Le patrimoine culturel Immatériel, quel patrimoine pour quelle patrimonialisation ?
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Le patrimoine culturel Immatériel, quel patrimoine pour quelle patrimonialisation ?

Traduit de l‘anglais par A.S.

The Idea of Heritage ً a Re-Theorization

My argument, in short, is that all heritage is intangible, and is not usefully characterised as simply a thing, or a place, or even an event; but rather must be reconceived as a moment or process of cultural and social negotiation. Heritage is not about cultural stasis or preservation ؽ although that can be a consequence of what heritage is and does ؽ but rather ‗heritage‘is a cultural process concerned with the negotiation, navigation and arbitration of cultural change.  However, in discussing the intangibility of heritage I am not simply referring to the usual ‗intangible examples such as language, dance, oral history, theatre and so forth, but rather arguing that we should not be defining the concept of ‗heritage by its materiality or non-materiality, but rather by what is done with it.  More simply, whether we are dealing with a historic house, industrial site or archaeological ruin, or whether we are dealing with a dance performance, the retelling of oral histories or traditional storylines ؽ we are dealing with the same thing. Moreover, what we are dealing with or addressing, what heritage is, is the performance and negotiation of identity and sense of place.

Re-theorising heritage as a performance or a cultural process rather than a thing‘, monument or intangible event ؽ broadens the conceptual understanding of heritage, and shows the cultural and political ‗work‘ that heritage does in any society. Heritage is a way of seeing and feeling, and frames not only the way the past is understood, but also the meanings and significance it has for the present. The meanings thus constructed may become authorised and legitimised through their institutionalisation via national and international laws, and through conventions for safeguarding and managing ‗heritage. Heritage can be defined as one of the technologies of governance ؽ that is a form of knowledge or gaze ؽ that governments and their bureaucracies draw upon, to help regulate social and cultural values and the historical narratives that underpin these (see Foucault 1991; Rose and Miller 1992; Smith 2004). Heritage creates a mentality or way of seeing and knowing, that renders certain social problems particularly those that intersect with claims to identity and representations tractable and subject to regulation.

Heritage is, of course, a form of representation and embedded within both heritage literature, governmental and inter-governmental policy is the idea that heritage is expressive of identity ؽ although how heritage and identity are linked is seldom examined,and is certainly not well understood. The physicality of traditional ideas of heritage ؽ as grand mansions, national monuments, or sweeping vistas ؽ not only aids in the naturalisation of identity, but also provides the intangible notions of identity and cultural value with readily identifiable tangibility, rendering them more objective. Certainly, the materiality of heritage allows for the intangible values associated with certain monuments and places to be more easily managed, and thus regulated and governed. Our attention is so focused by this way of seeing heritage, and so abstracted by issues of authenticity, that we are often diverted from considering how these objects are used to underpin and legitimise certain identity claims, while de-legitimising others. If we jettison our preoccupation with the materiality of heritage and focus instead on the intangible, we open up a wider conceptual space within which to reconsider not only the nature of heritage, but also how it is used, and the work that it does in society.

The heritage values that inform any sense of identity are used to construct ways of understanding and making the present meaningful. In particular, things that are defined as heritage are part of the suite of cultural tools that help individuals and societies remember (Wertsch 2002). They become, as Raphael Samuel (1994) points out, theatres of memory or of remembering. Heritage sites and museum exhibitions are places that help to mark a particular act of remembering or commemoration as important and noteworthy, and it is at this point that heritage becomes understandable as an act or a cultural process. The performance of heritage visiting, or of curating and managing heritage, are acts through which social and cultural values and narratives are re/constructed, remembered (and forgotten), negotiated, embraced or rejected. Visitors to heritage sites, museums or intangible events are not passive receptors of intended heritage ‗messages‘, but rather interact with sites, exhibitions, and their curators in a range of ways that is both mindful and active in the meanings constructed (Moscardo 1996; Bagnall 2003; Mason 2005; Smith 2006; Watson 2007).

It is important to note that these performances, no matter the narratives and memories they construct or rehearse, will always be contested. All heritage is dissonant and controversial, and what may be inclusive and comfortable to one person or community will always be exclusionary and discomforting to another (Brett 1996; Tunbridge and Ashworth 1996; Lowenthal 1998; Ashworth 2002). What is valued and treasured by one community may be devalued, or valued for different reasons, by another, and heritage values and narratives will therefore be contested and disputed. However, the cultural process or performance of heritage is about the negotiation of these conflicts. Heritage is a constitutive social process through which we examine, legitimise and/or contest a range of cultural and social identities, values and meanings that prevail in the present, which can be affirmed and passed to the future. Thus, heritage is not the historic monument, archaeological site, museum artefact or intangible event as defined by the ICHC, but rather the activities that occur at and around these places, objects and events. These places and expressions of ICH are given value by the act of naming them heritage and by the processes of heritage negotiations and re/creations that occur at them. They are not intrinsically valuable, but ascribe heritage values as they are taken up in national or sub-national performances of identity and memory making.

In short, heritage is a cultural process in which historical and cultural narratives and meanings are created, recreated, affirmed or rejected. This act of creation and negotiation may occur around and at places defined as heritage or in association with events defined as ‗intangible heritage but ultimately what is the essence of heritage is not simply the place or event, but what is done with them. What is done may be the re-confirmation of received narratives and collective memories, or the challenging of these by groups or individuals, or the assertion of new narratives, values and memories that suit the needs and aspirations of the present. This re- theorisation of heritage stands in opposition to the dominant Western ways of thinking, talking and writing about heritage, that I call the Authorized Heritage Discourse or AHD.

The authorised heritage discourse

This dominant, elite or professional discourse emphasises the materiality and innate value of heritage and subsequently obfuscates the cultural and social work that heritage does in society. The authorized heritage discourse developed in Western Europe in the nineteenth century, and one of its foundational principles or ethics derives from Ruskin‘s (1849) and Morris‘s (1877) idea of ‗conserve as found‘. Encapsulated in this conservation ethic is not only the idea of the inherent value of material heritage, but also the important role that they play in representing the social and cultural values of their times. Such a degree of importance is placed on the materiality of Western culture and its technological and material achievements, and so much is simply ‗understood‘ by the aesthetic worth of certain objects that the material has often come to stand in for the social or cultural values it symbolizes. In other words, the monument tends to be conflated with the cultural and social values that are used to interpret it and give it meaning. Subsequently within the AHD heritage is the monument, archaeological site or other material thing or place, rather than cultural values or meanings. This has often meant that, as Hewison (1987) has asserted, heritage is about cultural stasis and backward glances.  The preservation and conservation of material heritage becomes the preservation and conservation of certain desired values and cultural meanings ؽ the meanings that material things stand in for ؽ and Western heritage thus rightly may be critiqued for its inherent conservatism.  It is no accident that a systematic concern for heritage developed in the late nineteenth century following the wake of industrial change, and that a ‗second wave of institutional concern heritage developed and gained ground in the post-war era following the development boom of the 1960s and the various cultural and political changes of this period. The development of heritage discourses and practices to deal with endangered places and sites is, as argued above, about the mediation of cultural and social change. That this mediation has often resulted in the retention and re-legitimization of certain values and cultural meanings, however, says more about who was and is in control of the heritage process than it says about any tendencies within that process. Part of the Western process of heritage, the ways in which certain values and meanings are retained and given legitimacy is directly linked to the way in which heritage is defined ؽ the AHD itself is part of the process and it structures and defines the boundaries within which certain cultural and social values are negotiated and legitimized or not.

The AHD focuses attention on aesthetically pleasing material objects, sites, places and/or landscapes that current generations must care for, protect and revere so that they may be passed to nebulous future generations for their education and to forge a sense of common identity based on the past. The idea of inheritance, whereby the current generation is conceived as stewards or caretakers of a past is important as it works to specifically disengage the present (or at least certain social actors in the present) from an active use of heritage. Heritage must be preserved unchanged to pass on, the present is thus discouraged from actively rewriting the meaning of the past, and subsequently the present, which will of course eventually become the future generation‘s past.

A linked theme in this discourse is the idea that ‗heritage is innately valuable. This is because ‗heritage is seen to represent all that is good and important about the past that has contributed to the development of the cultural character of the present. Another given in this discourse is that of ‗identity heritage is about the construction of identity, specifically national identity. However, the lack of examination of exactly how identity and heritage are linked helps to facilitate the acceptance of established and legitimized cultural and social values and identity identity becomes an immutable given somehow inherently embedded within heritage monuments and sites.

A key aspect of this discourse is the idea that the proper care of heritage, and its associated values, lies with the experts. Principally architects, historians and archaeologists, who act as stewards for the past, so that present and future publics may be properly educated and informed about its value and meaning. Experts, especially archaeologists and architects, were significant in the development of the European discourse, which in turn has influenced the development of management policies, legislation and practices. The professional focus of these groups has helped to reinforce the stress placed in the AHD on materiality, monumentality and aesthetics.

Along with these experts, the upper middle and ruling classes have also played an active role in the meaning of the term heritage. This involvement is particularly marked in England, where the National Trust, an organization originally concerned with saving the natural landscapes for the use of urban workers, was to all intents and purposes hijacked in the 1940s by the aristocracy and landed gentry and became a means for acquiring public money to preserve their homes and estates. The influential National Trust reinforced the authority and legitimacy of aristocratic heritage, and thus the ‗proper place of this class in English social, cultural and political life.  The dominance of this discourse is continually reinforced and institutionalized within government heritage agencies by a range of practices, including legal and policy processes.

The consequences of the AHD are significant as it obscures any recognition of the social, political and cultural work that heritage does in society because heritage simply is. This means that there tends to be a rehearsing of the dominant cultural and historical narratives, and the values that are drawn from these. This does not mean that the AHD cannot be challenged or changed ؽ it is in fact challenged all the time by a range of subaltern groups and, indeed, by the very existence of the ICHC. A first response to such challenges are often, however, a tightening of the AHD. Emma Waterton has demonstrated that the English AHD became more and more strongly asserted within British heritage policy in response to wider policy initiatives to battle social exclusion (Waterton forthcoming; see also Waterton and Smith 2008; Smith and Waterton 2009). The Governmental Review of Policies Relating to the   Historic Environment that was undertaken in England in 1999-2000 sought to not only remodel current legal frameworks for the protection of England‘s heritage, but also respond to a requirement by government for the cultural sector to address widening participation in heritage. As part of this process, the idea of intangible heritage was to be considered, especially as it was seen to facilitate social inclusion.  However, by the end of the Review the concept of intangible heritage was rejected as being meaningless. Instead, physical‘ evidence was re-emphasised as constituting the basis of ‗heritage‘. Associations, feelings and understandings were re-defined as intimately tied up with ‗physical evidence and were perceived as being unable to be expressed in isolation from the physical (Smith and Waterton 2009:296-7).

The reassertion of the AHD in response to this Review is telling. The Review itself may be viewed as a formalized and institutionalized expression of the heritage process at work. The review was triggered by social and political pressure to make heritage policy and legislation both more ‗transparent for landowners and property development and to make it more ‗inclusive‘ of the diversity of English history and cultural expression (Waterton and Smith 2008). However, the Review worked to respond to these challenges by reasserting and re-creating existing cultural values and historical narratives. The idea of heritage, and the legal and policy frameworks that protected it, were simply strengthened at the end of the review and no real conceptual or practical changes were made (aside from proposal, that have since been deferred, for the amalgamating a number of existing pieces of legislation into one).

Here we see the AHD in action reasserting itself to maintain heritage values and narratives that benefit certain sectors of society over others. In this case the maintenance of elite historical narratives and social values and the role of expertise in the domain of heritage management. In the next section, I will look at how the English AHD dealt with the challenges by the ICHC.

Intangible heritage and the English AHD

England, like many Western countries, has not ratified the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage ؽ and it does not look like they will anytime soon. This is not necessarily because they have an overt political problem with it, as with Australia‘s, Canada‘s or the US‘s concerns about its ability to enfranchise Indigenous people‘s cultural aspirations (Kurin 2004; Smith 2006).

Rather their problem is one of complete incomprehension of why the convention is at all necessary or at all relevant to them. The UK government and heritage agencies, in the main, see it as simply culturally irrelevant.

Cultural stasis and backward glances to history have been identified by the historians Wright (1985) and Hewison (1987) as a prevailing cultural tendency in England a process helped along by the AHD. As one person involved in the development of the ICHC noted in relation to the English response to the convention:

Interviewee: Intangibles are relevant to every country – the intangibles ARE

heritage…that is what heritage is. We have trouble communicating this idea to Western countries who want to see things in a different way. We have trouble with England, who resist very strongly this way of thinking. They are stuck in their own mindset.

(Interview 5, UNESCO, The Intangible Heritage Section, Paris, 12th January 2006, quoted in Smith and Waterton 2009: 299) This mindset is not simply because of the existence of the AHD ؽ but the work it does in maintaining certain authorized historical and social narratives about what it means to be British and more specifically English. The challenges offered by the concept of ICH, and the ICHC more broadly, not only stand in opposition to the AHD, but challenge the fundamental notion of national identity and collective memory and history that is underpinned by the English AHD.

Those involved in the negotiation of the ICHC with England identified a palpable discomfort:

Interviewer: …it was just a sense that they [the British] didn’t know what people were talking about [in terms of intangible cultural heritage]?

Interviewee: Yeah, I mean it was the making of much-ado-about about nothing for them…all this intangible cultural heritage. It was like ‗who is this, what is this about, for what, for who? Do you want us to go out and collect, like stories from Gypsies or something? Who? Where? ... At that time is was just, it was like … what is this? It was unfathomable to be talking about something like this, there was, kind of, no sense of relevance. Here you have what was looked at in many countries as giving pride to the unrepresented as a matter of course, which for many people are the major cultures in those countries. Whereas I think for the folks in the UK, this was marginal, not very important stuff, for people who don‘t, aren‘t and can‘t encapsulate the identity of our cultural heritage.

(Interview 6, Smithsonian Institution, April 2006, quoted in Smith and Waterton 2009:299) Interviewee: We have intangible heritage and indigenous heritage existing all over the world. It is the way they [England] see their own heritage which is the problem, because they don‘t consider rituals and traditions, for example with the mining industry in the UK, as being both tangible and intangible heritage ؽ then it is a problem in their own view. (Interview 4, UNESCO, World Heritage Centre, Paris, 10th January 2006, quoted in Smith and Waterton 2009:299) This discomfort is revealed by policy makers within the UK, for instance: Interviewee: The UK has not said that it will ratify that convention [the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage, 2003] and I think it will be quite a long time before it does.

Interviewer : What are the reasons for that?

Interviewee : It is just difficult to see how you could apply a convention of that sort in the UK context…it is not relevant…it just does not fit with the UK approach…I think it would be very difficult to bring in a convention that says we are actually going to list this sort of stuff and protect it. What are the obvious examples you come up with? Morris Dancing? As intangible heritage and so on? The UK has no intangible heritage. (Interview 1, English Heritage, 4th July 2005, quoted in Smith and Waterton 2009:297).

The UK has no intangible heritage because the AHD says it does not. Moreover, the idea of intangible heritage threatens not only the comfortable and comforting constructions of heritage that the AHD maintains, it threatens the social and cultural hegemony maintained by the AHD. Too much is at stake both conceptually and materially in terms of political and social achievements of the AHD to take the concept of ICH too seriously.

What is ironic in the English position on ICH is that the nineteenth century ethic of ‗conserve as found on which the English (and indeed Western) AHD is founded derives from a concern to maintain tradition arts and crafts techniques and traditions. As Hassard (2009) argues, Ruskin, Morris and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings were concerned that any conservation of ancient buildings must not only stay honest to the original design, and avoid ‗dishonest restoration, but that any conservation work must reuse traditional building and craft techniques. What then was being preserved were as much the intangible skills as the tangible results of those skills. The idea of ICH should thus not be seen, as Hassard (2009) argues, as irrelevant to the idea of heritage in England, but rather an already existing and integral concept. That it cannot be seen as such is a result of the degree of emotional and political investment into the AHD ؽ any disruption to the AHD and the work it does in maintaining social order and national identity is simply too risky.

In conclusion

The definition of heritage that I offered at the start of this paper stresses a sense of action, power and agency. Heritage is something vital and alive. It is a moment of action, not something frozen in material form. It incorporates a range of actions that often occur at places or in certain spaces. Although heritage is something that is done at places or at intangible events, these places and events become ‗places or events of heritage both because of the actions of meaning making and remembering that occur at them, but also because they lend a sense of occasion and reality to the activities occurring at and around them. There is an interlinked relationship between the activities that occur at places and the places themselves ؽ but it is this tension between action and material representation that an important element of heritage. The tension may at once be about creating and maintaining historical and social consensus, but simultaneously it can also be a process of dissent and contestation.

If heritage is something that is ‗done, what then is done? There is no one defining action or moment of heritage, but rather a range of activities that include remembering, commemoration, communicating and passing on knowledge and memories, asserting and expressing identity and social and cultural values and meanings.  As an experience, and as a social and cultural performance, it is something with which people actively, often self-consciously, and critically engage in. What then does heritage do, what are the consequences of these moments that identify them as ‗heritage? The product or the consequences of heritage activities are the emotions and experiences and the memories of them that they create, and while these then work to facilitate a sense of identity and belonging it is not all they do.  What is also created, and continually recreated (rather than simply maintained) are social networks and relations, that themselves bind and create a sense of belonging and identity.  These networks and relations are facilitated through an activity in which social and cultural values, meanings and understandings both about the past and present are sometimes explicitly, and sometimes implicitly, worked out, inspected, considered, rejected, embraced or transformed.    Identity is not simply something ‗produced or represented by heritage places or heritage moments but is something actively and continually recreated and negotiated as people, communities and institutions reinterpret, remember and reassess the meaning of the past in terms of the social, cultural and political needs of the present. It is thus simultaneously about change and continuity, it is a mentality or discourse in which certain realities and ideas of being are constituted, rehearsed, contested and negotiated and ultimately remade.

Cultural meanings are fluid and ultimately created through doing, and through the aspirations and desires of the present, but are validated and legitimized through the creation and recreation of a sense of linkage to the past. Heritage provides a mentality and discourse in which these linkages are forged and recast.  What makes certain activities ‗heritage are those activities that actively engaged with thinking about and acting out not only ‗where we have come from in terms of the past, but also ‗where we are going in terms of the present and future. It is a social and cultural process that mediates a sense of cultural, social and political change.

However, this process is currently mediated in the West by the existence of an AHD that works to ensure that the processes and performances of heritage are regulated and controlled. In England, we have seen the AHD in action in response to the idea of ICH that threatens to broaden the conceptual practice of heritage and thus possibly déstabilise the social relations that this helps to underpin and maintain. What this shows us, ultimately, is that the processes of safeguarding and managing heritage is itself an integral part of the process of the heritage performance.

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Le 24/12/2024

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