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Heritopia explores the multiple meanings of the past in the present, using the famous temples of Abu Simbel and other World Heritage sites as points of departure. It employs three perspectives in its attempt to understand and explain both past and present the truth of knowledge, the beauties of narrative, and ethical demands. Crisis theories are rejected as nostalgic expressions of contemporary social criticism. Modernity is viewed as a collection of contradictory narratives and reinterpreted as a combination of technological progress and recently evolved ideas. The book argues that while heritage is expanding, it is not to be found everywhere, and its expansion does not constitute a problem. It investigates the World Heritage Convention as an innovation, demonstrating that the definition of a World Heritage site succeeds in creating a tenable category of outstanding and exclusive heritage. The book introduces the term “Heritopia” in order to conceptualise the utopian expectations associated with World Heritage. Finally, it points to the possibilities of using the past creatively when meeting present-day and future challenges.
kritikos , meaning capable of judging, and krisis , meaning a decision or judgement. So is it the case, as many have claimed, that the use of the past increases in periods of crisis? Crisis and the heritage industry I believe that a civilisation which tends towards conservatism is a declining civilisation because it is afraid to go forward and ascribes more importance to its memories than to its future. Strong, expanding civilisations have no memory: they reject, they forget the past. They feel strong enough to be destructive because they know they can replace
To set the scene for the rest of the book, this chapter discusses the evolving discourses of the rural and the urban, the exploitation of this discourse by some political parties, and the rise of the heritage industry. It then proceeds to survey the literature, in both anthropology and geography, on north European immigration into rural Western Europe: who these people are, when they arrived, what effects have they had on the social, economic, and political life of the places they chose to settle in. Since this material is relatively scanty, I have also relied on material within popular travelogues. I then discuss, in a similar manner, the nature and consequence of labour migration from North Africa and Eastern Europe to these areas. I conclude by considering the roles anthropologists can play today in today’s countrysides, in the development of rural life and the formulation of rural policy.
Nationalism has reasserted itself today as the political force of our times, remaking European politics wherever one looks. Britain is no exception, and in the midst of Brexit, it has even become a vanguard of nationalism's confident return to the mainstream. Brexit, in the course of generating a historically unique standard of sociopolitical uncertainty and constitutional intrigue, tore apart the two-party compact that had defined the parameters of political contestation for much of twentieth-century Britain. This book offers a wide-ranging picture of the different theoretical accounts relevant to addressing nationalism. It briefly repudiates the increasingly common attempts to read contemporary politics through the lens of populism. The book explores the assertion of 'muscular liberalism' and civic nationalism. It examines more traditional, conservative appeals to racialised notions of blood, territory, purity and tradition as a means of reclaiming the nation. The book also examines how neoliberalism, through its recourse to discourses of meritocracy, entrepreneurial self and individual will, alongside its exaltation of a 'points-system' approach to the ills of immigration, engineers its own unique rendition of the nationalist crisis. There are a number of important themes through which the process of liberal nationalism can be documented - what Arun Kundnani captured, simply and concisely, as the entrenchment of 'values racism'. These include the 'faux-feminist' demonisation of Muslims.
This book presents a study of material images and asks how an appreciation of the making and unfolding of images and art alters archaeological accounts of prehistoric and historic societies. With contributions focusing on case studies including prehistoric Britain, Scandinavia, Iberia, the Americas and Dynastic Egypt, and including contemporary reflections on material images, it makes a novel contribution to ongoing debates relating to archaeological art and images. The book offers a New Materialist analysis of archaeological imagery, with an emphasis on considering the material character of images and their making and unfolding. The book reassesses the predominantly representational paradigm of archaeological image analysis and argues for the importance of considering the ontology of images. It considers images as processes or events and introduces the verb ‘imaging’ to underline the point that images are conditions of possibility that draw together differing aspects of the world. The book is divided into three sections: ‘Emergent images’, which focuses on practices of making; ‘Images as process’, which examines the making and role of images in prehistoric societies; and ‘Unfolding images’, which focuses on how images change as they are made and circulated. The book features contributions from archaeologists, Egyptologists, anthropologists and artists. The contributors to the book highlight the multiple role of images in prehistoric and historic societies, demonstrating that archaeologists need to recognise the dynamic and changeable character of images.
analysis were honed in the 1980s. Angela McRobbie's work outlining the second-hand market and vintage as historical labour and identity work was published in 1989. 4 Robert Hewison's important study of the heritage industry was published in 1987. 5 Raphael Samuel's retort to historical ‘inbreeding, introspection and sectarianism’ Theatres of Memory , considered TV dramatisations, historical reinactment and children's entertainment through the lens of popular memory and
contention that ‘we are manufacturing heritage , a commodity which nobody seems able to define, but which everybody is eager to sell, in particular those cultural institutions that can no longer rely on government funds as they did in the past … At best, the heritage industry only draws a screen between ourselves and our true past.’ 17 While announcing a problematic belief in the notion of a true past, Hewison thus partly sees the rise of ‘heritage’ investment as an economic response to the removal of grants and subsidies under the Thatcher governments of the 1980s. As
). 4 See Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory (London: Verso, 1994) and Robert Hewison, The Heritage Industry (London: Methuen, 1987). Samuel offers a detailed and wide-ranging study of some of the ways in which memory is preserved in British society, arguing that ‘the last thirty years have witnessed an extraordinary and, it seems, ever growing enthusiasm
increase in musealisation in Switzerland and Germany over the twentieth century (Lübbe 1982 ); Robert Hewison observed an increase in the number of museums, theme parks, and visitor centres in England since the 1960s and launched the concept “Heritage Industry” (Hewison 1987 : 83ff); Françoise Choay perceived an inflation in heritage since the 1960s, reacting particularly strongly against the establishment of industrial monuments and increased heritage tourism (Choay 1992 (French): 158ff; 2001 (English): 138ff); and Andreas Huyssen observed a “relentless museummania
, the decade saw a wider growth in the heritage industry, described by Robert Hewison as the symptom of ‘a country obsessed with its past, and unable to face its future’, and the prominence of historical drama can be seen as a particular manifestation of this trend.8 The economic downturn also severely impacted the BBC itself, as Carl Gardner and John Wyver described in 1980: Inflation began slowly to outstrip the Corporation’s fixed revenue and the licence fee fell more and more out of phase with costs – from being an other-worldly institution where vulgar things