The Habitus of Heritage: a Discussion of Bourdieu's Ideas for Visitor Studies in Heritage and Museums

This article argues that Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptual framework of habitus, field and symbolic capital has much to offer museum and heritage visitor studies. However, rather than focusing on his well-known critique of high-cultural taste, the discussion here concerns displays of the ‘ordinary’ and social histories - of occupations, crafts, places, communities. Habitus reveals how visitors to such sites are involved in making value judgments, not solely of aesthetics but also of the social identities on display. In particular, it directs analytic attention to the active positions that visitors take up during the visit. Instead of focusing on their immediate actions and responses, however, or on exhibitions alone, I approach the visit as a moment in a person’s life, where a relationship is constructed between an individual biography, a social field that assigns value to different identities, and the particular set of symbols encountered during the visit. It is suggested that these are appropriated as symbolic ‘tokens’ in accordance with individuals’ practical relation to the world they inhabit. Past experience, memory, and class become crucial here, as these illuminate the subjective stances visitors adopt to the symbols on display, which also involve important affective and non-ideational dimensions. Data from prior visitor research conducted by the author are reanalyzed to illustrate the points made. The aim is to show how visiting is a social practice that mobilises symbolic dimensions of memory and class experience, one which cannot be understood by examining exhibit-visitor interactions in isolation.Key words: visitor studies, heritage, museums, Bourdieu, habits, symbolic capital

Heritage, Governance and Marketization: a case-study from Wales

This paper seeks to uncover what the marketization of heritage means in practice. Ironically, both the sponsors and the critics of heritage may over-estimate how amenable it is to the ‘spirit of enterprise’ (whether loved or loathed). This is particularly the case with heritage visitor-sites which have been set up with regeneration-targeted funding. Their planners and sponsors like to think of them as seed-beds for growing the green shoots of enterprise and economic development in the local sphere. This is in accordance with latter-day political doctrines of entrepreneurial governance and the selling of place (for both place-promotion and tourism). On the other side of the fence, their critics accuse them of selling out to the market, shoe-horning history into a standardized industry and turning local culture into a commodity. I shall argue that this picture is caricatured on both sides

'Community': a useful concept in heritage studies?

This article aims to show the clearly differentiated national context in which concepts of community as used in heritage developed from the late nineteenth century to the present day. In the first part of this article, we look at the origins of the academic use of ‘community’ in Germany from the late nineteenth century to the present day arguing that its association with National Socialism has tainted the concept permanently. In the second part of this article, we move to France, where we also find a long-term scepticism when it comes to the concept of community. The strong republican tradition, which mistrusted everything that was capable of constructing identities that would divide and compartmentalise the republican ethos, rejected notions of community. Ideas associated with community were usually seen as particularist and therefore incompatible with the universalism of republicanism in France. In the final part of the article, we compare the sceptical reception of ‘community’ in the German and French cases with a far more positive left-wing tradition of community studies in Britain. The comparison of the uses of the concept of community in those three countries shows how a transnational dialogue can lead to more theoretically aware use of the concept of ‘community’

Ethnography and data re-use: issues of context and hypertext

This paper seeks to open up debate around context and the re-analysis of stored qualitative data. How to ensure that subsequent users of deposited datasets can appreciate and be guided by the context of the original study? The paper introduces the idea of hypertext as one way of facilitating this. We discuss how „context‟ might be thought through in particular relation to ethnography, where it is frequently difficult to distinguish between data and context, and highlight some of the inherent problems in the notion of archiving ethnographic context. In a discussion focusing in on multimedia, we draw attention to the different kinds of contextual information that are necessary to interpret data in different media forms. The paper‟s starting position is that originators of data and re-users have in front of then a qualitatively different kind of knowledge-base, due to the fact that data and data-records are not the same thing. This doesn‟t rule out re-use but does imply that quite full and careful kinds of documentation are necessary to try and make it sufficiently rigorous, a demand which also, however, has to be balanced against the dangers of information overload. These challenges lead us to question whether the traditional archiving model is the most suitable way of communicating context to re-users; we present some of our insights from work on hypertext to explore the potential of the hyperlink as a key contextualising tool

Genome-Wide Association Study in BRCA1 Mutation Carriers Identifies Novel Loci Associated with Breast and Ovarian Cancer Risk

BRCA1-associated breast and ovarian cancer risks can be modified by common genetic variants. To identify further cancer risk-modifying loci, we performed a multi-stage GWAS of 11,705 BRCA1 carriers (of whom 5,920 were diagnosed with breast and 1,839 were diagnosed with ovarian cancer), with a further replication in an additional sample of 2,646 BRCA1 carriers. We identified a novel breast cancer risk modifier locus at 1q32 for BRCA1 carriers (rs2290854, P = 2.7×10-8, HR = 1.14, 95% CI: 1.09-1.20). In addition, we identified two novel ovarian cancer risk modifier loci: 17q21.31 (rs17631303, P = 1.4×10-8, HR = 1.27, 95% CI: 1.17-1.38) and 4q32.3 (rs4691139, P = 3.4×10-8, HR = 1.20, 95% CI: 1.17-1.38). The 4q32.3 locus was not associated with ovarian cancer risk in the general population or BRCA2 carriers, suggesting a BRCA1-specific associat