| Summary: |
Call for Papers
What is the difference between commodifying heritage and simply
selling it?
Lowenthal asserts that: ‘If the past is a foreign country,
nostalgia has made it the foreign country with the healthiest trade
of all’. Heritage is valuable, not merely in social, emotional,
aesthetic and historic terms—it is a commodity which can be
bought and sold in the increasingly capitalistic global market.
Heritage objects, places and symbols are being re-appropriated and
sold as destinations, used as marketing tools for unrelated products,
remade into souvenirs, and sold into private hands. This begs the
question, what are consequences of commodifying the past?
The World Trade Organisation states that tourism and its associated
business is the world’s largest industry. According to one
interpretation, ‘heritage products’ (heritage, museums,
historic homes, tribal dance performances, etc) ‘lure’
tourists through their historic and/or intellectual curiosity, nostalgia,
antiquarian interest, search for roots, pilgrimage etc. Moreover,
the intangible cultural heritage is often repackaged and converted
to suit the needs and the tastes of tourists. Yet, as places and
practices become designated for economic consumption they are frequently
further divorced from the lives of locals and from their ‘authentic’
purpose, consequently diminishing or at least changing their value.
While the argument outlined above is convincing and commonplace,
heritage is at the same time increasingly understood as open to
a multiplicity of interpretations. The tension between these various
understandings of the heritage calls for a return to these central
interpretative postulates. We need to explore at greater depth how
heritage is commodified and to ask whether and why this matters.
The 9th Cambridge Heritage Seminar intends to examine the positive
and negative aspects of the relationship(s) between commodification
and heritage. Furthermore, it seeks to question the very usefulness
of the term ‘commodification’ in the context of heritage
studies. Papers and posters which investigate this question through
a diverse range of heritage ‘areas’ such as intangible
heritage, museums, the historic environment, monuments, tourism,
heritage theory, etc. are encouraged. Contributions based on case
studies are particularly welcome. Presentations will be limited
to 20 minutes; posters should contain a mix of visual and verbal
information and be no smaller than A2 size. Some indicative questions
of the type we hope to address are:
- What are the effects of turning heritage sites and objects into
commodities?
- How does heritage have agency in the commodification process?
- What are the effects of the commodification of heritage on local
communities and their practices?
- How can we reconcile commodification and consumption of heritage
with other aims such as preservation?
- Is private ownership of the ‘past’ morally appropriate
or acceptable?
- How are the other values of heritage affected by the process
of commodification?
- How does the process of commodification affect the wider landscape
surrounding the object/monument?
- Does the commodification of heritage lead to the editing out
of unsavoury history?
- Can we justify the commodification of ‘traumascapes’,
‘heritage that hurts’ or so called ‘negative
heritage’?
- What are the effects of using terms such as ‘cultural
property’, ‘cultural goods’, ‘the heritage
industry’?
- Is heritage becoming nothing more than entertainment through
the process of its commodification?
|
