Ritual, Heritage and Identity

The Politics of Culture and Performance in a Globalised World

Christiane Brosius, Karin M. Polit

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000083743
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book explores the importance of ritual and ritual theory to discourses of authenticity and originality, thereby deepening our insight into concepts of cultural heritage, identity and nation in a globalised world. The volume is the first interdisciplinary attempt to understand the significance of rituals and related performative traditions in the creation of grounded cultural identities, 'home' and heritage as geographically experienceable locations. It assembles perspectives from social and cultural anthropology, performance studies, education and arts that can deal with the politics of revitalisation and preservation of ritualised traditions. While some chapters in this book emphasise on the ritualisation of cultural heritage by concentrating on power relations and politics, as well as actual processes of identification, especially for marginalised ethnic groups or migrant communities, others explore how rituals as intangible heritage are strategically employed by different groups all over the world to make their claims public and to improve and negotiate their position on a local, national or global platform. This book recognises ritualised performances as transnational and cross-cultural phenomena, which are not only tied to and defined via national territories and identities but which also demand new theoretical and methodological approaches towards the discussion of rituals and heritage.

Part I
Framing Heritage

1
Heritage in Ritual and Identity

Gregory J. Ashworth

In the interactions between ritual, heritage and identity, ritual can be taken to either constitute heritage or be a vehicle through which heritage is communicated. Similarly, identity is taken to be a resultant of the application of heritage. Therefore, within the triad, it is heritage that is the key component, for it is through the heritagisation of ritual that it is ascribed contemporary value, and heritage is the main instrument in the process of identification. Despite its critical role, heritage is generally vaguely and inconsistently defined. It is frequently defined in terms of the object rather the process, translated into logically misleading policies dominated by paradigms of preservation or the recognition and expression of spurious authenticity. Ignoring the pluralisation of heritage identities, and the near universal condition of heritage dissonance, leads to policies that are at best irrelevant and at worst seriously discordant. This chapter views heritage as a contemporary process in the service of multiple social, economic and political needs. Heritage being simultaneously personal and collective, private and public, cannot be other than polysemic, inherently dissonant, and both supportive and undermining of place-bound and non-place-bound multiple identities. Ritual, as intangible heritage, plays a prominent role in this process being subject especially to museumification and vernacularisation. Finally, the implications of all heritage and all identity being liable to be contested are considered.

The purpose of this chapter is to investigate an aspect of the relationships between the three quite different elements that have been juxtaposed in this book, namely heritage, ritual and identity. Heritage will be taken as the starting point for an exploration of its relationship with the other two elements. However, all three terms need defining, both discretely and in the context of the threefold relationship. The conventional definitions, or just popular usages, of all three terms, but most especially of heritage, have become so wide as to encompass many meanings. This could be no more than a topic for academic debate if it were not that heritage has been a major field of public policy endeavour. Indeed it could be asserted that governments, especially at the level of the nation-state, have attempted to nationalise the past by their active interventions through public heritage agencies. For whatever reason, heritage has become a major area of public policy at various jurisdictional levels and for various public policy objectives. More recently, identity, and specifically place identity, has become a policy goal as public agencies have assumed growing responsibility for shaping these conditions, as in the Dutch Belvedere programme (Ashworth and Kuipers 2001). It is this government interest that provides an underlying imperative to the arguments of this chapter, because the lack of clear agreed definitions has led to the establishment of a number of deeply embedded misunderstandings and assumptions that are rarely challenged. This has rendered public policy at best ineffective and at worst counter-productive.

The Triad of Heritage, Ritual and Identity

It is more than usually important to arrive at clear working definitions of the three entities to be related. All three suffer from vagueness, ambiguity and even on occasion contradiction in definition, which in turn leads to a number of widely held and unhelpful delusions that impact negatively upon policy. The three are not viewed here as equal parts of a triptych. Ritual is taken here to be either a component of heritage or as a vehicle for the transmission of heritage not least inter-generationally. Similarly, identity is treated largely as a resultant of heritage. Therefore, within the triad, it is heritage that is the key component in this approach, for it is through the heritagisation of ritual that it is ascribed contemporary value, and heritage is a major instrument in the process of identification, that is the way people create their individual, group and place identities.

Heritage as resources, process and outcome

Heritage, as the active ingredient in the triad, needs particularly careful definition; but unfortunately, the word has had its meanings so stretched that it is in danger of becoming practically meaningless. Originally, heritage was a legal term for an individual inheritance from a past to a present — it has been extended to all aspects of pasts in the present and even all cultural productivity, whether in the past or present, deemed worthy of bequeathing to futures. It has also been collectivised so that what was my individual inheritance becomes our collective heritage, with the possessive ‘our’ being defined as whatever social group is being so constructed through heritage.

Heritage may be viewed and used in policy as a resource, a process and an outcome. Heritage is frequently defined, especially by those responsible for the management of artefacts and sites, in terms of the object. It is seen as a resource rather than a process or outcome. This is well illustrated by the misleading and linguistically tautological UNESCO usages of ‘cultural’ as opposed to ‘natural’ heritages, when logically heritage as process is, by definition, a cultural construction. Similarly, more recently the adjectives tangible or intangible have been applied to the resources of buildings, sites or landscapes on the one hand, and to cultural expressions on the other. Again, heritage as process is inevitably and completely intangible being a product of the creative imagination of the individual or the group conveying intangible meanings. Such dichotomies as cultural/natural, tangible/intangible are unhelpful, and too often translate into logically misleading policies dominated by paradigms of preservation or the recog-nition and expression of some imposed authenticity of the object, which in turn results in the delusions and dissonances discussed in the following paragraphs.

Therefore, heritage is used here with a single, quite specific meaning. Heritage is not a relict artefact or building or a site associated by someone with past times, conditions, events or personalities. It is not a result of the work of historians, archaeologists or antiquarians concerned with the descriptive recreation of selected pasts. Nor is it what remains in fallible human memory. As a process, it uses sites, objects, and human traits and patterns of behaviour as vehicles for the transmission of ideas in order to satisfy various contemporary needs (Ashworth 1993). Heritage is a product of the present that draws upon an assumed imaginary past, and justifies itself by reference to an equally assumed imaginary future. As such, ‘it is a medium of communication, a means of transmission of ideas and values and a knowledge that includes the material, the intangible and the virtual’ (Graham 2002: 1003).

The outcomes of such a process will necessarily change through time as new presents supersede the old, which then imagine and identify with new pasts and new futures. Heritage and identity are thus driven by current needs, fashions and tastes, and there can be no universal, eternal and inalienable heritage values. Our current sacralised artefacts, monument lists, inscriptions, collections and icons are just the fashions of the recent past fossilised into a different present. They are the attempts — fortunately, largely futile — to colonise an imagined future with our values as we clutter it with our preserved artefacts.

Ritual as resource and communication

The definition of ritual can safely be left to the social anthropologists for whom it has long been a central concern (Bell 1997; Grimes 1994; Smith 1987). It is only important for the argument here to note some of its main characteristics relevant in this argument. There is broad agreement that it is an established and prescribed pattern of actions, which raises the questions of who is prescribing and for what purposes. Second, the repetitive and ritualised patterns of behaviour relate fundamentally to groups rather than individuals, and have social significance to groups. Third, it is a set form of communication conveying a meaning beyond the immediate actions. In this sense, ritual has many of the characteristics of a language in which ideas are encoded and subsequently decoded. Thus, it contains three intrinsic characteristics, which relate it to heritage as described earlier, namely formal prescription, some social purpose relating to group homogeneity or cohesion, and, finally, a conveying of meanings between people. There is a further function of ritual as liminal process (van Gennep 1960), facilitating or communicating transition from one condition or state to another, frequently as ‘rites of passage’, which can be given a spatial dimension (Shields 1991), and although this idea can be incorporated into a heritage process, it is, despite its significance to the study of ritual, too marginal to this argument to be considered here.

Ritual actions are not automatically heritage anymore than are natural phenomena or man-made structures, but they may be made so. As such, the three ways of viewing heritage could each be applicable. Heritage as resource can provide the materials from which rituals are constructed. Heritage as process of transformation may function as a medium of communication whereby ritual is the medium through which values, norms or ideas from an imagined past are transmitted to a present or to an imagined future generation. Third, ritual may be an outcome as part of a heritage package, often combined with other non-ritualised heritage experiences. The familiar stylised performances that are the archetypical heritage experiences for tourists and residents alike, provide numerous well-known examples of rituals (such as the ubiquitous ‘changing of the guard’ performances) commodified within heritage packages, though precisely which meanings are being conveyed to these different consumers could be questioned. In each of these respects, ritual not only mirrors heritage closely, it may become inextricably entwined with it.

Identity as outcome

The noun identity has two contradictory meanings. It is that which makes something or somebody uniquely different, as in identity documents, and it is also that which makes somebody or something the same as, or identical with, something or somebody else. Both meanings are often used interchangeably, which can be a source of confusion not least in social policy. In this discussion, identity is treated as an outcome, a condition created largely through heritage, which may or may not be conveyed through ritual as the vehicle of transmission. Like heritage, it is a product of the imagination, and like heritage, there is an uneasy co-existence of individual and collective identities. Also, like heritage, it is almost always plural, as both groups and individuals can, and generally do, possess multiple co-existing identities. If identity is the outcome, a condition or state of mind, then identification is the process by which this is created. The condition identity is shaped by an active verb, identification, which describes the process, and by an identifier who plays the critical role in such a process.

Place

There is a fourth dimension, which so far has been implicitly rather than explicitly present in the descriptions and discussion — place. Much but not all heritage is place-bound; much but not all identity is place identity. Place can be more than a locus or an arena on which heritage, identity or ritual occurs; it can be an inherent and integral component of all three. However, a further complication is that identity and place identity are not the same, although they are often elided in policy statements (Ashworth and Graham 2005). People may identify with specific physical locations, as they may with specific social and cultural groups, and places may be used to articulate or manifest such group identities to the extent that the location becomes an expression of the group. The real or perceived qualities of the place are transferred to the people. We are what we are because of where we are. This is the social equivalent of place-product branding of the ‘Swiss watch’ variety, in which certain assumed favourable characteristics of a place are transferred into associations that are assumed to be beneficial to the product (Kavaratzis and Ashworth 2005). At a further remove, the place may be used as the identifier of the group (the Oxford Movement, Bloomsbury Set, Amsterdam School), but such labelling by place generally makes little use of place associations other than as identifiers.

Equally, however, the identity of people may have little or nothing to do with places. Much social and even political identification has no particular need to be rooted in space. To take the argument further, it may be said that local place identification, far from being — as is often implied — a universal basic human need, is a preoccupation of an unusually place-bound minority. Much local place identity is a marginal concern of local political and governmental jurisdictions augmenting their legitimacy, or is an instrument of tourism or real estate promoters enhancing place-products through branding places. This place is distinctive; therefore, we or our product, our service or just our right to govern, are distinctive. Much human behaviour may even favour the absence of place or even a ‘placeless’ place, functioning effectively in a deliberately created sense of ‘placelessness’ (Relph 1976), in which an instant familiarity and recognition is more important for functional efficiency than the creation of a distinctive, and therefore unfamiliar, place.

Among academic observers, geographers in particular are at permanent risk of succumbing to a place fetishism that fails to recognise that much, if not most, identity as well as much heritage, is not intrinsically and necessarily place-bound. It can be ‘de-rooted’ and ‘re-rooted’ relatively easily. It may even be necessary to note that the term ‘sense of place’ is often used as if it were an intrinsic quality of places, but the sensing comes from the people not the places, as places have no intrinsic sense. Quite evidently, identity is ascribed by people to a landscape, townscape and even a point in space; it is not given by such phenomena to an observer. Stones, bricks, trees, rivers, hills and sites are physical entities, which have no intrinsic cultural values whatsoever until someone endows them with these. Landscapes, monuments or sacred sites are social constructions and products of human imagination. As such they are not waiting to be discovered, recognised and appreciated. One could speculate about whether place identity could exist on an uninhabited, unvisited and unknown planet, for a place that cannot be imagined cannot have identity. An important corollary of this is that different imaginations will create different identities even in the same physical locations, and that the senses of place will be as mutable as the people who create them. The active variable, therefore, is always the ‘someone’ who imagines, together with the unspoken justification, ‘for some reason’. The implications of this for spatial policies are obvious.

Delusions and Dissonances in Approaches to Heritage

The simple definitions and the arguments outlined so far may have created an illusion of clarity, precision and unanimity. However, between the logic and the implementation, there are a number of delusions and dissonances.

Logical delusions

There are a number of logical implications of the heritage paradigm expounded earlier in the chapter. These need summarising if only because fundamental misunderstandings are a prevalent source of confusion in much public policymaking.

First, heritage is not about preserving or recreating pasts. It is not possible to preserve what no longer exists. Heritage is aspects of an imagined past as used in the present or bequeathed to an imagined future. Equally, heritage does not exist as a resource waiting to be recognised, preserved and valued. It is a contemporary cultural construction whose values are ascribed and therefore mutable.

Second, deriving from the first argument, heritage cannot be viewed as a fortuitous endowment, richly or parsimonious bestowed on people or places as beneficiaries, whether they wish ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Plates and Figures
• Glossary
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Ritual, Heritage and Identity in a Globalised World
• Part I: Framing Heritage
• Part II: Ethnography and Practice
• About the Editors
• Notes on Contributors
• Index