The ontological politics of heritage; or how research can spoil a good story

Criminologists, perhaps more than other social scientists, are much exercised by the extent of what they do not know. Theirs is a field dominated by the efforts of the controlling state and its law enforcement apparatus to record criminal behaviour in all its myriad forms, gleaning information that is then used as a basis for policy-making and the allocation of resources to further that end. Important stuff, of course; but it does mean that the study of crime has become more than usually obsessed with the dichotomy of ‘presence’ and ‘absence’ in its thought world. It is well known, for example, that recorded crime is the tip of an iceberg, the remainder of which is made up of a bulky and submerged ‘dark figure’ of unknown and unknowable criminal enterprise, as set out in the well-cited paper ‘On Exploring the Dark Figure of Crime’ by Biderman and Reiss (1967). And then there is the issue of what constitutes crime in the first place, a phenomenon that appears to be bounded more by legal codes than any deeper ontology, and which therefore begets attempts on the part of criminologists to find a better way of describing…what? Law-breaking? And how does that make us judge the law itself? Or is it about deviance, lawful or otherwise? It might seem odd to commence a chapter about heritage research with a reference to criminology, but, as ever with heritage, there is much to be learned from its connections with other disciplines in the social sciences. What we borrow from criminology is the idea of a ‘dark figure’ of heritage – those practices and experiences that lie beyond its conventional, official, touristic, popular or commercial manifestations: in other words, its good stories.Our concern with this is informed by the idea of an ‘ontological politics’, or the recognition that in the definition of what constitutes heritage – and, by extension, heritage research – there are various expressions of definitional power. Some- times these are ‘hard’, as in the form of ideological constructs that are exclusive of other understandings or meanings, and sometimes softer, in the form of received wisdoms, accepted practices, habits. While we have come to this concern with ontological politics via various detours through other fields (see, for example, Mol, 1999), it is from this perspective that our interest in the presence/absence dichotomy that defines heritage – in both commonsense and academic research – emerges. Where, we might ask, is the ‘dark figure’ of heritage, and of what is it constituted? What defines what is present and what is absent in the heritage field? What, then, is Othered? And how can we flex our research into both capturing the latter and truly interrogating it? Here we part company with our criminology colleagues and occupy our own field with thoughts about how we can find a way of addressing these questions, in a way that does justice to the diversity and theoretical complexity that are so evident in the rest of this book