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Interpret Europe European Association for Heritage Interpretation
72
minds (summary)
Philipp P. Thapa (Germany)
Philipp P. Thapa is an ecologist, philosopher,
and writer. He has worked in international
conservation and development, taught ethics
and environmental philosophy at several
universities, and published literary writings and
translations. As a fellow of the Sustainable
Europe Research Institute Germany, he leads the
research under The Big Green (202327), an EU
project on culture and sustainability.
Contact: philipp.thapa@seri.de
Abstract
That we try to persuade each other of what we
believe to be true and good is a commonplace
and often beneficial part of social life. More so,
some situations are inherently about and for
persuasion. When we attend a lecture or read a
newspaper comment, we at least accept the risk
of having our minds changed, and we often
want just that, in that we want to learn
something. The same applies to guided heritage
tours. Still, heritage interpreters, like teachers or
journalists, find themselves in a position of
special trust and hence special responsibility. If
they use it to challenge and influence their
obligation to make their agenda transparent
and be prepared to support it with arguments,
not just appeals or suggestive storytelling.
Keywords
persuasion, ethics of interpretation, good
practice, Socratic method
Introduction
It is quite literally the job of heritage interpreters
to help their audiences make sense of the world
and our place in it, at least as reflected in the
piece of the world they happen to be
interpreting. In other words, interpreters have a
platform, and many of them feel that they
should use it to encourage sustainable
behaviour. Depending on the audience, this may
require no more than affirming, in passing, what
people already believe and practise. In other
cases, encouraging sustainable behaviour may
requ
as the theme of this conference asks us to
consider. Between particular habits and
comprehensive mindsets, which combine
worldviews, ethics, politics, and more, there
extends a wide field of topics, large and small,
on which interpreters may want to change
I condense the subject matter of this paper by
as a general term covering topics of all sizes as
well as various degrees of intended influence. Of
course, raising a question is not the same as
brainwashing an audience. Arguably, however,
in the context of a conference that introduces its
radical shifts in our way
of life are needed
polite challenges and open-ended discussion
serve the ultimate purpose of making people
(I bracket here the question how effective
to changing behaviour. I tend to agree with
David Uzzel (and Karl Marx) that on a societal
scale it is often more effective to change
behaviour first by changing the material,
economic and legal conditions within which
people make their lives. Minds will follow. Then
again, it is easier for governments to implement
Conference 2024 Challenging mindsets through heritage interpretation Proceedings
73
such lifestyle-changing policies if the dominant
cultural values or mindset supports them. And
of course, however effective as a point of
interpreters get to work on.)
Is it okay for heritage interpreters to try and
minds? After all, this could be seen as adding an
undue moral and political agenda to
interpretation, among other conceivable
objections.
I consider this question from an ethical point of
To think or act ethically is
to take care for the basic needs and legitimate
expectations of others as well as our own.
(Weston 2013:5)
For our present purposes, keep in mind the
following questions: Who are the others that
interpreters should take care for? What
legitimate expectations should interpreters
strive to meet? And how should their own needs,
hopes, and desires influence their decisions in a
professional context?
The situation
The first step of an ethical assessment should be
to understand the situation (cf. Bleisch et al.
individual case but a generalised type of
situation, the one heritage interpreters find
themselves in when doing their job.
Stakeholders are the persons (or, more
generally, beings, depending on your ethical
outlook) who could be affected by the
include the interpreter themselves and relevant
most obvious
immediate audience, such as a group of people
taking a guided tour around a heritage site or
the visitors of a related exhibition or website.
In addition, recall what sustainable development
means and why someone would consider using
their platform as an interpreter to change
that the stakeholders also include everyone in
the world who could be affected by any actual
changes in the behaviour of audience members.
These indirect stakeholders range from
immediate associates of a person who tries to
live more sustainably today to everyone whose
chances for a good life in the future, say in 30 or
100 years, stand or fall with the cumulative
effects of such individual efforts.
At the same time, as the horizon of this ethical
decision-making situation expands, the causal
link between the effect any individual interpreter
has on their audience and future states of the
world quickly blurs and disappears. This means
that an interpreter cannot be sure what good, if
any, their sustainable-development messaging
does. At the same time, if they deliver a bad
interpretation experience or otherwise wrong
their audience in the process, the moral damage
will be quite concrete and immediate. This
makes it hard to use our shared responsibility to
future people as a blanket justification.
As this conference has taught me, when I ask
how heritage interpreters should interact with
their audience, I have already answered another
contested question: Should there be
professional interpreters in something like the
traditional sense at all, instead of everyone
doing interpretation by and for themselves? As
will become clearer below, I think there is much
to be said for professional interpreters who
-
informed questions and alternatives. In their
respective talks and responses at this
conference, Patrick Lehnes and others have
argued for and about this with reasons arising
from research-based theories and extensive
practical experience. For my present purposes,
Interpret Europe European Association for Heritage Interpretation
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however, I think I get can get away with an
argument by analogy.
Recall our moral question: Is it okay for heritage
behaviour by changing their minds? If you think
heritage institutions and professionals should
avoid offering a specific interpretation of
heritage, it is only consistent to reject the even
more intrusive idea of using interpretation to
contributions to this conference had expressed
such qualms by suggesting that we need to
hen
which approaches are acceptable and which are
(Interpret Europe 2023). In comparison, the
audience at my talk, or at least its vocal
members, seemed quite nonchalant about
instrumentalising their professional role for the
worthy cause of sustainable development.
My answer mirrors this situation in that it has
two corresponding parts. Firstly, heritage
interpreters belong in a category of
professionals that also includes teachers,
journalists, or artists. These professions are
united by the fact that it is part of their job to
challenge what people believe and try to change
their minds if necessary, including by making
them see the world in new ways that may
change their lives. This grouping of professions
makes sense despite the fact that our legitimate
expectations towards teachers, journalists, and
artists differ widely in other ways. With teachers
and journalists, heritage interpreters share a
responsibility to be truthful when reporting
facts, and transparent about the way they
interpret them. The example of artists of all
majority of the population in liberal democratic
societies, positively revel in exchanges of diverse
interpretations of the world and of what is
important in life. Therefore, as a principle, if the
typical work of teachers, journalists, and artists
is morally permissible, then so must be the
transparent attempt of heritage interpreters to
educate their audience on sustainable
development.
Secondly, however, just as for other professions,
the freedoms and powers of heritage
interpreters come with related responsibilities
and pitfalls.
Among the moral pitfalls that heritage
interpreters should be aware of as part of their
general professional ethic (as I imagine it), it is
moralising, manipulation, and lying or warping
the truth that seem most relevant to our present
discussion. These terms may sound a bit
each of these failings comes as a gradual scale
of moral shadiness rather than a singular type of
bad action. The question you should ask is, how
does the way I interact with my audience rate on
each of these scales (among others)? Be careful
to keep the overall shadiness down as much as
possible.
Moralising. As someone who teaches ethics in
the context of nature conservation and
sustainable development, I have often found
myself in the position of telling (prospective)
professionals that they should ask moral
doing their job, and use moral reasoning to
figure out what is right. It amounts to teaching
people to see moral problems potentially
that this extension of moral concern can itself be
harmful and requires a balancing awareness
against moralism (Taylor 2012). Imagine a
religious or political fanatic who insists on
pressing their particular beliefs on you at every
son.
While offering some moral perspective and
Conference 2024 Challenging mindsets through heritage interpretation Proceedings
75
discussion can be a legitimate and valuable part
every piece of information, topic, or situation
calls for moral judgment and messaging,
including in terms of sustainable development.
Manipulation. While moralistic appeals may
cross a line, they are at least easy to spot,
enabling the audience to disregard them if they
want to. Manipulation relies on influencing
people without them having a clear idea of what
is going on. Unfortunately, you may slip into
manipulation in the very attempt of avoiding
open moralising. For example, some
participants at my talk mentioned how they
select and arrange information so that their
audiences will arrive at certain conclusions by
themselves. Depending on details and degree,
this can be just good teaching, or it can be a
morally dubious alternative to making your
message transparent.
Lying and warping the truth. Further down the
slippery slope of manipulation, telling the truth
story and then into outright lying all for the
good cause, supposedly. Beware of the danger.
Good practice
If you do decide to promote sustainable
behaviour in your heritage interpretation, the
following principles can help you do it
responsibly.
Be transparent. If people come to you to learn
about heritage and you frame the factual
information in a certain way or add a message,
you give them a fair chance to decode what you
tell them, to object, or to walk away.
overdo it). Perhaps needless to say, heritage
interpretation should focus on the heritage, lest
it turn into an exercise in Education for
Sustainable Development that the audience
Keep the conversation open. Even if you send a
strong message, make sure to invite questions
lecture, but offer a conversation.
Know your claims and arguments. Like all
learning experiences, heritage interpretation
works with emotions, and it may involve various
styles and devices of communication including
storytelling, jokes, suggestive audiovisuals, and
the design of visitor environments. Such a mix
of media can help avoid lecturing and make
space for different voices and interpretations.
However, when you claim a fact, you should be
able to support this claim with evidence. In the
same way, when you try to convince people that
they should act differently, you should be
prepared to back this up not just with stories or
emotional appeals, but with clear arguments. Do
you know what you claim when you try to turn
do you have good arguments to support your
case? (The audience at my talk seemed rather
fuzzy on this.)
Respect dissent. Some people may reject even
your best arguments. Some may make
alternative claims that you think are false.
Respect their freedom to disagree with you
while making it clear that you disagree with
them. Then continue the conversation with the
whole audience.
Conclusion: Philosophy over rhetoric
The sets of principles and moral pitfalls in the
previous sections are ad-hoc proposals meant
to set us thinking. I came up with them based on
the idea that interpreting with the goal of
(cf. Kastely 2022 on the ethics of persuasion). I
make no attempt here to explore how they
Interpret Europe European Association for Heritage Interpretation
76
relate to the larger conversation about good
practice in heritage interpretation (for recent
contributions see TEHIC n. d., UNESCO 2022,
Interpret Europe 2020). Judging from the
for the Interpretation and Presentation of World
Heritage Sites (e.g., UNESCO WHIPIC 2023), the
global community of professionals and
researchers recognises various ethical issues in
aware, a coherent ethics of heritage
interpretation that could inform good practice
remains to be spelled out. Let my talk serve to
underline that this could be a worthwhile
project.
I came to this conference as an environmental
philosopher newly working on the relationship
between arts/design/culture and sustainable
development (under a European project called
The Big Green,
13
with partners including
Interpret Europe). It was my first immersion in
the professional community of heritage
interpretation, but I immediately felt at home.
One reason is that I began my own career as a
volunteer at a national park or, as I now know
to say, in the field of natural heritage
conservation and interpretation and still hope
to return to that kind of work. The other reason
is that the more examples I saw of what
interpreters do, the more familiar it seemed.
philosophy in a classroom, I know that some
colleagues offer philosophical walks and other
forms of outdoor philosophy, open to everyone.
To bring the similarities to a head,
environmental philosophy as a whole can be
described as an effort to interpret the
relationship between humans and their natural
heritage. If this seems plausible, then consider
the flipside: Heritage interpreters, whose job is
routinely defined as facilitating a meaning-
making process (e.g., UNESCO WHIPIC 2023: 8;
13
https://thebiggreen.philippthapa.me
Tilkin 2016: 7), always-already find themselves in
the role of philosophers, for better or worse.
With this in mind, I may be professionally biased
in making the following final point. It has been a
long time coming, ever since Plato wrote the
dialogue known as Gorgias around 380 BCE. In
it, the founding figure of Western philosophy,
Socrates, argues with a professional speaker,
Gorgias, and some of his colleagues about the
nature and worth of rhetoric. Socrates criticises
this
producing a desired effect on the minds of the
audience. Against it, he sets his own style of
conversation, which has come to define
philosophy and, by extension, the ideal of the
sciences, informing modern expectations
towards good communication in general. At its
best, a Socratic, philosophical conversation uses
questioning and reasoning to discover the truth
(as Socrates puts it), as a team, in an open-
ended way, without a foregone conclusion.
Heritage interpreters face the same choice, or
rather they need to strike a good balance
between persuading their audience of what they
believe is right and keeping the conversation
open. When in doubt, I hope you will choose
philosophy.
Conference 2024 Challenging mindsets through heritage interpretation Proceedings
77
References
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