A new model for memory work: nostalgic discourse at a historic home

Abstract

To make domestic heritage sites useful to their communities, we must acknowledge discourses, define structures and critically examine the interplay of our own and others’ practices of commemoration. How do agendas of remembering and forgetting intersect at historic dwellings? These issues are explored through the Elihu Akin House, a late eighteenth‐century house museum in a New England coastal village. Existing site narratives are dissected through the social theories of Peirce and Bourdieu, revealing nostalgia as a structuring element of cultural logics. The author argues that mechanisms of nostalgia, approached critically, offer interpretive common ground for memory work at historic homes (and beyond). As a material and emotional discourse, nostalgia binds memory, place and experience. This study proposes a new model for heritage‐makers seeking to alter site narratives without undermining a site’s established worth. They might identify then disrupt pre‐existing nostalgic narratives, finally bridging those disruptions through additional, critical nostalgic discourses. New and established narratives can coexist, in harmony and in tension, and visitors should be invited into the interpretive process.

Keywords:

• memory
• nostalgia
• heritage
• narrative
• semiotics
• practice theory

Acknowledgements

My co‐editor Christa M. Beranek is a friend and a scholar. I thank her, anonymous reviewers and journal editor Laurajane Smith for helping to strengthen this piece; I thank assistant editor Emma Waterton for her assistance with style details. Mistakes of fact and missteps of opinion are my own. I am grateful to all contributors to this issue for their efforts and insights, here and in the practical world of memory‐making. They – alongside participants in the original conference session at the 2009 Theoretical Archaeology Group meeting in Palo Alto, California – inspire me always to be more thoughtful, more engaged and more useful. I also recognise the Dartmouth Heritage Preservation Trust, the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Claire T. Carney Library Archives and Special Collections and the Waterfront Historic Area League of New Bedford for their support of archaeology and preservation at the Akin House heritage site, past, present and future.

Notes

1. An ‘icon’ is a sign that refers via a mimetic likeness. A photograph of a house is an icon of that house (see Figures 1 and 2). An ‘index’ symbolises an object by referring to that object through proximity, causality or effect. The Akin House indexes a ‘family’ even though no one lives there because of its original purpose of housing a family unit, expressed through a conventional architectural form. A ‘symbol’ refers to a thing only through established use and meaning. The Akin House now symbolises a unique town identity.

2. While Peirce’s ontology is generally anti‐anthropocentric, it accounts for perception via the notion of ‘interpretants’, the understanding or context‐specific translation of the original sign as icon, index and/or symbol. Interpretants are not subjects, but they are practical subjective understandings. Accounting for interpretants opens an accounting of context, experience, bias and emotive response. Even so, Peircian semiotics, with its roots in scientific realism, might be criticised as too static and descriptive for interrogating culture as process (as in Preucel 2006). In realms of material practice, however, I believe that Peirce’s semiotics – especially the concept of interpretants – couples naturally with Pierre Bourdieu’s structural framing of cultural logics and social reproduction.

3. Mark Dion was born in New Bedford and stages assemblage/museum/collection‐inspired interventions in spaces around the world. Coincidentally, I also participated in Dion’s 2001New England Digs project. I was as conflicted about that project as ThirdMate seems about mine (for a discussion of Dion, see Vilches 2007).

4. A standard site report for work in 2007 has been written (Hodge 2008); 2008 and 2009 reports are in process.

5. Historical archaeology in particular has been critiqued, I think unfairly, for what some read as its overreaching claims to be a ‘direct bridge’ to the past (Mayne 2008). Few, if any, practising historical archaeologists claim direct access to the past or that such a thing even exists.