Use of the past?

How the past is used in the present to influence the sensory surroundings we live in or to make meaning, is really what sensory heritage is about. It is the sensorial politics of heritage making. Critical Heritage scholars learn us that heritage is not the things of the past in themselves, but the acts of using them or engaging with those element that are constructed to memorialise some aspects of the past. The following snippets from my PHD thesis published in 2023 expand on this and show the key scholary inspirations:

“05.01 Heritage as past used in the present

Laurajane Smith is an important voice in Critical Heritage Studies and her understanding of heritage is highly relevant particularly for her conceptualization of heritage as performed and emotional. Smith shares the attention to the emplacement of heritage. According to Smith (Smith, 2009, p. 82) the acts of heritage occur at places, which ‘...lends a sense of occasion and reality to them...’, while at the same time becoming heritage places due to the activities occurring. These heritage activities create emotions, experiences, and memories of them, which create and continually recreate '...social networks and relations that themselves bind and create a sense of belonging and identity” (Smith, 2009, p. 83). The acts of heritage are thus productive of the relationship to place as well as to landscape. Plurality and multivocality are emphasized by Smith's understanding of these links about place and landscape, but the use of heritage at places or landscapes has the power to define and stage, as '...the experience of heritage landscape/ place are inevitably themselves managed, and heritage performances become "staged", and meanings and memories becomes scripted or regulated by the way a place or landscape has itself been defined, mapped and thus managed...’ (Smith, 2009, p. 79). Smith foregrounds the performance of heritage, rather than material objects alone, when she (Smith, 2009, p. 83) writes:

‘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 selfconsciously, and critically engage in.’

05.02 Emotional and affective power of heritage The struggles and politics of heritage are, in addition to the discourses of the past, very much about the affective relationships to that past and the landscapes or places of it (Harrison, 2013); (Smith, 2009). In fact, it is the emotional content of heritage performance that gives realism, authenticity, and relevance to the values inherent in heritage for the everyday life of the performers (Smith, 2009). The emotional element is what makes heritage matter:

‘If we accept the assumption that heritage is linked in varying ways to the expression of identity, be it national, communal, familial or individual, we engage with an emotive concept. If heritage “matters”, then there is an emotional element in the way it matters’ (Smith, 2021, p. 50).

Mike Crang and Divya P. Tolia-Kelly (Crang & Tolia-Kelly, 2010, p. 2327) show that heritage sites, whether museums or heritage landscapes, produce versions of nation, race and include ethnic coding through affective responses that are neither universal nor individual but ‘...emerging from [historical] conjunctures of power, identity, and mobility’. Affective responses to heritage are brought about by the poly-sensory encounters with the heritage landscape - even beyond the 5 basic senses – and are related to feeling, emotion, cognition, memory, as Joy Sather-Wagstaff (Sather-Wagstaff, 2017, p. 19) shows through her engagement with ‘difficult’ or ‘dark’ heritage:

‘A key element to the affective power of such institutions is their potential to intentionally evoke a range of powerful emotions and memories, most notably through affective, polysensory modes of encounter with difficult artifacts; material culture in a diverse array of forms on display that, in lived experience, do elicit sensory engagement beyond just that of the visual.’

05.03 Heritage and memory are political

Heritage, as a particular way of using the past and memory in the present, as well as producing certain forms of memory, heritage, and belonging. But while this ‘...may at once be about creating and maintaining historical and social consensus...’ it is simultaneously contested (Smith, 2009, p. 83). On the one hand, the performativity of heritage is doing something with the cultural meanings and values of the present, it legitimizes the present through how it links to the past through memories, and simultaneously sets aims for the future as Smith teaches (Smith, 2009, p. 83) us:

‘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 engage 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.’

On the other hand, heritage is dissonant in that it implies acts of control through setting the terms for the present and the future as well as acts of contesting and dissent to these terms:

‘Heritage is dissonant–it is a constitutive social process that on the one hand is about regulating and legitimizing, and on the other hand is about working out, contesting and challenging a range of cultural and social identities, sense of place, collective memories, values and meanings that prevail in the present and can be passed to the future.’ (Smith, 2009, p. 82)

Rodney Harrison (Harrison, 2013, p. 4) expresses similar thoughts: ‘...heritage is primarily not about the past, but instead about our relationship with the present and the future’. The politics of heritage implies value struggles over what is recognized as heritage and what is not and what is valued important enough to define and legitimize the present and be brough into the future for landscapes, communities, and everyday lives. This valuing of the past occurs both from official and unofficial positions, which Harrison (Harrison, 2013) makes clear with a distinction between ‘official heritage’ and ‘unofficial heritage’. While ‘official heritage’ refers to the authorization of something as heritage by the state, 'unofficial heritage' refers to heritage making practices by, for example, local communities or particular groups, which are not recognized by the state. ‘Official heritage’ and ‘unofficial heritage’ are dialectically linked in that ‘...each influences the definition of the other’ (Harrison, 2013, p. 20) and their status can change over time or through struggles for recognition or preservation (Harrison, 2013). The same attention to other-than-official heritage practitioners is found with decolonial heritage approaches pointing to the potential for change found with them (Kølvraa & Knudsen, 2020, p. 5):

‘Here a more flexible and less institutionalized mode of heritage management – as we see it emerging not just from artists, but also from activists employing situationist or other aesthetic means, and from museums seeking new collaborations with artists or advocacy groups might better serve the decolonial agenda than more traditional and rigorous didactics focusing on imparting information to the public.’

The way heritage becomes used can impact the local communities and their relationships to their past, place and landscape as pointed out by Smith (Smith, 2009, p. 80):

‘In effect, the past is valued and understood differently by different peoples, groups or communities and how that past is understood validates or not a sense of place. In particular contexts this can be disabling for those groups or communities whose sense of history and place exist outside of the dominant heritage message or discourse, though it can be enabling for those groups whose sense of the past either sits within or finds synergy with authorized views’ .

Memory is inherently linked to the political and as much about the past as about the present as Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz (Radstone & Schwarz, 2010, p. 3) states:

‘Memory is active, forging its pasts to serve present interests. Whether embedded within nationalist struggles, for instance, or in the daily rituals of home-making in new lands practiced by the migrant, memory’s activities in the present belie the apparently simple, reified, and knowable past evoked by the call to remember.’

How the past is used and the power to decide what heritage of a landscape is considered proper will thus have a great impact on setting the terms of everyday life and the lived heritage of that landscape. Engaging critically with heritage, memory, and their sensory qualities brings attention to the power related to the past of landscapes and communities. From the perspective of power, the embodiment of memories (and traditions) as heritage makes them manageable. However, heritage is also about change, freedom, and inclusion. This is implied when Smith and Harrison point to the value struggles over heritage or the contestation and challenging of aspects of heritage. Heritage places have emancipatory potential through negotiation of the scale politics of heritage and moving away from heritage sites constructed simply as bounded territories or local sites or linking heritage to the national scale per se (D. C. Harvey, 2015). Memory also holds inclusive or democratic potential, as Crang and ToliaKelly (Crang & Tolia-Kelly, 2010, p. 5) argue:

‘An impulse to engage research and think heritage more democratically has resulted in a focus on memory. Before being canonized, authorized or, indeed, made material in the public domain, memory is at heart inclusive, accessible and a way of ‘doing’ heritage from below.’

Heritage is thus a performative and political act of using the past in the present. Heritage is not the things of the past, but the act of engaging with the past to make meaning of it and constitute the present where it is used. These performances link power, emotional qualities, memory, remembering, different elements of pasts, and physical landscapes. In this way, social practices of the past, traditions and material objects become part of a struggle over what is considered worth being included in transitions of areas, landscapes, or communities or over what is neglected or excluded—in short, part of the production of cultural spaces. Emotional heritage performances are part of a politics of recognition (Smith, 2021), with the ability to frame who belongs and are legitimate groups in a certain landscape.”

Reference: Frølund, M. (2023). Sensory segmentation around and with art monuments in rural landscapes: Towards a sensory heritage sensitive rural spatial justice. [Ph.D. thesis, SDU]. University of Southern Denmark. Faculty of Business and Social Sciences. https://doi.org/10.21996/2szz-kc78. Pp.83-88.

References in text:

Crang, M., & Tolia-Kelly, D. P. (2010). Nation, Race, and Affect: Senses and Sensibilities at National Heritage Sites. Environment and planning. A, 42(10), 2315-2331. https://doi.org/10.1068/a4346

Harrison, R. (2013). Heritage: Critical Approaches. Routledge. https:// doi.org/10.4324/9780203108857

Harvey, D. C. (2015). Heritage and scale: settings, boundaries and relations. International journal of heritage studies : IJHS, 21(6), 577-593.

Kølvraa, C., & Knudsen, B. T. (2020). Decolonizing European Colonial Heritage in Urban Spaces – An Introduction to the Special Issue. Heritage & Society, 13(1-2), 1-9.

Radstone, S., & Schwarz, B. (2010). Introduction: Mapping memory. In S. Radstone, S. Goodman, B. Schwarz, A. Barnier, F. Callard, H. Caygill, M. Carruthers, A. Coombes, S. Feuchtwang, & M. Freeman (Eds.), Memory : Histories, Theories, Debates (pp. 1-9). Fordham University Press.

Sather-Wagstaff, J. (2017). Making polysense of the world: affect, memory, heritage. In D. P. Tolia-Kelly, E. Waterton, & S. Watson (Eds.), Heritage, affect and emotion: politics, practices and infrastructures (pp. 12-29). Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Smith, L. (2021). Emotional heritage: visitor engagement at museums and heritage sites. Routledge.

Smith, L. (2009). Uses of heritage. Routledge.