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Humanity-made threats to heritage: Heiden Heritage MOOC Week 4

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Humanity-made threats to heritage

The topics discussed this week have to do with the various threats to heritage and we mostly focussed on man-made threats. How does this relate to your site? What could be potential threats to your heritage? How would you counter these threats, both in theory and in practice? Write about these issues in order to show - both to yourself as well as to your fellow students who will be grading your work - that you understand them and you know how to incorporate those with your chosen personal heritage. Through thinking about these issues and incorporating them into something of your own you will learn how these concepts influence heritage managing decisions.

 

As I work through these exercises I am finding them more and more challenging. I begin to ask myself why I am trying to relate the issues in the module with ‘my heritage’. After all, what seems to be suggested is that there are problems with the term, ‘my heritage’ and the ontology of heritage it implies – as something whose being depends on its importance to me.

To tell truth, I have struggled from the beginning to define ‘my heritage’. This is partly because deriving from a post-colonial colonising culture, ‘My heritage’ has been formed outside myself – in histories of an over-determined shared consciousness of ownership of a world or universal heritage – the kind of ideology Hamilakis (2012:4f.) sees as supportive of the idea of the ‘universal survey (or panoptic) museum’ (like the British Museum).

I struggle with that ideological inheritance and it pushes me to empathy with emergent post-colonial local identity in order to identify with cultures threatened by neo-colonial thought. That empathy might advocate the repatriation of the ‘Elgin’ Parthenon marbles, and support for the removal of the icons of colonial thinking (Rhodes-Must-Go! Victoria-Tower-on-Castle-Hill-must-go!). For me it makes me value values of my own ‘sub-culture’ that are under threat from being immersed in majority OR hegemonic cultural icons (such as being a gay man, or class – these themes came up in my Castle Hill pieces).Yet Hamilakis (2012:8) argues that this binary presentation of the issue is itself a fallacy. His preferred position is the ‘exilic imagination’ and I must say that this resonates with me. What it suggests is that there is nothing warm, comfortable or easy about determining your heritage: ‘about ongoing clashes with the colonial and neo-colonial regimes of authority and rule, not only in faraway places, but … in our own nation-states and localities, ….our own projects, our own writing and scholarly practice.’

That raises for me another perspective on statues of Rhodes and Victoria Tower, that emblem of mock-Gothic superiority over the Indian sub-continent in a town-environment now home to many families, once self-identifying exiles of that continent, even if no longer. 

Victoria Tower on Castle Hill

Victoria Tower on Castle Hill. By Richard Harvey - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1005635

Victorian imperial heritage and intangible culture linked to it are part of my ‘heritage’. The point is NOT to rip them down and pretend they too are forgotten but to exile yourself from them: they are heritage not ‘my heritage’. They need to be understood in all their complexity but not as symbols of assurance for a stable identity but as memorials that nothing is as stable as is comfortable in our identities and that relating to objects, sites and practices from the past is necessary as exiles if we are to imagine them differently (under new ontological conditions, in Hamilakis) in the future.

So ‘my heritage’ (exiled from the present comfort with itself) is not universal and not local in significance but in continuing evolutionary and perhaps revolutionary emergence. It is there and must be understood but only by some kind of struggle, even if that is struggle in writing and thought – deep down in the ontology of the self.

So that is why I think the kind of unprotected ‘multi-temporal perception and embodiment of materiality’ is my Castle Hill – and on it still stands it Victoria Tower with its uneasy relation to my ‘self’. But if this is not comfortable, it is also difficult to make practical for a heritage manager. If we venerate the pre-Roman site is that at the cost of eighteenth-century mining adits, or of complex unreconciled sites of Victorian early working-class radicalism or later Victorian comfort with a wealth-creating imperialism. Where would I start to preserve – or perhaps I preserve bits, some parts of which will be documentary interpretation and showcase them all, or do I just turn it into a forgotten state that will reap its rewards in physical deterioration of all these features. Whatever, I do, what would I do if this later perceived as an excellent site for a nuclear-bomb bunker in a new Cold-War against an imperialist Russian or American state? Who knows? All Hamilakis says is that, it is hard, isn’t it!

My favourite quote – still getting my head around it is Pels in his interview:

So in a way, very often the individual pieces of heritage, again, often defined by a certain origin in the past, those may be under threat. But I think the overall collection of heritage sites, and heritage objects is increasing. And heritage is not under threat,

…. 

And so, I guess if you put it in two words. The exploitation of heritage sites by people who actually do not care about this assignability is probably the major threat.

 Is this translatable thus? What matters is attributing and respecting the multi-assignability of the significance of all heritage and finding ways of respecting that whilst still struggling against colonialism and racism. Maybe so!

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