push for the opening of this new visitor centre in the same year as this seminal referendum. Nonetheless, no such political or economic calls to action have been put forth for Dún Nechtain. The stark dissimilarity between Bannockburn and Dún Nechtain, and the reason why they differ so remarkably in current commemoration and preservation efforts, lies in the aftermath and political considerations, not in tangibility, as explained earlier. The fact that Dún Nechtain resulted in the Picts establishing themselves as ‘the dominant nation in northern Britain’ after their defeat of a Northumbrian army is of little consequence to a nation where Picts no longer exist (Historic Scotland 2012). Even if archaeological remains were to be found, it is highly improbable that the battle would suddenly jump to the forefront of British, or even Scottish, consciousness. Despite this perspective, there has been a large amount of interest from local communities in Forfar and Kincraig, in close proximity to each of the potential battlefield locations. A public meeting was held in May 2012 with Iain Banks and Lesley Macinnes of Historic Scotland, who summarised the gathering by stating:

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We appreciate this was disappointing news to all of those who attended, but I am really heartened that everyone felt that there was more that could be investigated. It was fortunate that there were also representatives at the meeting from Kincraig, the site further north that is also pointed to as a potential location … . The possibility was mooted of a joint project between the two communities and we would be very interested to be kept up to date with how that develops. It is a true testament to the interest and historical knowledge of the campaigners for each location that they are willing to look at new options for carrying out new research. (Historic Scotland 2012)

Banks echoed Macinnes’s sentiments by adding: We recognise the tremendous historical significance of the Battle of Dun Nechtain and the meeting made it clear how much support there is for it to be formally designated … . The situation we have is that there is no conclusive evidence to allow us to specify the location. With such an early battle archaeological evidence is going to be scarce and the written archives only reference vague topographical reference points … . If the community here was able to work with their counterparts in Kincraig to investigate both sites, we could learn much more about each area and, if we were very lucky, resolve the location of this important turning point in the history of Scotland. (Historic Scotland 2012)

The fact that both the Centre for Battlefield Archaeology and Historic Scotland have apparently left the future investigations of this ill-defined site in the hands of non-experts shows that there is little desire on the part of either group to further investigate or establish the location of this unique site of ancient conflict. Their purposeful neglect reflects their priorities of tangibility and political capital, respectively – both of which are currently absent from this battle. The fact that local community members desired to have – at the very least – these sites professionally investigated, if not considered for the Inventory of Historic Battlefields, ostensibly appears to be of very little consequence to these ‘authorised’ actors in heritage designation. This example highlights what can happen when communities who have the same goals differ so substantially in fulfilling them that the potential for umbrage, and even animosity, can exist. Conclusion These examples have highlighted ways in which community engagement faces both challenges and opportunities. Although they both represent issues within the context of the UK, this is not a uniquely British problem and will most certainly be repeated, sooner rather than later, in other contexts. However, without contentious and divisive decisions it is quite probable that the tireless efforts of different groups working both together and apart would never come to fruition. Adversity can often be a catalyst for mutual action on the part of disparate groups. Nonetheless, even best intentions, such as the attempt to recognise Dún Nechtain, can sometimes be a nonstarter when faced with government and academic priorities, which clash with those of other, less influential, communities. This may even include established projects, such as Remembering Flodden; although it has not necessarily suffered from the ecomuseum, the latter has still created conflict among communities who in the end share similar, if not identical, goals.



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As for Culloden, and as of May 2014, little change in the status of the housing planning application has been made, despite continued resistance to the building plans. Since the period during which formal legal complaints and procedures can be brought against the ruling is due to expire, efforts against this development have quickly run out of steam, mainly due to a lack of funding. The leader of the Stop the Development at Culloden group, who spearheaded the protest and online petition, lamented that it would cost about £50,000 in legal fees to successfully appeal the decision, explaining: ‘we can’t actually take the case to the Court of Session. We have been advised by our lawyer  that unfortunately we need grounds that we do not really have. But our focus [is] still 100% on stopping the battlefield from being developed’ (MacAllister 2014). Although, from certain perspectives, this fight has, apparently, been lost, a strong statement has been made that even development near such an iconic battlefield will certainly face future difficulties in terms of broad-based support. As such, it is clear that political and financial pressures may continue to trump even the most vocal of protests from local residents and other concerned stakeholders. In many ways, it could be argued that these examples expose the rifts, and perhaps insurmountable challenges, in engaging with communities at these types of heritage sites. It can be valuable to contemplate examples such as these, where community engagement in the management of heritage sites has posed challenges, and to deconstruct them in order to explore what not to do. Yet, it is equally beneficial to take into consideration the alternative point of view, and examine what aspects of these tensions and challenges have brought people and organisations together to achieve common objectives. Along with the negative rhetoric, as well as the best-intended actions of some, others have been spurred to action that has perhaps not divided, but rather united, those who may not otherwise have worked together towards a similar goal. Bibliography and References Allison, H G, 2007 Culloden Tales: Stories from Scotland’s Most Famous Battlefield, Mainstream, Edinburgh Barr, N, 2001 Flodden 1513: The Scottish Invasion of Henry VIII’s England, Tempus, Stroud ——, 2003 Flodden, Tempus, Stroud Battlefield 1403, 2014 Battlefield 1403 [online], available from: http://www.battlefield1403.com/ [16 February 2014] Battlefields Trust, 2014 Proposed Housing Development at Culloden [online], 29 January, available from: http://www.battlefieldstrust.com/news.asp?NewsArticleID=118 [16 February 2014] BBC News, 2014 Protests over Culloden Battlefield housing held [online], 1 March, available from: http:// www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-26392421 [5 March 2014] Black, J, 2000 Culloden and the ’45, Sutton, Stroud Civil War Trust, 2011 Annual report [online], available from: http://www.civilwar.org/aboutus/annualreports/2011-annual-report.pdf [13 January 2013] ——, 2012 Civil War Trust History, Preservation Revolution: A Short History of the Civil War Trust [online], available from: http://www.civilwar.org/aboutus/cwpthistory.html [13 January 2013] ——, 2014a About Us [online], available from: http://www.civilwar.org/aboutus/ [16 February 2014] ——, 2014b Our Accomplishments [online], available from: http://www.civilwar.org/aboutus/accomplishments.html [16 February 2014]

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Corsane, G, Murtas, D and Davis, P, 2009 Place, local distinctiveness and local identity: Ecomuseum approaches in Europe and Asia, in Heritage and Identity: Engagement and Demission in the Contemporary World (eds M Anico and E Peralta), Routledge, London, 47–62 Craig, B, 2000 Historical Advocacy: The Past, Present, and Future, The Public Historian 22 (2), 71–4 Davis, P, 2011 Ecomuseums: A Sense of Place, Continuum, London Duffy, C, 2003 The ’45: Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Untold Story of the Jacobite Rising, Cassell, London English Heritage, 2010 Battlefields: Definition [online], available from: http://www.english- heritage.org.uk/ server/show/ConWebDoc.16550 [23 January 2010] Foard, G and Partida, T, 2005 Scotland’s Historic Fields of Conflict: An Assessment for Historic Scotland by the Battlefields Trust [online], available from: http://www.battlefieldstrust.com/media/660.pdf [23 October 2009] Flodden 1513, 2014a Archaeology [online] available from: http://www.flodden1513.com/index.php/site/ subpage_no_nav2/archeaology [22 January 2014] ——, 2014b Ecomuseum Homepage [online], available from: http://www.flodden1513.com [22 January 2014] Gold, J R and Gold, M M, 2007 The Graves of the Gallant Highlanders: Memory, Interpretation and Narratives of Culloden, History and Memory 19 (1), 5–38 Goodwin, G, 2013 Fatal Rivalry, Flodden 1513: Henry VIII, James IV and the battle for Renaissance Britain, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London Gouriévidis, L, 2010 The Dynamics of Heritage: History, Memory and the Highland Clearances, Ashgate, Farnham Hallam-Baker, C, 2014 Personal communication (Skype interview with the director), 24 March Harrington, P, 1991 Culloden 1746, Osprey History, Wellingborough Heritage Lottery Fund, 2012 The Flodden 500 Project wins Heritage Lottery Fund support [online], 19 November, available from: http://www.hlf.org.uk/news/Pages/TheFlodden500Project.aspx#.U2lB4_ldUlA [22 January 2014] ——, 2014 Remembering Flodden Project, Your Heritage Project [online], available from: http://www.hlf.org. uk/ourproject/Pages/May2012/0575cc83-a5b9-49c9-b994-a577cdbe8dc9.aspx#.U2lBZ_ldUlA [22 January 2014] Highland Council, 2013 South Planning Applications Committee, 11/04653/FUL: Inverness Properties Ltd, Viewhill, Inverness, Report by Area Planning Manager – South [online], 20 August, available from: http:// www.highland.gov.uk/NR/rdonlyres/9EC476FA-576F-4329-BD1E-2FD479A95376/0/Item52PLS04313. pdf [7 February 2014] Historic Scotland, 2011a A Guide to the Inventory of Historic Battlefields [online], available from: http://www. historic-scotland.gov.uk/guidetobattlefieldinventory.pdf [10 November 2011] ——, 2011b Bannockburn Set for a New Visitor Centre as Culture Minister Announces Project for 2014 [online], 11 October, available from: http://www.historic- scotland.gov.uk/news_article?articleid=29441 [10 November 2011] ——, 2012 Dun Nechtain Public Meeting [online], 16 May, available from: http://www.historic- scotland. gov.uk/news_search_results.htm/news_article.htm?articleid=36144 [25 May 2012] ——, 2013a Aberlemno Sculptured Stones [online], available from: http://www.historic-scotland.gov.uk/ index/places/propertyresults/propertydetail.htm?PropID=PL_002&PropName=Aberlemno%20Sculptured%20Stones [12 January 2013] ——, 2013b The Inventory of Historic Battlefields – Bannockburn [online], available from: http://data. historic-scotland.gov.uk/pls/htmldb/f?p=2500:15:0::::BATTLEFIELD:4 [7 September 2015]



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——, 2014 Culloden Statement – Looking after our heritage: battlefields [online], available from: http:// www.historic-scotland.gov.uk/index/news/indepth/culloden-statement.htm#.UyxuUvldXgw [22 January 2014] Howard, P, 2002 The Eco-museum: innovation that risks the future, International Journal of Heritage Studies 8 (1), 63–72 ——, 2003 Heritage: Management, Interpretation, Identity, Continuum, London iFlodden, 2014 iFlodden [online], available from: http://iflodden.info/ Jedrzejewski, N, 2014 Outlander author joins Culloden homes battle [online], 17 March, available from: http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/arts/news/outlander-author-joins-culloden-homes-battle-1-3343110 [19 March 2014] Lord, C P, 1991 Stonewalling the Malls: Just Compensation and Battlefield Protection, Virginia Law Review 77, 1637–73 MacAllister, D, 2014 Culloden battlefield housing protestors drop plans for Court of Session appeal [online], 2 May, available from: http://www.inverness-courier.co.uk/News/Culloden-battlefield-homes-protestorsdrop-plans-for-Court-of-Session-appeal-02052014.htm [6 May 2014] National Park Service, 2001 Guidance for Developing a Battlefield Preservation Plan [online], available from: http://www.nps.gov/hps/abpp/RevisedPlanGuidance.PDF [25 October 2009] National Trust for Scotland, 2014a Chairman’s Log: Protecting Culloden [online], 16 January, available from: http://www.nts.org.uk/About/Chairman/ [22 January 2014] ——, 2014b Culloden News: Chairman highlights an opportunity for change in the wake of Culloden planning decision [online], available from: http://www.nts.org.uk/Property/Culloden/News/2377/ [22 January 2014] Pittock, M, 1991 The Invention of Scotland: The Stuart Myth and the Scottish Identity, Routledge, London Pollard, T, 2009 Culloden: The History and Archaeology of the Last Clan Battle, Pen and Sword, Barnsley Pollard, T and Banks, I, 2009 Editorial, Journal of Conflict Archaeology 5 (1), 11–16 Prebble, J, 1961 Culloden, Secker and Warburg, London Reese, P, 2003 Flodden: A Scottish Tragedy, Birlinn, Edinburgh Reid, S, 1994 Like Hungry Wolves: Culloden Moor 16 April 1746, Windrowe and Greene, London ——, 1996 1745: A Military History of the last Jacobite Rising, Spellmount, Staplehurst Remembering Flodden, 2012 About the Remembering Flodden Project [online], available from: http://www. flodden.net/about [18 November 2012] ——, 2014 Remembering Flodden Project Homepage [online], available from: http://www.flodden.net/ [2 February 2014] Richards, E, 2000 The Highland Clearances: People, Landlords, and Rural Turmoil, Birlinn, Edinburgh ——, 2007 Debating the Highland Clearances, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh Sadler, J, 2006 Flodden 2013: Scotland’s Greatest Defeat, Osprey, New York Sadler, J and Serdiville, R, 2013 The Battle of Flodden, The History Press, Stroud The Scotsman, 2014 Plans to build houses on Culloden could be ditched [online], 21 March, available from: http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/heritage/plans-to-build-houses-on-culloden-could-beditched-1-3349146 [22 March 2014] Sikora, J, 2013 ‘This Deathless Field’: The Role of On-site Interpretation in Negotiating the Heritage Values of Historic Battlefields, unpublished PhD thesis, Newcastle University

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Smith, L, 2006 The Uses of Heritage, Routledge, London Synnott, M G, 1995 Disney’s America: Whose Patrimony, Whose Profits, Whose Past? The Public Historian 17 (4), 43–59 Szechi, D, 1994 The Jacobites, Britain and Europe 1688–1788, Manchester University Press, Manchester Towton Battlefield Society, 2014a Objectives [online], available from: http://www.towton.org.uk/objectives-2/ [3 March 2014] ——, 2014b In the community [online], available from: http://www.towton.org.uk/tbs-in-the-community/ [3 March 2014] Waterton, E and Smith, L, 2009 Taking Archaeology Out of Heritage, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne

13

At the Community Level: Intangible Cultural Heritage as Naturally-occurring Ecomuseums Michelle L. Stefano

‘I

ntangible cultural heritage’, as defined by the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), continues to gain traction as a concept within the international heritage discourse. Despite the fact that a decade has now passed since the enforcement of the 2003 Convention, the issue of effectively safeguarding intangible cultural heritage (hereafter ICH) remains an important topic of debate at international, national and regional levels.1 Most importantly, there exists a framework for the safeguarding of ICH that continues to gain international acceptance: the set of guidelines and suggestions put forward within the 2003 Convention, including its accompanying Operational Directives (see UNESCO 2014). This is based on the fact that over 165 States Parties have now accepted and/or ratified the 2003 Convention, which attests to its geographically spread popularity, as well as its potential for setting the standard for safeguarding approaches on an international scale (UNESCO 2016). Particularly relevant to the following discussions is the topic of museological intervention with respect to safeguarding ICH. The current framework, as structured and promoted by UNESCO, is linked to the museum sector and its practices in two major ways. First, within the past several years, museums across the world have been called upon to engage more with ICH through the efforts of the International Council of Museums (ICOM), such as the 2004 Declaration of Seoul, and through relevant sub-committees (ICOM 2004; see also Vieregg and Davis 2000, Vieregg et al 2004; ICME 2004; Boylan 2006). In general, these developments can be viewed as a response to UNESCO’s early efforts in the 2000s, especially the 2003 Convention, and the concern with rising cultural homogenisation via the forces of globalisation (see, for instance, Baghli 2004; Kurin 2004a; Lee 2004; Yim 2004). At ICOM’s 2004 General Conference it was stated that although museums have historically prioritised tangible heritage and would, thereby, need to significantly shift their approaches in order to engage with ICH, they are ‘probably the best institution to do so’ within society (Kurin 2004b, 8). While national governments determine what agencies, ministries and/or organisations are to be held responsible for the implementation of the 2003 Convention within their territories, it is possible that the museum sector will become even more involved than ever before. As Kreps (2003) highlights, and as later discussions on ecomuseology reveal, museums have engaged

1

This is evidenced by the increasing number of international conferences, field schools and UNESCOsponsored meetings and workshops since the mid-2000s that have ICH, and approaches to its safeguarding, as their focus.

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with living heritage long before the ‘ICH’ concept was born. Thus, the issue of safeguarding ICH can certainly be approached from a museological perspective. The second way in which the current framework engages with the museum sector is arguably less overt. Specifically, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (2006) astutely emphasises that the methods promoted through the 2003 Convention are fundamentally museological in nature. Speaking more generally, she explains: ‘[H]eritage is created through metacultural operations that extend museological values and methods (collection, documentation, preservation, presentation, evaluation, and interpretation) to living persons, their knowledge, practices, artifacts, social worlds, and life spaces’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2006, 161). Indeed, inventorying, which consists of identifying, listing and documenting ICH, is the required first step towards its safeguarding at the national level by States Parties (see, for instance, UNESCO 2003, Articles 12, 13, 16 and 17; UNESCO 2014). Here, it can be considered that the current framework is structured by the 2003 Convention, but, most importantly, it is propelled forward as an ‘operation’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2006, 161) through longstanding museum methods and practices. Even though other methods beyond inventorying are encouraged, particularly those that aim to involve source communities, groups and individuals, a safeguarding approach that begins with the idea that ICH can be listed, as well as documented, in order to safeguard it runs the risk of neglecting a more holistic view of its intrinsic connections to people, places and larger social and environmental contexts, the reasons why such heritage is intangible (Stefano 2012). As Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (2006, 161) outlines, museological values and methods are ‘extended’ to these living entities in a process that can be assumed to originate from the ‘outside’ with respect to the source practitioners of the cultural expressions at hand. Accordingly, relationships between the selected ICH and its practitioners can change. In terms of listing and documenting activities, which can be considered two sides of the same coin, how can these vital links be addressed? If, at its heart, all heritage is a set of values, meanings, memories and emotions (Smith 2006, 56), what information is collected on paper, and what information is captured on film? Moreover, do not these activities tend to treat separately the vital connections between people, their intangible cultural expressions and the places in which they evolve (Stefano 2012)? On this note, both Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998; 2004, 60) and Kurin (2007, 12) highlight that documenting ICH is limited in scope only because its vitality could never be transformed into tangible take-away items. Certainly, it is reasonable to propose that in order for such heritage to be safeguarded it must first be identified. In this light, the idea of ICH inventories can bring to mind limitless scrolls of information since ‘there is no community without embodied knowledge that is transmitted orally, gesturally, or by example’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2004, 57; see also Blake 2006; Hafstein 2009). Nevertheless, fundamental to the act of listing is the process of exclusion; there will always exist intangible cultural expressions that are not listed and thus remain ‘unidentified’ or ‘unrecognised’ through these outside forces (Hafstein 2009, 105). Furthermore, the inventorying process has been argued to ‘quantify heritage’ and, in turn, treat ICH as a series of items (Hafstein 2009; see also Kurin 2004b, 74). It can be suggested that, within this process of itemisation, the aesthetic attributes of ICH are prioritised (Stefano 2012). Meaning, the external qualities of a cultural expression, such as the details of costumes or the footwork in a dance, garner the most attention, as opposed to the significance, values and meanings that give them life. In this sense, how can ICH be viewed holistically and, thereby, treated accordingly within safeguarding approaches?



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As a way forward, and further elaborating an approach argued elsewhere (Stefano 2012), this chapter suggests that intangible cultural expressions can be considered as ‘naturally-occurring ecomuseums’ in order to promote a more holistic view of the reasons why they are in existence and continually changing. As opposed to beginning the safeguarding process with a non-holistic view of ICH, as discussed, recognition of the interconnected relationships between people, their heritage, associated places and larger social and environmental contexts is needed, an approach fundamental to ecomuseology. The suggestion that ICH can be viewed as ‘naturally-occurring ecomuseums’ is based on data collected from the practitioners of the Rapper Dance, a centuriesold sword-dancing tradition from North East England, concerning the roles museums can play in safeguarding it. While numerous factors can contribute to the vitality of ICH, it should be stressed that the knowledge, significance, values and meanings concerning certain living cultural traditions, practices and expressions are first and foremost embodied by people (Logan 2007). Therefore, any heritage management initiative that aims to effectively sustain ICH should start from the perspectives of those who embody it, in whatever form it takes. With respect to the data presented here, the notion of museological involvement in safeguarding the Rapper Dance is investigated through in-depth interviews with its performers in the North East of England, as well as in another place to which it has spread in recent years: Brooklyn, New York City. In addition, participant observation during the period 2007–9 and during 2011 has brought to light the ways in which the dance is currently being safeguarded within its community, without any ‘outside’ intervention. In order to consider the dance as a ‘naturally-occurring ecomuseum’, the following section outlines key aspects of the ecomuseological philosophy. The Ecomuseological Approach As presented, the acts of listing and documenting ICH, as endorsed by UNESCO, have been situated within the realm of traditional museum practice. Additionally, the limitations of both traditional museum practice and the act of listing ICH have been discussed as stemming from the vitalised, mutable and ephemeral nature of living heritage. In this regard, it is worth noting that documenting ICH, particularly from a museological perspective, is understandable, since there exists no other way to ‘capture’ it in tangible form for use within the museum context. Upon closer examination, it can be argued that this need to document is in direct response to an inherent limitation of museology itself: the museum building. Describing this notion as the ‘limits of detachment’, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998, 30) contends: ‘Typically, we have inscribed what we cannot carry away, whether in field notes, recordings, photographs, films, or drawings. We have created ethnographic documents.’ Here, it becomes clear that these ‘limits of detachment’ are rooted within the fact that people, and the cultural expressions they embody, cannot easily be brought into the museum for safeguarding purposes.2 Indeed, in Loomis’ Folk Artisans Under Glass, it is warned that even demonstrations of cultural traditions within the ‘refined setting’ of the museum can ‘inevitably’ change

2

For an examination of the challenges that museum professionals (in the North East of England) face with respect to engaging more deeply with ICH, see Stefano 2009.

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them owing to a separation from their natural, or source, contexts (1992, 193). In a sense, documents have traditionally been collected as a means of bridging this gap between the museum and the world outside its walls. Most pertinent to this discussion is the fact that the absence of a museum building can be considered a key facet of the ecomuseological approach. Within ecomuseological philosophy an emphasis is placed on the ‘outside world’ or, more specifically, a set territory within which heritage expressions live and continue to develop in connection to their source communities and larger social, political, economic, cultural and environmental contexts. In the following paragraphs, two main principles of ecomuseology are introduced: the in situ safeguarding approach and the crucial component of community authority over decision-making and safeguarding initiatives. Key Tenets of Ecomuseology The ecomuseological movement can be traced back to late 1960s France and the work of Georges Henri Rivière and Hugues de Varine (Boylan 1992; Hudson 1992; Corsane and Holleman 1993; Davis 1999; 2011). One of the first ecomuseums, Le Creusot-Montceau-les-Mines, encompasses an area of roughly 500 square kilometres in the Burgundy region (De Varine 1973; Davis 2011). It was noted that ‘every building, every person, every cow, every plant and every tree within the [eco]museum’s boundaries was to be considered as belonging to the collections’ (De Varine 1993). As such, it is evident that, within the ecomuseological framework, maintaining the connections between people, heritage and locality has been given a higher priority than having a place into which representations of heritage are gathered and, thereby, potentially separated. This is especially crucial for heritage that is given its life by people and through their interactions with larger social and environmental changes (Stefano and Corsane 2008). Juxtaposing the components of traditional museology and those of ecomuseology are Rivard’s (1984, 92; 1988) two formulae: •

Traditional Museum = building + collections + expert staff + public visitors

•

Ecomuseum = territory + heritage + memory + population

Here, the shared heritage and memories found within an ecomuseum correspond to a set territory and, most significantly, its inhabitants. The fact that the ‘expert staff’ found within the traditional museum is replaced with the ‘population’ (Rivard 1984, 92) of the ecomuseum has particular resonance with data discussed in the following sections. In general, it is proposed that people are the experts with reference to the heritage expressions they embody. In recent years, the notion of community authority – equivalent to that which has traditionally been exercised by museum curators and other staff members – has become a significant marker of ecomuseological practice (see, for instance, Corsane et al 2007a). Specifically, researchers at the International Centre of Cultural and Heritage Studies at Newcastle University have generated a set of guidelines, or principles, which can be used to assess if a heritage management approach is ecomuseological in nature (see Corsane 2006a; 2006b; Corsane et al 2004; 2007b). For example, the first two of these principles specifically state that an ecomuseum is ‘initiated and steered by local communities’ and that decision-making processes are conducted in a ‘democratic manner’ (see Corsane 2006a, 110).



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Taken together, the in situ, community-led approach that is characteristic of ecomuseology can be considered to promote a more holistic viewpoint of living heritage, or ICH (Stefano 2012). This is based on the priority that is given to allowing cultural expressions to change under the authority of those who embody them. The following section examines a particular example of ICH, the Rapper Dance, in terms of how it is currently being safeguarded and how, according to its practitioners, museums can contribute to its safeguarding for future generations. From there, the philosophy of ecomuseology is revisited not only as an approach that can be applied to more effectively safeguard the dance but as a set of methods that are already being used in an organic, naturally-occurring heritage management approach. The Rapper Dance Believed to have been in existence since the eighteenth century, the Rapper Dance has its roots within the coal-mining villages of the North East of England. The earliest reference to a regional sword dance is found in Wallis’s 1769 book, Natural History and Antiquities of Northumberland (see also Cawte 1981, 97). Wallis (1769, 28) states: Young men march from village to village, and from house to house with music before them, dressed in antic attire, and before the Vestibulum or entrance of every house, entertain the family with the Motus incompositus, the antic Dance or Chorus armatus, with swords or spears in their hands erect and shining. This they call, The Sword-Dance.

Although descriptions such as Wallis’s have provided information on the presence of sword dances in the region, there is little known about the exact origins of the Rapper Dance (Cawte 1981; Lawrenson 2007; Rapper Online 2012a). This is partly due to the fact that this was a living tradition of the working class, knowledge of which was passed on by oral transmission (Cawte 1981). Understandably, very few records exist pertaining to the Rapper Dance until the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. Historically, coal miners performed the dance for their fellow villagers during certain holidays (Rapper Online 2012a). During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the dancers would also perform in pubs for extra beer money (Cawte 1981), a type of venue that is still used throughout the region today. When performed, it consists of five men (and now women) holding their sword with one hand and the sword of their neighbour with the other. The dancers are connected by their swords while stepping into various configurations and appearing to tie themselves into a series of intricate knots. It is important to note that folk musicians are also a part of the Rapper dancing community, as musical accompaniment is needed for both performances and rehearsals (see Stefano 2010). In more recent history, groups of Rapper dancers are called ‘teams’. The annual competition, Dance England Rapper Tournament (DERT), is where most of these teams come together to be judged on their technique, speed and showmanship. It is noteworthy that, in recent decades, women have also joined the Rapper community, both forming teams of their own and dancing with men. The acceptance of female participation in a historically male tradition is reflective of the fact that intangible cultural expressions evolve in response to larger social changes, such as the increasing acceptance of gender equality. There is a growing number of female rapper teams, including those that are mixed – both male and female (see Rapper Online 2012b).

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Owing to the decline in the coal-mining industry over the course of the twentieth century, Rapper dancers today come from a variety of occupational and geographical backgrounds. In fact, the Newcastle Kingsmen, a team established by Newcastle University students in 1949, has been credited with reviving the tradition within the North East after World War II (Rapper Online 2012c). As coal miners lost interest in performing the dance, students from non-coalmining backgrounds brought the living tradition to wider audiences. While beyond the scope of this chapter, this ‘change of hands’ is an important component in its survival of the dance today, and particularly in its mid-twentieth-century revitalisation. This transition signals that certain socioeconomic factors can also play a significant role in sustaining living traditions, especially those that were once of and for the working class. As a result of migration, as well as the Internet, there are Rapper teams both in the UK and elsewhere in Europe, as well as in Australia, New Zealand and the US (Rapper Online 2012b). Indeed, the US is home to numerous teams, from Massachusetts to Oregon. In 2010 the first Dancing America Rapper Tournament (DART), which is modelled after DERT, was held in Boston, and several UK teams made the trip to compete. The following sections examine how museums can help to safeguard the dance, as well as how it is currently being safeguarded by its communities without any ‘outside’ support. The analysis is based on participant observation and in-depth, semi-structured interviews with members of teams from the Newcastle area (2007–9), including the well-known Newcastle Kingsmen, as well as with a team that is based in New York City: Half Moon. In 2011 ethnographic fieldwork was conducted with the Half Moon team at their practice space, Brooklyn Friends School, and during a competition event at various venues throughout Manhattan. Interviews with several team members proudly recalled that, in the 1980s, Half Moon was established as the first female Rapper team anywhere. Indeed, it was stated that in the late 1980s and 1990s Half Moon went over to ‘England a number of times and [it] opened up a lot of eyes over there to the fact that women actually could do this dance’ (Interview HM1 2011). One of the founders of the Half Moon team noted that she had learned the dance while in college in New Haven, Connecticut, in the late 1970s, from an established American Morris dancer, David Lindsay. It is through connections such as these that the Rapper Dance, among other English dances, took root in the US. To shed some light on the relationships Half Moon has to the source contexts of the dance in the UK, one of the longstanding members of the team noted: I love that we share this tradition and that we speak the same language – you know, dance language. There’s a touch of carrying on the English tradition. When we went to a working man’s club outside of Newcastle and it was pretty, sort of, thrilling to go – it was the seat of where so much has been done during the twentieth century – and met an older woman who had danced on a team in the 50s and who had won a competition, and knowing that there’s a women’s thread that carried through there. And going there – it was a little like going to Mecca or something – and we get excited when we have the chance to dance with English teams and we exchange ideas and so, I think we do feel connected and I think we also have a sense of [being] American and so, we’re different in a certain way. (Interview HM5 2011)



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Moreover, other team members pointed out their ancestral connections to England, which they felt were strengthened through the dance. As mentioned earlier, there was also a great pride felt among the dancers of Half Moon for helping to expand the tradition to include female teams. A dancer described the reception they received, and the eyes they opened, at the first event in which they competed in England: We actually were at Whitby [Folk Week] on our first trip. There was a big arena stage where we got to perform … and then we were supposed to teach a workshop […] and a lot of people said: ‘You got women teaching that workshop? Forget about it; I’m not going!’ But then what happened was about halfway through the week, we competed in what they called the ‘Ceremonial Dance Competition’. We didn’t do our Rapper – we heard afterwards from some of the judges that if we had done our Rapper, for whatever reasons, we would not have won. We did [another dance] and we actually won the competition. Anyway, after we won, the next day all of a sudden, the attendance at our [Rapper] workshop doubled. So, we did go through quite a bit of hostility, but when we went back again, there were a number of women’s Rapper teams that have formed up, including Short Circuit and I can’t remember the names of the other ones … and we like to think that we helped to open the way by showing them it can be done. I’m not sure if that’s totally true, but we like to feel that we had a little bit of a role in showing that women can do it and they can do it well. (Interview HM6 2011)

Attendance at Half Moon rehearsals for five months revealed that the older members of the team are also involved with transmitting the meanings, knowledge and skills of the dance to younger generations, as there were several young women participating as beginners. While there remains a relationship between the team and the original source contexts of the dance in the UK, the dance is being safeguarded, as well as evolving, in newer contexts, such as in New York City. As mentioned, the following sections explore, from the perspectives of UK and US dancers, the ways in which the dance can best be kept alive for the future. Echoing the sentiments of the mid-2000s, when museums were spotlighted for their potential to sustain ICH worldwide, an idea that is still reflected in the scholarship today (see Alivizatou 2012a), the ways in which museums can help to safeguard the dance, as well as possible limitations of museological intervention, are examined. What Roles can Museums Play in Safeguarding the Rapper Dance? In general, when the question of what museums can do to safeguard this intangible cultural expression was raised, the potential roles of documenting, providing venues and acting as ‘access points’ for information were discussed by the dancers. Before examining these roles further, it is important to highlight that a certain wariness with respect to museological intervention was also expressed. For instance, one dancer contended: ‘[Museums] can help with the history of it, but not the actual dancing. I don’t think that museums are that dedicated these days’ (Interview Aa3 2007). Additionally, it had been warned that museums could ‘stagnate’ the vitality of the dance through potential institutionalisation (Interview Aa10 2007), as well as by starting to ‘commercialise’ it and, thereby, rendering it ‘too big’ in comparison with how it exists today under the authority of its practitioners

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(Interview Aa7 2007). This notion of stagnation, with respect to ICH in the museum setting, was also highlighted as a potential problem by participants of the 2004 ICOM General Conference, mentioned earlier (Yim 2004, 12; Matsuzono 2004; Lee 2004, 6). During the interviews with Rapper dancers, discussions shed light on this possible phenomenon, which led to the suggestion of other, more dynamic ways in which museums can sustain the dance. The act of recording information about ICH is still viewed by some as a valid role that museums can play. For example, a dancer stated: The tradition has evolved, which is important for the tradition, but at the same time, we need to record what it was because otherwise it will be forgotten … you can’t take [the recordings] as, ‘That’s exactly how it was done!’ … it’s more, ‘That’s the snapshot. That’s how it was done then.’ … but, at the same time, it’s still important that it’s recorded. Otherwise, things get forgotten and people get forgotten and it’s not just about the dances, it is about the people involved. (Interview Aa6 2007)

Offering another reason why documentation can be valuable, it was explained: One of the big problems with the tradition is that it was very, very much a working class one … and the original dancers were not terribly considered ‘museum material’. It is very, very hard to find any written evidence or any photographic evidence of the early days of Rapper. So, although there are few key amateurs that do collect and that do, every time they find a newspaper clipping or been to somebody they note down what they’ve been told, or every time they see a photograph they get a photograph of it to keep a record, no one person has ever got the resources to have a proper, comprehensive overview and collate all the information they can get their hands on … and what is desperately needed is a museum that is interested enough to have a specific section on Rapper. (Interview Aa5 2007)

Here, it is suggested that the traditional museological activity of documentation was recognised by informants as beneficial to promoting the importance of the dance, as well as providing a place to store relevant information about its history. However, as noted, documentation of the dance was also understood as insufficient in terms of safeguarding approaches. On this note, a dancer commented: I don’t know so much about [museums safeguarding the dance] … I think that it’s something that museums can document, but by the nature of what we do, I think it’s something that needs to be done, or something that needs to be performed. (Interview Aa9 2007)

Explaining this reasoning further, he continued:

It’s not something that’s preserved in record or documentation […it’s] something that people, that members of the public, are only aware of through their engagement with it and just being there when it happens […] I think it’s important to get involved and to get out there and to… to put it out where it’s, you know, in front of people … to perform it. (Interview Aa9 2007)



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Similarly, a Half Moon dancer spoke of the value, as well as limitations, of using audio-visual technology for recording the dance: It’s so much easier now to video than it ever was before. [A fellow dancer] has this huge archive of photos and videos that he’s taken, but it’s kind of out of context … so, I think it’s real nice when people see it. (Interview HM6 2011)

Another dancer imagined a ‘typical’ museum exhibit to argue similar ideas with respect to the need for live performance and engagement with the dance. He stated: It’s hard to preserve something where the thing that makes it what it is, is that live vibrancy … it’s there; it’s in front of you; it’s being done and … photographs just can’t carry that … and you can see … imagine a display of a set of swords tied in locks, stuck on a wall with a few photographs of the old boys and maybe a photograph of a set of youngsters doing it and … what does it tell anyone anything? It doesn’t really. (Interview Aa1 2007)

These examples serve to illustrate what was found to be the common progression of topics within the interviews – that is, conversations tended to focus on the ways in which museums can help promote the dance as it stands today in its most vitalised form. One of the promotional roles museums can play, according to the dancers, is to serve as venues for live performances. In effect, museums would be opening their doors to the Rapper community for the sharing of the significance, values and meanings of the dance as conveyed through its performance. Moreover, it is suggested that the more venues the Rapper dancing community has access to, the greater the probability that it can be sustained. On this note, a former Newcastle Kingsmen member asserts: ‘Well, providing a space is always a good idea; practice space is really hard to come by unless you’re lucky and have a good pub that allows you to dance upstairs’ (Interview Aa1 2007). With this in mind, they provided numerous examples of how museums can provide spaces for the dance. For instance, one dancer felt that Beamish Museum, an open-air museum in Durham County that is dedicated to the heritage of the region, is a good place for its performance. He stated: I would like to see more museums have, like, a Rapper team there, especially in the museums of the North East because it was associated with the original North East mining … so, I’d like to see museums like Beamish […] because they’re helping to preserve everything else … you know, Beamish [has] a railway, they’ve got a pub, they’ve got a town, a mine. (Interview Aa7 2007)

Another dancer talked about museums having a ‘folk day’, where the folk music traditions of the region, as well as the Rapper Dance, can be demonstrated (Interview Aa2 2007). She noted that this could be especially beneficial for children by providing workshops where they ‘can have a go at [the traditions]’ (Interview Aa2 2007). They also highlighted the educational role museums can play. For instance, another dancer explained:

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I think that there are museums that could take a far more active role in educating people … even when you can see a little information about [the Rapper Dance], it’s not pushed […] it’s something that ‘used to happen a hundred years ago’ … and they don’t actively encourage people to get involved in it now and I think they should. I think, mainly, people come across us either by chance or because they have seen us perform in public … and then they’ve got our details off us and met us later and, the dedicated ones who fancy having a go, really try … but the number of school parties and the number of university trips and individuals and interested people that would go to the multitude of museums in the North East [UK]; they’re not […] aware of Rapper at all. (Interview Aa5 2007)

In addition, one dancer noted that playing an educational role is not only limited to museums; schools should also be involved in teaching this living tradition to their students (Interview Aa4 2007). This point resonates with the argument of Hyeonjeong (2008, 91), who notes that providing venues for the transmission of ICH is critical for attracting new members to join. In turn, membership could grow, which can contribute to the sustainability of this example of ICH. Similarly, the idea that museums should act as ‘access points’ for information about the dance as it is practised today was also considered important, especially for those in the Newcastle region. Dancers spoke of the need to focus on its contemporary existence in that information can be supplied to museum visitors about the festivals, pubs and competitions in which it is performed, as well as about joining. For example, a Newcastle Kingsmen member noted: We can only glean a certain amount of information about how Rapper was performed in the past by looking at notations and historical records, but I think ultimately, it’s about the contemporary interpretation of what we’re [doing] and making it relevant to where we are now […] I think that museums can probably document what’s come before and also maintain some acknowledgement of the fact that things are still alive and well. (Interview Aa9 2007)

In general, it has been said that seeing the dance and listening to its accompanying music through live demonstration is considered the ultimate opportunity for experiencing and understanding what the performers choose to communicate. The vitality of this intangible cultural expression exists only through live performance, including rehearsals and the ‘birthday parties’ in between (Interview Aa4 2007), and is a means of facilitating the passage of information from one generation to the next. A Half Moon member noted that, unless ‘you know somebody who does it, or happen to be passing and see it happen’, one may not even know it exists (Interview HM6 2011). Therefore, an increased opportunity for live performance and, thus, transmission has been viewed as a long-lasting way forward for safeguarding not only the dance steps and musical notes but also the significance and values that lie within. It can be argued that museums could contribute most to the safeguarding of this living tradition through supporting its practitioners so that they can continue to do what they are already doing. As argued in the following section, the safeguarding and promotional efforts that are already undertaken by the Rapper dancing community strongly resonate with the basic tenets of ecomuseological philosophy. Thus, this community, as widespread as it is, can be viewed as a ‘naturally-occurring ecomuseum’.



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The Rapper Dance as a Naturally Occurring Ecomuseum From the perspectives of the Rapper dancers, museums can help support the transmission, practice and growth of the dance through promotional efforts. Moreover, two dancers specifically mentioned that museum sponsorship, through financial aid and/or free publicity, could contribute to keeping the dance alive (Interview Aa1 2007; Interview Aa7 2007). Nevertheless, these potential activities can also be considered redundant when compared with the ways in which the dancers are already safeguarding their living tradition. In this respect, museums should help to reinforce the current safeguarding efforts that are occurring naturally outside their walls. Here, the supportive roles museums can play centre not on the dance itself but on the people who embody, practise and perform it. While museum support can certainly be beneficial, it is important to stress that the responses examined earlier bring to light the safeguarding methods – whether instituted by a museum or not – that are deemed most crucial to the dancers. Through answering questions about possible museological intervention, responses have been based on dancers’ own practical knowledge and experiences that are already informing their safeguarding and promotional efforts. Most significantly, the current safeguarding methods employed by the Rapper community strongly resonate with the approach of ecomuseology in both theory and practice (Stefano and Corsane 2008). Recalling the ecomuseological principles outlined earlier, the Rapper Dance is practised, transmitted and evaluated in situ. Moreover, its development is facilitated under the authority of its practitioners and, therefore, can be considered, from the standpoint of the heritage discourse, a community-led heritage management approach. Taken together, the Rapper Dance, represented by those who are devoted to it and the places in which they meet, constitutes a naturally occurring ecomuseum when thought of in terms of, again, heritage management. In other words, it is not expected that the Rapper dancers view their actions as ecomuseological in nature, for they are interested in sustaining the dance for far more personal, as well as shared, reasons that can be argued to differ from those held by an ‘outside’ heritage professional (see Stefano and Corsane 2008; Stefano 2010; 2012). Yet, viewing this living tradition as a naturally occurring ecomuseum can help promote within the heritage sector a much-needed holistic and integrated view of ICH and its effective safeguarding. It is worth noting that this conceptualisation of ICH – that is, ICH that is safeguarded by its source community – also modifies the ecomuseum concept. Specifically, ecomuseums are traditionally understood as being represented by a particular territory, a demarcated geographical region that constitutes the area in which in situ heritage management approaches are undertaken (Davis 2011). Moreover, ecomuseums are typically concerned with the heritage of its inhabitants, as exemplified by Rivard’s (1984) ‘population’ component presented earlier. However, although the Rapper Dance originated within the North East of England, it does not belong to a set, demarcated territory in a conventional sense. As presented, there are teams throughout the world, and the places in which the dance is performed are continually changing. For instance, on Wednesday evenings the Newcastle Kingsmen and Pengwyn Rapper teams are usually rehearsing in an upstairs room at the Cumberland Arms pub in Newcastle; during this time, other groups of dancers may also be gathering for informal sessions at pubs in Northumberland and Durham counties, as well as beyond. Ultimately, there is no permanent border within which the dance is performed – new places for meeting emerge and schedules change. While the notion of ‘population’ is most often associated with the inhabitants of a geographical area, here, the dancers are viewed as belonging to the ‘territory’ that is formed through their

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movement – that is, the fragmented, geographically spread network of places within which this living tradition is expressed and innovated. After all, it is they who embody the significance, values and meanings of the Rapper Dance; therefore, wherever they go, their ICH goes as well (see Stefano and Corsane 2008). The fact that the Rapper Dance is completely under the control of its practitioners also reflects ecomuseological philosophy. Recalling principles 1 and 2 cited earlier, the dancers are directly responsible for the ongoing development of their living tradition through an approach that is, at its core, democratic. Competitions, festivals, rehearsals and performances are organised and produced through the efforts of this network of practitioners. Participant observation of numerous conventions has found that a democratic approach to voicing opinions and making decisions is achieved through the methods of consensus building and, in some cases, voting. A dancer with Half Moon described her understanding of this process: There’s a creative thought process as we all try to put together a dance and think about stylistically how we want it to work. Everybody contributes in a different way; there are people who see patterns; there are people who can move in a way that other people want to emulate; there are people who have enthusiasm and commitment for showing up and who are goodnatured when other people are not as good-natured. So, their personalities add to it even if their dance ability is not on the same level. (Interview HM3 2011)

Moreover, competitions provide great examples of how decisions regarding standards of technique, stylistic developments and issues of authenticity are reached within the larger community (see Fig 13.1). For instance, at DERT 2007, the most important competition of the year, teams consisting of young teenagers from Boston brought new techniques, as a result of their youthful energy, to the tradition. Their eligibility in competing in DERT, including the warm reception they were given by the British dancers, demonstrated a community-led acceptance of new stylistic developments by teams located far from the dance’s English coal-mining roots. The Morris Ring, an association for English Morris and sword-dancing teams, which seeks to ‘maintain’ and ‘preserve’ them (The Morris Ring 2011), does not allow female participation, as it would be viewed as inauthentic (Cartridge 2010, pers comm). Interestingly, this has prevented Rapper teams from joining, as they disapprove of this anachronistic regulation. Instead, the Rapper Dance continues to be practised through the decision-making of its practitioners outside the more official associations, designations and interventions of the heritage sector. Essentially, it is the Rapper community that decides what is ‘authentic’, or ‘inauthentic’, with regard to the dance. Half Moon dancers are conscious of the balance between ‘authenticity’ and innovation. One member explained that they want to ‘preserve and also to hopefully innovate at the same time’ (Interview HM1 2011). She continued: I feel like with a lot of folk traditions, one the one hand, there is preserving what had been done for ages, but also with that things get passed down and things get changed in a way and new things get created … . I think that’s a part of the folk tradition as well: preserving the authenticity of that [history] and making it relevant to the world that you live in as well. (Interview HM1 2011)



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Fig 13.1 Dancers bending their swords together at DERT 2008 in Liverpool, UK. Photo by M. Stefano

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Furthermore, the acceptance of female participation provides a good example of how an in situ safeguarding approach allows for heritage expressions to reflect larger social and environmental changes, as mentioned earlier. Kept in the hands of its source practitioners, the dance is allowed to evolve through ‘exposure’ to a larger ecology of human experience, such as the political push for gender equality of the past several decades. Viewing the Rapper Dance as a naturally occurring ecomuseum should be considered as a conceptual tool that helps to widen the view of ICH to include not only its aesthetic attributes but also the people who embody it and their connections to the places and larger social and environmental contexts within which it develops. Indeed, in recent years Brown (2005, 42), Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (2006, 164) and Kurin (2007, 12) have called for a more ecological perspective with regard to conceptualising and safeguarding ICH. For instance, Brown (2005, 42) explains: Ecological thinking is characterized by holism and awareness of interconnections. It recognizes that the management of complex systems demands attention not to one variable but to many, and that there will always be uncertainty about how changes in individual variables affect the whole.

Therefore, it is suggested that an ecomuseological framework, based on the key principles discussed earlier, can be used. Most importantly, this holistic viewpoint of ICH can serve to protect it from being treated as a series of ‘items’ in an inventory, one of the first safeguarding steps in the UNESCO framework (UNESCO 2003). In effect, the prospect of separating – albeit conceptually – the aesthetic qualities of ICH from its source communities, groups and individuals and contexts can be guarded against. Moreover, since the ecomuseological framework places the safeguarding focus on supporting people, the activity of recording ICH is cast in a new light; it becomes a method that is used in conjunction with an array of other, more dynamic initiatives. Importantly, the naturally occurring ecomuseum concept emphasises the expression of ICH in its entirety: the reasons why it is practised and how it is continually vitalised are prioritised. With the Rapper Dance, if these underlying reasons could be mapped onto a two-dimensional surface, the resulting image may resemble an intricate, web-like configuration of lines drawn between points that represent actual people, the places in which they meet and the socioeconomic factors that facilitate individual participation, to name a few. In three dimensions, this ecomuseum can be conceived of as a fluid, ever-changing entity that centres upon the livelihood of the dance through the dedication of its practitioners. Interestingly, Hudson (1996, 18) noted decades ago that Europe is nothing but a ‘giant network of potential ecomuseums’ that are ‘cellular’ in structure, an idea that is similar to how the Rapper Dance could be described, with the addition of its manifestations elsewhere. Applying the Naturally Occurring Ecomuseum Idea With regard to intangible cultural expressions that are threatened with extinction, it can be useful to imagine them as once being an integral part of naturally occurring ecomuseums of their own. It is safe to assume that most traditions across the world that are still living in some form or another have been safeguarded without, or with little, ‘outside intervention’ and, thus, have been sustained through methods that can be considered ecomuseological in nature (ie community-led,



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in situ approaches). Indeed, Kurin (2007, 12) notes that if ICH is in the hands of its community members then it can be considered safeguarded. In any case, using this concept as a starting point can encourage a more holistic and integrated analysis of why a former naturally occurring ecomuseum has begun to fail. For instance, in the examples of ICH recently inscribed on the List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding, one of the main instruments of the 2003 Convention, it is often suggested that the forces of urbanisation, migration and a diminishing transmission rate to younger generations are to blame for their weakened states (see UNESCO 2015). In turn, the approach to the rehabilitation of these intangible cultural expressions may actually need to focus on factors that, traditionally, fall outside the realm of ‘culture’ and appear to have little connection with, for example, a ritual dance or storytelling practice, such as economics and politics. Through an ecomuseological framework, economic and political factors, for instance, are considered a part of the process of heritage expression, as they are a part of the social contexts in which ICH practitioners function and change. Grounding this notion in New York City, a Half Moon dancer mentioned the fact that it is an increasingly expensive place to live and work. In this light, she expressed the worry that this ‘may be part of the reason that we are having trouble holding on to the next generation of people’ (Interview HM6 2011). Applying the ecomuseological viewpoint underscores the fact that certain intangible cultural expressions are weakened beyond repair. Reinstating the once naturally occurring ecomuseum that sustained a particular form of ICH may prove to be impossible if there is a diminished number of practitioners to embody and value it (Nas 2002). Educational efforts may aim to teach younger generations the significance of particular intangible cultural expressions, but it is possible that they may not be able to value them when it is most needed. Understandably, the prospect of ‘erasure’, or death, is a natural component of the ecology of human experience and, thus, should be considered within safeguarding efforts that aim to sustain living expressions of heritage (Alivizatou 2012b). As noted, the naturally occurring ecomuseum concept can be seen to ‘update’ the philosophy of ecomuseology from its more traditional concern for a demarcated territory and associated inhabitants to a wider understanding also encompassing an ‘on-the-move’ group of people expressing a certain form of ICH. At the same time, the concept also revisits the radical roots of the ecomuseological movement as it was first theorised decades ago. For example, with regard to the concept of ‘death’, de Varine (in Davis 1999, 234) notes that ecomuseums are essentially a process – one that typically lasts the span of a generation, ‘ie twenty-five years’. Here, it is evident that ecomuseology was founded on the notion of impermanence. Indeed, one of the motivations for creating Le Creusot, one of the first ecomuseums, was not to conserve heritage but to boost the morale of its inhabitants after a sharp rise in unemployment affected the area’s population. On this note, de Varine (1993) states: ‘Something was needed to make it possible for the local people to achieve some kind of common purpose and to use the past, with its successes and disasters, as a way of discovering a new future’. Calling it a ‘rescue job’ and an ‘experiment’, it is asserted that creating social change was one of the core aims of the ecomuseum project (De Varine 1993; 1996, 23). Applying this logic to struggling intangible cultural expressions can serve to remind heritage professionals that ICH is also a process, based on the premise of organic and inevitable impermanence. Therefore, an effective way forward for its safeguarding would have to focus on supporting its practitioners to be able to respond to everchanging social and environmental conditions.

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Conclusion While the UNESCO framework for safeguarding ICH gains strength at the international and national levels, it is important to examine its potential shortcomings at the local level, where living heritage expressions, practices and beliefs truly live. In this sense, it can be considered that a particular tension exists with respect to these global initiatives and their local level ‘targets’. Positioned as a meeting place between the two, the Rapper Dance has been studied in terms of how possible museological intervention can help sustain it according to those who practice and embody it. Specifically, it has been argued that the traditional museum practices of inventorying and documenting, which propel forward the current UNESCO-ICH framework, are limited with regard to effectively safeguarding the dance. Thus, more dynamic methods that centre on supporting the Rapper community have been suggested. Examining potential museological contributions has brought to light the ways in which the dance is currently being safeguarded – methods that emphasise the interconnected relationships between people, their heritage expressions and the places and contexts within which they develop and interact. These methods have been argued to strongly resonate with the approach of ecomuseology, which has raised the idea that the Rapper Dance, based on its practitioners and the ever-evolving array of places in which they meet, can be seen as a naturally occurring ecomuseum. Viewing this cultural expression through the lens of ecomuseology helps to promote a more holistic and integrated conceptualisation of ICH. In turn, the naturally occurring ecomuseum concept can be used as a tool to understand and assess how intangible cultural expressions are best vitalised, developed and sustained for the future. Bibliography and References Alivizatou, M, 2012a Intangible Heritage and the Museum: New Perspectives on Cultural Preservation, Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek CA ——, 2012b The Paradoxes of Intangible Heritage, in Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage (eds M Stefano, G Corsane and P Davis), The Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 9–22 Baghli, S A, 2004 The Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage and New Perspectives for the Museum, ICOM News 57 (4), 15–17 Blake, J, 2006 Commentary on the UNESCO 2003 Convention on the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, Institute of Art and Law, Leicester Boylan, P, 1992 Is Yours a ‘Classic’ Museum or an Ecomuseum/‘New’ Museum? Museums Journal 92 (4), 30 ——, 2006 The Intangible Heritage: a Challenge and Opportunity for Museums and Museums Professional Training, International Journal of Intangible Heritage 1, 53–64 Brown, M, 2005 Heritage Trouble: Recent Work on the Protection of Intangible Cultural Property, International Journal of Cultural Property 12 (1), 40–61 Cartridge, C, 2010 Personal communication (email exchange with the author), January Cawte, E C, 1981 A History of the Rapper Dance, Folk Music Journal 4 (2), 79–116 Corsane, G, 2006a ‘From ‘outreach’ to ‘inreach’: how ecomuseum principles encourage community participation in museum processes, Communication and Exploration: Papers of International Ecomuseum Forum, 157–71



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——, 2006b Using Ecomuseum Indicators to Evaluate the Robben Island Museum and World Heritage Site, Landscape Research 31 (4), 399–418 Corsane, G and Holleman, W, 1993 Ecomuseums: A Brief Evaluation, in Museums and the Environment (ed R De Jong), South African Museums Association, Pretoria, 111–25 Corsane, G, Elliot, S and Davis, P, 2004 Matrix of enabling features and ecomuseum indicators and characteristics, unpublished document Corsane, G, Davis, P, Elliot, S, Maggi, M, Murtas, D and Rogers, S, 2007a Ecomuseum Evaluation: Experiences in Piemonte and Liguria, Italy, International Journal of Heritage Studies 13 (2), 101–16 ——, 2007b Ecomuseum Performance in Piemonte and Liguria, Italy: The Significance of Capital, International Journal of Heritage Studies 13 (3), 224–39 Davis, P, 1999 Ecomuseums: A Sense of Place, Leicester University Press, London ——, 2011 Ecomuseums: A Sense of Place, 2 edn, Continuum, London, New York De Varine, H, 1973 A ‘Fragmented’ Museum: the Museum of Man and Industry, Museum 25 (4), 242–9 ——, 1993 Tomorrow’s Community Museums [online], available from: http://assembly.coe.int/Museum/ ForumEuroMusee/Conferences/ [20 January 2012] ——, 1996 Ecomuseum or Community Museum? Nordisk Museologi 7 (2), 21–6 Hafstein, V, 2009 Intangible Heritage as a List: From Masterpieces to Representation. 2008, in Intangible Heritage (eds L Smith and N Akagawa), Routledge, London, New York, 93–111 Hudson, K, 1992 The Dream and the Reality, Museums Journal 92 (4), 27–31 ——, 1996 Ecomuseums Become More Realistic, Nordisk Museologi 7 (2), 11–20 Hyeonjeong, K, 2008 The Importance of Communities being able to Provide Venues for Folk Performances and the Effect: a Japanese Case Study, International Journal of Intangible Heritage 3, 83–94 ICME, 2004 Conference 2004: Museums and Intangible Heritage [online], available from: http://icme.icom. museum/index.php?id=24 [8 August 2015] ICOM, 2004 Resolutions adopted by ICOM’s General Assemblies, 1946–to date [online], available from: http://icom.museum/resolutions/eres04.html [8 August 2015] Interview Aa1, 2007 Personal communication (interview with the author), 5 September, Cumberland Arms Pub, Newcastle-upon-Tyne Interview Aa2, 2007 Personal communication (interview with the author), 12 September, Cumberland Arms Pub, Newcastle-upon-Tyne Interview Aa3, 2007 Personal communication (interview with the author), 12 September, Cumberland Arms Pub, Newcastle-upon-Tyne Interview Aa4, 2007 Personal communication (interview with the author), 12 September, Cumberland Arms Pub, Newcastle-upon-Tyne Interview Aa5, 2007 Personal communication (interview with the author), 17 September, Cumberland Arms Pub, Newcastle-upon-Tyne Interview Aa6, 2007 Personal communication (interview with the author), 17 September, Cumberland Arms Pub, Newcastle-upon-Tyne Interview Aa7, 2007 Personal communication (interview with the author), 17 September, Cumberland Arms Pub, Newcastle-upon-Tyne Interview Aa9, 2007 Personal communication (interview with the author), 3 October, Cumberland Arms Pub, Newcastle-upon-Tyne

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Interview Aa10, 2007 Personal communication (interview with the author), 10 October, Cumberland Arms Pub, Newcastle-upon-Tyne Interview HM1, 2011 Personal communication (interview with the author), 10 March, Brooklyn Friends School, New York City Interview HM3, 2011 Personal communication (interview with the author), 10 March, Brooklyn Friends School, New York City Interview HM5, 2011 Personal communication (interview with the author), 17 March, Brooklyn Friends School, New York City Interview HM6, 2011 Personal communication (interview with the author), 17 March, Brooklyn Friends School, New York City Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B, 1998 Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums and Heritage, University of California Press, Berkeley CA ——, 2004 Intangible Heritage as Metacultural Production, Museum International 56 (1–2), 52–65 ——, 2006 World Heritage and Cultural Economics, in Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations (eds I Karp, C A Kratz, L Szwaja and T Ybarra-Frausto), Duke University Press, Durham NC, 161–202 Kreps, C, 2003 Liberating Culture: Cross-cultural perspectives on museums, curation and heritage preservation, Routledge, London, New York Kurin, R, 2004a Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage in the 2003 UNESCO Convention: a critical appraisal, Museum International 56 (1–2), 66–77 ——, 2004b Museums and Intangible Heritage: Culture Dead or Alive? ICOM News 57 (4), 7–9 ——, 2007 Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage: Key Factors in Implementing the 2003 Convention, International Journal of Intangible Heritage 1, 10–20 Lawrenson, T, 2007 Lecture on the Rapper Dance, Cumberland Arms Pub, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, September 2007 Lee, O Y, 2004 Preparing a Vessel to Contain Lost Life: Preservation and Successful Inheritance of Intangible Cultural Heritage, ICOM News 57 (4), 5–6 Logan, W S, 2007 Closing Pandora’s Box: Human Rights Conundrums in Cultural Heritage Protection, in Cultural Heritage and Human Rights (eds H Silverman and D F Ruggles), Springer, New York, 33–52 Loomis, O, 1992 Folk Artisans Under Glass: Practical and Ethical Considerations for the Museum, in American Material Culture and Folklife: A Prologue and Dialogue (ed S J Bronner), Utah State University Press, Logan UT, 193–200 Matsuzono, M, 2004 Museums, Intangible Cultural Heritage and the Spirit of Humanity, ICOM News 7 (4), 13–14 Nas, P J M, 2002 Masterpieces of Oral and Intangible Culture: Reflections on the UNESCO World Heritage List, Current Anthropology 43 (1), 139–48 Rapper Online, 2012a Origins and History of Rapper [online], available from: http://www.rapper.org.uk/ history.html [8 August 2015]. ——, 2012b Rapper Teams Listing [online], available from: http://www.rapper.org.uk/teams/ [8 August 2015] ——, 2012c Newcastle Kingsmen [online], available from: http://www.rapper.org.uk/teams/profiles/kingsmen.php [8 August 2015]



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Rivard, R, 1984 Opening up the Museum or Toward a New Museology: Ecomuseums and ‘Open’ Museums, Québec City ——, 1988 Museums and ecomuseums: questions and answers, in Økomuseumsboka-Identitet, Økologi, Deltakelse (eds J A Gjestrum and R Maure), Norsk ICOM, Tromsø, 123–8 Smith, L, 2006 The Uses of Heritage, Routledge, London, New York Stefano, M L, 2009 Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage: five key obstacles facing museums of the North East of England, International Journal of Intangible Heritage 4, 112–24 ——, 2010 Outside Museum Walls: Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage in the North East of England, unpublished PhD thesis, Newcastle University ——, 2012 Reconfiguring the Framework: Adopting an Ecomuseological Approach in Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage, in Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage (eds M Stefano, G Corsane and P Davis), The Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 223–38 Stefano, M L and Corsane, G, 2008 The applicability of the ecomuseum ideal in safeguarding intangible cultural heritage in North East England, in World Heritage and Sustainable Development (eds R Amoêda, S Lira, C Pinheiro, F Pinheiro and J Pinheiro), Green Lines Institute, Barcelos, 347–57 The Morris Ring, 2011 Rapper Sword Dance [online], available from: http://www.themorrisring.org/aboutmorris/rapper [8 August 2015] UNESCO, 2003 The Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, UNESCO, Paris ——, 2014 Operational Directives for the Implementation of the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, UNESCO, Paris ——, 2015 Lists of intangible cultural heritage and Register of best safeguarding practices [online], available from: http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/en/lists [8 August 2015] ——, 2016 The States Parties to the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003) [online], available from: http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/en/state-parties-00024 [1 May 2016] Vieregg, H and Davis, A, eds, 2000 Museology and the Intangible Heritage, ICOFOM Study Series 32, Museums-Pädagogisches Zentrum, München Vieregg, H, Sgoff, B and Schiller, R, eds, 2004 Museology and the Intangible Heritage II, ICOFOM Study Series 33, Museums-Pädagogisches Zentrum, München Wallis, J, 1769 The Natural History and Antiquities of Northumberland, W and W Strathan, London Yim, D, 2004 Living Human Treasures and the Protection of Intangible Cultural Heritage: Experiences and Challenges, ICOM News 57 (4), 10–12

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Subaltern Sport Heritage Gregory Ramshaw

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onceptualisations of heritage have become complex in recent years. Though traditionally understood within conservationist paradigms and, therefore, primarily concerned with the preservation of objects, buildings and other tangible articles, heritage is now understood as more of a process whereby heritage is not the object itself but the wide range of values and interpretations that are ascribed to objects, rituals and traditions, to name but a few (Ashworth 2008; Smith 2006; Tunbridge et al 2013). The consequence of a process-based approach to heritage is that we may examine the uses of heritage and, in particular, how heritage can be tool in the legitimisation and de-legitimisation of competing claims to the past. As Silva and Santos (2012, 438) argue, ‘power is a central matter within the realm of heritage’ and, following Graham et al’s (2000) assertion that the only inherent aspect of heritage is dissonance, it stands to reason that heritage is not just a top-down hegemonic process but also a tool of political legitimisation and advocacy for social movements, particularly by those groups seeking to alter consensus, statesanctioned and regulated versions of the past in order to enact social and cultural change (Smith 2006). In this, subaltern heritage narratives – which stand outside of dominant discourses, challenge consensus views and, in some cases, undermine those views through dissonant and alternate heritage perspectives – become a means by which communities participate in creating and shaping their heritage and identity, particularly when these community heritages have been ignored, marginalised or silenced (Smith 2006; 2007). In terms of the wide variety of heritages on offer, sport heritage perhaps seems the least likely to form subaltern heritage approaches. After all, sport heritage – whether in tangible forms such as museums, stadia and ceremonies or in intangible forms such as chants, rituals and traditions (Ramshaw and Gammon 2005) – typically advocates hero-worship (Snyder 1991) or dominant political agendas such as honouring military personnel and veterans (Scherer and Koch 2010), whereby dissonant social or political considerations are marginalised or entirely absent (Springwood 1996). Furthermore, as sport heritage is often created primarily for its economic value either through tourism or through souvenir sales (Ramshaw and Gammon 2005), subaltern approaches in sport heritage – particularly those approaches that challenge or embarrass teams, leagues, owners, other groups of supporters or sanctioned heritage institutions such as halls of fame – may not always be saleable. However, sport heritage can also be a theatre of resistance whereby subaltern approaches challenge the accepted orthodoxy in terms of identifying, interpreting and safeguarding heritage. This chapter explores the ways in which sport heritage may be employed to undermine dominant narratives and create spaces of resistance for people and communities alike.

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Sport Heritage: Spaces for Resistance? The relationship between sport and heritage is not a new one. As Timothy (2011) argues, sport has long been a central part of culture, while the spaces, artefacts and traditions of sport are strongly embedded in local, regional and national heritages. However, it is only recently that the relationship between sport and heritage has been examined in academic circles. To date, most of the research has explored sport heritage in terms of its touristic use, though, as Ramshaw (2014) demonstrates, sport heritage is frequently employed in avenues beyond tourism as well, including in conservation, identity and memorialisation. In general, sport heritage is predominantly used in the celebration and veneration of sporting achievement and athletic prowess (Ramshaw and Gammon 2015; Snyder 1991) though it does have the capacity to address critical narratives as well (Ramshaw and Gammon 2005). However, as Springwood (1996) argues, such narratives almost inevitably confine broader social issues to the distant past and are often used more in terms of marketing and self-congratulatory promotion than to address contemporary social challenges and concerns. For example, major league baseball celebrates the legacy of Jackie Robinson, the first African American player, every April 15 (Robinson’s debut for the Brooklyn Dodgers was on that date in 1947) by having every player and manager wear Robinson’s number 42 on that day (a number otherwise retired – and therefore unavailable to wear – throughout professional baseball). Although Jackie Robinson Day, on one level, could be considered a means by which baseball recognises and acknowledges its challenging past as a means of contemporary awareness and education, on another level it could be seen as simply another way to sell commemorative souvenirs, attract African American spectators and confine racism in baseball as an element of the past. Similarly, baseball player Curt Flood and baseball players’ union negotiator Marvin Miller, who were instrumental in creating free agency and a collective bargaining system, have been bypassed for inclusion into the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. The sport’s labour issues are widely considered embarrassing to the baseball’s owners and commissioners, and those in charge of inducting members into the hall of fame have decided that Flood and Miller are not worthy of recognition and celebration, despite their importance to the sport’s history (Crasnick 2012; Snyder 2006). Furthermore, many – if not most – sport heritage sites are constructed primarily for economic purposes, from the establishment of tourism economies to the creation and maintenance of an increasingly global fandom. As such, the idea of a subaltern sport heritage – where dissonant narratives seek to disrupt dominant and authorised heritage discourses – is exceptionally rare. However, it would seem that sport could be fertile ground for the establishment of subaltern heritage narratives. Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, sport is an immensely popular form of culture and, as Gammon and Ramshaw (2013) note, sporting moments or achievements are often the material of collective memory. While inevitably such achievements are later commodified in various ways, including at sport heritage sites and through the vast sports memorabilia market, and can be kindling for the dewy-eyed sentimentalist, Moore (2002) contends that such moments can form a kind of ‘practical nostalgia’ whereby people and communities resist commodification and, rather, look to re-establish what was once good (and could be again). Secondly, Wright (2012) suggests that sport heritage can be used for capturing, preserving and disseminating community history and memories. In particular, in his examination of tours of English football stadia, Wright found that such tours go beyond commodification of club or venue history; rather, the venue becomes a repository for local identity. While clearly there may



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exist a tension between the economic and the social outcomes of such tours, there appears to be space to explore narratives beyond those sanctioned by the organisation. Finally, sport heritage can be a vehicle for both celebrating overlooked or marginalised heroes while also revealing the inequalities that obscured these athletes’ accomplishments. This is particularly the case when athletes have been marginalised because of race, gender or sexual orientation. Of course, many sport heritages also subjugate dissonance, particularly when it comes to broader social issues. However, at its best, sport heritage has the capacity to celebrate triumphs as well as reveal discrimination, inequality and adversity. Subaltern Sport Heritage: Four Snapshots While many sport heritage constructions are unabashedly commercial and do not reveal tensions between official and subaltern narratives, the following are a few examples where dissonant and subaltern sport heritage narratives have been revealed and, in some cases, embraced. In some instances sport heritage has been used as a source of community engagement and identity, while in others a subaltern narrative has been adopted in order to challenge or subvert dominant and official heritages. Each example, however, reveals how individuals and communities might choose to use sport heritage in creating alternate spaces or for challenging official heritage narratives. Cherbourg Ration Shed Museum Phillips et al (2014) examined the use of sport heritage at the Cherbourg Ration Shed Museum (RSM), a community-based Indigenous museum in Queensland, Australia. Sport heritage serves an important role at the RSM. As Phillips et al describe, sport narratives at the RSM are about more than the mythology of sporting prowess and entertainment value of encountering the sporting past; rather, the RSM ‘recognises the cultural significance of sport through exhibitions’ (Phillips et al 2014, 213) by highlighting the social, cultural, political and identity history of the place and people. Furthermore, the RSM is curated by community members, with the community members simultaneously being both the producers of the narrative as well as part of the exhibition. The RSM offers an excellent case of how sport heritage can be used as a tool of dissonance and subversion, as well as a space for creating new narratives of hope and pride. As Phillips et al (2014) argue, the RSM – its buildings, artefacts and narratives – demonstrates the use of sport as a tool of colonial hegemony and dominance. Indeed, sport was often used as a source of discipline, a vehicle for overt racism and a tool of marginalisation. Museum exhibitions describe how sport was, at times, used to culturally nullify local populations. Critical approaches to sport heritage are relatively rare and often do not delve into broader political and cultural debates (Vamplew 1998); as such, the curatorial approaches at the RSM are quite rare. However, the many sporting achievements of community members are also a source of pride and of inspiration, particularly given the social and political context in which they were achieved. Champion athletes, spectacular performances and superlative career achievements are also explored in the exhibitions. While celebrating excellence in athletics mirrors the ‘hero worship’ of more traditional sports museums, the ‘heroes’’ achievements are placed in a much broader context at the RSM. Sport, James (2013) contends, can be both a source of subjugation and of liberation. Sport heritage at the RSM subverts several dominant narratives at once, both highlighting the role

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sport played in suppressing local people as well as celebrating the sporting achievements of the community within a hostile social and political context. Furthermore, these dual narratives hold a mirror up to the present, demonstrating that issues of racism and marginalisation are not in the past, while also providing a source of inspiration for contemporary sports men and women. Baltimore’s Druid Hill Park Sport heritage need not just be about famous sporting events or legendary sporting achievements. Indeed, at its best, it can be used as a vehicle for highlighting forgotten or marginalised pasts, while also reinterpreting spaces for the present. Schultz’s (2012) exploration of the commemoration and performance of African American community sport and recreation heritage in Baltimore is about much more than the sporting past. Racial segregation in the United States was all-encompassing, including in sport and recreation. In the case of Druid Hill Park in Baltimore, separate sport and recreation spaces, namely a swimming pool and tennis courts, were constructed to serve the African American population. As Schultz (2012) describes, these facilities were often poorly built and maintained, particularly in comparison with those used by the white population and, at the time of desegregation of the park in the 1950s, all facilities that were used by African Americans were not maintained and fell into disrepair. In terms of heritage, Schultz (2012) describes nominal to non-existent representation and commemoration of African American history and heritage (both sport and non-sport), with nearly all of the markers, plaques and statues in the park being those of (white) presidents, explorers and local dignitaries. In the case of Druid Hill Park, Schultz (2012) highlights several ways in which sport heritage can be employed by local communities to commemorate struggle, emphasise marginalised narratives and utilise practical nostalgia. In particular, the local community looked to a moment in Druid Hill Park’s sporting past, a 1948 interracial tennis tournament, as the focal point for heritage commemoration, as well as a broader project that captured the community members’ memories and nostalgia about recreation in Druid Hill Park. In terms of the tennis tournament, two forms of heritage commemoration were used: a plaque with the names of those who participated in the tournament and defied the segregationist laws (and were arrested for doing so), and a public art performance that attempted to re-enact the tournament and participants’ arrest. Though Schultz (2012) suggests that the plaque may have been more successful in addressing subaltern narratives (due in part to some issues in the stages of the re-enactment), the choice of sport and recreation as a vehicle for addressing larger concerns suggests, in this case, that sport can be both effective and emotive in displays of public history. Furthermore, in a manner similar to the RSM case, Schultz (2012) also notes that Druid Hill Park was also a space for positive sport legacies, despite the broader social context in which the sport took place. In other words, community residents remembered that going to Druid Hill and swimming or playing tennis was fun, despite the social context, and that the nostalgia for play, childhood sport and time with friends and family were all positive memories. Paralympic Heritages The Paralympic Games, a sporting event for disabled athletes that was first staged in Britain in 1948 and is now part of every Olympic games, has a long and distinguished history and heritage that, as Brittain et al (2013) argue, has been largely marginalised and ignored. Brittain et al argue that the marginalisation of Paralympic heritage exists for several reasons, including dominant



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discourses of acceptable bodily function and athleticism, Paralympic artefacts and materials being viewed as neither culturally or economically valuable, and Paralympic heritage legacies – both in terms of the athletic performances themselves as well as the broader social and cultural legacies associated with staging an Olympic games – being obscured by the more dominant ‘regular’ Olympic heritages. As such, the recognition and dissemination of Paralympic heritage represents a kind of subaltern and dissonant heritage to dominant narratives about body type and function and athletic achievement and worth, from both social and economic perspectives. Brittain et al (2013) suggest several avenues for recognising and disseminating Paralympic heritage, including a coherent collections policy on a par with that of the Olympic Games, inclusion of Paralympic athletes, records and achievements at all Olympic museums and sites, the establishment of a virtual Paralympic museum, as well as blue plaques and a walking tour of Stoke Mandeville where the Paralympic games were founded and first took place. All of these platforms serve several purposes beyond acknowledging an overlooked aspect of the sporting past. In many ways, the broad inclusion of Paralympic heritage challenges existing norms about athletic ability as well as positioning the event – and the athletes – as not simply an addition or a sub-event but rather a partner and parallel athletic competition to the Olympic Games. Furthermore, Brittain et al (2013, 182–3) explain that the Paralympics have had ‘a profound impact upon people with disabilities and the attitudes towards them by non-disabled members of society’. As such, even the recognition of Paralympic heritage provides a vehicle for the disruption of accepted heritage discourses, although, unlike other forms of subaltern sport heritage, the Paralympic narrative does not look to replace dominant narratives as much as be included as part of an inclusive Olympic legacy. Southbank Skatepark The case of the Southbank Skatepark, a once unused undercroft along the South Bank of the Thames in London that has been used by skateboarders and other urban artists since the 1970s, demonstrates the breadth of what might be considered ‘sport heritage’ as well as how sport heritage spaces can be sources of dissonance between different community groups and organisations. Although the undercroft is an infamous part of the pedestrian embankment and is considered by some stakeholders to be the ‘home’ of British skateboarding (Long Live Southbank 2014), the Southbank Centre – a large, multipurpose arts venue that technically has legal rights to the undercroft space – looked to demolish the undercroft, move the skatepark to a different location along the South Bank and re-purpose the area for performance and retail space. The Southbank Skatepark represents a new and largely subaltern way of understanding sport heritage. When plans for the site’s demolition were announced, the ‘Long Live Southbank’ campaign used legislation meant to protect village greens (spaces on which cricket has traditionally been played) as a means of protecting the undercroft. In particular, the organisation argued that the undercroft – like the village green – represents a place where ‘a significant number of the inhabitants of any locality, or of any neighbourhood within a locality, have indulged as of right in lawful sports and pastimes on the land for a period of at least 20 years’ (Commons Act 2006 in Jones 2014, 75). Similarly, national arts and heritage organisations such as English Heritage1

1

Note, on 1st April 2015 the duties of English Heritage were split between two organisations: Historic England and the English Heritage Trust (which is now known as English Heritage).

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and the National Theatre argued that the space is unique and should not be moved or destroyed (Burrell 2013). Users of the space also placed its significance in sport heritage terms, with one urban artist stating that the undercroft ‘is to skateboarders the same as the Oval cricket ground is to cricketers or Wimbledon is to lawn tennis players’ (Burrell 2013, np). However, there is conflict in terms of which community is served by the undercroft, and whether local school children with little access to the arts would benefit from an expanded arts space at the Southbank Centre. The musician and activist Billy Bragg has argued that the space and commercial ventures will support and fund local arts initiatives in schools and help local entrepreneurs develop their business acumen (Bragg 2013). Furthermore, he argues that the preservation of the Skatepark in its current location actually harms the local community, stating that the ‘skateboarders set out to put themselves above everyone else in the South Bank community’ (Bragg 2013, np). The case was ultimately resolved in September 2014, with the skatepark being kept as a shared public space after immense public backlash to its redevelopment (Vincent 2014). Towards a Contemporary Understanding of Subaltern Sport Heritage Sport heritage, though often a space of uncritical hero-worship, offers intriguing possibilities for communities. As the four subaltern sport heritage examples demonstrate, issues of race, class and ability – not to mention the very meaning of sport, as well as what constitutes its success – are already part of the sport heritage landscape, and offer avenues for communities to engage with sport heritage in articulating goals, values and aspirations. In the case of both the RSM and Druid Hill Park, sport heritage is used as a tool not only of representation but of challenging dominant understandings of the past. Furthermore, there is a call to action – an understanding that the sporting past is not just about scores and results but is also an avenue for creating community leaders through understanding and being inspired by the sporting past. Acknowledging and demonstrating discrimination is one part of the narrative at RSM and Druid Hill, but the narratives must also include a component of celebration, of what the people and events of these challenging sporting pasts can tell us about perseverance, resistance and success. Similarly, Paralympic heritage must discuss the challenges of the past, particularly in terms of heritage representation and worth, but must also demonstrate that Paralympic sport is sport, that Paralympic athletes are athletes, and that its heritage shows that it is not that of a subservient competition, but a co-event with the Olympics. Indeed, there is a temptation to right the wrongs of the past, but one of the aspects in which the critical and non-critical components of sport heritage can merge is that sport is emotional, sport is exciting and sport can generate wonderful moments and performances regardless of social context. It is in this, the critical and celebratory, that subaltern sport heritage can thrive. However, as the Southbank Skatepark example demonstrates, subaltern heritage can cause community conflict, both in terms of what constitutes a sport ‘heritage’ – and whether it is a place, a practice, or both – that is worthy of protection and conservation, but also whether heritage considerations should be paramount in community needs and well-being. While many sport heritages are fossilised and have become stagnant symbols of eras long gone, others have re-emerged and been rearticulated as a reaction to contemporary issues and controversies. Most notably, many athletes – including basketball superstar LeBron James and members of the St Louis Rams NFL football club – staged game day on-court/-field protests over the deaths of numerous African Americans at the hands of police officers in the United States,



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specifically sporting #ICantBreathe2 apparel and giving the ‘Hands Up, Don’t Shoot’3 gesture (McDonald 2014). Many of the athletes specifically cited the actions of John Carlos and Tommy Smith, who upon winning medals at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City each raised a ‘Black Power Salute’ fist while the American national anthem played, as inspiration for their protests (Sheinin 2014). ‘I Can’t Breathe’ and ‘Hands Up, Don’t Shoot’ began as slogans for community protests and were later promoted through social media, but were adopted by contemporary athletes and viewed through a sport heritage lens. In fact, by adopting the #ICantBreathe and #HandsUpDontShoot slogans current athletes not only placed their actions alongside those of Carlos and Smith but placed themselves as part of a broader heritage of the activist athlete, signalling that sport and its heritage does not exist outside of broader social and political movements. Despite the potential of sport heritage to reveal and celebrate subaltern narratives, several issues remain. Sport heritage remains a powerful and often profitable endeavour for athletes, clubs and sport organisations, whether it is employed for ticket and merchandise sales, event promotions and marketing or community relations. As such, any narratives that do not originate from an official source, and may threaten commercial or marketing activities, are often disputed and suppressed if they are a threat. This is not to suggest that communities should abstain from employing dissonant sport heritage but, rather, sports organisations and some of their supporters may not always welcome such narratives. For example, the debates in the United States and Canada over the use of Native American mascots demonstrates a dissonant sport heritage, often pitting aboriginal groups and their supporters against fans, owners and league officials (Robidoux 2006). Sport heritage is also frequently dismissed as not particularly important, particularly in arts and cultural circles. Graham et al (2005) described the difference between ‘high’ and ‘low’ heritages, with popular heritages (that would seemingly include sport) to be considered low and therefore base and unworthy of recognition. Furthermore, many sport heritages do employ broader social views and are often very resistant to any narrative that is not about statistics, great performances and hagiographical treatment of ‘sporting heroes’. As such, sport heritage may not always be the best option for subaltern heritages. However, should communities use sport heritage, they will find that it can help bring new perspective to shared moments and memories and place ‘great moments’ or ‘great performances’ in new contexts. Sport heritage also has the potential for reaching across generations, as even the recent past can be part of the sport heritage narratives. Similarly, as sport has been so widely covered, particularly by television, and is readily retrievable through websites such as YouTube, different generations can learn, share and acquire different perspectives about the sporting past. Finally, though subaltern sport heritages are often about acknowledging the failures and issues of the past, they can be a source of community cohesion and understanding, as was the case when the 2016 verdict into the Hillsborough disaster was announced. While this is not always the case, such as with Southbank, more often than not sport heritage can be a vehicle for recognition, reconciliation and understanding.

2

#ICantBreathe is a Twitter hashtag inspired by the final words of Eric Garner, an African American who was choked to death by police officers during his arrest on Staten Island, New York in 2014. The officers were not indicted for Garner’s death, sparking outrage in various communities across the United States. 3 ‘Hands Up, Don’t Shoot’ was a chant and gesture that was part of the Ferguson, Missouri protests at the death of Michael Brown in 2014. The slogan was later adopted on social media as #HandsUpDontShoot.

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Conclusion Power is central to our understanding of heritage. The legitimisation and delegitimisation of what heritage is, and who is included, is part of virtually every heritage narrative. However, heritage can also be a tool for destabilisation, as subaltern and dissonant narratives can disrupt official and accepted understandings, challenging us to see the past from a different point of view. Although sport heritage seems to be an unlikely instrument for dissonance, particularly as it is primarily used in the celebration and commodification of sporting heroes and infamous events, it can also be a tool for subaltern perspectives on the past. The four examples illustrated in this chapter provide only a small example of how sport heritage might play a role in illustrating dissonant heritage approaches, each of which shows how communities might wish to use sport heritage to achieve particular ends. Furthermore, sport heritage offers a unique vehicle for change, in that it seeks often to celebrate victory and triumph, as well as hardship and dedication, all within a popular and (frequently) unifying discourse. Bibliography and References Ashworth, G J, 2008 Paradigms and paradoxes in planning the past, in Selling or Telling? Paradoxes in tourism, culture and heritage (eds M Smith and L Onderwater), ATLAS, Arnhem, 23–34 Bragg, B, 2013 The South Bank skateboarders shouldn’t veto our community dreams, The Guardian [online], 31 July, available from: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jul/31/south-bank-skateboarderswrong-veto-community [6 May 2015] Brittain, I, Ramshaw, G and Gammon, S, 2013 The Marginalisation of Paralympic Heritage, International Journal of Heritage Studies 19 (2), 171–85 Burrell, I, 2013 National Theatre and English Heritage unite to oppose redevelopment of London’s Southbank Centre, The Independent [online], 4 July, available from: http://www.independent.co.uk/artsentertainment/art/news/national-theatre-and-english-heritage-unite-to-oppose-redevelopment-of-londonssouthbank-centre-8686108.html [6 May 2015] Crasnick, J, 2012 Time for Miller’s Call from the Hall, ESPN.com [online], 27 November, available from: http://espn.go.com/mlb/columns/story?id=4700428andcolumnist=crasnick_jerry [4 May, 2016] Gammon, S and Ramshaw, G, 2013 Nostalgia and Sport, in Contemporary Cases in Sport (eds A Fyall and B Garrod), Goodfellow Publishers, Oxford, 201–20 Graham, B, Ashworth, G J and Tunbridge, J E, 2000 A Geography of Heritage: Power, Culture and Economy, Arnold, London ——, 2005 The uses and abuses of heritage, in Heritage, Museums and Galleries (ed G Corsane), Routledge, London, 26–37 James, C L R 2013 Beyond a Boundary: 50th Anniversary Edition, Duke University Press, Durham NC Jones, A J H 2014 On South Bank: The Production of Public Space, Ashgate, Farnham Long Live Southbank, 2014 About [online], available from: http://www.llsb.com/about/ [6 May 2015] McDonald, S N 2014 LeBron James is looking for an ‘I Can’t Breathe’ shirt and he may wear it tonight, The Washington Post [online], 8 December, available from: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/ wp/2014/12/08/lebron-james-is-looking-for-an-i-cant-breathe-shirt-and-he-might-wear-it-tonight/ [6 May 2015] Moore, P, 2002 Practical Nostalgia and the Critique of Commodification: On the ‘Death of Hockey’ and the National Hockey League. The Australian Journal of Anthropology 13 (3), 309–22



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Phillips, M G, Osmond, G and Morgan, S, 2014 Indigenous sport and heritage: Cherbourg’s Ration Shed Museum, Journal of Heritage Tourism 9 (3), 212–27 Ramshaw, G, 2014 A Canterbury tale: imaginative genealogies and existential heritage tourism at the St. Lawrence Ground, Journal of Heritage Tourism 9 (3), 257–69 Ramshaw, G and Gammon, S, 2005 More than just Nostalgia? Exploring the Heritage/Sport Tourism Nexus, Journal of Sport Tourism 10 (4), 229–41 ——, 2015 Heritage and Sport, in The Palgrave Companion of Contemporary Heritage Research (eds E Waterton and S Watson), Palgrave-Macmillan, London, 248–57 Robidoux, M A, 2006 The Nonsense of Native American Sport Imagery: Reclaiming a Past that Never Was, International Review for the Sociology of Sport 41 (2), 201–19 Scherer, J and Koch, J, 2010 Living With War: Sport, Citizenship, and the Cultural Politics of Post-9/11 Canadian Identity, Sociology of Sport Journal 27, 1–29 Sheinin, D, 2014 After Ferguson, Staten Island, and Cleveland, athletes are becoming activists again, The Washington Post [online], 5 December, available from: http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/afterferguson-staten-island-cleveand-athletes-are-becoming-activists-again/2014/12/05/5ed5d61e-7c8d-11e4– 8241–8cc0a3670239_story.html [6 May 2015] Schultz, J, 2012 Lest we forget: public history and racial segregation in Baltimore’s Druid Park, in Representing the Sporting Past in Museums and Halls of Fame (ed M Phillips), Routledge, London, 231–48 Smith, L, 2006 Uses of Heritage, Routledge, London ——, 2007 Empty gestures? Heritage and the politics of recognition, in Cultural heritage and human rights (eds H Silverman and D Fairchild Ruggles), Springer, New York, 159–71 Silva, L and Santos, P M, 2012 Ethnographies of heritage and power, International Journal of Heritage Studies 18 (5), 437–43 Snyder, E, 1991 Sociology of Nostalgia: Sport Halls of Fame and Museums in America, Sociology of Sport Journal 8, 228–38 Snyder, B, 2006 A Well Paid Slave: Curt Flood’s Fight for Free Agency in Professional Sports, Penguin, New York Springwood, C F, 1996 Cooperstown to Dyersville: A Geography of Baseball Nostalgia, Westview Press, Boulder CO Timothy, D J, 2011 Cultural Heritage and Tourism: An Introduction, Channel View, Bristol Tunbridge, J E, Ashworth, G J and Graham, B J, 2013 Decennial reflections on A Geography of Heritage (2000), International Journal of Heritage Studies 19 (4), 365–72 Vamplew, W, 1998 Facts and Artefacts: Sport Historians and Sport Museums, Journal of Sport History 25 (2), 268–82 Vincent, A, 2014 Southbank’s skatepark saved for the long term, The Telegraph [online], 19 September, available from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/architecture/11108582/Southbanks-skatepark-savedfor-the-long-term.html [6 May 2015] Wright, R W, 2012 Stadia, identity and belonging: Stirring the sleeping giants of sports tourism, in International sports events (eds R Shipway and A Fyall), Routledge, London, 195–207

15

Museums and the Symbolic Capital of Social Media Space Julian Hartley

I

t was Pierre Bourdieu who first showed us that it is unnatural to visit the museum when its symbols seem distant from our personal sense of place. He brought to light issues of exclusion that require museums to close the gap between themselves and a public distanced and disengaged by their position in social space (Bourdieu 1977; 1984; 1989). The influence of Bourdieu’s sociology, albeit updated and adapted, is traceable in the various approaches many museums adopt to overcome cultural barriers in their public perception and community engagement (Merriman 1991; Fyfe 2006; Prior 2005; Barrett 2011). However, an emerging body of literature draws attention to the fact that most segments of the online public are excluded or disengaged from museums on the web (Kidd 2011; Pratty 2006; Russo and Peacock 2009). Common to this writing is the distinction between museums on the web and the online public. This chapter lays out the case that, as the structure of social space changes online, the digital public is blind to the online resources and social media activities of museums for the simple reason that the museum has not adapted its practices to the new structure. Consequently, neither museum digital collections nor invitations for the public to join them on social media are socially inclusive; a distinction can thus be made between being on the web and being of the web. However, while Bourdieu’s model of social space has been hugely influential in helping museums understand issues of social exclusion and public engagement (Bourdieu 1984; Merriman 1991; Prior 2005; Barrett 2011), its application rarely makes a distinction between the way social space is structured offline and online. This is odd, as Bourdieu’s model of social space is far more appropriate as an explanation of the cultural distances between distinct social clusters online than it is for its more common application to real place-based communities. His model is seen to correspond with online phenomena, such as people with no prior relationship to one another clustering via their individual acts on social media. Internet theorists Clay Shirky and Felix Stalder support this comparison with Bourdieu through their exploration of the way social space changes its structure when it transfers online (Shirky 2008; Stalder 2006). This leads me to an interesting discrepancy concerning Bourdieu’s influence on the way museums engage with social media and the way his concept of social space reveals issues of social inequality in museums’ approach. Between these contradictory perspectives I identify examples of public engagement that successfully bridge social distances between the museum on the web and the online public. In this context it will be seen that museums’ digital practices are required to correspond in real time to events online that cause micro shifts in the social

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structure. This challenges the notion of the inclusive museum, as museums on the whole resist the immediacy of real time as a taxonomy in their management of collections. Museums on the Social Web and the Online Public Writers are beginning to explore why museum processes for social inclusion often neglect the online public, who remain excluded and may be misrecognised. Kidd’s 2011 paper uses ‘frame analysis’ to call into question the naturalised discourse surrounding social media use by museums, whereas Jacobs et al (2012) argue that ‘the notion of findability is critical in a digital space where so much data and content is being created. If something cannot be easily accessed then to some extent it does not exist for those who cannot find it’ (Cameron 2003; Pratty 2006; Russo and Peacock 2009; Jacobs et al 2012). According to Fiona Cameron, the difficulties museums have in engaging digital publics relate to a question originally raised in the 1990s by Sarasan and Donovan about whether collections databases put online for the public to search really fulfil the information and pedagogic needs of an emerging community of online users (Cameron 2003). She also draws our attention to a closely related second question concerning the issue of data quality, referring to Thomas and Mintz (1998), who query whether the way objects are initially interpreted by museum staff for the purposes of documentation will also engage the needs of online users. These questions resonate with recent research papers concerning museum communication with social media. For example, Russo and Peacock (2009) argue for new theoretical models of user behaviour in social media spaces that explore and explain more effectively this medium’s ecologies of practice1 and qualities of space. From their perspective, museums have been overly focused on what they themselves might get from social media, as opposed to understanding and engaging the cultures of practice found online. In a similar vein, Kidd draws our attention to the idea that ‘even as “the museum” coverts and articulates a move from a broadcast model of communications to a social media model, the current use of such media more often than not neutralise, contain and flatten its promise’ (Kidd 2011, 68). Engaging audiences through social media spaces or recognising the way issues of exclusion manifest online is proving problematic. It can seem that museums on social media and the public online occupy different social positions, implying a source of contradiction in the museum’s public remit: While cultural managers are increasingly interested in showing evidence of online success, funding agencies and government departments currently lack the expertise to offer guidelines or set standards for measurement. For many organisations this results in a confusing mixture of statistics and reporting which is time-consuming to provide and reveals little about online user behaviour, engagement and satisfaction. (Finnis et al 2012, 4)

A pertinent question, therefore, is how to decipher the social media practices of museums for the institutionalised cultures of practice framing their use. For this purpose, Kidd (2011) is particu1

The idea that practices can be understood as living things, and that they are interdependent with other practices to which they are connected (Kemmis et al 2012[AQ not in biblio]).



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larly useful in describing the way she borrows Erving Goffman’s method of ‘frame analysis’ as a means of deciphering and articulating the current use of social media by museums (Goffman 1974). ‘Frame analysis’ provides Kidd with the means to establish the prevailing, institutionalised logic which underlies the use of social media in the museum (Kidd 2011). Her approach is reconsidered here for its usefulness in mapping social distance between museums on the web and the online public. As Goffman first suggested, ‘Frames’ are ‘clusters of rules which help to constitute and regulate activities, defining them as activities of a certain sort and as subject to a given range of sanctions.’ Frames are necessary for agents to feel ontological security, the trust that everyday actions have some degree of predictability. Framing is the practice by which agents make sense of what they are doing. (Giddens 1984, 87)

In other words, frames provide museum practitioners with both the necessary schema to make sense of their place in the world and the ontological security that their workplace practices have some degree of predictability. Thus ‘frames’ can be considered to constitute the collective identities through which museum professionals come to know themselves and others, and frame analysis is used to garner an understanding of the organisational logics of the social and political fields in which these digital practices are formulated (Goffman 1974; Kidd 2011). In this context, Kidd argues that, in inviting the public to collaborate in social media spaces, museums are acting on the basis of a number of different frames that serve their agendas and have little to do with the qualities of online public space or the ethics of democratic exchange implied by social media. Furthermore, frame analysis enables Kidd to detach the museum online from social space as it emerges out of the crowd of digital activity (Kidd 2011). This means she can orientate whether the frames being projected by the museum align with the frames within which the public understand their participation in social media space. Analysis of the ‘frames’ helps Kidd to unpack the assumptions inherent in museum discourse and reveal the schema through which museum professionals engage social media and, with that, the hidden power relationships at work in these exchanges. This application means we can begin to read the digital practices of museums within the symbolic schemes in which they are acted out and the displays of underlying power, resources and assumptions this reveals. Frames are in this respect one aspect of Bourdieu’s broader concept of ‘habitus’:2 a system of internalised structures, schemes of perception, conception and action common to all members of the same group or class. Habitus operates unconsciously and the unconscious, Bourdieu tells us, is never anything other than the forgetting of history; it is ‘history turned into nature, i.e. denied as such’ (Bourdieu 1977, 78). In this capacity, the museum’s ‘framing’ of social media space also functions in the sense that schemes of perception and action are recognised through symbols and these lay claim to how social inclusion, collaboration and engagement are expressed and recognised. The symbolic value of these practices contributes to maintaining them as the legitimate approaches to social media but, problematically, as we have 2

In this instance ‘habitus’ refers to museum professionals and their schemes for understanding social exclusion along with the practices in public engagement this legitimises.

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seen above, the online public do not recognise the museums on the web. Moreover, the assumptions on which these frames are formulated misrecognise the nature of social inequalities online. Bourdieu’s Influence as Both Bridge and Barrier to Social Media Spaces As Bourdieu suggests, to fully understand the ‘symbolic’ for its underlying powers, resources and assumptions we would first need to plot the position that museums online occupy in the structure of social space as a system of relations and differences instead of absolute attributes. This analytical approach takes into account both Bourdieu’s influence on the way museums frame social media and the way his concept of social space can be used to model social organisation online. Between these two perspectives we can plot the amount of cultural distance, or degree of social exclusion, separating the museum online and the digital public. That Bourdieu’s concept of social space3 will be shown to serve both of these perspectives produces an interesting discrepancy in which his theory of social space is seen to both rationalise the way museums frame social media and critique their approach. Unpacking this disparity will enable us to identify practices in digital engagement that close social distance between the museum and the digital public while also exploring why these digital practices might be culturally challenging for the museum to achieve (Bourdieu 1984). For Bourdieu, the fact that museums are often free to enter does not mitigate the fact that free entry is also optional entry. Rather, the preference or choice to visit can only be explained by the position the agent holds in social space. He maintained that the museum, rather than welcoming the broad spectrum found in social life, instead reinforced existing social and cultural distinctions and maintained inequality, where class difference often determined the capacity to be comfortable in the museum (Bourdieu 1984; Barrett 2011; Prior 2005). Bourdieu’s influence on the way museums frame social media is thus found in the idea that the structure of social space can be plotted to reveal those whose sense of place is socially distant to the museum and who exclude themselves on this basis. He asserts that these preferences serve to constitute ‘status groups’ by establishing symbolic boundaries between individuals occupying different locations in social space. Thus a given location in space imprints a particular set of dispositions upon the individual. It is this sense of one’s place which, in interactions, leads people whom we call in French ‘les gens modestes,’ ‘common folks,’ to keep to their common place, and the others to ‘keep their distance,’ to ‘maintain their rank’, and to ‘not get familiar.’ These strategies, it should be noted in passing, may be perfectly unconscious and take the form of what is called timidity or arrogance. In effect, social distances are inscribed in bodies or, more precisely, into the relation to the body, to language and to time so many structural aspects of practice ignored by the subjectivist vision (Bourdieu 1989, 17).

Accordingly, social life in all its diversity should be viewed as a unity made up of a series of homologues or ‘fields’ that are relative to one another, rather than conceived as separate unrelated areas:

3

Although Bourdieu’s analysis is based on social data from the 1960s, now criticised for being out of date and neglecting social complexity, there is a broad acceptance that his theory is sufficiently robust to be adapted to current contexts (Barrett 2011; Prior 2005).



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‘The very notion of space, that is, a set of distinct and coexisting positions which are exterior to one another and which are defined in relation to one another’ (Bourdieu 1984, 271). This concept of social space creates the problem for the public museum of how to be public when many sections of the public exclude themselves. Bourdieu thus contributes a reflexive understanding of the position museums hold within the social structure (Bourdieu 1984; 1989; 1991). That in recent years museums have sought to become more closely stitched into the lives of the communities they seek to serve, more outward looking and exposed to the needs of audiences and other stakeholders, is seen to reveal a Bourdieusian influence (Fyfe 2004; Barrett 2011). When museums approach social inclusivity from this perspective communities are not only consulted but empowered to take an active role in decision-making within the museum, mediating partnerships for the co-creation of exhibitions and other processes of co-production related to personal and collective identity. In this respect, there is an inescapable familiarity linking the habitus of museums with social media; independent of any internet, the museum is a social medium. In this respect it was as far back as 1997 that Charlie Gere suggested it was possible to make an analogy between contemporary museum practice and the internet, the latter acting as the paradigm for the former. In 1977 the Council for Museums and Galleries in Scotland called for a curatorship of social responsibility: ‘for museums to see themselves in a new place “in the total social environment ” … more outward looking, seeking to serve their public’ (cited in Parry 2007, 110). The internet in general, and social media in particular, seem an attractive fit with the recent drive in museums to be socially inclusive. The frame of ‘inclusivity’ and ‘collaboration’ are also the characteristics that displace the museum from occupying a distinct position in social space. These qualities attract interrelationships between people and collections, fostering discourse between them and supporting discursive networks, and in this sense we might think of the museum distributed across social space. When Gere first made an analogy between museums and the internet his aim was to promote a note of caution about museums imitating the internet’s distributed properties as a space of encounter and exchange. He argues that ‘the Internet brings with it issues in relation to power as complex as those found in the traditional model of the museum’ (Gere 1997, 65). As we have already seen, an emerging literature is now questioning why museums find it problematic to attract and engage audiences online. It appears that museums realise that online resources need to be user-centred but lack sufficient knowledge about the online public and how to reach them in order to remedy this situation. In this respect, the museum’s framing of social media space is having the opposite effect to its intended aim – that is, to be in the total social environment. Rather than interfacing museum communication in social media space, the ‘inclusivity’ and ‘collaborative’ frame appears to fix the museum’s position, putting social distance between it and the diversity of social life online. A Bourdieusian perspective would explain why museums are having difficulties engaging digital audiences by suggesting that the museum misrecognises the way social inequality manifests online, with the result that the online public remain socially distanced from, and blind to, the museum’s digital offerings (Bourdieu 1984; 1989). Perhaps part of the issue here is that the differentiated communities that make up, for example, the social life of a city, which city museums work hard to engage, have no place in Bourdieu’s structure of social space. Bourdieu’s sociology may well have informed the way the museum approaches these communities, but his theory and structure of social space are not concerned with real communities or groups. He goes to some pains to clarify that fact:

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The misunderstanding that the analyses proposed particularly in Distinction elicit are thus due to the fact that classes on paper are liable to being apprehended as real groups. This realist (mis)reading is objectively encouraged by the fact that social space is so constructed that agents who occupy similar or neighboring positions are placed in similar conditions and subjected to similar conditionings, and therefore have every chance of having similar dispositions and interests, and thus of producing practices that are themselves similar. The dispositions acquired in the position occupied imply an adjustment to this position, what Goffman calls the ‘sense of one’s place’. (Bourdieu 1989, 17)

Rather, Bourdieu was concerned more with how individual life styles could be mapped to reveal collective patterns of behaviour. He was keen to demonstrate that there is a correspondence between the economic and the symbolic that legitimises and reproduces social class. However, Bourdieu could not have foreseen social media’s impact on social organisation or that comparisons can now be made between his mapping of social space and social media space. It will be seen below that these similarities can help explain both social exclusion online and why museums are having difficulties engaging the digital public. Comparison between the internet’s manipulation of social space and Bourdieu’s model stems from his statistical analysis of quantitative lifestyle and socio-economic data that was to reveal corresponding4 patterns of human behaviour spanning a large geographic area – that is, France in the 1960s and 1970s. In this respect Bourdieu was a pioneer in the use of big data for social research; taking data from multiple locations, he was able to plot patterns in human behaviour beyond the usual constraints of a particular place, time or social context. His method is argued here to have inadvertently modelled the way social space forms via the internet’s distribution and will be shown to correspond with online phenomena, such as people with no prior relationship to one another who cluster via their individual acts on social media. For example, internet theorists Stalder and Shirky have between them mapped social media’s distribution of human agency online and the manipulation of space this causes, comparing it favourably to the structure of class relationships Bourdieu plotted in his depiction of social space (Stalder 2006; Shirky 2008). From their perspective, our every action online contains code about the way we are individually culturally disposed and, owing to the data trail each of us leaves as we go online, these social scientists are beginning to put the individual at the centre of a system of social relationships and patterns. Following their analysis, the key aspect of the ‘digital public space’ as a unique space is that it enables the connection of distributed entities to occur as if they were in one place. The quality of this space is such that people and things previously disconnected are increasingly attracted to self-organise as the semantic possibilities for connection are so much greater in distributed structures; people and things coalesce into network arrangements on this basis. Consequently, being part of the digital social space equals being part of a context whose functional logic is based on ‘real time’ social interaction, no matter in which multiple places its constitutive elements are located (Stalder 2006).

4

Bourdieu’s statistical technique is Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA). One characteristic of MCA is the fact that individual cases retain their categorical ‘identities’ within the factorial space. This makes it possible to plot the dispersion of the members of each occupational category within the space (Bourdieu 1984, 1289).



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Social Space and Distributed Networks Developing this comparison further, Shirky’s 2008 book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organising without Organisations has much to offer. As implied by its title, Shirky is keen to pursue his idea that, where people had previously been organised through society’s structures, such as museums, the internet enables their self-organisation. His case studies often trace people with no prior relationship to each other who self-organise or cluster in real time, with the only linking factor to explain these forms of organisation being the distribution of social capital via social media. In this respect, the internet’s distributed structure allows people to flexibly connect with one another no matter where they are located, as they are all ‘here’ in the same time-sharing environment. This is what Shirky means by ‘Here Comes Everybody’. Distributed entities cluster in digital social space as if they were in one physical place and he demonstrates that the easier it is to create real-time interaction across distances, the less important is the fact that local co-presence enables real-time interaction as well. For Shirky, people and things that are geographically distant become quasi-locally present in social space. Thus, we have two interlocking movements: one is fragmentation of ‘place-based’ communities, while the other is the integration of social processes and the particular cultures through which they are created. This dynamic encapsulates the digital public space. We can compare Bourdieu’s ‘social space’ and the ‘digital public space’ by using Shirky’s concept of ‘small world networks’. This helps in two ways: firstly, its explains how the travel of information occurs through distributed structures, clustering those with similar social dispositions, and, secondly, it illustrates how the dynamic between ‘social capital’ as the context through which information flows and the internet as the distributed structure shape one another. Shirky encourages his reader to imagine striking up a conversation with the stranger next to them on a plane. He asks why it is that two people who previously did not know one another quickly realise they have a friend or acquaintance in common. At this point both passengers express surprise and say: ‘What a small world!’ (Shirky 2008, 212). This apparent serendipity seems impossible. Considering the world population, each would have to know something like 60,000 people to have a 50–50 chance of knowing someone in common. Clearly few of us do, yet we discover these small world connections all the time. Their importance here is that, for Shirky, these seemingly abstract meetings are indicative of the way social capital is formed and travels on the internet. So what is happening? In practice only a few travel by air and these passengers share departure and arrival cities, increasing the odds of there being a link between them. Significantly, each traveller has a circle of friends so there is a network of potential interrelationships, meaning that in any social group there will be a disproportionate amount of social capital between members. Although you are unlikely to know any given contact of the other traveller, you are very likely to know one of the most connected people they know. In fact, social networks are held together not by the bulk of people with hundreds of connections but by the few with thousands. The point here is that highly connected people are the backbone of social networks. ‘And the “knowing someone in common link” the thing that makes you exclaim “small world” with your seatmate is specifically that connection’ (Shirky 2008, 215). From this we see that a few influential people account for a wildly disproportionate amount of overall connectivity online, which allows information to move through large networks. In this sense, ‘small world networks’ are both an amplifier and a filter of information; information in

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the system is passed along by friends and friends of a friend tend to get information that is also of interest to their friends. Through Shirky (2008) the concept of ‘small world networks’ offers a model of social space based upon the principle that, in social media communication, information disperses through the mass of the many by loosely tied connections between distinct social clusters. His analysis describes Bourdieu’s notion of ‘social space’ in the sense that information can be shown to organise itself relative to the points in which the social capital of our two travellers intersects. Interestingly, the language Shirky uses following his introduction to small world theory is very familiar to that used by both Bourdieu and Bourdieu and Wacquant. By discussing the following examples of this similarity, the issue of social exclusion in the digital public space will be contextualised within Bourdieu’s concepts of ‘symbolic power’ and ‘misrecognition’ (Bourdieu 1984; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). Shirky, for instance, maps the way that distributed media have made it much easier for people to create ‘social capital’ as the visibility and ability to search online means that the semantic possibilities for the likeminded to locate one another, and to assemble and cooperate with one another, are so much greater. In other words, the internet’s distributed structure means that a person’s activity is made visible and ‘public’ to others, networked within their own cultural parameters, implying that the social dispositions individuals display to others generate the networks they travel in (Shirky 2008). Like Bourdieu (1984), Shirky is also describing a space in which people organise themselves according to their internalised schemes of perception and the relative structure of symbolic order this creates. He comments that one reason the phrase ‘social capital’ is so evocative is that it connotes an increase in power analogous to financial capital. In economical terms, capital is a store of wealth and assets; social capital is that store of behaviours and norms in any large group that lets its members support one another. (Shirky 2008, 222)

This definition echoes Bourdieu, who writes: ‘Social capital is the sum of the resources, actual or virtual that accrue to an individual or group by virtue of possessing a durable network of more or less institutionalised relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 119). Shirky also draws our attention to ‘[…] one of the essential conundrums of social capital [that] inclusion implies exclusion’ (Shirky 2008, 202). Thus ‘social space’ for both these authors describes an unequal, non-inclusive and symbolised environment or ecology. As Shirky documents, social media networks can emerge instantly and across geographic distances, so demonstrating a consequence of this technology to be that ‘groups have become ridiculously easy to form’ (Shirky 2008). From his perspective, social media is fracturing social strata into niche networks because social capital ceases to be structured by the influence of the relation between location and time, thus ‘unfixing’ community from place. The use of mobile phones is a further stimulus to these changes (Stalder 2006). For the place-based museum the problems of connecting with participants in transient digital networks are seen to be hard to overcome. However, there has been some success when the properties of digital social space are understood.



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Digital Engagement Using the museum as a public space in which to display the structure of the internet as social space makes Click!, a social media project organised by Shelley Bernstein at Brooklyn Museum (2008), uniquely interesting. It both offers a visual understanding of the way social media space can intersect people’s private and public spheres and demonstrates the way the internet can influence a museum’s onsite exhibition practices. Click! was conceptualised from the book The Wisdom of Crowds, by James Surowiecki (2004), who asserts that ‘diversity and independence’ are two of the most important factors that make crowds intelligent. Click! allowed us to rethink how the connectivity of social media could be used to exhibit Surowiecki’s concept and, in this respect, to explore this media as an organising agent through which to visualise the wisdom or ‘data’ of the crowd. The exhibition was built around three stages. Firstly, the Brooklyn Museum solicited photographs from artists via an open call on their website, Facebook group, Flickr groups and outreach to Brooklyn-based arts organisations. Secondly, the museum’s social media network, a jury of the masses, evaluated the photographs in terms of aesthetic quality and relevance to the exhibition theme. Importantly for this project, as all evaluations were private and all artists were unnamed it was not possible for the citizen judges to know how others had rated the photographs. To this end Click! employed various techniques to preserve their independence and diversity, such as a widget which randomly selected the photographs to be judged so that judges were blind to each others’ activity, thus inhibiting friends from forming favourites and therefore influencing the crowd behaviour. Thirdly, the museum used their collective data to select and size the various photographs for display in the exhibition. Representing crowd wisdom through their different sizes, the photographs behave as if rising to the front of a collective consciousness. This process generated a ‘tag cloud’ which made visible how the votes had coalesced to favour one image over another. Here, social media space acts as an organising agent, coalescing independent thought in the display of photographs. The Click! exhibition was a visualisation of self-organisation which complements Bourdieu’s conception of social space in the sense that those with similar tastes had coalesced independently; this organisation is similar to his use of big social data to map corresponding patterns in lifestyles of individuals unknown to each other. We can thus claim Click! as a data visualisation of the structure of online social space and read its symbols not only for the wisdom of the crowd but also for the well-known problems of exclusion from museums. A different crowd to this museum’s already established social media network, I imagine, would have produced different results. Thus an issue with Click! is that, although it used social media in its processes, it was still bound from the internet as a complex diverse and public space. Museums and ‘Mass Self-communication’ as the New Public Sphere Complementing Click! as a study of social space is the sociologist Manuel Castells’ (2007) notion of mass self-communication. Through this concept he aims to capture the flexibility, instantaneity and unfettered capacity of large self-organised crowds online to diffuse any kind of material. As he observes, ‘we are indeed in a new communication realm, and ultimately in a new medium, whose backbone is made of computer networks, whose language is digital, and whose senders are globally distributed and globally interactive’ (Castells 2007).

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Within this new communication space various museums have set up direct links to the users/producers of horizontal communication networks, scanning social media in real time to select themes and issues potentially connected to their collections. When, in May 2010, the real-time news ‘object’ of volcanic ash was closing airports and stranding commuters it was also trending across social media, which prompted the Tate to look into its digital collections. They uncovered a ‘real-time’ sketch drawing by Clarkson Frederick (1793–1867) of a volcano spitting ash in a style that matched the mass media imagery dominating news output at that moment. Acting more like a newspaper than a gallery, the Tate put this timely image on the internet through Twitter, resulting in further augmenting action in social media space as the link was retweeted. There was thus interplay between the three media types: the Tate, traditional mass/broadcast media and the digital environment. All acted together to tweet the location of the Clarkson Frederick sketch and were coupled in feedback, each shifting and adapting in real time and in relation to one another, feeding off each other and events as airports cancelled flights and frustrated passengers posted their plight on the social web. Mass media, such as the BBC News, tapped into these localised networked exchanges as a source of content. In a continuing process of circularity, the content from these broadcast channels was recirculated, transported and translated via the social media networks. Although not native to the internet, by treating it as a mass self-communications space the Tate was able to involve a widely dispersed public. What is interesting here is the way distinct media types interacted in real time and the quality of public space this produced. Castells (2007) argues that the space of mass self-communication produces concepts of public and publicness which premise a particular idea of space and time that reconfigures the public sphere away from public institutions such as museums and galleries. However, in this example we see the Tate adapting to the new public space. ‘Object-Orientated Democracies’: Museum Experimentation with Digital Public Space Like the Tate, the Powerhouse Museum has gained an avant garde reputation for making their digital collections open and visible in social media space. Yet, when we deconstruct the assumptions on which these digital practices were formed, an argument emerges that they were as much a barrier to online publics as they were to the ideal of the open, inclusive and engaged museum. Between 2004 and 2006 this museum’s website had been developed to enable the public to add their own folksonomies (descriptive terms in the form of tags and keywords) to the collections’ documentation data and these contributions now sit alongside its formal taxonomies (the curatorial classification of the collection) and object providence. Folksonomies have the effect of ‘augmenting serendipity’ (Chan 2007). For example, in contrast with the Powerhouse’s official description: ‘Sylvester the Cat, licensed from Warner Brothers Looney Tunes cartoons, cloth / cardboard / plastic, Equity, China, 1994’, a particularly memorable folksonomy for Chan was ‘puddy tat’. While a museum’s official collection records would be highly unlikely to employ such a term, Google’s sophisticated algorithms for returning information based on search queries can easily make the semantic connection between this object and its user keyword. The difference folksonomies made to the visibility of Powerhouse content was that internet users, searching for common topics and consumer items, were coming across object records on the first page of their Google search returns. Folksonomies therefore act as a kind of interstice



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between formal museum nomenclatures and popular culture. This new space then has agency to engage more nuanced and social understandings of collections. This explains why the ‘Ubra’, a 1950s women’s brassiere, became one of the museum’s most viewed online objects in 2007, in contrast to its previous relative obscurity. Cameron (2008) explains that ‘through Google searches linking objects to a consumer culture of shopping. Its popularity coincided with the re-invention and launch of the 2006 Ubrain stores, with media coverage, and the efforts of consumers to purchase the item.’ She uses this example to convey how the space of connectivity generated by public interest in the Ubra online brought together an assembly of unlikely parties: heritage values, an authorised museum significance and the mobile worlds of consumer consumption and online shopping. Through this and other examples, Cameron makes the case that the relationship between consumption and production has become more diffuse, with consumers being the medium through which collections data are shared; consequently, the contexts of consumption increasingly bypass the museum, being self-generated by the social grouping instead. Cameron’s is a convincing argument: collections and the meanings, values and significances attributed to them can no longer be considered fixed, given or separate from the networked forms and qualities of space enabled by the internet. Following Latour (2005), Cameron argues that an ‘object’ is not necessarily a thing in itself but rather a social space made up of a network of different perspectives, cultures and materials that together produce a definable public space. From this perspective, what holds a network together is its explicit purpose or object, which provides the network as a whole with some fundamental values in relation to which its internal negotiations maintain the logic of the collective identity. For this reason, these network formations can also be treated as culturally bound structures where ‘code’ is considered a form of ‘cultural capital’. The link to Bourdieu being proposed here is based on Latour’s (2005) notion that an object in ‘social space’ is an effect of an array of relations – the effect, in short, of a network. As such, the stability of this object/network can maintain itself only while those relations linking the different agents or actants hold together and do not change their shape. In a manner similar to Bourdieu’s, Latour presumes that the cohesion of ‘social space’ is a balancing of different perspectives that requires the networked members to be self-aware of their relative positions to one another – that is, the protocols that keep the network environment stable. Following this logic, the attraction or non-attraction of collections data in the digital public space would be contained within the communication parameters and variables that structure the shape of the network, thus reflecting a symbolic order in those interrelationships. Latour (1992; 2005), like Stalder (2006), Shirky (2008) and Bourdieu (1984; 1989), places a great deal of emphasis on the cultural qualities that delineate network shapes. While Cameron (2008) may have shown that some online social groups attract collections data, what we do not learn is why other social contexts are distanced or excluded from this cultural resource. The task is therefore to explain why museums’ data travels to and within some networks but is not attracted by others. Rationally, it is not simply the attraction of online collections which has to be explained, as Cameron (2008) and Chan (2007) have attempted, but also their non-attraction. The apparent potential for cultural disparity in the flow of online collections data seemingly reproduces the same issues of social inequality or exclusion to collections in the digital public space as those demonstrated in Bourdieu’s and Barbel’s 1960s social survey of museum visitors,

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which revealed a connection between social background and non-visiting. This is shown in their classic study of European art museum audiences, The Love of Art (1991), which remains one of the most influential academic studies of social indices of art perception (Prior 2005). A Bourdieusian perspective to the ‘digital public space’ as ‘social space’ would suggest that exclusion to collections data is a problem of self-exclusion to do with individual properties of cultural and symbolic capital. Arguably, Cameron’s analysis of object-centred networks can also be read as implying a problem of social exclusion, particularly when we consider that the internet’s manipulation of space enables social networks to self-organise on the basis of code or ‘cultural capital’. Conclusion In order to model an approach to digital engagement this chapter has argued the case for breaking away from the assumption that museums and the internet can converge as media and has drawn attention, instead, to the cultural differences that separate them. Since Gere (1997), museums and the internet have been associated with an ethics of democratic exchange and celebrated for their distributed properties of space. A language of public space and democracy contrasts with the evidence and experience that museums find it difficult to engage audiences through social media and that digital resources often remain unused (Kidd 2011; Russo and Peacock 2009). In the context of this problematic background, an understanding of social exclusion in social media space has been developed by exposing and exploiting a conundrum in the way Bourdieu’s concept of social space can both rationalise and criticise museums’ use of social media (Bourdieu 1984; 1989). On the one hand Bourdieu contributes a reflexive understanding of the position museums hold within the social structure that has led them to become more closely stitched into the lives of the real communities, while on the other hand we learn that projecting this inclusivity frame onto social media space is misaligned with the way digital publics organise online. Based on data from individuals who were geographically distributed throughout France, Bourdieu’s model of social space demonstrates space as a structure made up of relative social distances between classes that self-organise via the individual’s innate sense of place. Unknown to Bourdieu, he had modelled both social media space and the issues of social exclusion that manifest online. Like Bourdieu’s spatial model, social media enables the connection of geographically disparate people and entities to occur as if they were in one place. As Stalder argues, the digital social space mediates a timesharing environment that allows people to flexibly connect with one another wherever they are located (Stalder 2006). Thus, participating in this space equals being part of a context whose functional logic is based on ‘real time’ social interaction, no matter in which multiple places its constitutive elements are located. However, in writing about social space Bourdieu took pains to emphasise that he was not describing the ‘real’ world in which social groups are bound by the particular characteristics of their location. As place-based institutions with a public remit, the way museums understand social exclusion is inherently forged on identifying and segmenting communities within the local structures and spaces of their neighbourhoods. This distinction was suggested to be a cultural reason for social distance between museums online and the digital public (Bourdieu 1989). For practices in digital engagement to close this social distance they would need to recognise a digital culture and concept of social space free from the constraints of place. The underlying



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approach would aim to open up digital collections in a format and context of interaction that enables individuals to use it according to their own interests, questions and activities rather than predetermining the likely entry points or outcomes. This holistic approach recognises that public engagement with museum collections does not necessarily view the ‘museum online as destination’. Instead, social space as it forms online and in real time is the object, context and instance of interaction. Digital practices are thus required to correspond in real time to events online that cause micro shifts in the social structure. As highlighted above, museums on the whole resist the immediacy of real time as a taxonomy in their management of collections. Therefore, this model of digital engagement provides an interesting challenge to the notion of the inclusive museum. Bibliography and References Barrett, J, 2011 Museums and the Public Sphere 2010, Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester Bennett, T, 2007 Habitus Clive: Aesthetics and politics in the work of Pierre Bourdieu, New Literary History 38, 201–28 Bernstein, S, 2008 Click! A Crowd Curated Exhibition [online], Brooklyn Museum Exhibitions, available from: http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/click/ [14 July 2014] Bourdieu, P, 1977 Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge ——, 1984 Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA ——, 1986 The Forms of Capital, in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (ed J G Richardson), Greenwood Press, New York, 241–58 ——, 1989 Social Space and Symbolic Power, Sociological Theory 7 (1), 1425. Bourdieu, P and Wacquant Loïc, J D, 1992 An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, London Bourdieu, P, Darbel, A and Schnapper, D, 1991 The love of art: European art museums and their public, Polity Press, Cambridge Cameron, F R, 2003 The Next Generation ‘Knowledge Environments’ and Digital Collections, paper presented at Museums and the Web [online], available from: http://www.archimuse.com/mw2003/papers/ cameron/cameron.html#ixzz34eqvpPrt [14 July 2014] ——, 2008 ‘Objectcentred democracies: contradictions, challenges and opportunities’, paper presented at Montreal: Archives and Museums Informatics [online] available from: www.archimuse.com/mw2008/papers/ cameron/cameron [14 July 2014] Castells, M, 1996 The rise of the network society, in The Information Age: Economy, Society, Culture, 1, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford ——, 2001The Internet Galaxy, Oxford University Press, Oxford ——, 2007 Communication, power and counter-power in the Network Society, International Journal of Communication 1 (1), 238–66. Chan, S, 2007 Tagging and searching: Serendipity and museum collection databases, in Museums and the Web 2007: Proceedings (eds J Trant and D Bearman) [online] Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics, available from: http://www.archimuse.com/mw2007/papers/chan/chan.html [14 July 2014] Finnis, J, Chan, S and Clements, R, 2012 Let’s Get Real: How to Evaluate Success Online? Report from the Culture24 Action Research Project

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Fuchs, C, 2002 Some implications of Pierre Bourdieu’s works for a theory of social self organisation, European Journal of Social Theory 6 (4), 387–408 Fyfe, G, 2006 Sociology and the Social Aspects of Museums, in A Companion to Museum Studies (ed S Macdonald), Blackwells, Oxford Gammon, B and Burch, A, 2008 Designing Mobile Digital Experiences, in Digital Technologies and the Museum Experience. Handheld Guides and Other Media (eds L Tallon and K Walker), Altimira Press, Lanham MD, 35–60 Gere, C, 1997 Museums, Contact Zones and the Internet, in Museum Interactive Multimedia 1997: cultural heritage systems design and interfaces – Selected Papers from ICHIM 97 (eds D Bearman and J Trant), Archives & Museum Informatics, Toronto, 59–66 Goffman, E, 1959 The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Penguin, Harmondsworth ——, 1974 Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience, Harper and Row, London Jacobs, N, Thompson, B, Myerson, J and Molga, K, 2012 Taxonomy of the Digital Public Space, in Digital Public Spaces, FutureEverything, 22–3 Kidd, J, 2011 Enacting Engagement Online: framing social media use for the museum, Information, Technology and People 24 (1), 64–77 Latour, B, 2005 From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik or How to Make Things Public, in Making Things Public – Atmospheres of Democracy (eds B Latour and P Weibe), The MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 4–31. Marty, P F, 2011 My Lost Museum: User Expectations and Motivations for Creating Personal Digital Collections on Museum Websites, Library and Information Science Research 33 (3), 211–19 Merriman, N, 1991 Beyond The Glass Case: The Past, the Heritage and the Public in Britain, Leicester University Press Parry, R, ed, 2007a Museums in a Digital Age, Leicester Readers in Museum Studies, Routledge Parry, R, 2007b Recoding the Museum: Digital Heritage and the Technologies of Change, Routledge, London Pratty, J, 2006 The inside out Web museum, in Museums and the Web 2006: Proceedings (eds J Trant and D Bearman) [online], Archives & Museum Informatics, available from: http://www.archimuse.com/mw2006/ papers/pratty/pratty.html [14 July 2014] Prior, N, 2005 A question of perception: Bourdieu, art and the postmodern, in The British Journal of Sociology 6 (1), 123–39 Proctor, N, 2010 Digital: Museum as Platform, Curator as Champion, in the Age of Social Media, Curator: The Museum Journal 53, 35–43 Russo, A and Peacock, D, 2009 Great expectations: sustaining participation in social media spaces [online], available from: http://www.museumsandtheweb.com/mw2009/papers/russo/russo.html [14 July 2014] Russo, A, Watkins, J, Kelly, L and Chan, S, 2006 How will social media affect museum communication? in Nordic Digital Excellence in Museums (NODEM): Proceedings [online], available from: http://eprints.qut. edu.au [14 July 2014] Shirky, C, 2008 Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organising Without Organizations, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA. Simon, N, 2009 Avoiding the Participatory Ghetto: Are Museum Evolving with their Innovative Web Strategies? in Museum Two [online], available from http://museumtwo.blogspot.co.uk/2009/04/avoidingparticipatory-ghetto-are.html [14 July 2014] ——, 2010 The Participatory Museum [online], available from: http://www.participatorymuseum.org/ [14 July 2014]



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Snow, D, Burke Rochford, E. Jr, Worden, S and Benford, R, 1986 Frame alignment processes, micromobilization, and movement participation, American Sociological Review 51, 464–81 Stalder, F, 2002 The Culture of Conduits Essay for ‘Zones’, exhibition, Observatoire 4, Montreal ——, 2006 Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society, Polity Press, Cambridge Surowiecki, J, 2004 The Wisdom of Crowds, Doubleday (Random House), New York

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Relational Systems and Ancient Futures: Co-creating a Digital Contact Network in Theory and Practice Billie Lythberg, Carl Hogsden and Wayne Ngata

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his chapter explores the complex engagements navigated by heritage professionals and a self-defined and genealogically connected community working together under the auspices of two separately funded but related projects: ‘Artefacts of Encounter’, funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council and Arts and Humanities Research Council and based at the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA); and ‘Te Ataakura’, funded by the Māori Centre of Research Excellence Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga and based at the Eastern Institute of Technology, Aotearoa-New Zealand.1 These brought together Toi Hauiti, the working arts group of Te Aitanga a Hauiti, a Māori tribal community, and MAA researchers to co-create a digital contact network, a ‘reciprocal system’. Co-authored by representatives of each party and project, this chapter foregrounds the task ostensibly at hand and the work required to establish the ‘relational systems’ prerequisite to this task. In service of the latter, we describe the development of interpersonal relationships and protocols for respectful and generative transactions, where no distinction is made between their application to ‘real world’ or ‘virtual’ exchanges and ‘things’. Virtual media are among the many mechanisms via which heritage professionals and ‘communities’2 engage with each other. These include websites and databases designed to store knowledge and ‘things’ – both digitised and born-digital – as data and to replicate and generate connections between them. The tools of virtual media also facilitate engagement and affect presence via, for example, video conferencing. The ambitious project co-designed by Toi Hauiti and MAA relied heavily upon virtual media. The digital contact network itself would be a custom-built system hosted and shared online, requiring almost daily collaboration between the two groups. Though extended periods of face-to-face engagement were planned and facilitated between Toi Hauiti and MAA, there was also reliance upon virtual media tools so the dispersed team could remain in contact.

1

Aotearoa, ‘land of the long white cloud’, is the Māori name for what is now more commonly called New Zealand. Aotearoa-New Zealand is a naming convention that reflects the bicultural relationship of Tangata Whenua (‘people of the land and sea’: indigenous Māori) and Tangata Tiriti (‘people of the Treaty of Waitangi’, the founding document of New Zealand: non-Māori). 2 See Watson (2007), and Schorch, this volume, for a discussion of what constitutes a ‘community’ in contemporary museum practice.

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The Projects: Artefacts of Encounter and Te Ataakura The origins of a co-created digital resource lay in the aspirations of Artefacts of Encounter, a three-year project (2010–13) that located and examined artefacts collected on more than 40 voyages that entered Polynesia between 1765 and 1840, and used these artefacts as primary evidence of the nature and legacy of encounters between European explorers and Pacific islanders. A key project aim was to develop a way to collaborate with institutions holding artefacts in New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom and United States, Europe and Russia and to direct the output of this research into an online digital system that might effectively span the geographical, temporal and linguistic barriers of their physical locations. This digital platform would then form a basis for collaboration with Toi Hauiti, whose ancestors had been among the first Māori to greet Captain James Cook when he visited Uawa, on the east coast of the North Island of Aotearoa-New Zealand, in 1769. Part of the project research would focus on tracing artefacts from Uawa in order to incorporate them into the digital contact network and make them available online to Te Aitanga a Hauiti. The project would also facilitate Toi Hauiti making visits to their holding institutions to reconnect with them. Cognisant of the challenges their small community would face if they were to adopt what they describe as a ‘bricks and mortar approach’ to the physical repatriation of these treasures into locally built and maintained facilities, Toi Hauiti have instead embarked on projects of knowledge repatriation. These involve identifying and making visits to reconnect with their taonga (ancestral treasures and instantiations of ancestral presence) overseas, whom they conceptualise as their cultural ambassadors in these places, and reaffirming relationships with their caretakers in their holding institutions. They also acknowledge intangible taonga such as knowledge and virtual taonga such as digital replicas and data as instantiations of ancestral presence. Accordingly, in the project’s planning stages Toi Hauiti requested that their access to such content developed or obtained in this project, and any shared authorship of it, be physically located at a local level – on a server within Uawa and managed by them. The aims of Te Ataakura, a two-year project (2010–12) complementary to Artefacts of Encounter, were to find ways to present Māori artefacts in digital form and repatriate the ancestral knowledge they contain as triggers for social, cultural and economic revival. These objectives map clearly onto the broader goals of Toi Hauiti, which are to help strengthen community identity as a platform for exploring community economic development solutions. From the outset, the collaboration towards establishing a system that could meet the needs of both projects was driven by two primary goals: first, to establish a reciprocal exchange of information relating to objects in the collections of MAA and other museums around the world; and, second, to create technology that could form the basis of future development programmes anticipated by both parties. The researchers from MAA saw the partnership as an opportunity to expand the knowledge base of artefacts collected on early voyages to New Zealand and to test the capacity for online spaces as fulcrums for anthropological research and collaboration. For the leaders of Toi Hauiti, the collaboration would continue their long-term objective by which Te Aitanga a Hauiti could look to digital technologies as a realistic means to connect with their taonga (ancestral treasures) lying in overseas museums and to establish a digital legacy for Hauiti knowledge: the very stuff of ancient futures.



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Toi Hauiti Engagement with Heritage Professionals Te Aitanga a Hauiti translates literally as the descendants or reproduction of Hauiti, reflecting both their shared ancestral connection to sixteenth-century chief Hauiti and the ongoing generativity of the people of Hauiti and their arts. Hauiti was the youngest of three sons, and his father Hingangaroa is credited with developing and disseminating a body of knowledge whose influence still resonates today across Māoridom in expressions of artistic, technological, cultural and academic achievement. A tohunga whakairo (priestly carver), Hingangaroa was also a teacher, a seer and a noted authority on celestial and terrestrial knowledge and practice. His whare wānanga, or house of learning, was Te Rāwheoro, which was attended by Māori from throughout the North Island, who came to learn and benefit from his skills and knowledge. Te Rāwheoro officially closed in the mid-nineteenth century, but its teachings continued in pockets within nearby communities. Over the past years Hauiti’s descendants have been gathering remnants of that body of knowledge together to underpin their tribal development (Ngata et al 2012, 232). The knowledge framework of Toi Hauiti is built on the premise of ‘ancient futures’ – that is, articulating and applying traditional or ancestral Hauiti knowledge in modern situations. Te Rāwheoro and its legacy were the scaffolding for the Te Ataakura project specifically, and give structure to the work of Toi Hauiti in general. Perhaps 750 of the descendants of Hauiti still live in Uawa, and many more make their homes throughout Aotearoa-New Zealand and in countries across the seas. The MAA project staff with whom Toi Hauiti worked included anthropologists, art historians and technical developers based in Cambridge and London (United Kingdom), Belo Horizonte (Brazil), Auckland (Aotearoa-New Zealand) and – for workshops and periods of extended fieldwork – in both Uawa and its neighbouring town, Gisborne. The peculiarities of our collaboration across geographical divides, multiple time zones and languages were precisely the wider concerns of the projects at hand and the digital solutions designed to address them. The partnership between Toi Hauiti and MAA built on earlier collaborations to rediscover, reinvigorate and promote the rich artistic and cultural heritage of Te Aitanga a Hauiti and related iwi (tribal communities) developed and successfully delivered by Toi Hauiti over the past 15 years (see Ngata et al 2012). The return to the community of a patu pounamu (greenstone hand club) from Tairāwhiti Museum in May 1999 catalysed a reassertion of the east coast’s unique artistic and knowledge traditions, particularly those connected to the Te Rāwheoro whare wānanga. Since then the group has worked to engage its community at large in exploring, developing and publicising this invaluable resource. Their cultural heritage is an inheritance related by and through whakapapa, the meshwork of relationships that links everything in Te Ao Māori, the Māori world. This extends to naming and recounting the history of their projects and initiatives in whakapapa-like terms. Te Ataakura is itself a tipuna (ancestral) name that means ‘the burning dawn, the red dawn, rising before us for the future’, and, as a project, fits into the generative whakapapa of Toi Hauti initiatives for knowledge revitalisation. Reconnecting with taonga is critical to their goals. To date, Toi Hauiti have located Te Aitanga a Hauiti taonga in private and public collections throughout Aotearoa-New Zealand and in the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and the United States. These taonga instantiate mātauranga Hauiti or Hauiti knowledge, and tracking them down and reconnecting with them is part of the reclamation by Toi Hauiti of a knowledge base that allows each Hauiti descendant to ‘know oneself so you can get on with life’ (Ngata nd). As official project partners of Artefacts of

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Encounter, and under the auspices of Te Ataakura, Toi Hauiti sought in general to strengthen their connections with museums with whom relationships had already been established, to form connections with others and visit significant taonga in their collections, and to initiate a digital repository for all known Hauiti taonga. Toi Hauiti were also keen to use the opportunity (afforded by their involvement) to offer the benefit of their experience in working with museums and related institutions to other Māori and Pacific Islanders. Furthermore, they aimed to reanimate whakapapa ties with other groups within Aotearoa-New Zealand and the Pacific in order to collaborate on rediscovering and reinvigorating shared aspects of cultural knowledge and artistic heritage. The Digital Contact Network: Conceiving a Platform for Engagement Previous experiences involving MAA as partner in other museum ethnographic projects looking to utilise digital technology as a means for community collaboration3 provided a premise for a web-based scenario whereby different groups could access, share and develop discussion around digital objects. However, while these types of approach often result in a centralised hub into which all users enter (the digital contact zone), the different requirements of Artefacts of Encounter and Te Ataakura determined that a single outcome would not work for either party. In discussing Clifford’s record of the difficulties that arise from the museum as ‘contact zone’ (1997) – when a museum’s physical space is the location for community engagement and the museum therefore wields the power of the ‘host’ – Hogsden and Poulter (2012a) raised concerns about how the same imbalance of power can be equally relevant to museum-controlled digital spaces. In the same way that inequalities of power can arise from the institutionalisation of the contact zone, so the same inability for groups to maintain localisation and ownership over information exchange carries forth into the digital equivalent. A network of two hubs was proposed as a mechanism that could address the needs of the project partners and respond to some of the asymmetries and conflicts of interest raised by Clifford and engaged with by Hogsden and Poulter. Under investigation, then, were opportunities for multiple models of ownership and control of digital content that could be afforded by a structure of autonomous hubs networked together across the internet, rather than the one-size-fits-all approach that is so often the outcome when one group in a project partnership is dominant in available resources and expertise over another. Hogsden and Poulter (2012a, 277) refer to this model as a digital contact network: As an online framework of linked yet autonomous hubs, the contact network can be locationindependent (in that it exists as linkages over the internet) whilst at the same time allowing each hub or group the capacity to situate their node distribution … [their users] … wherever they wish through the ownership and control of their own servers (provided that a suitable connection to the internet is in place). Each hub is free to work in its own (locally) controlled way, and to make its own decisions about the management of information, the form it will take, and what expertise it will share with, and take in from, the network … Thus, within the

3

For example, the ground-breaking work of the Reciprocal Research Network (http://www.rrncommunity. org), for which MAA is a partner museum providing digital access to Northwest Coast collections.



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contact network … each group can interpret and interact with object information arriving within its own online space from a variety of sources, whilst simultaneously being a source of knowledge for other hubs.

They conclude by suggesting that such a model would thereby facilitate ‘an exchange of digital objects (and information associated with them) in much the same way as the museum contact zone invites, but without the asymmetry that arises when one party is a guest in another party’s space’ (2012a, 277).

Fig 16.1 Contact network: Hubs with their nodes connected in an autonomous, non-hierarchical network. © C. Hogsden and E. K. Poulter 2012 Thus, for our purposes, a digital platform shared by both projects took the form of a digital contact network that involved the independent development of two hubs: a research system called KIWA for the Artefacts of Encounter project, and Te Rauata, a digital repository for the Te Ataakura project. As a hub within the digital contact network, the KIWA system is an ethnographic research platform that assumes a museum-type approach in data structure and its content representation – it follows an object-centric design. In addition to bringing together for the first time a diverse array of existing knowledge sources, such as museum catalogues, object labels and voyage inventories, the KIWA system took a unique approach by conceptualising object records as ‘encounters’. Thus, any one object could have a number of encounters in the form of museum

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catalogue records or data resulting from researcher interaction. ‘Museum Encounters’ could be gathered dynamically from museums where open data endpoints were available, while ‘Researcher Encounters’ became the product of a systematic data entry exercise after each museum research visit. In this way, both partner museums and KIWA users become nodes connecting to a digital system, or networked hub. To some extent, KIWA needed to retain a status of access control within the network since it was possible that the Artefacts of Encounter project would need to respect intellectual property and copyright protocols should these be enforced by any of the institutions the project team was working with. Te Rauata was conceived to meet the particular vision of Toi Hauiti for a digital repository containing mātauranga Hauiti (Hauiti knowledge). Everything within Te Rauata would be connected by the genealogies and oral histories that weave together the Māori world, known as whakapapa (relationships), which not only locate everything in relation to one or more others but is also their overarching system for encoding and disseminating knowledge. Te Rauata was designed to assemble taonga Hauiti, mātauranga Hauiti and whakapapa Hauiti in digital form, in a custom-built repository system housed on a server at the local school in Uawa. It could draw on and exchange information with KIWA, but would be entirely owned and controlled by Toi Hauiti, providing a template that could be adopted by other Māori iwi (‘tribes’ or extended kin groups). To a certain extent, a ‘closed system’ hosted by Toi Hauiti (rather than a publicly accessible site or social networking device such as Facebook) gave Te Rauata some affinity with a traditional Māori school of learning (whare wānanga) wherein access to knowledge could be carefully and appropriately mediated. This is particularly important when dealing with items of a sacred or restricted nature, to protect community members as well as the sanctity of these items. Protocols for its operation were underpinned by the Te Aitanga a Hauiti maxim of reciprocity, Ka tipu te whaihanga e hika ki Uawa, Ka riro te whakautu ko Te Ngaio-tū-ki-Rarotonga, Ka riro te manaia, ka riro te taowaru… ‘and so knowledge creation and innovation thrived in Uawa and was shared with others’, and moderated by tribal elders and advocates. The autonomous nature of a network ensures that information can be published to others according to its suitability, while anything deemed culturally sensitive remains at the local level. Thus, in the same way that it was necessary to formalise the data-sharing relationship with the KIWA hub in the network, so the same would be established between Te Rauata and other iwi, museums and archives, Kaupapa Māori educational institutions, Pacific communities and affiliated researchers involved. Like KIWA, Te Rauata was grounded as the product of a research investigation, but, unlike KIWA’s attempt to create something that did not already exist (i.e. to create a new and formerly impossible way to bring together items and research), Te Rauata was intended as a digital resource that could continue a time-honoured process of knowledge construction, accumulation, authentication and dissemination – whakapapa. In addition to providing alternative and additional methodologies for access to, and display of, digital taonga (ancestral treasures), Toi Hauiti envisioned that Te Rauata would operate alongside their existing, generative process of making, recalling and strengthening whakapapa or relational connections, identity and history. This is an activity of routine face-to-face negotiation that can – and often does – occur over lengthy time periods, and both sparks and necessitates lively debate. In order for Te Rauata to replicate the dynamism of whakapapa it would need to provide a digital equivalent of this otherwise physical and interpersonal workflow; a ‘holding pen’ of sorts for data that may or may not be approved for inclusion in Te Rauata by Toi Hauiti advocates with expert knowledge of whakapapa. This would



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ultimately act as a filter for the repository, while also providing the means to assert the relational context that enabled new entries to be accumulated into the data system. Unlike KIWA, that complied with an object-centric approach, Te Rauata would need to be designed to a different logic, a structure that is relationship-centric. In addition, it would require innovative solutions to the conceptual largesse of its contents. How to Contain the World Within a Digital System Te Rauata was predicated on insights drawn from taonga, mātauranga and whakapapa Hauiti. It would contain and be structured by what matters to Te Aitanga a Hauiti within Te Ao Mārama (literally ‘the world of light’; the realm of humans) and Te Pō (the spiritual world; the realm of ancestors past and yet to be born). Together, these realms comprise the Māori world and are understood to influence one another. The Māori concept of time describes the interaction between Te Ao Mārama and Te Po, as people progress into the unknown future guided by the people and events of the knowable past. The waiata (song) used to welcome visitors to Ruakapanga, the whare whakairo or carved house at Hauiti marae (the physical centre of their community),4 describes the encoding of this ancestral knowledge in taonga. Tomokia tōku whare ko Ruakapanga He whare kōwhaiwhai, tukutuku, He whare kōrero e Enter my house Ruakapanga A painted house, a woven-panelled house A house of stories

These lines introduce the tangible characteristics of Ruakapanga, its elaborate kōwhaiwhai paintings and its woven wall panels known as tukutuku, and the intangible mātauranga Hauiti they contain: the stories they can tell, the histories they bring to bear on the present. We return to discuss the significance of Ruakapanga and its tukutuku panels later in the chapter, but the evocation of Ruakapanga is offered here as a classic example of Hauiti ancestral knowledge in tangible and intangible forms. These span at least seven categories, none of which is discrete (see Fig 16.3). During the face-to-face fieldwork component of Te Ataakura, when the basic structure of Te Rauata was under consideration by Toi Hauiti and MAA members in Uawa, it became apparent that we needed a term that could both encompass and provide conceptual purchase on the many ‘things’ Te Rauata would contain. Many of these were proving impossible to confine within the normative high-level categories that might usually be employed in the planning stages of a digital repository for heritage content, such as ‘object’, ‘place’, ‘materials’.

4

Marae are communal gathering complexes focused around an ancestral whare, or meeting house, where people hold meetings (hui), come together to work and play, gather to welcome newcomers, celebrate weddings and birthdays, and farewell their dead (tangihanga). They generally incorporate a whare named for an ancestor, which functions as a meeting house and overnight accommodation, a whare kai, or kitchen and dining hall, bathroom facilities separate to all of these, and the marae proper, an open area in front of the whare where the formalities of welcoming and challenging the intentions of visitors are conducted.

Fig 16.2 Ruakapanga house, Hauiti marae, Tolaga Bay, New Zealand. Photo from National Library NZ, reproduced with permission

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Fig 16.3 Categories of mea. © B. Lythberg, C. Hogsden, W. Ngata To give an example of the challenges we encountered, Te Aitanga a Hauiti babies are said to be born performing a haka (action song) to their ancestor Paikea – in other words, they are indoctrinated from a very early age into the stories and performances associated with Paikea. Paikea is an enigmatic and important ancestor for Te Aitanga a Hauiti. Attacked by his brothers while at sea on a fishing trip, Paikea escaped certain death by calling to his ancestors, the whales, who aided his journey to the east coast of Aotearoa. Paikea had to be part of Te Rauata, but it would prove difficult to confine him within one or even two of the seven high-level categories depicted in Figure 16.3. According to oral narratives and whakapapa, Paikea was a man, a whale and a commander of the sea. He is now an ancestor and the subject of chants and action songs. He is simultaneously a number of carved wooden figures at the gables of meeting houses, past and present, on the east coast. One of these now plays a role as a cultural ambassador for Te Aitanga a Hauiti and other east coast iwi at the American Museum of Natural History in New York (Lythberg et al 2015). Thus we see that, if constrained to using the categories in Figure 16.3, Paikea would figure in them all. He is a descendant of Atua, who is Tipuna and Tangata; a manipulator of Whenua; and the protagonist of Kaupapa. Materialised as a Taonga for a Te Aitanga a Hauiti Whare, Paikea now resides in both the Whare of the American Museum of Natural History and as a digital Taonga in its online Anthropology Collections Database (http:// www.amnh.org/our-research/anthropology/collections/database; Lythberg 2013, 182–6). In order to deal with these fluid and dynamic categories, Toi Hauiti advocate Wayne Ngata suggested we use the single and multifaceted category of mea (Salmond 2013, 15). Mea is an expansive term used colloquially by Māori speakers to replace words that can’t be remembered, or names that are forgotten, but the term has far more considerable conceptual purchase to commend its use here. As a noun it denotes things; as a verb it denotes actions such as speech, thought, intention, making, using and doing; and as a particle it denotes a lapse of

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time. Its embrace is sufficient to encompass all of the mea that matter to Te Aitanga a Hauiti, linked together with and defined by whakapapa (cf. Salmond 2013, 15). Thus, throughout the projects, when referring to what is so often loosely described as ‘content’, or ‘things’, we came to use the concept of mea. Conceptualising Engagement and Knowledge Exchange in Māori Terms Māori conceptualisations and expressions of meaningful engagement were critical to the development of our shared projects. These are captured in two sayings that came to underpin our work together, which address themes of collaboration, complementarity and cooperation, using metaphor and rallying calls to action. The first is a whakatauki or proverbial saying from Te Aitanga a Hauiti that encodes the value of teamwork and the importance of a common goal, using the knowledge contained in an ancestral narrative. Whakapaupakihi was the name of one of the fishing nets of Hauiti, as well as one of the significant battles he took part in. It is invoked now as a metaphor for bringing the young people of Hauiti together on the east coast in a range of sporting and cultural activities: Whakapaupakihi, tuakana taina Whakapaupakihi, tuituia! Whakapaupakihi, the net that brings us together to work towards a common goal!

The second epigraph states the need for collaborating parties to make appropriate and complementary contributions to shared work. Nihil de nobis, sine nobis Nothing about us without us

This sixteenth-century European political motto was made popular in the 1990s by marginalised groups, especially disability activists (Charlton 2000). It has since been adopted by some Māori – including members of Te Aitanga a Hauiti – because it asserts the rights of those with or for whom work is done to be actively involved at every stage of the work’s inception, production and dissemination. This is a key goal of Kaupapa Māori research methodology, whereby space is made within the academy for Māori people and mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge, culture and values), and to challenge dominant Anglo-Western modes of research (Hēnare et al 1997). Sometimes the expression ‘Nō te Māori, Mō te Māori – by Māori, for Māori’ is used to describe this, but it reflects a narrow understanding of the term Kaupapa Māori, which is ‘used by Māori to describe the practice and philosophy of living a Māori, culturally informed life’ (Smith 1997, 464–73). More specifically, the co-developer of Kaupapa Māori, Linda Smith (1999, 120), lists seven critical Kaupapa Māori values that must be practised when engaging in Māori research: aroha ki te tangata (a respect for people) kanohi kitea (the seen face; that is, present yourself to people face-to-face) titiro, whakarongo … kōrero (look, listen … speak) manaaki i te tangata (share and host people, be generous) kia tūpato (be cautious)



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kaua e takahia te mana o te tangata (do not trample over the mana [personal potency and status] of the people) kaua e mahaki [sic] (do not flaunt your knowledge).5

These tenets of good, productive relationships inform the approach Toi Hauiti members take to their lives and provide guidelines for cross-cultural collaborations such as the projects discussed here. When Toi Hauiti engaged with MAA in Artefacts of Encounter and Te Ataakura their motivation was the educational, cultural and economic health of their people. First and foremost, such projects and project personnel must demonstrate the potential and commitment to speak to and with the people of Hauiti rather than simply about them, and must contribute to the community’s broader goals. The benefits when this kind of engagement is successful extend beyond the community, as Pipi et al identify (2004, np), citing senior Māori academic Hirini Moko Mead (2003, 318): In his reflections on the tikanga (protocols) of research, [Mead] writes that: Processes, procedures and consultation need to be correct so that in the end everyone who is connected with the research project is enriched, empowered, enlightened and glad to have been a part of it.

No distinctions are made about who experiences these impacts, with the inference that if research is tika, or right, then all – the participants, their whānau (extended family), the researchers, the community – will be left in a better place because of the research project in which they have been involved. Whether or not the research is tika or right can be measured not only by the success of the project at hand but also by whether its working relationships continue beyond the timespan of a project, and researchers and their work effectively become entwined in the relational meshwork – the whakapapa genealogies and oral histories – of the community. Knowledge of and the ability to recount whakapapa are critical to Māori for positioning themselves in relation to others, where ‘others’ is understood to include everything in both Te Ao Mārama (the world of light and humankind) and Te Pō (the ancestral realm). As Artefacts of Encounter and Te Ataakura projects member Amiria Salmond explains, whakapapa has a ‘distinctive relational dynamism, enabling its most learned exponents to summon up connections to anything and anyone within its prodigiously inclusive embrace’ (2013, 20). For example, in the process of assembling the mea that matter to Toi Hauiti, British navigator Captain James Cook was put forward as a necessary inclusion to Te Rauata. In October 1769 Te Aitanga a Hauiti people welcomed Cook and his chiefly Tahitian guide Tupaia to Uawa, their whenua (land and sea) on the east coast of Aotearoa-New Zealand’s North Island, now a small coastal town commonly called Tolaga Bay following Cook’s naming convention. Cook himself is referred to somewhat familiarly as ‘Jim Cook’ by Toi Hauiti, who recognise his arrival as both the beginning of what they frame as their bicultural inheritance and the start of the processes that would see objects of great importance to Te Aitanga a Hauiti offered in relationship-building transactions and transported far from them. As Cook was destined to outlive all of his children, 5

The Māori for this last value reads better when rendered as ‘Kaua e whakahīhī’.

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who died without having children of their own, in strictly biological and genealogical terms it is impossible for anyone to claim descent from him. Yet, for Toi Hauiti, connections had been made in 1769 via meetings, their extension of hospitality, exchanges of knowledge and technologies and, most significantly, his receipt of taonga, arguably via significant tuku transactions (explained below). These had woven Cook into an ongoing relationship with Te Aitanga a Hauiti such that he is afforded and necessitates a place in their whakapapa. The historical relations between Te Aitanga a Hauiti ancestors and Tupaia, Cook and his men continue to resonate today for this community. Prior to the projects discussed here, Toi Hauiti had developed an exhibition called Te Pou o Te Kani (named for the pou or house post of ancestor Te Kani a Takirau), a temporary museum of Hauiti taonga past and present in downtown Uawa, open for three months from October 2003; and Te Whatakōrero, a CD-ROM database of Hauiti taonga in New Zealand museums, produced in 2005. They had hosted workshops and conducted the closing ceremony for the Pasifika Styles exhibition at MAA in 2008, and made trips to Tübingen University in Germany to visit the pou of their ancestor Hinematioro from Uawa, collected by Captain Cook. Toi Hauiti had developed the Uawanui a Ruamatua Heritage Trail with local organisations, historians and the Natural History Museum and Royal Botanic Gardens in London, and begun a programme of replanting the banks of the Uawa River with seed from the progeny of plants collected there by Cook’s gentleman botanist Joseph Banks in 1769. In these projects, as in Te Rauata, they honour the tuku exchanges of their ancestors and keep the legacies of their ‘ancient futures’ alive. Tuku Tuku is the Māori word for a certain type of transaction whereby something important is released into the care of someone else, thus establishing the expectation of an enduring relationship; a tuku such as the gift of a taonga between people could establish an ongoing reciprocal relationship between them (Henare [Salmond] 2005, 121; Salmond 2013, 21). Through certain tuku transactions ‘people and their gifts were philosophically inseparable’, and the tuku exchange thus established an ongoing relationship of a type that allowed previously unrelated people to work together (Henare [Salmond] 2005, 122; cf. Tapsell 1997). Without entering into a fine-grained analysis of the ‘gift’ such as those already offered by numerous scholars since Mauss (1990 [1950]), we follow Salmond in positing here that certain types of transactions in Te Ao Māori establish and instantiate relationships that might be considered in whakapapa-like terms. What this means for projects such as Artefacts of Encounter and Te Ataakura, which rely upon transactional relations – the sharing and exchange of knowledge and data – is that the relationships, not the work, must be afforded primacy, precisely because these enable the work to be done and establish the possibility of enduring connections. Casting aside all romantic notions of researcher–community relationships, there are obvious practical motivations behind the formation of ongoing working relationships between communities who wish to be talked with and to rather than about. Moreover, the investment a community makes in educating researchers with whom they wish to work is time- and energy-consuming. At the most pragmatic level it makes good sense to recognise and continue to develop those connections that are beneficial to communities. In practice this means that when relationships are generative they should be maintained. The relationship between Toi Hauiti and MAA, active now since 2008, is evidence of this. The significance of whakapapa and transactional relations to our project, when added to the Kaupapa Māori principles already listed, are the lynchpins of our work together.



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As already described, a decision was made that, despite the multiple mea that were to be included in Te Rauata, as far as data categories were concerned there would be only two: the mea themselves, and the relationships or whakapapa between them. These are mutually constitutive. In essence, ‘every thing in Te Rauata exists only because there is a relationship that says it does, recounted in narrative that defines its identity and shape’ (Hogsden and Poulter 2012a, 281). In this way, Te Aitanga a Hauiti whakapapa provided both the fine filter and almost limitless potential for the mea that matter to be incorporated into Te Rauata. As a hub within the digital contact network, Te Rauata could then choose to make some or all of its whakapapa connected and verified content available to other hubs and nodes within the network in accordance with partnership understandings. The unique qualities of digital objects are what enable networked interactions such as these to take place: they are mobile and can be easily reproduced, recontextualised and, most importantly, shared (Srinivasan et al 2010). Digitisation and the creation of digital taonga were both a methodology and the object of study of Te Ataakura. By using digital techniques to allow iwi (tribal communities) to reconnect with their taonga (ancestral treasures) in international collections, the two digital platforms built for our projects aimed to put new technologies to work both for users of KIWA, whose research might benefit from this, and for Māori ends. They also aimed to generate mātauranga Māori or Māori knowledge in relation to these taonga and their histories, and to advance existing and emergent Māori-led projects of cultural, socioeconomic and artistic revitalisation. Revitalisation is an important word here, which speaks to the incentive for Toi Hauiti to harness technology in order to ‘travel digital horizons and build a digital iwi economy’ (Ngata nd). ‘Revitalisation’ and its complementary term ‘reciprocation’ were commonly used in our conversations about the work at hand, and to conceptualise both the nature of digital mea within the digital worlds of KIWA and Te Rauata and their association with mea in Te Ao Māori (not all of which happen to be physical, and not all of which are conceived of as taonga or ancestral treasures (Ngata et al 2012, 242)). It is vital here to acknowledge that of the digital mea that are digital taonga, these are indeed taonga, not merely surrogates or representations. ‘No distinction is made between sacred objects, and the like, and copies (including photographs) of them. All are equally powerful, sacred, or otherwise instilled with vital values and thus require appropriate care and protection’ (Brown and Nicolas 2012, 314). The value of digital taonga for Māori communities such as Toi Hauiti might therefore seem to lead logically into a discussion of digital or virtual repatriation, whereby museums can retain taonga by returning digital representations of them (Solomon and Thorpe 2012; Brown and Nicholas 2012). However, Hogsden and Poulter (2012a; 2012b) have reasoned that, unlike the relationshipconcluding act of a repatriation or return, relationships of ongoing exchange and obligation are at the core of the long-term effectiveness of the projects discussed here, much like those initiated by tuku transactions. They go so far as to question whether digital repatriation or return is even possible: As opposed to physical objects that can only exist in one place at a given time, objectives for simultaneous use are a prerequisite for digital collaboration projects and rely upon the ‘multiple’ nature of digital objects. This raises the question, is it possible to ‘return’ something that occurs in many places at once? (Hogsden and Poulter 2012a, 278)

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They conclude that, even when the term ‘digital repatriation’ is used to describe projects whereby digital representations of museum objects are made available to source communities, it isn’t the digital object that is being returned but, rather, through the digital object, the knowledge that the physical object exists, the knowledge that it contains and the connections that it revitalises. It is in this way that the physical can be reproduced or recreated to become a conduit that allows groups such as Toi Hauiti to establish relationships with museums currently holding their taonga. What this activity opens up, then, is a dialogue, a sharing of knowledge or a platform for digital reciprocity rather than the closure implied by virtual repatriation or return. Nonetheless, despite sharing ideas about the nature and potential of digital reciprocity, the realities for sharing digital mea between members of Toi Hauiti and MAA in order to develop the digital contact network – especially when collaborating at great distances – proved quite difficult. Put simply, for a period of our engagement MAA developers’ requests for digital mea to enable early software development stages were unrequited. Two clear reasons emerged for this: the need for, and logistical difficulties of, engaging successfully face-to-face; and the unexpectedly complicated transactional nature of our engagement. The Importance of Being

kanohi ki te kanohi

Of the Kaupapa Māori practices already identified as critical to the success of meaningful engagement, the most problematic within our digital and often cyber-based project was the need for kanohi kitea (the seen face), or, as it is more commonly described, the need to be kanohi ki te kanohi or face-to-face. A common Māori greeting is Tēnā koe: literally ‘there you are’, and a welcome is often sealed with a hongi, a pressing of noses and exchange of breath that celebrates the first breath shared by progenitors of humankind Tane and his earth-formed maid, Hine-ahu-one. Being face-to-face is at the core of what it means to be Māori; it reinforces and is reinforced by whakapapa connections. It is by being face-to-face that the other tenets of healthy and productive relationships fall into place: the demonstration of aroha ki te tangata (a respect for people) and ways to manaaki i te tangata (share and host people, be generous); the ability to titiro, whakarongo … kōrero (look, listen … speak) in real time; the exercising of intuition that instructs when to kia tūpato (be cautious); and the humility of kaua e takahia te mana o te tangata (not trampling over the mana of other people) and kaua e whakahīhī (not flaunting your own knowledge). With a team as geographically dispersed as ours, and a digital output destined to dwell within the vagaries of the internet, even before the projects began we had harnessed technology to be ostensibly kanohi ki te kanohi across oceans, continents, time zones and airwaves. We held meetings via Skype wherever possible for the intimacy that being able to see people appears to offer over and above other electronic communications such as email and phone calls. For Toi Hauiti this was nothing new: they are early adopters of technologies and inventors of the ‘tele-tangi’, or funeral via mobile phone, to facilitate their kin living far from Uawa to nevertheless be ‘present’ there to farewell whānau members (Ngata et al 2012).6 Indeed, their partnership with MAA to develop a digital contact network stemmed in part from their acknowledgement that many of their rangatahi (young people) live away from their whenua (customary land and sea) and that 6

Young tech-savvy members of Te Aitanga a Hauiti utilised internet and technical solutions of the time to broadcast tangihanga (funerals) to relatives around the world in 2006, 2008 and 2012. It is now a developing practice of funeral homes in New Zealand.

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Fig 16.4 Working kanohi ki te kanohi in Uawa. Photo by B Lythberg



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digital platforms facilitate engagement with Te Aitanga a Hauiti whānau (family members) and mātauranga (knowledge) that might otherwise be non-existent. However, despite our use of Skype to ‘virtually’ attend meetings with one another, our interactions were subject to broadband time lags and confined to prearranged and sometimes uncomfortable time slots (finding a convenient time for people in New Zealand, Brazil and United Kingdom to meet is very difficult). Our digital meetings could not suffice to replace our meeting face-to-face so that trust could be developed and our relationships could be further built upon. As Cram and Pipi (2000, 14; cited by Pipi et al 2004) have determined, being kanohi ki te kanohi is particularly critical when undertaking an important take or purpose, such as our development of a digital contact network that would contain taonga (ancestral treasures). Being face-to-face means that all parties can use all their senses to assess both the people with whom they are engaging and the projects they are proposing to undertake. What became quite evident over a year-long planning exercise leading up to the start of developing Te Rauata, which included visits to Uawa by MAA team members, was that options for exchange would be difficult until our two teams could work face-to-face for extended periods. This was helped by our getting together for shared conference presentations, project symposia in Auckland and Vancouver and several intensive workshops held in Uawa; by visits between the residences of Ngata in Uawa and Lythberg in Auckland; and Hogsden’s relocation to Gisborne, a town neighbouring Uawa, for six months during the projects. In addition, Toi Hauiti representatives were accompanied by MAA team members to reconnect with taonga in museums in Florence and London, and to New York to revitalise whakapapa ties to their ancestor Paikea. Somewhat ironically, it is by reflecting on these reconnections with physical taonga that the nuanced transactional nature of our engagement, and its ramifications for the sharing of digital taonga between members of the two projects, becomes clearer. Transactions and Reconnections The Te Pou o Te Kani exhibition already mentioned as a key early output of the Toi Hauiti programme of cultural revival was named for Te Aitanga a Hauiti ancestor Te Kani a Takirau. It celebrated both presence and absence in Uawa by drawing attention to the parts of the ancestral house bearing his name that are now – owing to transactions of various kinds – scattered in museum collections throughout the world. One of the foci of Toi Hauiti efforts is to reassemble Te Kani a Takirau in digital form in Uawa, and some of their work during Artefacts of Encounter and Te Ataakura was towards this end. The projects’ funding for travel facilitated Toi Hauiti members’ reconnecting with a tukutuku panel believed to be from the Te Kani a Takirau whare at the National Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology in Florence in September 2012; the whalebone hair comb, or heru, of Te Kani a Takirau at the British Museum, also in September 2012; and the gable figure, or tekoteko, from the whare, itself an ancestor (among other things, as already described) called Paikea, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in April 2013 (Lythberg et al 2015).7 The visits themselves were organised by MAA and Toi Hauiti project members with the necessary professional relationships and language skills to negotiate private visits and hands-on access to 7

These encounters, and many others, are described in the ‘News’ section of Artefacts of Encounter nd.



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these taonga. They could gently steer the nuanced engagements when their customary and institutional custodians were, for the first time, kanohi ki te kanohi, and so too were Toi Hauiti with their taonga that – as we have already described – are also ancestors (and other mea besides). These face-to-face meetings were handled with sensitivity and caution in their planning stages and during their execution (Lythberg et al 2015, 204), observing the tenets of Kaupapa Māori research that warn kia tūpato (be cautious) and kaua e takahia te mana o te tangata (do not trample over the mana of the people). The delicate nature of the past transactions that had brought about the presence of Hauiti taonga in these museums, and the present (and potential for future) transactions between Toi Hauiti and the museums’ curators and collection managers, were keenly anticipated and navigated. We can only surmise now that some of the transactions that had placed these taonga into the hands of Europeans were in the spirit of tuku, and were thus intended to establish ongoing relationships between their donors and recipients; when these taonga were obtained the documentation of their transaction was scant at best and often muddied by difficulties of translation, both of language and intent. The projects’ personnel from MAA had considerable experience of working with communities, both within and external to the museum, in relation to tangible museum objects, including those whose documentation is insufficient to determine precisely their provenance and the intentions of their donors: the details of their transactions. Yet throughout the development of the digital contact network the transactional nature of the knowledge exchange required to furnish Hauiti mea as data with which to explore digital possibilities was insufficiently acknowledged. Essentially, despite an acute awareness of the intimacy, affect, and importance of reconnecting Toi Hauiti with taonga in museum collections, and despite theorising that digital taonga are indeed taonga, MAA project members still conceived of the digital contact network as a digital framework to be filled with mere ‘data’, which, surely, could simply be handed over. MAA project members had failed to recognise that these ‘data’ were taonga too, and the surrender of this to the developers was itself a type of tuku exchange, one that needed to be carefully handled and managed with appropriate protocols. The solution to this impasse, when it emerged, was digital, and its realisation the product of incidental conversation that comes only from a face-to-face working environment. Existing open-source software was modified to operate as a conduit for Toi Hauiti to share data with MAA’s technical developers. The transactions were tracked by an activity log that documented not only when and which Toi Hauiti members had made data available, but also whether these were still ‘work in progress’ or were ‘completed’ and therefore ready for MAA to view. Likewise, MAA activity within the software was logged, keeping a clear record of transactions. Thus, our tuku exchanges could be unambiguous and clearly documented and managed as they occurred and as mea made their way into Te Rauata. Conclusion: A Tukutuku Framework for Engaging Communities Tomokia tōku whare ko Ruakapanga He whare kōwhaiwhai, tukutuku, He whare kōrero e Enter my house Ruakapanga A painted house, a woven-panelled house A house of stories

Fig 16.5 Tukutuku woven panels in Ruakapanga. Photo by Fiona Collis

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We return to this welcome in our conclusion in order to expand the generative metaphor of the woven tukutuku panels that line the walls of Ruakapanga and tell many of its stories. Named perhaps for the transactions that bring them into being, tukutuku panels are made by two people standing either side of a substrate framework. They collaborate by passing strands of dyed plant fibre back and forth through the framework, and between one other, to create an intricately woven pattern or story, the weaving of which also adds to the panel’s structural integrity. In other words, tukutuku are created out of repeated exchanges between two people largely obscured from one another and yet standing face-to-face. As they work, only the person facing the right side of the panel can see the final pattern as it emerges and judge whether each tuku, or exchange, is correct, yet both need to work to keep the tension between them productive. Like a digital contact network, the face of a tukutuku panel displays the result of much work and many exchanges that have happened behind the scenes to weave the work together. Tukutuku are also taonga that record and tell stories. Thus a tukutuku is a productive metaphor for the work Toi Hauiti and MAA undertook together because it evokes the weaving together of stories, taonga and people such as we hoped to effect in our digital contact network. At another level, the metaphor of the tukutuku connotes the unavoidably transactional nature of engagement, where outcomes require input from both sides, where trust must be placed in others to lead and guide, and where even face-to-face engagements might result in one party feeling as though they cannot properly see or assess the work in progress. In recent years, the term tuku has been used to describe the act of downloading data from the internet, further extending its conceptual reach into the transactional realm of cyber space and commending its application to the projects under consideration here. Since Artefacts of Encounter and Te Ataakura officially concluded, project participants have moved to other projects (and some to other institutions altogether) but have remained in contact and continue to work towards shared outputs, this chapter included. For Toi Hauiti this continuation of work accords with their long-term vision and focus on their rangatahi or young people, encapsulated in the aphorism Mo tātou, mo ka uri i muri ake nei – For us and our children after us. For [now former] MAA project personnel it reflects a denial of the short termism of many such projects that is an inevitable outcome of funding-associated restrictions, and exemplifies their ongoing commitment to the people of Toi Hauiti – their entanglement in Whakapaupakihi, the net of Hauiti. The digital contact network we conceived remains a work in progress, as might be expected from a system that is by its very nature generative and therefore unbounded in its potential. KIWA and Te Rauata remain on opposite sides of the globe but able to communicate and reciprocate. Meanwhile, as a result of the projects and their particular challenges, their developers – technical, philosophical and otherwise – are now better equipped to engage in further projects such as these, and in particular, with each other. Artefacts of Encounter and Te Ataakura figuratively wove a tukutuku panel for the house of stories of Te Aitanga a Hauiti: the digital contact network itself is an artefact of encounter, exchange and engagement, much like the many mea and relationships within it. Acknowledgments The chapter has been informed by field notes, emails, photographs, videos, sketches and memories; The Artefacts of Encounter website (http://maa.cam.ac.uk/aofe/); and project analyses

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already published (Hogsden and Poulter 2012a; 2012b; Ngata et al 2012; Salmond 2012; Salmond 2013; Lythberg et al 2015). We are grateful to our colleagues and collaborators, too numerous to be named here; to the funders of our projects; and to the editors for their comments, which have greatly improved our chapter. Bibliography and References Artefacts of Encounter, nd [online], available from: http://maa.cam.ac.uk/aofe/ [19 June 2016] Brown, D and Nicholas, G, 2012 Protecting indigenous cultural property in the age of digital democracy: institutional and communal responses to Canadian First Nations and Māori heritage concerns, Journal of Material Culture 17 (3), 307–24 Charlton, J, 2000 Nothing About Us Without Us: disability oppression and empowerment, University of California Press, CA Clifford J, 1997 Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA Cram, F and Pipi, K, 2000 Māori/Iwi Provider Success: Report on the Pilot Project, IRI, Tamaki-Makaurau, Auckland Henare [Salmond], A J M, 2005 Museums, Anthropology and Imperial Exchange, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Hēnare, M, Keiha, P and Henry, E, 1997 Tikanga Whakaruruhau: Towards a Pedagogy of Māori Business and Economic Development Education, The University of Auckland School of Business and Economics, Executive Programmes Working Paper, June 1997 Hogsden, C and Lythberg, B, 2013 Artefacts of Encounter: a collaborative project at University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Museum Ethnographers Group [online], available from: http:// www.museumethnographersgroup.org.uk/images/CASE_STUDY_EIGHT_.pdf Hogsden, C and Poulter, E, 2012a The Real Other: Museum objects in digital contact networks, Journal of Material Culture 17 (3), 265–86 ——, 2012b Contact Networks for Digital Reciprocation, Museum and Society 10 (2), 81–94 Lythberg, B, 2013 The American Museum of Natural History Database (review), Journal of Museum Ethnography 26, 181–6 Lythberg, B, Ngata, W and Newell, J, 2015 Houses of stories: the whale rider at the American Museum of Natural History, in Museum and Society Special Issue: Museum education today: synergies and innovations in multicultural contexts. Museum and Society 13 (2), 195–220 Mauss, M, 1990 [1950] The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies Essai sur le Don 1950, trans W D Halls, Routledge, London Mead, H M, 2003 Tïkanga Māori: Living by Māori Values, Huia Publishers, Wellington Newell, J, 2012 Old objects, new media: Historical collections, digitization and affect, Journal of Material Culture 17 (3), 287–306 Ngata, W, Te Ataakura: Re-connecting voyage collections in archives and museums through the creation of digital taonga, presentation to Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga [online], available from: http://mediacentre. maramatanga.ac.nz/content/digitisation-and-research-part-two-dr-wayne-ngata [30 May 2012] Ngata, W, Ngata-Gibson, H and Salmond, A, 2012 Te Ataakura: digital taonga and cultural innovation, Journal of Material Culture 17 (3), 229–44



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Pipi, K, Cram, F, Hawke, R, Hawke, S, Huriwai, T M, Mataki, T, Milne, M, Morgan, K, Tuhaka, H and Tuuta, C, 2004 A Research Ethic for Studying Māori and Iwi Provider Success, Social Policy Journal of New Zealand 23 [online], available from: https://www.msd.govt.nz/about-msd-and-our-work/publicationsresources/journals-and-magazines/social-policy-journal/spj23/23-a-research-ethic-for-studying-mori-andiwi-provider-success-p141–153.html [December 2004] Salmond, A, 2012 Digital Subjects, Cultural Objects: Special Issue introduction, Journal of Material Culture 17 (3), 211–28 ——, 2013 Transforming translations (part I): ‘The owner of these bones’, Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3 (3), 1–32 Smith, G H, 1997 The Development of Kaupapa Māori: Theory and Praxis, PhD thesis, University of Auckland Smith, L T, 1999 Decolonising Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, Zed Books, New York/Otago University Press, Dunedin Srinivasan, R, Becvar, K M, Boast, R and Enote, J, 2010 Diverse knowledges and contact zones within the digital museum, Science, Technology & Human Values 35 (5), 735–68 Watson, S, ed, 2007 Museums and their communities, Routledge, London, New York

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Interview – Conal McCarthy Could you say something about your career so far, focusing on community engagement with heritage? I have worked in galleries and museums since the late 1980s, in a variety of roles including education, public programmes, exhibition development, collections and curatorial. From 1996 to 2000 I was a developer at Te Papa involved in education, public programmes and interpretation, including discovery centres for children and some temporary exhibitions such as the iwi exhibition with the Te Aupouri people of Northland. Since then I have moved into an academic position in museum and heritage studies, but our teaching and work placements mean we have close links with museums and heritage organisations around the country. My research on museums and Māori also keeps me grounded in current practice; for example, my 2011 book entailed over 60 interviews between 2008 and 2010 with Māori and Pakeha professionals, academics and community leaders around the country. What does the term community engagement mean to you? In my work as a researcher and writer in museum studies it is something that I have to consider, unlike some academic subjects, because theory and practice are so closely intertwined, and because there are many resonances, applications and implications for my writing in current museum work. I am aware that in much recent literature by people such as Bernadette Lynch there is a critical appraisal of community work and terms such as ‘collaboration’, which is justified as there has been much vague language about ‘community’ in the museum sector over the last 20 years. That does not mean we should abandon community work, and in fact there is still a need for a closer relationship between community studies and museum studies, of which Elizabeth Crooke’s work on community practice in what she calls the ‘active museum’ is an example (Crooke in McCarthy 2015). What we do need to do is define how we understand the term (for example, ethnic group, museum community or academic community), and look for real and meaningful ways to involve those communities in our work beyond the relatively obvious arena of events/public programmes, whether it is collections, exhibitions, policy formation or governance. One distinctive way this has developed in Aoteraroa New Zealand is through the concept of mana taonga (see McCarthy 2011; Hakiwai and Schorch 2014; McCarthy et al 2015), which is a powerful means of facilitating community input within museums and heritage organisations. Basically because the object (taonga/treasure) is owned by the community then they have mana (power, authority, responsibility) over how it is managed. At Te Papa this means iwi (tribes) have a real say in how their ancestral heritage is cared for, exhibited and interpreted. In that sense this concept of community engagement goes to the heart of museology and transforms it, so you could say collections are not at the heart of museums, relationships are, and those relationships are long term, not one-off transactions (Carroll 2008 in McCarthy 2011).

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How would you define ‘heritage’? Personally I refer to Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s (1998) idea of something in the present that has recourse to the past. It is very difficult to define heritage in public use and in New Zealand there are several definitions in policy frameworks of museums and heritage organisations which are analogous to the kinds of explanations found internationally – that is, old things inherited, objects, places and practices. Sometimes these differ from the international consensus, such as the ICOMOS New Zealand Charter, which has a slightly more expansive understanding of heritage conservation because of Indigenous perspectives, or the legislation of Heritage New Zealand, which talks about wāhi tapu/sacred areas. I find it useful to expand these terms with reference to Māori ideas about ancestral heritage which are encapsulated in the phrase taonga tuku iho/ treasures handed down (Tapsell 1997; Henare 2007; McCarthy 2011). Māori see this heritage as a living thing, not an inert artefact, which instantiates relationships with their ancestors and integrates past and present. We imagine cultural heritage in New Zealand has its own nuances? Yes, cultural heritage is very important; because it is a small country that is highly centralised, everyone has to deal with government regulations which are inflected by the Treaty of Waitangi (1840), where the idea of taonga/treasures often is applied to aspects of cultural heritage. However, in other ways New Zealand society is very pragmatic and overlooks heritage in favour of economic value; the current government has marginalised many of the processes in place to protect and manage heritage, seen, for example, in the current revisions of the Resource Management Act 2003. In the heritage sector, community engagement is still in its early stages compared with museums, who have been doing this work for much longer, partly as a result of the decolonisation process of the 1970s–1980s, in which Māori communities forced their way into museums. Heritage organisations have yet to involve communities in their work to such a degree, and heritage management is still dominated by the expert-driven, top-down model, although there is some interesting research which maps out how this could change (see Pishief 2012; Atkinson 2013). Are there key moments you can refer to that might have encouraged greater community participation in heritage practices? In museums and museum studies in Aotearoa the key turning point was the Te Maori exhibition which toured the US and New Zealand from 1984 to 1987 (Mead 1984; McCarthy 2007; McCarthy 2011). This dramatic participation of elders and tribal communities in the development, opening and staging of the exhibition marked a new inclusiveness, and Māori became more involved in museums as trustees, managers, curators, conservators and, of course, visitors, who attended museums in large numbers. This was a parallel event to The Spirit Sings controversy in Canada, but in New Zealand, while no comparable national policy statement emerged, there was a consensus by the late 1980s that things had to change. This happened across the sector at an operational level that was bottom-up rather than government-driven, often led by dynamic local leaders and communities who had close connections with their regional museum. Has the Association for Critical Heritage Studies (ACHS) had an impact? The emergence of ACHS has been positive in many ways, in beefing up the critical and theoretical aspects of professional heritage practice, which has, I suppose, been quite loose and uncritical



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at times. There has been too much focus on fabric and heritage materials at the expense of values and people (see Sully in McCarthy 2015). However, there is a danger with this embedding of heritage studies as an academic field in the university that scholars focus on theory at the expense of practice, and that may mean community engagement may be overlooked and practitioners shut out of debates. We do need to theorise community engagement, but this work needs to happen in an open and democratic fashion with scholars and communities, otherwise heritage studies will end up being divorced from the community base where it can have greater effect. Do you think the term community engagement is still useful, and has it achieved its aims? It is still meaningful, but is called different things in different countries and there is a lot of work to do to explore, analyse and theorise it. No, it has not achieved its aims; there has been good work in some places: for example, on social inclusion in the UK, participation of native/ tribal communities in former settler colonies such as Australia and New Zealand, but not across the sector or across museums’ range of activities. For example, it tends to be seen in front of house areas, but not in management, governance or collections care. Some academics argue that community engagement is still at the margins and not at the core of museum work, despite some progress (see Nightingale in McCarthy 2015). However, if museums and heritage organisations don’t embrace community engagement they will face a grim future as they won’t attract support from governments, funders and sponsors. They have to show their social value in this work, not sit there and expect to be funded for the intrinsic value of their collections. What do you think the future holds for museums and their communities? I would like to say the future should be bright, as this work really has to happen, but I am afraid the signs are not good and there is something of a conservative reaction to the new museology in some quarters; in others, particularly art galleries, they were never active in this area anyway. In New Zealand, following the settlement of Treaty claims, Māori will only get more active; they want more than collaboration, they want to run things their way – museums have to face up to this and change, or else. As Hakiwai argues (2014), museums have no choice but to actively support Māori cultural and social development. They should not be afraid of it, they should embrace it, because it will enable them to transform themselves. I would like to think this work in New Zealand is a leading example of what can be done which other nations can learn from. Bibliography and References Atkinson, J, 2014 Education, values and ethics in international heritage: Learning to respect, Ashgate, Farnham Hakiwai, A, 2014 He Mana Taonga, He Mana Tangata: Māori taonga and the politics of Māori tribal identity and development, Museum and Heritage Studies, Victoria University, Wellington Hakiwai, A and Schorch, P, 2014 Mana Taonga and the public sphere: A dialogue between indigenous practice and Western theory, International Journal of Cultural Studies 17 (2), 191–205 Henare, A, 2007 Taonga Maori: Encompassing rights and property in New Zealand, in Thinking through things: theorising artefacts in ethnographic perspective (eds A Henare, M Holbraad and S Wastell), Routledge, London, New York, 47–67 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B, 1998 Destination culture: Tourism, museums, and heritage, University of California Press, Berkeley CA

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McCarthy, C, 2007 Exhibiting Maori: A history of colonial cultures of display, Berg, Oxford, New York ——, 2011 Museums and Maori: Heritage professionals, indigenous collections, current practice, Te Papa Press, Wellington ——, ed, 2015 Museum practice, The International Handbooks of Museum Studies vol 2, gen eds S Macdonald and H R Leahy, Wiley Blackwell, Oxford, Malden MA McCarthy, C, Dorfman, E, Hakiwai, A and Twomey, Ā, 2015 Mana Taonga: Connecting Communities with New Zealand Museums through Ancestral Māori Culture, Museum International 257 (60), 5–15 Mead, S M, ed, 1984 Te Maori : Maori art from New Zealand collections, Heinemann/American Federation of Arts, New York Tapsell, P, 1997 The flight of Pareraututu: An investigation of taonga from a tribal perspective, Journal of the Polynesian Society 106 (4), 323–74.

Contributors Gregory Ashworth was educated in Geography at the Universities of Cambridge, Reading and London (PhD 1974). He has taught at the Universities of Wales, Portsmouth and, since 1979, Groningen, the Netherlands. He is, since 1994, Professor of Heritage Management and Urban Tourism in the Department of Planning, Faculty of Spatial Sciences, University of Groningen. His main research interests focus on the interrelations between tourism, heritage and place marketing, largely in an urban context. He is the author or editor of around 15 books, 100 book chapters and 200 journal articles. He received honorary life membership of the Hungarian Geographical Society in 1995 and an honorary doctorate from the University of Brighton in 2010, and was knighted for services to Dutch Science in 2011. Evita Buša studied ceramic art at the Applied Art School of Riga, Latvia, where she received a BFA with distinction in 1992. She also holds an MFA in art history from the Art Academy of Latvia and an MA in International Museums Studies from Gothenburg University, Sweden. She has 18 years of professional experience in the non-profit arts and culture-related fields. Since 2008 she has served as the Head of Public Programming and the Education Department of the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Helen Graham is University Research Fellow in Tangible and Intangible Heritage and Director of the Centre for Critical Studies in Museums, Galleries and Heritage, University of Leeds, School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies. Her research and teaching interests directly flow from working in learning and access teams in museums and coordinating community heritage projects. She deploys collaborative research approaches to explore questions of participation in museums and heritage as well as using the resources museums and heritage offer for enlivening local democracies. Helen has recently acted Principle Investigator on an Arts and Humanities Research Council Connected Communities Research project ‘How should decisions about heritage be made?’, which has explored ‘how to increase participation from where you are’. Julian Hartley co-founded Dim Sum Digital, a company offering data expertise to the culture and media sector. Clients include the Guardian Media Group, University of Manchester and The Indigo Trust in South Africa. He is also a PhD candidate at the University of Manchester’s Centre for Museology, where his specialist area of research is museums and the digital public space. Between 2008 and 2014 he was researcher in residence at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, which included instigating, following, documenting and critically reflecting upon processes, challenges and actions of digital engagement and the people involved in them. Stephanie Hawke is a museum and heritage professional working in the North West of England. Her PhD focused on the contribution of heritage to sense of place, exploring the principles of ecomuseology and the way in which people engage with their local heritage.

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Carl Hogsden is a museum practitioner, technologist and developer, and his work for the University of Cambridge Museums has sought innovative avenues for combining these three disciplines. A focus of his ongoing research considers how technology can be used effectively to share knowledge about collections by generating scalable digital networks involving people and museums. In particular, he is interested in how online collaboration and reciprocity can enable a conduit between the internet and physical dimensions of the museum for integrating multiple voices in collections-based and exhibition activity. Shatha Abu Khafajah is an Assistant Professor at the Hashemite University. She completed her BSc degree in Architectural Engineering, and her MA degree in Archaeology, with special emphasis on documentation and conservation of architectural heritage in Jordan. She received her PhD from Newcastle University in Cultural Heritage Management. Her research focuses on the meanings and uses of cultural heritage, sustainable development, and the intersection between anthropology, archaeology, architecture and urban landscape in different contexts. She is also interested in the applications of local communities’ perceptions of, and attitudes towards, material of the past in general and architectural remains in particular. Nicole King is an associate professor and chair of the Department of American Studies and director of the Orser Center for the Study of Place, Community, and Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She received her PhD in American Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2008 and a MA in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies from the Foreign Languages and Literatures Department at the University of New Mexico in 2001. Her research and teaching interests focus on issues of place and space, economic development, identity and power. Her scholarship analyses changes to the social and built environment during the rise of consumer culture in the twentieth century, such as the development of vernacular landscapes of tourism in the US South and the parallel decline of industrial manufacturing and rise of arts, entertainment and tourism in Baltimore. Bernadette Lynch is an academic and museum professional with 25 years’ experience in senior management in UK and Canadian museums. Formerly Deputy Director at the Manchester Museum, University of Manchester, she has an international reputation for ethical, innovative participatory practice. In her influential research and consultancy work she specialises in public engagement and participation with diverse communities and in leading museum transformation and change, publishing widely on participatory democracy in museums. She is an Honorary Research Associate at University College London working on power, democracy, debate, conflict, contested collections and difficult subject matter in museums. Her work is available online: http://ucl.academia.edu/BernadetteLynch Billie Lythberg is an interdisciplinary humanities and social sciences researcher working at the junction of economics, anthropology and art history. Her core research interest is in indigenous philosophies of economics and aesthetics, with particular foci on Tongan and Māori arts, entrepreneurship, ‘gift exchange’ and sustainability. She is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Auckland Mira Szászy Research Centre for Māori and Pacific Economic Development, New Zealand, and an Affiliated Researcher at Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.



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Conal McCarthy is Director of the Museum & Heritage Studies programme at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Conal has degrees in English, Art History, te reo Māori and Museum Studies, and has worked in galleries and museums in a variety of professional roles. Among his current research projects is the history of museum visitation in Australia and New Zealand, a study of museums and anthropology 1900–1940 and a project on Indigenous Museologies in Australia, New Zealand, the USA and Canada. He has published widely on museum history, theory and practice, including the books Exhibiting Māori: A history of colonial cultures of display (2007) and Museums and Maori: Heritage professionals, indigenous collections, current practice (2011). His latest book, an edited collection on contemporary museum practice, was published in a new series, International Handbooks of Museum Studies, in July 2015. Ashley Minner is a community-based visual artist and scholar from Baltimore, Maryland. She holds a BFA in General Fine Art and an MA and an MFA in Community Art, which she earned at Maryland Institute College of Art. A member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, she has been active in the Baltimore Lumbee community for many years. She is the founder of the Native American After School Art Program (NAASAP) and the Liaison for the Title VII Indian Education Program of Baltimore City Public Schools. She serves as Vice Chair on the Maryland Commission of Indian Affairs under the Governor’s Office of Community Initiatives of Maryland, representing the Baltimore District. Her involvement in her own community informs and inspires her studio practice. She works with several local and regional arts for social justice organisations, including Alternate ROOTS. She is currently pursuing a PhD in American Studies at the University of Maryland College Park, where she is studying vernacular art as resistance in related communities of the US South and Global South. Wayne Ngata is from the Te Aitanga a Hauiti tribe of Ūawa-Tolaga Bay. He is an Associate Professor at Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi, an indigenous university in Whakatāne, New Zealand, and is an advocate for indigenous advancement through education and productive citizenship, particularly through the Māori language. His area of scholarship is Māori literature and art as platforms for tribal development. He has strong working and research relationships with regional, national and international institutions. He is Chairperson of the Māori Language Commission and a member of the Board of the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology. Bryony Onciul is a Lecturer in Public History at the University of Exeter. She is the author of Museums, Heritage and Indigenous Voice: Decolonizing Engagement (Routledge, 2015). She received her PhD from the International Centre for Cultural and Heritage Studies at Newcastle University and was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Her work focuses on issues around community engagement, public history, indigenising and decolonising museology, (post)colonial narratives, identity and performance, understanding place, climate change and the politics of representation. Her current research projects include an international project on Indigenous Museologies and two AHRC-funded Care for the Future projects on heritage and climate change and on the consequences of apologies for historical wrongs. Bryony founded the UK Chapter of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies.

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Elizabeth Pishief is currently working as a heritage consultant running her own business based in Hawke’s Bay, Aotearoa New Zealand. She has worked for local and central government in a variety of roles, as well as in museums for Heritage New Zealand and in the commercial sector. Her liberal understanding of historic heritage has been formed during 25 years’ experience in all aspects of land-based historic heritage management—Māori cultural heritage, archaeological heritage and built heritage, and in ongoing academic study. She has qualifications in English literature from Victoria University of Wellington (VUW) (BA); diplomas in history and museum studies and an MA in Museum Studies from Massey University; and a PhD in Museum and Heritage Studies from VUW. Her heritage interests are heritage research and writing; local and New Zealand history; iwi and community engagement; the management and conservation of heritage places; and heritage education, including capacity building in the sector. Gregory Ramshaw is an Associate Professor in the Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism Management at Clemson University, where his research explores the social construction and cultural production of heritage, with a particular focus on sport-based heritage. His research is published in numerous peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Heritage Tourism, the International Journal for Heritage Studies and Tourism Geographies, among many others. His edited and co-edited texts include Sport Heritage (2015), Heritage and the Olympics (2014) and Heritage, Sport and Tourism (2007). He blogs at The Sport Heritage Review (www.sportheritagereview.com) and tweets at @sportheritage1. Philipp Schorch is Marie Curie Fellow (European Commission) at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany, and Honorary Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University, Australia. He received his PhD in Museum and Heritage Studies from the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and is currently conducting a collaborative investigation of indigenous curatorial practices in three Pacific museums (Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, Hawai’i; Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa; Museo Antropológico Padre Sebastián Englert, Rapanui, Easter Island). He is co-editor (with Eveline Dürr) of the volume Transpacific Americas: Encounters and Engagements between the Americas and the South Pacific (Routledge, 2016) and co-convened (with Conal McCarthy and Eveline Dürr) the international conference Curatopia: Histories, Theories, Practices. Justin Sikora is a Historic Resource Specialist with OC Parks in Orange County California. He co-manages the interpretation, exhibit development, event planning, volunteer management and internship coordination for the county’s historic sites. His current research explores the post-World War II transformation of southern California from agrarian ranch farming to rapid suburbanisation, and the tensions this brought within a profoundly militarised landscape. This investigation will be the subject of an exhibit which features the photographs of a photojournalist from Orange County who documented these changes from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s. He completed his doctoral research at Newcastle University, England, at the International Centre for Cultural and Heritage Studies, where his research explored on-site interpretation at historic battlefields and how sites’ interpretive presentations influence visitors’ valuations of these spaces.



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Michelle Stefano studied art history (BA, Brown University, 2000) and museum and heritage studies (MA, Gothenburg University, Sweden, 2004) and completed her PhD in heritage studies at the International Centre for Cultural and Heritage Studies at Newcastle University in 2010. Since 2011 she has worked for Maryland Traditions, the folklife programme of the state of Maryland, of which she is now its Co-director. Since 2012, she has led the partnership between Maryland Traditions and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. As part of this partnership she is a full-time faculty member in the American Studies Department, teaching students museum and heritage studies, cultural research and documentation, as well as collaborating with other scholars across disciplines on research projects focused on culture, place and community. Gemma Tully has worked in collaborative heritage and museum studies for over ten years. Her PhD research developed new strategies for the presentation of Egyptian heritage in European museums, based on consultation with diverse Egyptian communities and European museum visitors. In 2013 she completed a post-doctoral research project exploring perceptions of the Theban Necropolis (Egypt) by its varied stakeholders. Since 2014 she has directed the community archaeology component of the Archaeological Mission to Mograt Island, Sudan. She is also a museum educator and a regular guest lecturer on museum and heritage courses at European universities. John Tunbridge studied at Cambridge, Bristol and (as Research Fellow) Sheffield Universities, and arrived at Carleton University in Ottawa to teach Urban Geography in 1969. Forty years ago he made pioneering contributions to heritage studies in geography and has since written extensively on heritage and related tourism issues, particularly in waterfront contexts. His research was enhanced by visiting teaching roles at Australian, UK (Portsmouth) and South African universities, and he retired formally from Carleton as Emeritus Professor of Geography in 2008. Since then he has been Visiting Professor at Brighton University and was recently Adjunct Professor at Curtin University, Perth, Australia. Among his many (continuing) publications he has co-authored six books, notably The Tourist-Historic City, Dissonant Heritage, The Geography of Heritage and Pluralising Pasts, inter alia with Gregory Ashworth (see above).

Index Actor Network Theory (ANT)  80–82

Actors  3, 25, 31–7, 40–1, 80, 84, 117, 148–50, 154 Affinity models  78, 80 Agency  14, 16, 21, 24, 32, 34–5, 37, 39–41, 47, 56, 68–9, 80, 94, 149, 180, 194, 199 Agent  22, 24, 36, 41, 152, 191–92, 194, 197, 199 Ahi ka (Heritage)  55, 66–7 Alterglobalisation Movement  81, 84–5 American Museum of Natural History  213, 220 American studies  122–23, 128–131, 134–35 Anarchism 77–80 Anthropology  34, 36, 38–40, 93, 123, 205, 213, 220 Antiquities 163 in Jordan  114–15 Aotearoa New Zealand  4, 6, 35–6, 39–40, 55–70, 164, 205–223, 227–29 Appropriation  12–13, 48–49, 53, 59–60, 69, 75, 95 Archaeology  3, 4, 55, 56–9, 65, 67, 94, 113, 115, 117, 147, 205 and Art  94 Archaeological response  59–60, 67 as performance  59, 67 Battlefield  147–48, 153–54 Biblical 115 Collaborative 93 Discourse  57, 67 Education 57 Emotional attachment/effect  59, 67 Excavation  59, 67 Exhibits 92 Interpretive 117 Iwi monitor  60 Material evidence/remains  56–7 Midden 61 Practice 57 Professional detachment  61, 67 Scientific data  57

Site 69 Surveying  59, 67 Visual aspect of  57–9 Weakness of  63 ArchSite  59, 63, 65 Art  3, 4, 5, 12, 15, 37–8, 68, 80, 91, 94–103, 107–112, 139–141, 182–85, 197, 200, 205, 207–8, 217, 229 Artefact union  94–97 Artists  2, 4, 5, 19, 91, 94–103, 108, 110–11, 139–141, 183–84, 197 in archaeological displays  94 Initiatives 184 Artefacts  49, 57, 59, 91–4, 97–103, 122, 142, 143, 147, 149, 153, 180–83, 206 ‘Artefacts of Encounter’  6, 205–210, 215–16, 220–23 Arts and Humanities Research Council  74, 205 Assemblage  3–4, 32–4, 37, 39–41, 80, 81 Assembling  31, 33, 215 Association for Critical Heritage Studies (ACHS)  3, 48–9, 52, 123, 228–9 Athlete 181–85 Athletics  181, 183 Audience  6, 24, 35, 85, 92–7, 100, 108–9, 111, 113, 142, 164, 190, 193, 200 Authorised Heritage Discourse (AHD)  5, 47, 48, 52, 55, 67, 74–5, 123, 152, 180 Authority  59, 81 Baltimore American Indian Center  140–143 Barbel 199, Baseball  133, 180 Beneficiary  13–14, 20, 23–5 as passive receivers  14, 16 Bennett, Tony  31, 33–4, 79–81 Bernstein, Shelley  197 Bishop Museum  38–40 Blue plaques  183 Bourdieu, Pierre  6, 51, 189, 191–97, 199–201 Bragg, Billy  184

238

Index

Britain  12, 49, 80, 115, 153, 182 British National Trusts  47, 48 National Trust  48, 74 Scottish Trust  48, 152–53 Brooklyn Dodgers  180 Brooklyn Museum  6, 197 Brown, Alison  2, 13, 31, 32, 92, 93 Brown, Michael  172, 185 Built environment  49, 51, 130, 134 Cameron, Fiona  24, 190, 199–200 Canada  24, 185, 228 Castells, Manuel  197–98 Centre for Battlefield Archaeology  153–54 Centre-periphery model  14 Chambers, Robert  14 Change  15, 51, 52, 60–1, 69, 74, 78, 83, 93, 107, 111, 113, 116, 117, 121–22, 140, 142–3, 149, 155, 160–64, 169–73, 179, 186,189, 196, 199, 228–29 Charity  15, 147 Cherbourg Ration Shed Museum  181 Christianity 12 Citizens  13–14, 16, 24, 142, 197 Citizenship  13, 15 ‘Flexible citizenship’  34 Civic Role 23 Centres 24 Responsibilities 76 Trusts 51 Click!  6, 197 Clifford, James  2, 14, 26, 35, 38, 39, 208 Co-creation  25, 193 Co-curation 75–7 Collaboration  1, 4, 6, 19, 22, 32, 38, 85, 93–4, 110, 115, 121, 141, 147, 191, 193, 205–8, 214–17, 227, 229 Collections  6, 32, 34–9, 57, 75, 77, 80, 85, 91–2, 95, 97, 100, 108–9, 151, 160, 162, 183,189–90, 193, 198–201, 206–8, 213, 217, 220–221, 227, 229 Co-collecting 75 Collecting  23, 34, 41, 59, 75–7, 92,110 Databases  190, 205 Digital  189, 198–201 Policy 183 Collective memory  57, 180 Collier, S. J.  33,

Colonial 18 Architecture 107 British colonists  59, 115 Colonialism  31, 33, 40, 115 Colonisation 81 Discourse  40, 59 Expansion 57 Histories 34 Legacy 142 Power  59, 115, 181 Thought 36 Commodification  180, 186 Community  1–7, 13, 20, 23, 36–41, 47–50, 51–2, 55–6, 61, 68–9, 73, 81–6, 94, 100, 103, 107–112, 113–117, 119–22, 131, 133–34, 140–43, 149–53, 153–55, 159–60, 164, 172, 179–82, 184–6, 189, 193, 195, 200, 205, 207, 210, 216–22, 227–29 Art  101, 107, 141 Artist  5, 108, 139 as object  82 Aspirations 13 Caution of the term  1, 51, 55, 82, 227 Concept of  3, 21, 31–4, 41 Cult of  55 Definition of  55, 148, 151, 227 Development  26, 81, 83–4, 115, 184, 206 Disengagement 49 Divided  47, 183–84 Driven methodology  5, 123, 134, 151, 163, 169, 172–3 Empowerment  4, 13, 22, 24, 64, 109, 111, 114, 116 Engagement  1–3, 6–7, 17, 19–20, 32, 35, 37, 41,47–9, 51–3, 73–85, 91–103, 107–12, 114, 140–44, 148–55, 181, 189 in Baltimore  4, 119–120, 141, 182 in Jordan  114–117 in New Zealand  55–70, 207–23, 227–29 in Polynesia  3, 31–41 in Puerto Rico  109–111; Events  120, 126, 129, 133 Expertise  55–6, 68, 120, 154, 160 Future  50, 85 Heritage 179–80 Identity  75, 82, 206 Indigenous  56, 37, 139–44, 181–82, 205–223 Initiatives  109, 133–34, 141, 148, 162, 170



Index 239

Intangible cultural heritage  159–174 Local  5, 15, 25, 48, 97, 110, 114–16, 120, 148, 150, 184 Member  13, 21, 23, 34, 39, 76, 108–11, 123–29, 135, 141 Museum relevance to  52 Non-expert  55, 82, 154 Online  190, 196 Originating  13, 32 Ownership of heritage  6, 50, 68, 116, 140, 148, 152, 162, 208, 227 Participants  14, 16, 23 Partners  13, 20, 22–3, 32 Plural 48 Protest 185 Rapper  161, 163–72, 174 Sense of  133, 140 Shared identities  49 Source  6, 169 Tourist 48 Urban 48 Conceptual frame  36, 67 Conflict  3, 5, 13, 23, 50, 84, 148–49, 152, 154, 184, 208 Connections  31, 33–4, 36, 40, 55–6, 59–61, 63–9, 77, 80–1, 83, 91, 95, 103, 107, 109, 112, 116, 120–21, 130, 135, 143, 160, 162, 164–5, 172, 194–8, 200, 205, 207–8, 210, 215–16, 218, 220, 228 Conservation  1, 5, 6, 47–8, 51, 57, 75–6, 113, 148–9, 173, 179–80, 184, 228 Department of Conservation  57, 61 Whose Heritage to Conserve?  47 Cook, Captain James  206, 215–16 Collection 35–6 Co-production  23, 32, 193 Cornwall, Andrea  14, 22 Council for Museums and Galleries (Scotland) 193 Cricket 183–4 Critical friends  16 Critical heritage studies see also Association of Critical Heritage Studies  48, 123, 134–35 Crooke, Elizabeth  2, 13, 32, 227 Cross-cultural  36–7, 94, 215 Cultural Capital 199–200 Landscapes 63 Ownership  64, 120

Renewal 32 Revitalisation  6, 31, 36, 40, 110, 164, 207, 217–18, 220 Sector  11, 16, 21 Curator  2–3, 21, 32, 34–9, 41, 52, 93–4, 100, 102, 108, 141, 162, 221, 228 Curatorial practice  31- 41, 93–4, 97–8, 108, 181, 193, 198, 227 as performance  33, 39 Decision making processes  14, 56, 68, 78, 80, 81, 84–5, 143, 162, 170, 193 Consensual  13, 78 Co-option  13, 78 Decolonisation  31, 35, 40, 228 De-industrialisation  4–5, 119–135 DeLanda, M.  33 Deleuze, Gilles  33, 73, 76–7, 81 Democracy  17, 22, 76, 84, 198–200 ‘Democratic deficit’  76 Undermining 15 Department of Conservation (New Zealand) 57, 61 Diamond Jubilee  16 Digital see also Online, Social Media, and Web Audiences  193, 197 Collections  189, 198, 200–201, 205–23 Contact zone  208–209 Economy 217 Engagement  6, 192, 200–201, 208–11, 217–18, 220 Heritage 3 Humanities 120 Mea  217–18, 221 Networks  6, 196, 205–23 Platform 206–2 Practices  36, 40, 189–92, 198, 201 Publics  189–90, 192, 194, 197, 199–200 Repatriation  6, 206–10, 217–18, 220 Repository  6, 208–12 Space  6, 189–90, 194–96, 198–200, 208 Stories 124 Tonga  210, 213, 217, 220–21 Disability  16, 182–83, 214 Discrimination  18, 128, 181, 184 Disengagement  5, 6, 49–50, 68–9, 189 Dissonance  5, 6, 47, 50, 68, 179, 181, 183, 186 Dissonant Heritage  47, 50

240

Index

Druid Hill Park (Baltimore)  182, 184 Eastern Institute of Technology (Aotearoa-New Zealand) 205 Ecomuseology  5, 148, 159–174, 161–62 Definition  151, 162 Flodden Ecomuseum  149–152, 154 ‘Naturally-occurring’  5, 161, 163, 168–69, 172–74 Economic and Social Research Council  205 Economics  1, 13, 15–19, 21, 25, 31–4, 36, 39–41, 47–8, 50, 64, 66, 69, 77–78, 83, 109–12, 115–16, 128, 142–3, 153, 162, 164, 172–73, 179–81, 183, 194, 196, 205, 206, 215, 217, 228 Egypt  91–3, 95, 96–103, 115 Represented in Western museums  4, 91–103 Empathy  14, 15, 69, 140 ‘Empowerment-lite’  14, 32 English Heritage  147, 183 Epistemologies  35, 80 Equality  74, 78, 81, 83–5, 127–28, 163, 172 Inequality  15 181, 189, 192–93, 199 Erosion  57, 69 Ethics  64, 78, 81, 85, 92, 94, 191, 200 Ethnography  5, 32–41, 56, 84, 92, 94, 97, 123–24, 130, 161, 164, 208–209 Euro-Americentric  34, 38 Europe  34–6, 38, 39–40, 51, 57, 63, 67, 92–3, 139, 164, 172, 200, 206, 214, 221 Exchange  3, 6, 31, 93–4, 164, 191, 193, 198, 200, 205–6, 208–10, 214–24 Exclusion  6, 15–16, 73, 77, 79, 117, 160, 189–200 Exhibitionary complex  80 Exhibitions  23–4, 36, 38, 66, 75–6, 83–5, 91–103, 108–10, 113, 124, 141, 143, 148, 181, 193, 197, 216, 220, 227–28 Farah, Nuruddin  11–12 Feminist 78 Flood, Curt  180 Folksonomies  6, 198–199 Foucault, Michel  73, 76 ‘Frame analysis’  190–91 Fraser, Nancy  14 Frederick, Clarkson  198

Funding  18, 19, 52, 83, 86, 141–42, 143, 147, 151, 155, 220, 223 Agencies  1, 14, 16, 20, 190 Future (the)  3–4, 17, 21–2, 26, 32, 40, 49–50, 53, 74–6, 78–80, 85–6, 91, 107–111, 113, 117, 119–124, 126, 128, 134, 147, 152, 154–55, 163, 165, 173–74, 205–7, 211, 216, 221, 229 Gender  84, 128, 163, 172, 181 Geography  4, 47, 51, 123 Gere, Charlie  193, 200 Gifts  3, 11–14, 18, 24, 26, 141, 216 Gilchrist, Alison  81, 83–4 Globalisation  35–6, 40–1, 81, 84–5, 159 Goffman, Erving  191, 194 Golding, Viv  2, 32 Good informant (the)  12 Government  14, 51–2, 66, 77, 79, 108, 115–16, 117, 121–22, 124, 134, 147–49, 152, 154, 159, 190, 228–29 Governmentality 55 Investment  14, 147 Policy  16, 228 Graeber, David  78, 85 Gramsci, Antonio  13 Guattari, Felix  33, 81 Habitus  191, 193 Happiness see also Well-being  3, 11–12, 15–19, 24–6 Happy Museum Project  15–16 Index 16–17 Turn  15–19, 25 Hapu  59–60, 63–5 Hawai’i 37–40 Hegemony  13, 15, 24, 80, 179, 181 Heritage management  6, 49, 66, 82, 161–63, 169, 228 Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga  59, 60 Hermeneutics  3, 32–5, 37, 39, 41 Heroes  95, 181, 185–86 Worship 179, 181, 184 Hierarchy  33, 57, 74, 84 Hillsborough 185 Hinematioro 216 Hingangaroa 207 Horizontality  73, 74, 77, 81, 84–5, 198 Humanitarianism  12, 18



Index 241

ICOMOS New Zealand Charter  228 Identity  5, 34, 36, 38, 40, 55, 56, 64, 66–8, 75, 82, 102, 139, 142, 143–44, 179–81, 193, 199, 206, 210, 217 Inclusivity  14, 47–8, 75–7, 79, 84, 128, 183, 189–90, 193, 198, 200–201, 215, 228 ‘Indebtedness engineering’  12 Indigenous  5, 31, 34–41, 56, 93–4, 142–44, 181, 205, 228 Indignity  73, 79 Inequality  15, 181, 189, 192–93, 199 Intangible cultural heritage (ICH)  5, 56, 119, 122–123, 159–74 and authenticity  170 and museums  159 – 160 and UNESCO  123, 174 Internet  164, 189, 193–200, 208, 218, 223 Interpretation  1, 3–5, 32–41, 48, 52, 56–7, 64, 66, 74–77, 85, 92–5, 97, 101–102, 110, 113, 115, 117, 122–24, 134, 143–44, 147–50, 160, 168, 179, 182, 190, 209, 227 ‘Invited spaces’  14 Iwi Heritage Discourse  55, 64–66, 67 Iwi  35–6, 55, 59–60, 64, 67–8, 207, 210, 213, 217, 227 James, LeBron  184 Kanohi ki te kanohi 218–21 Kaupapa Maori  210, 213–14, 216, 218, 221 Kidd, Jenny  190–91, 200 Kindness  14–5, 18 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara  31, 36–7, 123, 160–61, 172, 228 KIWA  209–211, 217, 223 Kothari, Uma  13 Laclau, Ernesto  13 Land  57, 59–60, 63–9, 215, 218 Latour, Bruno  33, 80, 82, 199 Law  64, 77–8, 81, 114, 132, 148, 152, 155, 182–83 Legacy  18, 35, 91, 101, 108–10, 123–27, 142–43, 180, 183, 206–207 Long Live Southbank  183 Lumbee (North Carolina)  5, 139–44 Macdonald, Sharon  33 Mana  36, 40, 64, 215, 218, 221, 227 Maori Centre of Research Excellence  205

Maori Land Court  63 Maori  4, 6, 35–7, 40, 55–70, 205–223, 227–29 Mapping  4–5, 57–9, 84, 119–124, 128–30, 134–35, 147, 150, 172, 191, 194, 196–97, 206, 228 Marginalisation  15, 92, 110, 179, 181–83, 214, 228 Mass self-communication  197–98 Matakite 63 Matauranga Hauiti (Hauiti knowledge)  207, 210–11 Material culture  31–41, 56, 109, 122 Mauss, Marcel  12, 216 May, Todd  79–80, 83 Mea  213–18, 221–223 Mead, Hirini Moko  215 Media see also Social Medial  31, 109, 119, 134–5, 205 Memory  56–7, 69, 83, 107, 110, 114, 119–20, 122–3, 126, 130, , 133–34, 160, 162, 180, 182, 185, 198 and emotion  57, 65, 67 Collective  57, 180 Memorabilia 180 Memorialisation  147, 149, 153, 180 Mental health  16, 86 Methodology  5, 35, 55–6, 120–21, 130, 140, 214, 217 Migration  12, 25, 31, 34, 40, 131, 143, 164, 173 Miller, Marvin  180 Modest, Wayne  2, 32 Multicultural 47 Multiple Correspondence Analysis  194 Museo Antropológico Padre Sebastián Englert 39–40 Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) (University of Cambridge)  205–08, 211, 215–23 Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa)  35–6, 39–40, 227 Mythology  128, 181 Nation  16–17, 31, 40, 47–8, 51, 75–6, 80, 91–2, 94–5, 141–42, 147, 149–50, 152–53, 159–61, 174, 180, 183, 185, 228–29 National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum 180

242

Index

National Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology (Florence)  220 Native Americans  5, 140, 142, 185 Neoliberalism 14 Networks  1, 3, 32, 36, 41, 64, 66–7, 80–4, 193, 195–200 New Economics Foundation  16 New Zealand – see Aotearoa New Zealand Archaeological Association  59, 61, 65 New Zealand Historic Places Trust  60 Nostalgia  180, 182 O’Neill, Mark  14–15 Objects  3, 12, 32, 34–41, 57, 60, 74, 76, 91, 93–4, 97–8, 101–102, 110, 139, 141, 179, 190, 199, 206, 208–209, 215–18, 221, 228 Occupy Wall Street Movement  85 Office of National Statistics  16 Olympics  16, 21, 182–85 Ong, A.  33–4 Online see also Digital  6, 26, 120, 124, 153, 155, 163–64, 189–201, 205–209, 213 Open Space Technology  78 Oral history  3, 5, 75, 82, 124, 131 Ownership see under Cultural, Museums, and Heritage  38, 64, 162–63, 165, 169, 207, 227 Delegated  76, 85 Government 149 Pa (fortified village)  57, 63, 65–66 Pakeha  63, 64, 66, 227 Paralympics 182–84 Participation  1, 3, 13–16, 20–6, 32, 38–9, 56, 59, 69, 73–86, 91, 94–7, 100, 103, 120, 140–43, 161, 163–66, 170–72, 179, 182, 191, 196, 200, 215, 223, 228–28 Partnerships  13, 18, 20, 22–3, 26, 32, 35, 51, 84, 94, 97, 109, 140–43, 183, 193, 206–210, 217–18 Passivity  12–20, 25, 41, 94–5, 115 Peers, Laura  2, 13, 31, 32, 92, 93 Performance  32–3, 39, 56 , 59, 67- 70, 108, 163, 167–68, 170, 181–85, 213 Place see also Sense of Place  3–6, 12–14, 18, 21, 23, 25, 33–6, 40, 47, 55–70, 74–85, 91, 94, 107, 119–35, 139–42, 148–49, 160–62, 166–74, 181–85, 189–96, 199–200, 206, 208, 211, 217, 228–29

Plaques 182–83 Pluralising Pasts 47 Policy  14, 16–17, 56, 112, 148, 183, 227–28 Politics  1–2, 5, 12–16, 19, 24–5, 31, 33–4, 36–41, 47–8, 50, 51, 64, 73–86, 97, 109–10, 123–24, 128, 142, 147, 149, 152–55, 162, 172–73, 179, 181–82, 185, 191, 214 Polynesia  3, 37–40, 206 Postcolonial  17, 31, 36, 64, 114–15, 128 Renaissance  64, 144 Posterity  50, 76, 79 Post-structuralism  74, 79–80,128 Poverty  15, 107 Power  4, 6, 13–24, 32, 48, 59, 64, 67–8, 74–82, 84, 91–4, 103, 107, 109–111, 114–16, 122, 128, 140, 143, 179, 185–86, 191–98, 208, 215, 217, 227 Powerlessness 15–16 Powerhouse Museum  6, 198 Preservation  4–5, 47, 51, 79, 82, 85, 95, 108, 109, 116, 123–24, 147–53, 160, 166–67, 170, 179–80, 184, 197 Pride  12, 91, 120, 123, 165, 181 Public (the)  4, 11–14, 19–24, 38–9, 47, 49, 59, 76–77, 79, 81, , 83, 85, 95,107–11,113, 117, 121, 124, 128, 134–35, 142, 148, 150, 151, 153, 162, 166, 168–69, 182, 184, 189–201, 207, 210, 227–28 Queensland (Australia)  181 Racism  23, 130, 133, 180–82 Rapanui (Easter Island)  39–40 Reciprocity  2–6, 11, 36–37, 64, 109, 205–210, 216–18, 223 Relational Systems  205 Relics  47, 124 Repatriation  36–7, 206, 217–18 Repository  180, 208–11 Resistance  4–6, 14–19, 23–6, 52, 75, 79, 110, 122, 127, 130, 140, 142–3, 152, 155, 179–80, 184–85, 190, 201 Rights  23–4, 214 Based approach  14–5, 23 Civil  6, 109, 111, 132 Human  15, 22, 24 Legal 183 Robinson, Jackie  180 Russo and Peacock  189–90, 200 Sacred  6, 57, 64, 69, 95, 101, 210, 217, 228



Index 243

Safeguarding  5, 159–74 Schultz 182 Scientific  97, 108–109, 117, 130, 132, 159 Collectors  34, 132 Enterprise  36, 40 Knowledge  31–2, 35–7, 56–7, 60–3, 67, 69, 80, 91, 194 Segregation  92, 117, 182 Desegregation 182 Sense of place  25, 122, 189, 192, 200 Settler society  59 Sexuality see also Gender  80–81, 84 Shirky, Clay  189, 194–96, 199 Skateboarders 183–84 Smith Laurajane  2, 5, 48, 55–6, 74–6, 79, 82, 122–23, 152, 160, 179 Smith, Linda  214 Social Justice  15, 22–4 Social media see also Twitter  6, 185, 189–201 Social space  6, 189–201 South Bank  183–84 South Pacific  31–32, 37–8, 40–1 Southbank Centre  183–84 Southbank Skatepark  183–84 Souvenirs  97–100, 179–80 Sport heritage  179–86 St Louis Rams NFL football club  184 Stalder, Felix  189, 194, 196, 199–200 Staten Island (New York)  185 Stoke Mandeville  183 Subaltern  5–6, 38, 179–86 Surowiecki, James  197 Sustainability  15–17, 23, 83, 114–15, 117, 168 Taonga  35–7, 40, 59, 206–213, 216–223, 227–29 Tate Britain  80 Te Aitanga a Hauiti (Maori tribal community) 205–207, 210–220, 223 Te Ao Marama (the realm of humans)  211, 215 Te Ataakura  6, 205–211, 215–17, 220, 223 Te Papa see Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa Te Po (the spiritual world)  63, 211, 215–16, 220

Te Rawheoro  207 The Birth of the Museum  79 ‘The connect’  4, 55, 56, 66–70 The Cyborg Manifesto  73 The National Theatre  183 The Oval  184 The Well-Connected Community 83 Theory of change  14, 21–22, 26 Toi Hauiti  205–223 Tokenism  14, 75 Tourism  51, 65, 117, 123, 149, 151, 179–80 Traditions  1, 4–6, 11, 21, 25, 35–6, 48–9, 55, 59, 64–5, 67, 69, 76–7, 79, 91–7, 100–101, 103, 107, 109, 122, 130, 141, 143, 161–74, 179–83, 193, 198, 207, 210 Treaty of Waitangi  66, 205, 228 Tuku  216–17, 220–23, 228 Twitter see also Social Media  126, 185, 198 Uawa  206–207, 210,-211, 215–16, 218–20 Ubra 199 UNESCO  47–8, 56, 108, 123, 159–61, 172–74 United States  127, 182, 184–85, 206–207 Utu 64 Victims  12, 144 Voice  2, 5, 11, 14, 19, 25, 49,92–4, 102, 109, 111, 114, 120, 124, 134, 150 Wahi tapu  75, 64, 66, 68–9, 228 Waitangi Tribunal  64, 66 Waterton, Emma  2, 32, 55, 74–6, 79, 82, 152 Web see also Digital, Online, and Social Media 189–92, 198, 208 Website  22, 85, 120, 124, 128, 185, 197–98, 205, 223 Welfare Economist 21 ‘Welfare model’  14 Well-being  12, 14–19, 26, 86, 184 Western  2, 12, 31, 35–8, 48, 55, 57, 64, 91–5, 115, 117, 214 Whakapapa  61, 64, 66, 207–208, 210–220 Wimbledon 184

HERITAGE MATTERS Volume 1: The Destruction of Cultural Heritage in Iraq Edited by Peter G. Stone and Joanne Farchakh Bajjaly Volume 2: Metal Detecting and Archaeology Edited by Suzie Thomas and Peter G. Stone Volume 3: Archaeology, Cultural Property, and the Military Edited by Laurie Rush Volume 4: Cultural Heritage, Ethics, and the Military Edited by Peter G. Stone Volume 5: Pinning down the Past: Archaeology, Heritage, and Education Today Mike Corbishley Volume 6: Heritage, Ideology, and Identity in Central and Eastern Europe: Contested Pasts, Contested Presents Edited by Matthew Rampley Volume 7: Making Sense of Place: Multidisciplinary Perspectives Edited by Ian Convery, Gerard Corsane, and Peter Davis Volume 8: Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage Edited by Michelle L. Stefano, Peter Davis, and Gerard Corsane Volume 9: Museums and Biographies: Stories, Objects, Identities Edited by Kate Hill Volume 10: Sport, History, and Heritage: Studies in Public Representation Edited by Jeffrey Hill, Kevin Moore, and Jason Wood Volume 11: Curating Human Remains: Caring for the Dead in the United Kingdom Edited by Myra Giesen Volume 12: Presenting the Romans: Interpreting the Frontiers of the Roman Empire World Heritage Site Edited by Nigel Mills Volume 13: Museums in China: The Politics of Representation after Mao Marzia Varutti Volume 14: Conserving and Managing Ancient Monuments: Heritage, Democracy, and Inclusion Keith Emerick

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Previous Titles Volume 15: Public Participation in Archaeology Edited by Suzie Thomas and Joanne Lea Volume 16: Displaced Heritage: Responses to Disaster, Trauma, and Loss Edited by Ian Convery, Gerard Corsane, and Peter Davis

Volume 17: The Carabinieri Command for the Protection of Cultural Property: Saving the World’s Heritage Laurie Rush and Luisa Benedettini Millington Volume 18: Changing Perceptions of Nature Edited by Ian Convery and Peter Davis Volume 19: Geoheritage and Geotourism: A European Perspective Edited by Thomas A. Hose