MA Week 48 - Heritage Readings (2) - Laurajane Smith

Heritage readings (2): Laurajane Smith, Uses of Heritage.

 

Authorised Heritage Discourse (AHD)

Laurajane Smith posits the idea of the ‘authorized heritage discourse’ (AHD) (p28),which arises from the aesthetics of its policy makers and practitioners, and its institutionalisation within various national and international codes. This AHD is largely concerned with monuments that have a perceived universal significance and which are tangible. Smith identifies two challenges to this: the desire of local communities (geographically- and/or socially-cohesive groups) to demand recognition; and the backlash against ‘Disneyfication’ of mass heritage tourism.

AHD uses the rhetorical device of ‘the past’, which is vague in definition, and therefore needs experts to understand it for us. Such a term disengages from the “very real emotional and cultural work that the past does as heritage for individuals and communities. The past is not abstract; it has material reality as heritage , which in turn has material consequences for community identity and belonging”(p29). AHD reflects the grand narratives of nation and aesthetics and privileges the view and stewardship of the expert (p.42).

“Material or tangible heritage provides a physical representation of those things from ‘the past’ that speak to a sense of place, a sense of self, of belonging and community’” (p30). However, the primary form of identity associated with AHD is often national, but this is under challenge as it ignores sub-national identities. AHD also promotes elite social classes - “non-traditional” concepts of heritage are excluded. Smith quotes Barthel (1996, pp 68/9) talking about the industrial site, and the masculinity and general unpleasantness of the dirty, grimy workplace; these are not presented to the public in the sanitised reconstruction. In fact, the public are seen as empty vessels or passive consumers (p32) as heritage has simply become a form of consumption via mass tourism (p33). Alongside sanitisation, authenticity can also become an issue with reconstructions and dramatizations and we are in danger of the ‘heritage theme park’ (p40).

 

Heritage and identity

Smith states that “material culture as heritage is assumed to provide a physical representation and reality to the ephemeral and slippery concept of ‘identity’”. It “fosters the feelings of belonging and continuity” (p48). Often, however, this identity is assumed in the literature to be national identity, as mentioned above. She posits the idea of the use of “symbolic elements” (e.g. flags) at national level, but these can then be used at a sub-national level as reminders and constructors of identity (p49).As modernization erodes customs and expectations, individuals and communities are forced to re-articulate and recover a sense of the past. This sense of the past can be used to confirm or reject identity.  

Smith introduces the idea of intangible heritage as part of the heritage discourse: “while there may be a physical reality or aspect to heritage, any knowledge of it can only ever be understood within the discourses we construct about it”(p54). I conclude that the idea of heritage covering the non-material must have been quite new when the book was written; she describes intangible heritage, including memory, music and oral history, as quite distinct from tangible heritage (p56).

 

Memory and remembering

Smith identifies an increasing interest in commemoration, arising from War anniversaries and the Millennium. At the point of writing of the book, she had identified only a passing mention of memory in the heritage literature. She argues this may be because “memory may be seen as subjective and not always reliable whereas history is about the accumulation of fact within an authorized narrative” (p58). A group can constructs an identity for itself though shared memories, i.e. the collective or social memory. These memorise are socially constructed in the present and make meaningful common interests and perceptions of collective identity. The collective memory is passed on and shaped in the present and is reshaped daily by interaction between members of the collective (p59). Smith further argues that “memory is an important constitutive element of identity formation” (p60). Unlike professional historical narrative it is personal and powerful.

 

Place

“Heritage is about a sense of place” (p75, Smith’s original emphasis). Heritage provides not only a “geographical sense of belonging” but also a “cultural place or sense of belonging”. “Heritage…[can be used] to express, facilitate and construct a send of identity, self and belonging” (p75). Smith is clear that place is not only physical, but also socially constructed and posits that the national is actually constructed from many sub-national places, rather than the opposite. She also acknowledges the vital role that place plays in everyday life :. “place is part of lived experience …an embodiment… of feelings, images and thoughts”(p 76). Futhermore, “heritage as place… creat[es] an affect on current experiences and perceptions of the world”. Thus, a heritage place may represent … a sense of identity and belonging for particular individuals or groups” (p77).

 

Reflection

From Smith’s work I understand AHD is a restrictive construct, concerning itself with a sanitised version of the past, politically constructed to suit the “experts” in history. Its exclusion of non-tangible heritage necessarily removes the individual as all our experience and memories are different – even within the same communities and families. Its driver is often the establishment of a national identity, with regional identities being marginalised. Members of the public are expected to use the heritage site in the way it has been prepared for them. Smith paves the way for subsequent researchers to break the restrictions of AHD. 

She argues that the past does play a part in the construction of our identity. The use of symbolic elements as constructors of identity at sub-national level could bring into play the Yorkshire Rose, a unifying symbol of Yorkshire. But any emotional affect that the Yorkshire Rose, or any other aspect of heritage has, is outside AHD as it is not factual. Yet as Smith acknowledges, it is powerful, and it is more likely to shape our identity.  

Memory also plays its part as a conduit between heritage and identity. We constantly reform and repurpose our memories. They become a discourse rather than a fact. But how can we say history is factual? If researchers are using archival research, they are potentially interpreting someone else’s interpretation of a particular event. Surely history is also a discourse – as Smith eloquently argues throughout the book, it is deliberately excluding and including to serve its own ends. Heritage is also associated with a place. This can be a physical place but could also be one’s cultural place in the scheme of things. Place is inextricably linked to lived experience and causes affects in the past and present. 

Place construct is also complicated and at this point it serves us to reflect on how the past and the present, our physical and cultural places, and our individual and group identities, are commingled. As I read more of the literature on these topics, rather than clarifying boundaries between them, I find they are more intertwined than ever and that any given book or paper privileges one approach simply because of the background of its author(s). This is not problematic in itself, though, as it simply underpins the autobiographical nature of my practice and the complexity of trying to compartmentalise its various components. The more I read, the more I think the visual can portray these topics as well as, if not better than, the text-based discourse as the visual serves to unify rather than dissect them.

MA Week 47 - Sense of Place and Place Attachement

Sense of Place and Place Attachment : an analysis of two journal articles

 

Scannell, L., & Gifford, R., (2010) Defining Place Attachment : A tripartite organising framework in Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol 30, Issue 1, March 2012, pp1-10

Summary

Place attachment is defined as a bonding between the individual and a meaningful environment. It is multifaceted, with many definitions, and Scannell and Gifford attempt to cram it all into a framework based on Person/ Psychological Process / Place. The person is “who”; the process is the “psychological drivers” the place is the “object of attachment” .I don’t propose to summarise the whole framework, but rather here I pick out the points most salient to my own research.

A place, and one’s experience in that place, make it meaningful to you, and the personal connection helps engender a stable sense of self. The authors posit attachment to a place as a fundamental human need; the “attached” place (my term for it) gives security and comfort. The attachment comes about via memories, beliefs and meanings, implying that one’s past and heritage are of significance when attaching to a place. Each individual has a “schema” of knowledge and beliefs about that place, which make it their ”own”. The place can contain the essence of important events. Elements of place can also come to represent elements of who you are.

Place includes social and physical aspects : connection via community, bondedness to neighbourhood, aspects that are not-place specific e.g. religion. Ties created by the broader social system give rise to homogeneous communities. Civic place attachment may occur by a group as symbolic, e.g. attachment to a city, pride in the county. To summarise, drivers of place attachment can include : amenities, personal friends/family, memories, good experiences, security, fit between yourself and place.

Analysis

On reading this rather difficult paper, I could immediately see a great overlap between the person and the psychological process. I am unsure that these can be separated, although this is in a psychology-based journal, so I have to assume that psychology classifies your “person” as different from the way you interact with any given thing.

Overall a lot of the points made seem like, well, good old-fashioned common sense. You connect with a place because it’s familiar, your family lived there, you’ve always had a good time with your mates there. However, I have to acknowledge that I’ve lived in the same place for most of my life, so I wear my place attachment very lightly.

Looking deeper into the points that the authors make, they argue that attachment comes about via memories, beliefs and meanings. Therefore I can conclude that heritage and history contribute to place attachment, and place attachment contributes to identity. Thus the construct of place is important in heritage – the heritage occurred in a place, and that place then becomes a site of attachment. This then contributes to the idea of the contingent heritage of individuals and groups who may or may not know each other but who have a shared attachment to a place, and again the shared attachment may or may not be known to each other. So we have elements of heritage and identity that are shared with strangers and vice versa. The authors’ idea of symbolic civic place attachment is a nice one, particularly speaking as a Yorkshirewoman, but I think it is an over-simplification and easily glosses over the multi-cultural make-up of many cities today, with all the benefits and problems that may bring.

 Therefore I think a note of caution has to be sounded here, though. Bathmaker argues that the former trajectories for life (class, gender, race) no longer hold true, although the big narratives still impinge on an individual’s daily life. Bundling our “heritages” and “identities” and “civic pride” together with those of strangers could be an over-simplification and an indicator of nostalgia creeping in.

The over-riding message I took from this was “Self as place and place as self?”. If you have spent a long time in a place, it becomes inseparable from your identity.  It gives a whole new meaning to the football chant “We are Leeds”.

 

Beidler, K., & Morrison, J., (2016) ‘Sense of place: inquiry and application’ Journal of Urbanism : International Research on Placemaking and Urban Sustainability, 9, (3), pp205-215

Summary

Beidler and Morrison’s article is a literature review-based paper which also proposes a framework for investigating and defining sense of place.  Their model is four dimensional, bsed on the self, the environment, the social interaction and an all-important fourth dimension, time.

They acknowledge that “at the center of all experience is the individual who is engaged in that experience”. The self converts a ”space” to a “place”. They quote Cross (2001, p10):’To some degree we create our own places, they do not exist independent of us’. The environment is the physical setting of the place, but enlarged to include such constructs as the town’s character. Within this element they also allude to the power constructs with which city planners try to make us use the city in a certain way. The social interaction brings into play the shared experiences of those people who use a place, and the relationships they build with other people as well as the place. Regarding the time dimension, the authors acknowledge the concept of “rootedness”, living in a place for a long time, and this giving you an intuitive understanding of your surroundings. They quote Relph: ‘An authentic sense of place is above all that of being inside and belonging to your place [original emphasis] both as an individual and as a member of a community and to know this without reflecting upon it’ (Relph, 1976, p65). However, they point out that different groups may be using the same space in different ways.

Analysis

Beidler and Morrison effectively argue the idea of sense of place as a discourse between the four elements of their framework. This inherent sense of fluidity in their argument makes a good deal of sense to me. Their centring of the framework on the self, narcissistic as that may seem, also appears completely logical. In a lot of the reading I’ve done, it has appeared that the authors frame their arguments based around an amorphous mass of people who just happen to share some characteristic (e.g. they live in the same place) without acknowledging that this mass is composed of individuals who are trying to make something of their lives.

The elements of the town’s character and the social interaction inevitably overlap, but it is the social interaction element that is most pertinent to my research. They state that ‘Phenomenological research stemming from cultural geography [in the 1980s] argued that ‘lived experience’ was central to place interpretation’. This fits exactly with my own argument of understanding a place because you’ve lived there for a long time, and can also be extrapolated to liking a place you’ve only visited once because you really enjoyed your day there. They stress the significance of memory, experience and social relations in the construction of the meaning of the place to the individual.

Regarding the time dimension, this appears to me as a kind of ”vessel” which contains or underpins all the other points. I couldn’t agree more with the Relph quote – I know this to be true intuitively. Their descriptions of the different groups using the same place give rise to the idea of any one person’s different identity and role within a place; different individuals, roles and communities within one place will have different degrees of and different experiences of place attachment.

Comparison

Beidler and Morrison’s article is much more accessible to me as a non-psychologist/geographer than Scannell and Gifford’s, but there are some common themes between the two. They both agree that place attachment and sense of place has some construction by the individual and by groups. In Beidler and Morrison’s case they attribute this to groups who physically interact, whereas Scannell and Gifford’s argument can be extrapolated to refer to strangers with contingent histories.

Both papers agree that memory is important to place construct. However, neither of them touch on the idea of nostalgia, despite both papers skirting around this. It seems reasonable to infer that place attachment via, say, the memory of a nice day at the seaside can turn into nostalgia with the passage of time. Scannell and Gifford’s paper says much less about this physical environment, but both papers agree that social constructs and human relationships are important in the construction of place. Buried within both articles are implications of heritage, history and identity and their complex entanglements with place.

Beidler and Morrison’s overt use of time as a “fourth dimension” in their paper seems to crystallise some of Scannell and Gifford’s arguments about memories and the essence of important events. Their acknowledgement that time spent in a place contributes to the construction of place attachment and sense of place seems self-evident to me, yet it lacks in Scannell and Gifford’s paper. Again this appears to me to flag up my individual experience and to underline once more the general academic treatment of the individual as an amoeba in an amorphous mass. Overall I found Beidler and Morrison’s article the much more helpful of the two.