Kelly Loughlin’s recent blog post resonated in many ways with my own
research which relates to cultural heritage and sense of place. Among the
many connections, some of which I have been able to include in the mind-map below, I wanted to tease out a few to expand upon.
The key ideas emerging from Kelly’s piece relate to memory,
commemoration, continuity, loss and resistance. I’d like to take each of these in turn
beginning with the notion of memory. For
Kelly, South West Burnley is a landscape of memory, physical changes and gaps
in the urban environment bringing memory to the fore. We became quite excited
yesterday as we exchanged our thoughts around the idea that physical places are
only the residue of much richer and more complex landscapes that exist within a
community’s imagination.
Catherine Degnen (2005) has written about
‘memory talk’, in a study of local people in Dodworth, South Yorkshire where
their conversation continually made reference to both buildings and people long
absent. For Degnen talk, “shuttled between present and past, individual and
collective…” (ibid: 230) so that people ceaselessly placed each other through,
“shared memories of where what had been and by what events they had experienced
together” (ibid: 733). In this reading, physical relics of the past were less
necessary as memory talk reconstructed, “where what had been...” Here the
landscape of memory is brought from the reserves of the imagination to the
foreground of human dialogue, what Dixon and Durrheim (2000) have called
‘discursive sense of place’.
Kelly described the way in which
places in South West Burnley that have fallen silent or are vanishing, work to bring memory to the fore. Paul Morris (1996) has explored ‘community beyond
tradition’ and the way in which a sense of community comes into the focus at
the point of its dissolution. This relates to what Kelly describes as a sense of ‘loss’
actually working to galvanise interest in the past, with memory serving as a form of resistance. A similar argument can be found within the discourse of globalisation and its accompanying loss of local distinctiveness:
“the search for meaning takes place… in the reconstruction of defensive
identities around communal principles” (Castells, 1996: 11).
For Kelly, memory is associated with
continuity and this is a notion that has emerged in the field of environmental
psychology. Researchers Claire Twigger Ross and David Uzzell (1996) explored
sense of place in London’s docklands and developed a process model for the
creation of a sense of place that linked to a feeling of distinctiveness (being
different to other people in other places), self-esteem (feeling proud of local
features and characteristics) and a sense of continuity over time. This
continuity is not just temporal, but is also related to a sense of the
continuity of one’s own identity associated as it is with place.
Identity is a key theme in any
investigation into culture, heritage and sense of place. The way we choose to
see our place and its history is bound up with notions of our own culture and
identity. Indeed Bella Dicks has argued that we all have an “identity centred
relationship with the past” (2003:125). Our cultural identities however are
complex, working in layers related to ourselves as private individuals but also
our collective identity. Benedict Anderson (1991) famously deconstructed the
notion of community by suggesting our collectivity is imagined and it seems to
me that the connections Kelly draws between memory and community must be
tempered by the knowledge that no one community can be viewed in terms of
homogeneity. Identities are plural and we must remember “the multivocality of
people in place” (Dicks, 2000: 99). Indeed, Elaine highlighted this sense of
fragmented community in conversations during the residency interviews. As a
resident who is not part of an existing group, she pointed out that she and
others like her could easily miss out on engaging with some of Ground Up’s
activities.
This problemetisation of the notion of
‘community’ also links with our South West Streets Museum project. It has been
argued that an interest in the past, in history and in heritage and museums, is
a symptom of economic and other forms of decline (Hewison 1987, Lumley 1988).
In the late 1980s this discourse was placed in the context of the decline of
industry. In a ‘preservation mania’ people became increasingly interested in
the vernacular heritage and social history of working class communities in
post-industrial areas (Dicks, 2003: 122; Harvey, 1996: 306). Likewise, communities
have become more interested in telling their own story and presenting their own
past, in what has been described as a ‘democratisation of heritage’ (Samuel 1994). The South West Streets Museum project can be seen in this way, as a form
of ‘unofficial community heritage’ (Crooke, 2008: 8). The challenge of the
museum however, is to represent community as a ‘whole’ when in fact, as
indicated above, communities have plural identities and interpretations.
Unofficial community heritage can be
seen as a grassroots interpretation that stands in opposition to official forms
of heritage where ‘community’ is a notion in resistance to ‘government’
(Witcombe 2003, 79-80) and it can be argued that Ground UP as a project and
more specifically the South West Streets Museum, lie firmly in the context of a
top-down / bottom-up dialectic. Geographer Yi Fu Tuan suggests that place has
to be understood from the perspective of those who have given it meaning (1974:
213), a postmodern approach, “eschewing grand narratives in favour of personal
observations and local knowledge” (Samuel, 1994: 196). As Kelly asserts in her
reflection on her time in South West Burnley, memory really can be a form of
resistance, this along with so much else in my review of literature around
heritage and sense of place, underpins Kelly’s observations and it will be
exciting to see how this translates into her art.
Steph 19.07.13
Steph 19.07.13
Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined
communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. Rev. and
extended. London: Verso.
Castells, M. (1996) The rise of the
network society. Cambridge, Massechusetts: Blackwell
Publishers.
Crooke, E. (2008) Museums and
community: ideas, issues and challenges. New York: Routledge.
Degnen, C. (2005) 'Relationality,
place, and absence: a three‐dimensional perspective on social memory', Sociological Review, 53,
(4), pp. 729‐744.
Dixon, J. and Durrheim, K. (2000)
'Displacing place‐identity: A discursive approach to locating self and other', British Journal of
Social Psychology, 39, pp. 27‐44.
Dicks, B. (2000) Heritage, Place
and Community. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
Dicks, B. (2003) Culture on
Display: The production of contemporary visitability. Maidenhead:
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Harvey, D. (1996) Justice, nature
and the geography of difference. Cambridge, Massechusetts: Blackwell Publishers.
Lumley, R. (ed.) (1988) The museum
time‐machine: putting cultures on display. London:
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Morris, P. (1996) 'Community Beyond
Tradition', in Heelas, P., Lash, S. and Morris, P. M.(eds)
Detraditionalisation:
critical reflections on authority and identity. Malden,
Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers
Inc.
Samuel, R. (1994) Theatres of
Memory: Volume 1. Past and Present in Contemporary Culture.London: Verso.
Tuan, Y.-F. (1974) Topophilia: a study of environmental
perception, attitudes and values London: Prentice-Hall
Witcomb, A. (2003) Re‐Imagining the
Museum Beyond the Mausoleum. London: Routledge.
