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24
WORKING WITH COMMUNITIES •
www.ahi.org.uk
ACHIEVING SELF-IDENTITY
AND SELF-WORTH
Jon Kohl looks at how participatory
interpretative frameworks can
strengthen community identities.
Interpretive planners with development
experience and facilitation skills can guide
communities through the creation of meanings
held and displayed in interpretive frameworks,
which contribute to community self-identity and
self-worth. These frameworks not only allow
them to design more authentic heritage products,
but also to more fully participate in development
projects of all kinds. The interpretation
community has underestimated the role of
interpretation in community
development.
INTERPRETATION AS
COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT
STRATEGY
The difference between heritage and resources
are the meanings that a community ascribes.
Once a consensus emerges that a resource
indeed embodies significant meanings, we call
that resource ‘heritage’, even though no such
consensus may exist on what those meanings
are. Though consensus may seem elusive, the
RIGHT:
Figure 1: Partial interpretive framework from
a university community (CATIE, in Costa Rica)
showing examples of descriptions, attractions
and stories matched to messages.
25
SPRING 2014 • VOLUME 19 • NUMBER 1 •
www.ahi.org.uk
prize well merits the hunt. A community’s self-
esteem, self-identity, pride and even market
potential all depend on meanings that people
both inside and outside the community assign
to the place. Often residents may perceive only
a shadowy notion of their site’s worth or its
central story and have never joined their
thoughts with those of fellow members in
a facilitated, consensus-based conversation.
Most communities cannot boast the attractive
power of, say, Paris and not just because they
do not share such outstanding heritage. Often
they have never even articulated a collective
meaning. Thus they suffer a confused self-
identity and self-worth that can inhibit
development, especially in poor, underdeveloped
communities, leading to a lack of self-
confidence and dependency on outsiders.
If indeed interpretation can be used by skilled
interpretive facilitator-planners to help people
forge collective meanings, (meanings that
help them to more deeply understand and
appreciate their own community), then perhaps
interpretation could be not only a therapeutic
tool, but a force to promote development,
especially in heritage tourism.
Communities that cannot articulate their
meanings, or have been wooed into declaring
marketing slogans or have lost inherited
meanings can fall victim to uncontrolled
tourism that threatens the very heritage
and value that attracted tourists in the first
place. To avoid meaninglessness or to pull
communities from a negative story that chains
them down, interpretation can meet the need,
but first interpreters must cast down the
traditional consultant-driven approach. Instead,
interpretive planners need to become meaning
facilitators and one tool that can help is the
participatory interpretive framework.
INTERPRETIVE FRAMEWORKS
GUARD COMMUNITY
MEANINGS
An interpretive framework holds local and
universal meanings, stories, attractions and
symbols relevant to a community on a single
page so that people can view the entire
framework. Aside from the hierarchical,
interrelated web of interpretive messages
themselves, the framework may include brief
descriptions of each message offering evidence
for perspectives revealed in messages as well as
how messages connect to the local site. They
may also include short lists of principal site
attractions and stories that correspond to
different messages in the framework (Figure 1).
It is through attractions and stories, as well as
interpretive products, that visitors encounter
and experience messages.
While the bottom row may have messages that
directly refer to the interpreted site (Figure 3),
the upper echelons display universalised
messages that express some truth applicable
throughout the world, for which the interpreted
site proves an outstanding illustration. Through
this universalisation of meaning as we ascend
the pyramid, local stories enjoy a direct
connection to revealed truths relevant to
people around the world, thus tying local
reality into greater arcs of consciousness and
importance, granting even the most forlorn
place its rightful place in the evolving universe.
MEANING MUST BE
CO-CREATED
For an interpretive framework to have any
chance of success, a wide and diverse slice of
the community must participate in its forging.
If they do not co-create, they will not own, and
when the intervener leaves, the framework will
fall into disuse. If key community perspectives
are left out, people who represent those
perspectives may not support the framework.
Co-owning is not enough though; a community
must be accompanied in its learning to use,
practise, know and create a new habit to
integrate it into daily work. There must be
enough awareness of its utility and even
leadership to try out the initiative.
INTERPRETIVE FRAMEWORKS
ARISE THROUGH PARTICIPATION
The methodology herein described comes
from the PUP Global Heritage Consortium’s
Interpretive Framework module, part of
its Public Use Planning Process
(www.pupconsortium.net). The one-day
workshop consists of two principal exercises:
Historical Scan. While site history may be well
documented in books, when a community
reconstructs it collectively its members come
to understand its evolution and its eras in a
new collective light, out of which arise stories
that will later populate the framework as well
as possible theme ideas that feed into the
afternoon session (Figure 2). While this step
is not essential to an interpretive framework, its
RIGHT:
Figure 2: Residents of Union Island, the most
southern island in St. Vincent and the Grenadines,
used the historical scan technique to identify
stories, eras, and themes in their island’s history.
This participatory tool is the first of three principal
steps in developing a community interpretive
framework.
© Jon Kohl
26
WORKING WITH COMMUNITIES •
www.ahi.org.uk
absence lessens the group’s ability to develop a
collective flow and work together, which will be
well served in the upcoming exercise.
Consensus creation of emerging messages. The
steps follow the Consensus Workshop Method,
a participatory tool, along with the ‘Historical
Scan’ within the Technology of Participation,
developed by the Institute for Cultural Affairs.
Essentially, the facilitator asks participants to
brainstorm significant attributes about the site
which participants then group, name, and
analyse into short thematic phrases, called
‘emerging messages’ (Figure 3). Later the
facilitator works with a small committee of
participants to convert emerging messages into
interpretive messages and then to fill out the
hierarchy of 4–7 messages, local to universal.
INTERPRETIVE PLANNERS
REQUIRE NEW SKILLS
Carrying out an interpretive framework in a
community development context requires
a new job description for conventional
interpretive planning consultants. Such
workers need training in participatory process
facilitation, experience in community
development, and a deep sensitivity to interior
issues of both individual and collective minds,
such as concerns, motivations, values and
consciousness. Anyone who works in
development should also be emotionally
mature, have an ego in check, and be willing
to accompany communities during extended
periods. Of course, they also have to be expert
interpreters, especially capable of helping others
make connections between local stories and
universal meanings and then help them capture
these meanings in well-crafted messages.
LEFT:
Figure 3: The interpretive framework for
El Cocuy National Park in Colombia
illustrates how a framework is built from
the bottom up, from emerging messages
produced in plenary through local and
universal messages written by a small
committee with the approval of the
plenary.
Jon Kohl is coordinating facilitator of
the PUP Global Heritage Consortium
and writes a blog on international
heritage interpretation. www.facebook.
com/heritageinterpretation.
This article was derived from a presentation he
gave at the European Association for Heritage
Interpretation conference in Sigtuna, Sweden,
in June 2013.
BELOW:
Figure 4: The co-ordinator for the historic centre
of the World Heritage City of Evora, Portugal leads
individuals from throughout the city in creating its
interpretative framework, drawing on thousands of
years of history.
© Jon Kohl
