Contesting the Center

ABSTRACT

The twenty-first century has witnessed significant changes in heritage management practice and scholarship. This paper suggests that many of these innovations and changes have emerged as a consequence of protest or provocation from groups outside the established heritage profession. While the centre and the periphery are relative terms, the periphery in heritage can be regarded as geographic and spatial but also political, social and cultural. The periphery might therefore include regional or minority communities, indigenous peoples, regional and remote areas or even fields of scholarship. The periphery is thus a socio-political space that reflects power inequalities and differential rights from those at the centre. Where the periphery is able to critique the centre, the relationship between the two is renegotiated. This paper suggests that in moving between the centre and the periphery, innovations in heritage emerge. While heritage regimes have undergone significant reformation, this paper suggests that it is the periphery that has advocated, and acted as the catalyst, for change.

KEYWORDS:

• Contested heritage
• heritage management
• marginalized

This collection considers the relationships between the center and periphery in heritage management and practice, and the way in which the tensions between the two create a space of innovation and change. The center and the periphery are regarded as relative terms that can only be defined in relation to one another. In this volume, they are revealed as geographic, political, economic, and cultural differences at a global scale, between nations, within countries and between ethnicities and social groups, and between the empowered and disempowered.

The volume explores some of the ways in which protest, provocation, and subversion by marginalized groups can disrupt formal processes of heritage management, to produce significant change and innovation at the center. It further explores how challenges to established heritage authority can reignite old conflicts. Issues of identity and sovereignty are a major source of conflict and contestation in heritage. As those in power seek to promote particular narratives of history and identity, invariably other stories and places become marginalized. Access to and interpretation of cultural sites and practices favor particular peoples, cultures, eras, or narratives, frequently sparking protest by marginalized groups (e.g., Hall 1999; Jones 2005, 96; Smith 2006; Harrison 2010; Silverman 2010; Gnecco 2015). Political disputes also emerge around differences between regions and cities, particularly where local regional practices are appropriated or erased by national narratives, and where decision making is centralized and geographically distant from the everyday practices and knowledge that constitute local heritage. Negotiations and responses to such conflicts have led to changes in how heritage is defined and identified. This in turn has created opportunities for new academic approaches to heritage. Previously the domain of material culture, with a basis in archaeology and architecture, heritage is increasingly considered from the perspectives of anthropology, geography, social history, literature, and folklore.

This special issue explores how the continuous renegotiation of heritage as a consequence of challenges from those at the periphery forces us to critically evaluate our approaches to heritage practice and theory. The impacts can be widespread; altering heritage practice locally can challenge the authority of peak bodies such as UNESCO, the World Heritage Committee, and national governments, and effect direct change at a systemic level (Logan 2001, 2004; Harrison 2013). The contributions to this volume consider how, despite such advances, the center often fails to recognize, respond, and accommodate the rapid and diverse challenges posed by those at the margins.

Centers and Peripheries

The center and periphery is perhaps most commonly or readily understood as a relative spatial relationship, in which the periphery is defined in terms of its physical distance from a center. For heritage conservation with its focus on sites and material culture, spatial relations are significant. At a global scale, there are significant differences in the capacity for heritage conservation in the developed and developing worlds (the global north and the global south). Spatial distances between the center—as represented by authorities and decision makers in capital cities and world centers—and those who live with, create, and understand heritage in regional and remote areas have further implications for recognition and conservation of heritage. While rapid development in urban areas is recognized as placing immense pressure on heritage of cities and urban areas (Winter 2013, 535), the vast scale of extractive industries such as mining and forestry can have enormous impacts on heritage in rural or regional areas. However, destruction of heritage in sparsely populated regions may be ignored because its remoteness renders it invisible to administrative and government centers that monitor such impacts. In many instances, it can also be invisible to the scrutiny of non-government organizations and a voting public.

While many of these issues include a spatial dimension, they extend much further. Significantly, Logan (2001) distinguishes between peripheries and “peripheralization” suggesting that older ideas of the periphery as strictly a measure of distance from the center have been revised to consider the economic, social, and political influences that produce peripheries (also Albahari 2008, 142–143). Peripheralization then extends far beyond a special definition and it becomes possible to recognize peripheries at a number of scales. While a division between core and periphery continues to exist between the metropolis and rural areas, and between the developed and developing worlds, socio-spatial peripheries are also present within the developed world and within urban centers. For instance, increased industrialization and urbanization globally has led to a polarization between “dynamic, growing metropolitan areas and rural or old industrial regions experiencing processes of shrinkage and decline” in Europe and other developed countries (Kühn 2015, 367). And significantly within the urban center there are patterns of core and periphery that manifest in rich and poor neighborhoods that suffer comparable inequalities. While for heavily place-oriented heritage, there often remains a preoccupation with physical space, the periphery–center relationship clearly has a social dimension. For instance, the invisibility of certain types of heritage often reflects a socio-political periphery in which particular forms of built heritage are more readily recognized as culturally significant. It is this social and cultural expression that can render the same space multiple places, and through which a single heritage property might be contested by the center or periphery.

The papers in this volume thus interpret the periphery in multiple ways: geographic and spatial but also political, social, and cultural. The political center–periphery manifests with regard to different levels of governance such as international, national, and local as well as through socio-political action. We regard the periphery as a socio-political space that reflects power inequalities and differential rights from those who are at the center. Significantly, the volume also highlights the ways in which the center and periphery are mutually constituted and renegotiated. It is in moving between the center and the periphery that innovations in heritage emerge.

Heritage Practice as Colonial Center

Heritage management and conservation practices have their origin in the nineteenth century post-Enlightenment Western Europe, Britain, and North America. Harrison (2013, 42–67) argues that an Enlightenment preoccupation with the public sphere led to an interest in preserving natural and cultural environments. It is from this point that the physical manifestations of the past—often in the form of archaeological sites—became integrated with modernist ideas of the nation as fixed, bounded, and homogenous (Graham, Ashworth, and Tunbridge 2000; Harrison 2013). Through the twentieth century state control over this heritage increased exponentially, as nation-states came to define what constituted heritage through decisions about which aspects of the past would be used to tell the authorized stories of the nation (Byrne 1991; Hall 1999; Graham, Ashworth, and Tunbridge 2000; Harrison 2013, 45). While these ideas of who defines heritage, belonging and national identity are widely contested, the issues they raise are felt even more keenly outside the EuroAmerican context, especially where legislative frameworks developed in Western Europe and North America were subsequently exported to colonies in Africa and Asia.

There has been extensive critique of established heritage practice that suggests the frameworks of heritage conservation are largely incompatible with the heritage practices of diverse non-European cultures or even local non-Western European traditions (Albahari 2008). Heritage management is criticized as a colonial concern that imposes Eurocentric ideas on subordinate and marginalized communities. Heritage studies and an evolution of best practice have sought to be responsive to these issues and develop broader definitions of what constitutes heritage, as well as policies and practices that are more inclusive of diverse cultural practices (Logan 2004; see, also, Winter 2014). Frequently cited examples include the growing recognition or consideration of social significance in heritage assessments, and the recognition of so-called intangible heritage in the form of practices and knowledge as a significant form of heritage. Both are regarded as significant developments in creating a more responsive heritage system with greater capacity for inclusivity. Despite this, the practices of heritage management can still be regarded as originating in and continuing to flow from the center to the periphery. This collection of papers seeks to explore how, despite this apparent flow, it is in fact those at the periphery who frequently provide the catalyst for change at the center.

Many of the criticisms leveled at heritage management practices are linked to the way in which heritage operates as an instrument of colonialism (see Harrison and Hughes 2010). In this regard, colonial powers are clearly designated as the socio-political and cultural center. The rapid expansion into and exploitation of the New World resulted in physical impacts and destruction of cultural resources at the periphery, and more significantly brought about extensive and manifest impacts on the cultural practices that produce and maintain such heritage. Furthermore, the frameworks for recognizing cultural significance and mitigating such impacts and losses are characterized by colonial preoccupations. While these issues have been characterized as a product of colonialism, the related impacts of globalization are also accountable. For instance, it is clear that the bureaucratic apparatus for heritage management is part of a larger imposition of institutional structures of administration, business, and industry, that is fundamentally “inspired by and modeled on those of the center” (Hannerz 1989, 206). Established heritage regimes have primarily valued and conserved the material and monumental (Smith 2006) within a framework dominated by risk and endangerment, imposing these priorities on the recognition and conservation of heritage everywhere (Harrison 2015). In many instances, these priorities are incompatible with cultural practices that value change and continuity of practices more than a fixed materiality. Globalization, especially through the growth of new technology, is a particular threat to cultural diversity in that it is no longer only material products that are exchanged and exploited, but the meanings attributed to those materials and practices are also more readily transported over vast distances (Hannerz 1989, 206).

Nevertheless, Hannerz (1989) suggests that such “radical diffusionist” views of globalization in which the center inevitably imposes itself and destroys the periphery, may be oversimplified with respect to culture. Like Wuthnow he suggests that the expansion of core economic and political influence can in fact generate cultural heterogeneity. This is reminiscent of Eriksen’s idea that globalization does not render the world culturally flat, but bumpy in new ways (Eriksen 2015). Following Ortner (1984), Hannerz’s critique of radical diffusionism points out that many theories relating to world systems and globalization are “preoccupied with the power of the center,” and thus portray historical events as solely imposed from the center onto the periphery, rather than considering the events and histories of the periphery in and of themselves (Hannerz 1989, 207–208). This volume extends this critique by suggesting that not only does the periphery create its own cultural responses in unique ways, and constitute its own histories, but suggests that the flow of influence is multidirectional.

Flow Between Periphery and Center

The center has traditionally characterized the periphery as “backward” and “under-developed,” and economic theorists suggest that peripheralization occurs because of a lack of innovation outside of the center. Kühn (2015, 371) argues that such polarizing theories are based on the idea that peripheries are in decline and do not allow for the possibility of “de-peripheralization” or “re-centralization.” The papers in this special issue consider the ways in which innovation is developed not simply in response to demands from the center, but within the periphery itself. It is possible that such considerations are largely overlooked because of this persistent perception by the center that the periphery is insufficiently sophisticated or complex (Kühn 2015). In contrast with economic models, this collection of papers suggests that there is a great deal of innovation in heritage practice at the periphery.

Like economic models, centers and peripheries of heritage management are fluid, and as Kühn (2015, 369) emphasizes “[p]eripheries do not have to remain peripheries forever.” Rather peripheries and centers are created within spatial and temporal dimensions. The economic, political, social, and cultural shifts that comprise peripheralization can equally produce de-peripheralization and re-centralization, and peripheral responses can instigate change at the center (Albahari 2008). This is drawn out in a number of contributions to this volume. Pocock and Lilley outline how some non-European states parties that might be regarded as peripheral in relation to the West, or the World Heritage system in particular, have become part of the center through simultaneous—and sometimes contradictory—actions. On the one hand, such actors represent themselves as marginalized by an “authorized heritage discourse,” and have effectively argued for a greater voice in the political heritage sphere based on a commitment from the center to create greater inclusion of cultural diversity. On the other hand, however, these same parties seek to silence marginalized groups who they perceive to be a threat to sovereignty of the nation state, as seen in the contribution from Hayes.

In another reversal of periphery and center, Woods explores how a previously powerful forestry industry has been peripheralized through changes in public ideology. As public support for conservation, and criticism of extractive industries, has grown, conservationists have moved from marginal protestors to powerful brokers at the center of natural heritage management, while the formerly powerful industry has experienced comparative peripheralization and loss of power. These examples demonstrate how peripheralization is a dynamic political, economic, and social process and that peripheries are produced at and between different spatial scales (Kühn 2015, 369). Furthermore, peripheralization does not always equate to unilateral disempowerment, and this is an important theme of this volume.

The Power of the Periphery

As the examples above suggest the position of periphery can be used to exact greater influence in reconceptualized heritage frameworks that strive to be more inclusive. Those at the periphery have lobbied for changes to national frameworks especially where they have had access to international audiences through United Nations conventions or international publicity (see Harrison 2013). There are several well-documented cases where indigenous people have effectively lobbied international bodies to ensure the protection of their heritage by national governments. This is one of the few ways in which indigenous people can, in fact, exact benefit from the World Heritage system. As Pocock and Lilley outline, however, the World Heritage system continues to be criticized—and in some instances is even more vigorously criticized—by Indigenous people, at the very time that it is striving to be more representative and inclusive of diverse cultures. Their research looks at whether the world heritage system can ever really benefit Indigenous people, because the underlying interconnected issues of sovereignty and translation have such different meanings and implications for indigenous and non-indigenous people. While the issues of marginalization have real consequences, from the margins indigenous people are able to effectively criticize the center.

However, it is not only those who have long been disempowered and recognized as having a right to greater representation in heritage processes who have effectively used the periphery to achieve their goals. As Woods’s paper outlines, the formerly powerful forest industry strategically employs its peripheral status to negotiate and maintain its own agenda. In particular, it employs the tactics of actors in the former conservation periphery to negotiate with, and position itself in relation to, a new center. By positioning itself as peripheral the forestry industry creates a new power dynamic that positions forestry as disempowered and oppressed and the conservation movement as powerful and oppressive.

While much critique of heritage has focused on the imposition of an external system on other peoples and cultures, responses to globalization can also create new responses. This volume considers the ways in which local—or in this instance groups at the periphery—take advantage of opportunities offered by the center. Hannerz (1989, 209–211) argues that rather than regarding local interest in the center (in his instance the geographic urban West) as a displacement of local practices and culture, this interest is in fact an integral part of what is valued in the periphery. Thus rather than dismissing the adoption of established heritage processes and practices by these new actors, we might also look at how and why the periphery values and makes use of conventional heritage rhetoric. This is apparent in the widespread interest in and desire to be part of the World Heritage system even as it is critiqued as being colonial and culturally biased (see Pocock and Lilley, this volume, and Turtinen 2000; Meskell 2012, 2013).

While the periphery is itself a relative position, and one that can be manipulated to socio-political advantage, this is most common where the instruments of the global center—mechanisms such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) can be used to protest the national political center, to achieve a desired outcome. Thus the relatively advantaged members of the periphery can use their peripheral position to challenge the center. However, economic polarization, social inequality, and political power mean that some groups (and their heritage) are more often pushed to the periphery. Hayes explores the example of the destruction of Old Kashgar, an ancient city of significance to the minority Uyghurs. The extensive modifications and destructions of part of Kashgar by the Chinese government are austensibly aimed at improving living conditions of people living in the old city. However, Hayes argues that the destruction of Old Kashgar by the Chinese state not only contravenes its own public commitment to heritage, but more significantly works to control, or even erase, a minority group by rendering them part of the center. Thus there continue to be groups of people, cultures, and forms of heritage that are marginalized and there are severe and real costs for those excluded by the center.

Peripheralization Within the Center

One of the key players in the creation of the periphery continues to be the nation state (see, for example, Herzfeld 1997; Nadel-Klein 2003; Jones 2005). As Poehls (2011, 339) notes, “the nation state is still an undeniable category beyond the surface of everyday life,” and one that strongly influences peripheralization. The nation state continues to authorize particular narratives of belonging, and by implication exclusion, and indeed has been particularly instrumental in postcolonial societies in establishing new national narratives (Harrison and Hughes 2010, 239). Borders and borderlands are integral to the production of territorialized identities creating centers and peripheries, heartlands and borderlands (Rösler and Wendl 1999). They are fundamental to how the nation is imagined, and to the political regulatory and disciplinary practices that constitute the state. In heritage terms, borders help to constitute what lies at the center in terms of an authorized and ordered body of material heritage at the heart of the nation. They are also fundamental to how the nation’s heritage is represented to “others,” whether they are other nations, immigrants, refugees, or tourists. Nevertheless recent research has shown how those at the margins of the nation, economically and politically as well as geographically, use heritage to contest and negotiate their position and the legitimacy of the state as the arbiter of a national past (Tunbridge and Ashworth 1996; Hall 1999; Jones 2005; Harrison 2010; Harrison and Hughes 2010).

Giblin’s paper in this volume, for instance, contrasts authorized pro-poor tourism with pro-poor tourism produced by people who occupy the margins of several African nation-states. In the former, messages about poverty and marginalization are portrayed as part of a centralized—usually historical—national identity, while the others are produced as a counter-narrative. While poverty might be assumed to be a universal indicator of marginalization, Giblin shows how state sanctioned narratives can centralize poverty as an historical aspect of national identity, but where such narratives are not endorsed by the state, they become a form of protest and provocation from the periphery.

Mason also examines the idea of authorized and protest versions of national identity in his examination of foundational narratives of the modern Mexican state. Focusing on commemorations of the Mexican Revolution, the paper explores how the authorized interpretation is linked to a political legacy of celebrated social rights, while smaller regional museums connect the same heritage to the role of revolution in countering a corrupt state. These examples not only show the multiple interpretations of history but also show the innovative ways in which marginalized groups can use established heritage practices to subvert and draw attention to contemporary issues.

Contribution of the Volume

The papers presented in this volume show how the processes of peripheralization, that overlap and influence one another, play out in the context of heritage. The increased interest in critical heritage studies, with its underlying critique of the center, makes it is useful to not only think about centers and margins but the relationships between the two.

The idea of peripheralization is pertinent to the way in which “authorized heritage discourse” is usually critiqued. Many critiques focus on the ways in which such discourses operate to marginalize particular groups of people and forms of heritage. In doing so, these excluded or marginalized groups are themselves at risk of being homogenized or fixed in particular positions in relation to the center. However, the case studies in this volume suggest that the creation of peripheries in heritage is much more dynamic. The spatial dimension of the periphery is not only a matter of geographic distance from the center, but one of social and cultural distinction within regions as well as between regions and geographic centers. Furthermore peripheralization is underscored by political, social, and cultural marginalization, and as such peripheries are created, reformulated, and even dissolved. In this sense, the idea of periphery and center is one that is valuable to think with, rather than the blunter instrument of “us” and “them,” or insiders and outsiders, that characterizes much of the critique of heritage as authorized and heritage as neglected. This volume demonstrates that while some groups continue to be marginalized and disempowered in heritage, those at the periphery can challenge the center to innovate; the periphery may move towards the center or even become a new center or displace a previous center. And those at the center may be peripheralized by political, economic, or social change.

For heritage studies, which have largely been place based, spatial definitions of the center and periphery remain highly relevant. Nevertheless, the social inequalities that give rise to peripheries are arguably of greatest relevance to a new social turn in heritage studies. These theories are much more concerned with understanding social differences as the basis of peripheries and centers in heritage. The papers in this volume make a valuable contribution to this shift not only in representing a diversity of geographic case studies but also in the variety of disciplinary studies. The heritage field has traditionally been predominated by archaeologists, architects, and historians. As heritage broadens its scope to include social and intangible values, new approaches are required. In many instances, traditional disciplines have expanded their own approaches to incorporate the methods of geography and anthropology, for instance, but there is still scope to include those disciplines directly. Heritage practice continues to be dominated by traditional disciplines, but for heritage to deepen its scope, we must be more inclusive of diverse research approaches. This volume contributes to this agenda with research from established heritage disciplines as well as oral history, international relations, anthropology, and tourism.

Acknowledgements

A number of papers for this special issue were developed for an invited session at the Association of Critical Heritage Studies Conference in Canberra, Australia. This session was made possible with generous funding from the Research Leadership Development Program at the University of Southern Queensland.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on Contributors

Celmara Pocock is Associate Professor in Anthropology and Australian Indigenous Studies at the University of Southern Queensland and adjunct Research Fellow at The University of Queensland. Her research interests include aesthetics and senses of place; storytelling and emotion in heritage identification and interpretation; and intersections between heritage and tourism. She has particular interests in social value and community heritage, including Indigenous heritage.

Siân Jones is Professor of Environmental History and Heritage at the University of Stirling. She is an interdisciplinary scholar with expertise in cultural heritage, as well as on the role of the past in the production of power, identity and sense of place. She has published on the politics of the past, cultural memory, authenticity, social value, community heritage and the practice of heritage conservation.

ORCID

Celmara Pocock http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3257-9689

Siân Jones http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6157-7848