Heritage and scale: settings, boundaries and relations

Abstract

While recent years have seen increasing interest in the geographies of heritage, very few scholars have interrogated the difference that scale makes. Indeed, in a world in which the nation state appears to be on the wane, the process of articulating heritage on whatever scale – whether of individuals and communities, towns and cities, regions, nations, continents or globally – becomes ever more important. Partly reflecting this crisis of the national container, researchers have sought opportunities both through processes of ‘downscaling’, towards community, family and even personal forms of heritage, as well as ‘upscaling’, towards a universal understanding of heritage. While such work has had critical impact within prescribed scalar boundaries, we need to build a theoretical understanding of what an emergent relationship between heritage and scale does within the context of dynamic power relations. This paper examines how heritage is produced and practised, consumed and experienced, managed and deployed at a variety of scales, exploring how notions of scale, territory and boundedness have a profound effect on the heritage process. Drawing on the work of Doreen Massey and others, the paper considers how the heritage–scale relationship can be articulated as a process of openness, pluralism and relationality.

Keywords:

• heritage and scale
• heritage and the nation state
• Scotland
• National Museum of Scotland
• Padstow
• Cornwall

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Mary Hilson and Nicola Whyte for comments on previous drafts, along with many students who have contributed to in-class discussions on this material over the last two years. A draft of this paper was presented at the Heritage and Memory workshop, University of Exeter, Tremough campus (September 2013), and an early draft of ideas presented to the Theorizing Heritage workshop, University of Sydney (November 2010). I would like to thank the attendees for some stimulating questions and discussion during and following these events. I would also like to thank the Editor and anonymous referees for their helpful comments and advice on an earlier draft of this paper.

Notes

1. In the UK, such debate has often been couched within the rhetoric of the Big Society, but recourse to the idea that heritage somehow supports and stimulates a broad sense of ‘togetherness’ has a much wider usage.

2. Association of Critical Heritage Studies, Gothenburg Conference, June 2012. The first such regional grouping put forward was for a Swedish chapter, which immediately prompted a discussion of whether this should be ‘Swedish’ or ‘Scandinavian’ in character.

3. A neat example of this, which can be connected to footnote 1, is the way in which the Skansen open air museum and Nordiska Museet, Stockholm, Sweden were founded and developed in reference to the waxing and waning of ‘Nordic’ identity in relation to ‘Swedishness’ (see Goodnow and Akman 2008; Hilson 2008). In its early years, Skansen was used to support an overtly ‘Scandinavianist’ agenda, and so included reassembled farmsteads from Norway, for instance, which now seem curiously out of place amid the display of Swedish cultural artefacts.

4. Made in 1320, in support of Robert the Bruce’s claim to the Scottish throne, the most widely cited passage of the Declaration of Arbroath reads: ‘for, as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom – for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself’.

5. See also Shore’s (2007) work on attitudes to ‘coloured up’ heritage among BME groups in Gloucester.

6. All internet form quotes are sic. and are anonymised.