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International Journal of Heritage Studies
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The recognition and misrecognition of community heritage
Emma Waterton
a
; Laurajane Smith
b
a
School of Humanities (History), Keele University, Keele, United Kingdom
b
Department of
Archaeology, University of York, York, United Kingdom
Online publication date: 12 February 2010
To cite this Article Waterton, Emma and Smith, Laurajane(2010) 'The recognition and misrecognition of community
heritage', International Journal of Heritage Studies, 16: 1, 4 — 15
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/13527250903441671
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13527250903441671
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International Journal of Heritage Studies
Vol. 16, Nos. 1–2, January–March 2010, 4–15
ISSN 1352-7258 print/ISSN 1470-3610 online
© 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13527250903441671
http://www.informaworld.com
The recognition and misrecognition of community heritage
Emma Waterton
a
* and Laurajane Smith
b
a
School of Humanities (History), Keele University, Keele, United Kingdom;
b
Department of
Archaeology, University of York, York, United Kingdom
Taylor and FrancisRJHS_A_444528.sgm
(Received 15 February 2009; final version received 7 September 2009)
10.1080/13527250903441671International Journal of Heritage Studies1352-7258 (print)/1470-3610 (online)Original Article2010Taylor & Francis161/2000000January-March 2010Dr. EmmaWatertone.waterton@his.keele.ac.uk
This paper revisits the notion of ‘community’ within the field of heritage,
examining the varied ways in which tensions between different groups and their
aspirations arise and are mediated. Our focus is a close examination of the
conceptual disjunction that exists between a range of popular, political and
academic attempts to define and negotiate memory, place, identity and cultural
expression. To do so, the paper places emphasis on those expressions of
community that have been taken up within dominant political and academic
practice. Such expressions, we argue, are embedded with restrictive assumptions
concerned with nostalgia, consensus and homogeneity, all of which help to
facilitate the extent to which systemic issues tied up with social justice, recognition
and subordinate status are ignored or go unidentified. This, inevitably, has serious
and far-reaching consequences for community groups seeking to assert alternative
understandings of heritage. Indeed, the net result has seen the virtual disappearance
of dissonance and more nuanced ways of understanding heritage. Adopting an
argument underpinned by Nancy Fraser’s notion of a ‘politics of recognition’, this
paper proposes a more critical practice of community engagement.
Keywords: community; politics of recognition; expertise; Nancy Fraser; Zygmunt
Bauman; social inclusion
Introduction
Out there, in the streets, all sorts of dangers lie in ambush; we have to be alert when we
go out there, watch whom we are talking to and who talks to us, be on the look-out every
minute. In here, in the community, we can relax – we are safe… (Bauman 2001, p. 2)
There are a handful of words within the wider social sciences that are continually
used, abused and reused, such as ‘identity’ and ‘culture’. These are words that in
essence are so fundamental they are difficult to take issue with; it is in their use that
they have become so problematic. To this list, we want to add ‘community’, a term
that has taken up a life of its own in recent years, not only within heritage studies but
in popular and political life as well. Indeed, it has become near-mandatory, operating
as it does as a salient and enduring feature of our everyday lives. At best, it has simply
become something akin to an affix: we encounter it regularly, whether we are turning
to digital TV’s Community Channel in our living room, listening to New Labour’s
communitarian-inspired speeches, or thinking of the evocative concept of the
*Corresponding author. Email: e.waterton@his.keele.ac.uk
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International Journal of Heritage Studies 5
‘European Community’. At its worst, the term operates as a questionable means of
maintaining the status quo, and in its use we fail to acknowledge its obvious links to
many social relations of power. In the heritage sector, things are no different. Here we
find the concept adorning a raft of policy directives, professional practice initiatives
and grassroots projects. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that it has also
become something of an obsession within associated scholarly writings.
An immediate consequence of this obsession has been the proliferation of ‘fast’
theories about community, few of which have been inspiring. In fact, like identity and
culture, our infatuation with community has, by and large, allowed us to turn it into
an epistemological obstacle (Alleyne 2002, p. 608). What we mean here, to borrow
from Brian Alleyne (2002, p. 608), is that community has all too easily become an expla-
nation or solution ‘rather than something to be explained’ (see also Neal and Walters
2008, p. 281). For examples of this we need only turn to contemporary initiatives aimed
at alleviating social inclusion or addressing public accountability, both of which have
instigated powerful discourses of community cohesion (Merriman 2004, Wetherell
2007, Smith and Waterton 2009a). Here, reified and unreflexive notions of community
have been conveyed across the sector, constructing and dividing society into seemingly
homogenous collectives defined by ethnicity, class, education or religion and so forth.
This artificial idea of community works to reinforce presumed differences between the
white, middle classes and ‘the rest’, as well as the full range of heritage experts and
‘everybody else’ (Smith and Waterton 2009a). It has therefore emerged as a discom-
forting convenience we – and here ‘we’ includes professionals, policymakers and
scholars – use to manage and make sense of ‘others’. A form of rhetoric that is ostensibly
about challenging our privileged stewardship and control over the past has thus essen-
tially become quite the opposite: a mechanism that ensures the continued misrecogni-
tion of a range of stakeholders within the heritage management process, particularly
those that are already at risk. Our aim in this paper, therefore, is twofold: first, we want
to encourage people to rethink the notion of community found within the field of
heritage; and, second, we will clarify some of the problems that are tied up in the ways
we currently understand and use the concept, again within heritage studies.
The contribution that we attempt to make in this special volume, then, is an open-
ing up of new ways of thinking about the term and what it might mean in practice.
First and foremost, our contribution starts from a handful of critical observations. In
order to understand any term, a lot of ground-clearing has to be done first, or a hacking
back of the theoretical undergrowth. For us, this means starting with the statement that
many, if not most, of the ways we have traditionally thought about ‘community’ in
heritage studies are ill-conceived and unhelpful. This may seem a pessimistic way to
start our paper, but we are not writing off the concept per se, merely the reverence with
which it is held. For far too long, a simplistic and romantic idea of community has
been peddled and pushed as a parallel avenue of enquiry within heritage studies,
distinct from our more traditional forms of engagement. We think there is much more
to community than that. What we want to suggest instead is a politically engaged and
critical conceptualisation; one that engages with social relationships in all their
messiness, taking account of action, process, power and change.
The uncritical community
Since the 1960s in general, and with the publication of Benedict Anderson’s (1983)
Imagined Communities more specifically, ‘everyone, but everyone’, to paraphrase
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6 E. Waterton and L. Smith
Paul Morris (1996, p. 223), has been ‘for community’. It is a term that has enjoyed a
considerable career within the social sciences, exercising scholars since the nineteenth
century and emerging as a serious subject to be reckoned with in the 1960s. Work by
Ferdinand Tönnies in 1974, for example, began the static typologies of community
that have come to dominate, whereas Margaret Stacey, writing in 1969, critiqued the
ubiquitous meanings of the term within the sociological lexicon, arguing that such
conceptual confusion failed to add anything useful to our understandings of what
community is. At that time, what it was – what community meant – was a rural-based,
face-to-face and traditional collection of people. By the 1970s, Bell and Newby felt
secure enough in this developing academic field to compile The Sociology of Commu-
nity: A Selection of Readings (1974), which aimed at illustrating some of the problems
and issues tangled up with this idea of community. Despite recognition that it was a
term not as straightforward as it at first appeared, by the time Anderson tackled it in
1983 it had become, ultimately, a ‘fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two
centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for
such limited imaginings’ (Anderson 1983, p. 7). From that point onwards, empirical
and interpretive analyses continued to accumulate, allowing Day and Murdoch in the
mid-1990s to comment that ‘although badly wounded, “community” is a concept that
just will not lie down’ (Day and Murdoch 1993, 85; see also Crow and Allan 1994,
Hoggett 1997). In the twenty-first century, it is still a term that resonates within
academic literature and, unsurprisingly, much of this sociological literature has found
its way – superficially, at least – into the literature emerging from heritage studies.
At the same time, community has come to form a central plank in public policy in
much of the West. In the UK, following the election of the New Labour government
in 1997, a series of concepts and policies have emerged that round on the idea of
community: regeneration, social inclusion, civic engagement, civil renewal and
sustainable communities, to name a few. Policy outputs with this focus have
included: Leading Cohesive Communities; Building Cohesive Communities: The
Crucial Role of the New Local Performance Framework (DCLG 2007); Regeneration
and the Historic Environment: Heritage as a Catalyst for Better Social and Economic
Regeneration (English Heritage 2005); and From Access to Participation: Cultural
Policy and Civil Renewal (IPPR 2005). The latter two in this list reflect the efforts to
conform to a more capacious form of governance, attempting to run the gamut
between commonality and difference, integration and multiculturalism. This focus
has been fostered in part by wider European policy concerns with social inclusion, a
concept originating from French social policies and spread across a number of indi-
vidual national discourses within Europe (Levitas 2005, p. 2). It also draws parallels
with national attempts to understand civic engagement, as undertaken in the United
States (Shackel and Gadsby 2007), international negotiations with the concept of
intangible heritage (Blake 2009) and social contexts prevalent in post-colonial coun-
tries attempting to acknowledge Indigenous demands for self-determination and
representation in heritage (Smith and Wobst 2005). Although we are more familiar
with the British experience, this debate and a certain obsession with the community
‘feel good’ factor can thus also be tracked internationally. The universalising power
of our desire for community should not be understated, nor should the core character-
istics that obstinately cling to the term. Indeed, while the policies mentioned here aim
at different things, they are bound by a comparable nostalgia for, or celebration of,
the idea of community. Moreover, they hold in common the implicit assumption that
‘community’ is somehow a cure for all manner of social problems such as deviance,
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International Journal of Heritage Studies 7
drug abuse, crime, poverty and exclusion. The Chairperson’s Foreword (by Sir Sandy
Bruce-Lockhart) in a recent UK governmental publication, Leading Cohesive
Communities illustrates this point:
The creation of strong, vital and cohesive communities is one of the most important
issues that we face … councils can help (and as this publication shows, already are help-
ing) to create strong communities, in which the fear of difference can be broken down
and everyone feels valued and safe, has an equal place and feels a shared responsibility
for their community. (Bruce-Lockhart 2006, p. 4)
Particularly striking about the sentiments evoked by Bruce-Lockhart is their similarity
to the quote by Zygmunt Bauman we used to open this paper. Thick threads of
comfort, safety and longing are woven through these examples, crafting together a
distinctive and enduring conceptualisation of community. Since the work of Tönnies,
these characteristics have been consistently used to refer to what society ‘should’ be
like, and are frequently and uncritically allied with ‘backwater villages’, undifferenti-
ated agrarian societies, the working classes and ethnic minority groups living within
industrial cities, and Indigenous groups in colonial and post-colonial countries (Elias
1974, p. ix; Alleyne 2002, p. 610). Fundamentally then, as Alleyne (2002) points out,
rather than harness ‘community’ solely to groups of people imagined in a golden age,
or back in time, it has also been pushed onto class, racial or ethnic hierarchies. The
implication here is that the social norm of being from a white middle-class back-
ground effectively exempts those groups from discussion; they ‘once had community
as a dominant form of social organisation, but … dropped it on the way to modernity’
and individualism (Alleyne 2002, p. 611; and see Brint 2001). It therefore presents
itself as an unpleasant paradox: on the one hand something confined to the past or
those who are excluded or ‘underdeveloped’, and on the other, something to lament.
For Bauman (1996, p. 50), this form of nostalgia provides the point of departure for
claims that you can:
recognise any human condition by what it thinks it does not have but should have; by
what it talks about obsessively since it desires it badly while being hopelessly short of
the means of acquiring it.
What sums up those desires and compulsions for contemporary society – nationally
and internationally – is ‘its infatuation with community’ (Bauman 1996, p. 50).
An important consequence of this obsession for heritage studies has been that so
much has come to be understood by the word ‘community’ that the theoretical
aspects of the term are less advanced than they ought to be; so much so that it is a
term now used with impunity. In the heritage sector, a multitude of community-
based projects have arisen, in large part running parallel to more academic-based
inquires into the nature of heritage. In these situations, jointly-run projects tend to
involve things that are done for communities, rather than with them. Moreover, the
sorts of projects that dominate the sector best apply to the white middle classes: we
presuppose particular economic means, a Western schooling, access to a specific
range of skills, and the freedom not only to get involved, but to choose or change
identities (Hodges and Watson 2000). In a strange sense of paradox then, despite
disassociating the white middle classes from the idea of community, we still tend to
assume that it is their social experiences we are dealing with. As such, it seems safe
to assume that as heritage professionals and policymakers, we have embraced the
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8 E. Waterton and L. Smith
rhetoric of community because it makes us feel good about the work we do. More-
over, we use this rhetoric because it seems like the right thing to do, especially as
we find ourselves increasingly in the midst of a political and social context rife with
exclusion, intolerance and injustice. But it is simply that: rhetoric. Once we strip
back the obsessive veneer, we realise that we do not know too much about commu-
nities; ironically, what we know is that it is a term never used unfavourably or in a
negative sense (Morris 1996, p. 223; Kumar 2005, p. 227). And so we argue over
them. We go into ‘the field’ and observe them, build up abstract notions of
‘community’ from material remains, or report on the quirky traditions of geographi-
cal ‘backwaters’. We reserve the right to speak for them and interpret them, and
sometimes, ultimately, we reject them, especially if they fail to conform to our
nostalgic ideals.
A more convincing account of community
This article builds on a series of arguments and debates that have arisen within the
cognate fields of sociology, anthropology and cultural studies in order to construct
what we hope is a convincing understanding of ‘community’. In presenting these
broader theorisations of community, we continue to chip away at the dominant, nostal-
gic ideal that currently occupies focus within the field of heritage studies. One of the
most frequently noted points to have arisen in these fields is that the term ‘community’
is highly contested (Burkett 2001, Howarth 2001, Neal and Walters 2008). Reveal-
ingly, recent scholars are also quick to point out that ‘communities are not very
community-like’ (Brint 2001, 6). In the rich vein of work that tracks these recent
observations we discover that communities are run through with divergent interests,
anger, boredom, fear, happiness, loneliness, frustration, envy, wonder and a range of
either motivating or disruptive energies. Added to this are thick seams of power that
structure any given collection of people, as well as mediate professionals’ desires to
speak on behalf of those whose lives have been marginalised by traditional heritage
narratives. In these terms, community becomes something that is (re)constructed
through ongoing experiences, engagements and relations, and not all these need be
consensual. It simultaneously slips out of the grammatical designation ‘noun’ – as
something that can be lost and found – becoming instead an action or process that is
constituted in the present: it is a doing word, or indeed, simply ‘something to do’
(Burkett 2001, p. 237, Neal and Walters 2008, p. 237, Smith and Waterton 2009, p.
37). It is, as many sociologists have suggested, an incomplete process through which
people construct and create identities, and bond themselves to others, whether
geographically, virtually or imaginatively (Neal and Walters 2008, p. 237). As Cohen
pointed out in the mid-1980s:
Community exists in the minds of its members, and should not be confused with
geographic or sociographic assertions of ‘fact’. By extension, the distinctiveness of
communities and, thus, the reality of their boundaries, similarly lies in the mind, in
the meanings which people attach to them, not in the structural forms. (Cohen 1985,
p. 98)
In all these cases, whether such processes are taking place on a small or large
scale, imaginatively or face-to-face, we wish to retain the sociality of the process.
Communities thus become social creations and experiences that are continuously in
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International Journal of Heritage Studies 9
motion, rather than fixed entities and descriptions, influx and constant motion,
unstable and uncertain. Moreover, ‘community’ should not be pinned to geogra-
phy alone, as it is a frame of reference or orientation that coalesces around shared
interests, common causes or collective experiences. These may be quite mundane
or they may be explosive; equally they may be fickle and transient or lock horns
with an issue that remains with a group for long periods of time. As Burkett (2001,
p. 242) puts it:
it is as about difference as much as it is about unity, about conflict and harmony, selfish-
ness and mutuality, separateness and wholeness, discomfort and comfort. To privilege
one of these aspects of tension in interpreting community is to deny the tranformatory
powers of human communion and to resort to fixed ideas about community.
Communities are thus not always sources of empowerment and positive identity;
indeed, predetermined ideas of community are often imposed onto groups of people,
who suffer, as a result, from lack of self-esteem, self-worth and self-identity (Howarth
2001, p. 233). Sprinkling the ‘feel good’ notion of community across these groups
does little to alleviate or diminish these formidable challenges. In essence, to avoid the
easy and therapeutic notion of community that currently dominates we must, to
borrow from Thrift (2005, p. 38), ‘think more carefully about whether we really have
it in us to just be unalloyedly nice to others at all times in every single place: most
situations can and do bring forth nice and nasty’.
Understanding ‘community’ within the field of heritage studies
Is there any harm done by traditional notions of community, or is our argument
simply an act of semantic hair-splitting? These questions move us to the central nub
of this paper, through which we hope to pull into the frame the social, cultural and
political stakes at risk within traditional theorisations of community. For us, the
concept of community has never been so powerful. Contemporary debates concerned
with multiculturalism, minority rights, self-image and social justice, to which the
term is often applied, stress the grids of power we aim to reveal. Our third and final
challenge in this paper, then, is to weave together the contours, content and various
trajectories of current forms of community engagements into an illustration of the
consequences this has for heritage studies. To do so, we borrow heavily from the
work of Nancy Fraser and her ‘politics of recognition’, a term to which Bauman
himself refers (2001, pp. 77–78). As it stands, the heritage sector is dominated by a
particular notion of community, one that overlooks the fact that representations of
reality can have powerful effects on any group under construction. It can lead to
misrecognition, discrimination, lowered self-esteem and lack of parity in any engage-
ment with heritage. This discourse shapes reality, both mystifying and naturalising
existing power relations. Importantly, it sets up specific branches of society – heritage
professionals and the white middle classes – as somehow devoid of community,
existing as nothing more than collections of individuals, while ‘othering’ everybody
else (Yar 2002, p. 184). As Burkett (2001, p. 241) points out, this understanding of
community all too easily ‘flips into homogeneity, a denial of difference, and an
assimilation of the Other’. It washes over disharmony, power and marginality,
thereby heightening misrecognition. In so doing, some understandings of heritage are
legitimised, while other nuances are discredited.
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10 E. Waterton and L. Smith
The politics of recognition: Fraser’s model
Nancy Fraser’s work on social justice issues has been flagged as a model for any
research that attempts to be politically engaged (Lister 2008, p. 157). In pushing an
account of ‘community’ that is explicitly political – in the sense of being contested
and power-laden – we have tasked ourselves with revealing some of the ways in which
traditional notions of community contribute to systemic problems such as insubordi-
nation and hierarchies of cultural value. Before discussing that, however, we first need
to introduce some of the core issues to Fraser’s work. What, for example, do we mean
by a politics of recognition? For Fraser, (mis)recognition equates to a question of
social status, and forms part of her wider theorisation of social justice (Fraser 2008a,
b; Lovell 2008). A central concept within this theorisation is ‘parity of participation’,
which ‘requires social arrangements that permit all (adult) members of society to
interact with one another as peers’ (Fraser 2003, p. 36: see also Fowler 2009). Parity
of participation, in Fraser’s articulation, encounters three kinds of obstacles: maldis-
tribution (economic), misrecognition (cultural) and injustices of representation (polit-
ical) (Fraser 2008a). All three are connected in Fraser’s model, with the latter
specifically revealing who is included (nor not) in patterns of economic distribution
and cultural recognition (Lovell 2008, p. 8). For the purposes of this paper, we shall
focus on the cultural aspects of this model, although we take as read that all three
aspects are intimately and irrevocably related. Underpinned strongly by Fraser, our
argument is that through the institutionalisation of the trope ‘community’, a range of
people suffer from status inequality and are thus unable to interact on terms of parity
in heritage matters. What is at issue is that some people are included within those
groups entitled to make decisions about what is (or is not) heritage, while others are
excluded. Not only are many people overlooked as authorities capable of adjudicating
their own sense of heritage, so too is their lack of access to necessary resources. They
are, in effect, subordinated and impeded because they do not hold the title ‘heritage
expert’, as well as lacking the resources assumed necessary to participate in heritage
projects (Western schooling, economic means, etc.), and also potentially ‘lacking’ a
particular vision or understanding of heritage and the accepted values that underpin
this vision (universality, national and aesthetic values, etc.).
Central to Fraser’s theorisation is what she terms the ‘status model’, which is an
explicit counter-response to approaches to recognition that adopted an ‘identity
model’. Fraser dismisses the latter as reifying or essentialising identity, which she
argues potentially leads to a situation in which group members feel bound by a collec-
tive – and simplified – identity to which they conform. The problem, at its simplest,
is that little allowance is made for inter-group differences or divisions. Moreover, fail-
ure to conform to such overarching identities runs the risk of being labelled inauthen-
tic. This is particularly pertinent to the heritage sector, where communities are
currently largely imagined as revolving around a combination of a limited set of char-
acteristics: rural, geographically defined, traditional, working class, ethnic, face to
face, and so forth. The identity model thus serves, as Fraser (2008b, p. 131) points out,
as a mechanism for misrecognition. Ironically, it also blends each individual member
of a group into a blander, homogenous collective, with no allowance for internal
unease, disappointment, conflict or power. It is this model that is most easily aligned
with dominant understandings of community within the heritage sector.
By way of alternative, Fraser’s (2001, p. 24) status model privileges the status of
group members, rather than collective identity, so that it is individuals within groups
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International Journal of Heritage Studies 11
that are seeking to be ‘full partners in social interaction’. If we adopt this take on
participatory parity, we are simultaneously bound to examine and challenge institu-
tionalised patterns of cultural value, particularly in terms of their effect on individu-
als. If, as in the heritage sector, such patterns render some collectives as normalised
whilst others are subordinated, Fraser (2008b, p. 135) suggests that we can speak of
misrecognition or status insubordination, through which swathes of individuals are
comparatively thought of as being unworthy of esteem. If recognition is not extended
to someone, they are, in effect, ‘not seen – as a full human being whose presence
matters’ (Sennett, cited in Lister 2008, p. 169). Examples of this include the margin-
alisation of contemporary Afro-Caribbean groups such as Ligali during the framing of
the 2007 bicentenary of the abolition of the British slave trade. Here, people of Afro-
Caribbean descent were not accorded the right to decide which aspects of a traumatic
past – and its meaning – were remembered, and were instead flattened into a softer
and broader narrative of British achievement (see Wallace 2006, Cubitt 2009, Mack
2009, Paton 2009 amongst others for fuller discussion). Examples can also be drawn
from the ways in which established class hierarchies have impeded the ability of
certain working class organisations to be given recognition in the development of
historical and heritage narratives and heritage practices (see for instance Watson
2007, Drake 2008, Wedgwood 2009). Also included is the more general institutional-
isation of symbols of elite cultural experiences as the epitome of ‘heritage’, as is the
case in a variety of administrative codes and professional practices within the sector
(Smith 2006, Smith and Waterton 2009a, Waterton 2009). Consequently, few heritage
professionals ask what people’s views of heritage are beyond the white middle-class
cultural symbols. This failure has meant that social inclusion policies, at least as prac-
tised in the UK, tend to be concerned with assimilating excluded communities into an
understanding of traditional definitions of heritage rather than broadening definitions
to serve a diversity of cultural and historical experiences (Smith 2009). Indeed,
professionals within the heritage sector seem reluctant to give up a little of their
power and allow other groups the status to participate on a par. However, when heri-
tage professionals do work to remodel practice to facilitate equitable participation
they are often constrained by a range of institutional and systemic issues. This issue
has exercised Keith Emerick, a UK heritage professional, when reflecting on and
reviewing his own professional practice (2009). He notes that UK policies of social
inclusion within the heritage sector require that professionals act less like ‘heritage
police’ and instead adopt roles of ‘facilitators’ and ‘enablers’ (Emerick 2009).
Guidance on how this transformation is to be undertaken is not provided, however,
prompting, for Emerick (2009, p. 46), the question: ‘If the existing system was
constructed, maintained and executed by professionals exercising their idea of value,
what was the likelihood that those same people and institutions would reinvent
themselves?’
The conceptualisation of community that dominates in the heritage sector aids
and reinforces the processes of insubordination and the affirmation of the status of
expertise. Indeed, the way that ideas of community have become intertwined with
heritage discourses and practice has rendered communities, as much as their
heritage, as subject to management and preservation. That is, community or group
identity becomes the object of regulation through the heritage management process,
not only reinforcing the power differentials in community–expert relations, but also
ensuring the legitimacy of essentialist notions of ‘community’ and their continual
misrecognition. This occurs because the discourses and values underpinning ideas of
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12 E. Waterton and L. Smith
‘community’, as we have identified them above, not only have exercised the heri-
tage sector internationally following concerns with social inclusion, civic engage-
ment and Indigenous representation, but have done so in a way that finds synergy
within the Western Authorised Heritage Discourse (AHD).
The AHD is, as Smith (2006) has defined it, a professional discourse that validates
and defines what is or is not heritage and frames and constrains heritage practices (see
also Smith and Waterton 2009b). This discourse emphasises the authority of expertise
to act as stewards for the past and its heritage, but also defines heritage as innately
material, if not monumental, aesthetically pleasing and as inevitably contributing to
all that is ‘good’ in the construction of national or group identity. The universality of
heritage values tends to be taken for granted, as, too, is the assumption that heritage is
intimately linked with the expression and manifestation of ‘identity’. Exactly how this
link is maintained remains unproblematised; however, that the link exists is one of the
foundational tenets of the AHD. So too is the idea that heritage must be preserved
unchanged, along with the cultural values that heritage in some way embodies, so that
they can be passed on to future generations. As we have argued elsewhere (Waterton
2009; see also Smith 2006), the AHD works to marginalise and/or fails to recognise
the legitimacy of subaltern communities or other competing concepts of heritage.
However, the AHD does more than reinforce what is or is not legitimate heritage. It
also, by systematically failing to question the linkage between heritage and identity,
renders identity as subject to the interventions of heritage expertise. Heritage manage-
ment and preservation practices defined within the AHD become agents in the regu-
lation and legitimisation of group identity. The cuddly nature of ‘community’,
together with the sense that the heritage sector is engaged in doing ‘good’ through its
engagement with communities, ensures that the problematics of this are hardly artic-
ulated. If, however, community is, as Burkett (2001) and others have suggested, an
ongoing process in which identity is explored and (re)created, then immediate
tensions manifest themselves in the tendency of heritage management processes to
fossilise and ‘preserve’ heritage as unchanged and unchangeable. Identity is not only
essentialised through this process, but subject to the pronouncements and authority of
expert judgements.
Conclusion
In adopting a status model of recognition, our aim is to add to debates seeking to de-
institutionalise patterns of cultural participation, particularly those directed by an
uncritical and unhelpful notion of ‘community’. This requires a number of changes,
not least of which is an epistemological change that shifts community from the realm
of explanation to something in need of explaining (Alleyne 2002). Within the dynam-
ics established by public policy on community engagement and outreach, abstract
ideas of ‘community’ and the practices of the heritage sector as framed by the AHD,
real life communities are not only misrecognised but misrepresentations of identity
become institutionalised in the heritage process.
In this paper, we have focused on two consequences of this process. Firstly, we
have attempted to identify a tendency for white middle/elite classes to be granted a
fuller status within the management process than other socioeconomic or ethnic
groups. Consequently, in Britain, their cultural symbols have come to stand in for, and
define, the national heritage experience. The act of country house visiting or perusing
art galleries, for example, is now privileged over those activities coded as ‘working
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International Journal of Heritage Studies 13
class’. Likewise, the heritage associated with the ‘great’ and the ‘good’ of white
British history is prioritised over histories that deal with the more repugnant charac-
teristics of empire; histories that in many ways could be coded as ‘black’, ‘ethnic’ or
‘feminine’. Secondly, it has also meant that communities of expertise have been
placed in a position that regulates and assesses the relative worth of other communities
of interest, both in terms of their aspirations and their identities. ‘Other’ communities,
therefore, have endured a less than equal footing from which to make claims about
their past, their heritage and their self-image. Indeed, groups affixed with the term
‘community’ (as it is traditionally understood) are often defined, or have their ‘authen-
ticity’ judged, against standards set by the heritage that has been preserved ‘for them’
by heritage agencies and their experts.
Notes on contributors
Dr Emma Waterton holds an RCUK Fellowship in History and Heritage at Keele University.
Her interests include the unpacking the discursive constructions of ‘heritage’; community
involvement in the management of heritage; the divisions implied between tangible and intan-
gible heritage; and the role played by visual media. Publications include the co-authored
volume (with Laurajane Smith) Heritage, Communities and Archaeology (Duckworth 2009)
and the co-edited volume (with Steve Watson) Culture, Heritage and Representations
(Ashgate 2010).
Dr Laurajane Smith was, until recently, Reader of Heritage Studies at the University of York,
UK. From 2010, she will be based in the Research School of Humanities, The Australian
National University. Her research interests include the re-theorisation of heritage, the interplay
between class and heritage, multiculturalism and heritage representation, heritage public policy
and community heritage. She is author of Archaeological Theory and the Politics of Cultural
Heritage (2004); Uses of Heritage (2006); co-author (with Emma Waterton) of Heritage,
Communities and Archaeology; editor of Cultural Heritage: Critical Concepts in Media and
Cultural Studies (2007), and co-editor of Intangible Heritage (2009).
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