Experiencing authenticity at heritage sites: some implications for heritage management and conservation

This article summarizes the results from recent research focusing on the experience and negotiation of authenticity in relation to the historic environment. I argue that approaches to authenticity are still hampered by a prevailing dichotomy between materialist approaches (which see authenticity as inherent in the object) and constructivist approaches (which see it as a cultural construct). This dichotomy means that we have a relatively poor understanding of how people experience authenticity in practice at heritage sites and why they find the issue of authenticity so compelling. Drawing on ethnographic research in Scotland and Nova Scotia, I show that the experience of authenticity is bound up with the network of tangible and intangible relationships that heritage objects invoke with past people and places. I argue that it is these inalienable relationships between objects, people, and places that underpin the ineffable power of authenticity, and this also explains why people use ideas about authenticity as a means to negotiate their own place in the world. A summary of the main thesis developed out of this research is provided with short case examples. The article then highlights the implications for practices of heritage management and conservation

Imagine all the people: Contact interventions and prejudice towards immigrants in schools

Sian Jones - ORCID: 0000-0002-2399-1017 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2399-1017The world that John Lennon imagined in 1971 seems like a far cry from the one we see today. In our increasingly globalized world, rather than sharing among people, recent years have seen a sharp rise in anti-immigrant sentiment in society, and in social exclusion of immigrants, including among children in schools. But John Lennon might not have been far from the mark in suggesting that the power of imagining more harmonious group relations. Research suggests that interventions grounded in imagined intergroup contact (i.e., imagined interaction between social groups) may improve social relations, and reduce prejudice. Such interventions have much promise, but has research shown that they can change behavior towards immigrants? In this article, I highlight how this body of psychological research might inform educational interventions that aim to reduce this prejudice.https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-32/september-2019/imagine-all-people32pubpu

Negotiating authentic objects and authentic selves: Beyond the deconstruction of authenticity

Our understanding of authenticity in the material world is characterized by a problematic dichotomy between materialist and constructivist perspectives. Neither explains why people find the issue of authenticity so compelling, nor how it is experienced and negotiated in practice. There is strong evidence supporting the view that prevailing materialist approaches to authenticity are a product of the development of modernity in the West. The result has been an emphasis on entities and their origins and essences. However, when we look at how people experience and negotiate authenticity through objects, it is the networks of relationships between people, places and things that appear to be central, not the things in themselves. The author argues that these inalienable relationships between objects, people and places underpin the ineffable, almost magical, power of authenticity and explain why people employ it as a means of negotiating their place in a world characterized by displacement and fragmentation. She illustrates this by drawing on ethnographic research surrounding the Hilton of Cadboll cross-slab

"Thrown like chaff in the wind": Excavation, memory and the negotiation of loss in the scottish highlands

Memory has become an important area of research in historical archaeology over the last decade with an increasing focus on retrieving the narratives of subaltern groups and painful memories of conflict, displacement and loss. Drawing on ethnographic research, I explore how archaeological excavation provides an arena for sharing, negotiating and contesting difficult forms of memory associated with the Highland Clearances. I argue that the Clearances involve a kind of "postmemory" revolving around a series of iconic motifs and that this provides a framework for interpretation and action in the present. Coherence is produced not through the "excavation" of silenced narratives, but through social processes of performance, negotiation and "composure," as people engage in a dialogue with past, present and future

Making place, resisting displacement: conflicting national and local identities in Scotland

First paragraph: In recent years, many commentators have stressed that cultural diversity and immigration are integral features of British history (e.g. see Hall 2000; Kushner 1992; Merriman 1997; Ramdin 1999; Walker 1997). Furthermore, ‘four nations’ histories of ‘the Isles’ have highlighted the fault lines of an internally divided series of cultures, which are emphatically hybrid and riddled with conflict (Samuel 1998). Nevertheless, the cultural fault lines that lie within and across the imagined national cultures making up the British Isles tend to be ignored or smoothed over in the context of museums and the presentation of archaeological and architectural heritage. Discourses of national heritage routinely focus on normative cultures which are presented as contained, coherent and homogeneous in essence (see Handler 1988; McCrone 2002), and Britain is no exception (Kushner 1992, Hooper-Greenhill et al. 1997). Admittedly, the ‘Celtic margins’ have been portrayed as a locus of cultural and racial difference in opposition to an English core lying at the heart of Britishness (Norquay and Smyth 2002; Harvey et al. 2002). But this tension has in turn often been associated with an emphasis on smaller-scale, normative, Scottish, Welsh, English and Irish national cultures (e.g. for Scotland see Cooke and McLean 2001; McCrone et al. 1995); a tendency that devolution threatens to enhance. Within these imagined national entities, cultural difference is almost always situated in relation to ‘minority-“non-white”-immigrant’ communities, with the ‘majority-white-indigenous’ population regarded as culturally homogeneous and unproblematic in this respect (Hesse 2000: 10; see also Hall 2000). Not surprisingly, strategies of social inclusion, which play a key role in the contemporary political discourse and social policy of New Labour, tend to mirror this dichotomy in the sphere of heritage and museums. Cultural difference is seen as a basis for exclusion and alienation amongst ethnic minorities, but amongst the majority ‘white’ population exclusion and marginality is attributed to economic depravation or physical factors, such as ill-health and disability (Sandell 2002: 3). The result of these combined strategies is that a core underlying homogeneous national heritage is maintained, with the ‘problem’ of cultural difference located either at national boundaries, or in terms of ‘non-white’, post-1945 immigrant multicultural heritage. 1 Thus, Britishness (and increasingly, in the context of devolution, Englishness, Scottishness and so forth) is ‘the empty signifier, the norm, against which “difference” (ethnicity) is measured’ (Hall 2000: 221)

Early Medieval Sculpture and the Production of Meaning, Value and Place: The Case of Hilton Cadboll

The Hilton of Cadboll Pictish cross-slab is regarded as one of the finest examples of early medieval sculpture in Scotland. The upper portion of the cross-slab is a prime exhibit in the Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, where such sculpture is portrayed as the 'high art' associated with the origins of the Scottish nation. At a local level, attachment to the cross-slab on the east Ross Shire seaboard (modern Highland) has remained strong since its removal in the mid-19th century. So much so, that a full-size reconstruction was commissioned and erected at the medieval chapel site, next to the village of Hilton of Cadboll, in 2000. However, discovery and excavation of the missing lower portion of the cross-slab in 2001 re-ignited controversy over its ownership and presentation and created tensions between national and local interests and identities