From Antiquities to Heritage

Transformations of Cultural Memory

Anne Eriksen

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781785332050
  9781782382980
• eBook ISBN:
  9781782382997
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Museum Studies

Eighteenth-century gentleman scholars collected antiquities. Nineteenth-century nation states built museums to preserve their historical monuments. In the present world, heritage is a global concern as well as an issue of identity politics. What does it mean when runic stones or medieval churches are transformed from antiquities to monuments to heritage sites? This book argues that the transformations concern more than words alone: They reflect fundamental changes in the way we experience the past, and the way historical objects are assigned meaning and value in the present. This book presents a series of cases from Norwegian culture to explore how historical objects and sites have changed in meaning over time. It contributes to the contemporary debates over collective memory and cultural heritage as well to our knowledge about early modern antiquarianism.

1

Heritage and Cultural Memory

A distinction between the contemporary concept of heritage and the general phenomenon that humans tend to value certain remains from the past is fundamental to the discussions in this book. The actual expressions that this evaluation of relics from the past acquires are subject to historical change. Heritage, as it emerged in the later parts of the twentieth century, with heritage studies as its corollary, is one such historically specific expression. As has been pointed out, both the theoretical premises and the empirical definition of heritage studies are somewhat vague (see, e.g., Harvey 2001: 319f). This is probably not due only to the composite character of the field of study and the fact that analytical work is often entangled with administrative concerns as well as with tourism and a diversity of commercial activities. An even more important reason is that the tendency to equate the contemporary concept with the more general phenomenon inhibits analysis. Without precise distinction, the word ‘heritage’ is used both as a generic concept and as a more historically specific term, which may work well on an empirical level, but which blurs theoretical understanding.

Seen in a somewhat wider perspective, the contemporary interest in heritage can be understood as part of the more general concern with the social and cultural aspects of memory, emerging in the 1980s and still flourishing (cf. e.g., Erll and Nünning 2010, Olick, Vinitzky-Seroussi and Levy 2011). Sociologist Paul Connerton has recently related this to the perhaps even more general issue of forgetting and argues that the fundamental reason for the present ubiquitousness of memory is ‘that modernity has a particular problem with forgetting’ (Connerton 2009:1). Now an extensive field engaging scholars from a number of different disciplines, memory studies have produced a veritable flood of scholarly works. Among the more ambitious attempts at developing the field, also on a theoretical level, are books with evocative, even poetic titles, such as The Texture of Memory (Young 1993), The Future of Nostalgia (Boym 2001), Stranded in the Present (Fritzsche 2004) and Present Pasts (Huyssen 2003). Even more extensive is the work of Aleida and Jan Assmann, with the ambition of developing a comprehensive theory of culture and cultural transmission centred on the concept of Cultural Memory (J. Assmann 1995; A. Assmann 2011). Corresponding to established convention, it will be capitalized in the following to distinguish the Assmannian concept from cultural memory as a generic term (cf. Erll 2011).

The amount of productivity alone makes the field of cultural memory difficult to delineate and define clearly. Nonetheless, attempts at doing so tend to focus on some fundamental works. Defining the field, these works at the same time raise some major issues which are still under debate. To describe what has been called the ‘memory boom’ in cultural theory, historian Anna Green typically presents three main works on the field (Green 2008: 100). While all have been highly influential, they also represent quite different positions. The first text is David Lowenthal’s book The Past is a Foreign Country, from 1985, which opened a debate on history, heritage and memory. Lowenthal understands heritage as artefacts, landscapes and buildings, as well as commemorations and historical reenactments. He argues that the preoccupation with identification, protection and display of historical artefacts, in other words the work to turn them into heritage, prevents true historical knowledge (Green 2008: 100, Lowenthal 1985). Lowenthal makes no secret of his critical attitude to the heritage ‘version’ of the past. Raphael Samuel, in the next text referred to by Green, emphatically has rejected Lowenthal’s and others’ critiques of what he at least saw as popular expressions of historical sensibility (Samuel 1994). Scornful of academic disdain, he admitted that ‘living history’ – or heritage – was present-minded and that it blurred the boundary between fact and fiction, but he nonetheless argued that it was ‘less megalomaniac than the idea of “scientific history”’ and more attentive to the small details of everyday life (Samuel 1994: 197f; Green 2008: 101). Green points out that heritage ‘incorporated a wide range of sources and perspectives not easily subsumed under one ideology or national narrative, although Samuel acknowledged that, as a whole, heritage could represent a search for a sense of the “indigenous”’ (Green 2008: 101). It may be added that Samuel’s perspective here shows clear relation to his earlier work on oral history and can be said to reflect the same wish for more democratic ways of doing and presenting history.

The third project included in this core literature of cultural memory is Pierre Nora’s large work Lieux de Mémoire, published in seven volumes between 1981 and 1992 and engaging a number of authors. In this ambitious attempt at constructing an alternative ‘narrative’ of French national history, Nora’s own concept of lieux de mémoire, or sites of memory, stands at the core. Nora argued that sites of memory crystallized collective memory, but also that this happened only when the society had undergone a kind of rupture with its past and when traditional forms of ‘organic’ memory no longer existed (Green 2008: 102, Nora 1989).

The essays in the work, about such different themes as literary texts, food, ideologies, founding people, religion and secular symbols, are attempts at describing important elements in French national identity without suggesting that this identity is a fixed phenomenon, but rather showing how realms of memory can draw on a wide variety of cultural myths and ideologies. Nonetheless, Green points out that despite the attempt to present national history from new perspectives, the work still ‘reflects the traditional focus of the historian, with reliance upon archival sources and the records of the elite’ (Green 2008: 102). Compared with Samuel’s perspective, seeing history from the margin and from below, Nora’s approach to collective memory is ‘centrist and top-down’, Green contends (Green 2008: 102). It may be added that this impression is further enhanced by the fact that there are very few individual historical agents in Nora’s work. The forces shaping collective memory and constructing the lieux de mémoire are to a great extent represented by institutions or by people acting on the behalf of institutions. Not only are the ordinary men and women of the nation largely absent, the focus in general is not on individual agency. This is probably due to the wish to avoid the traditional perspective, with the deeds of great men at the centre of political history, but the result is that the lieux de mémoire seem to emerge from some kind of magic growth, driven by superhuman forces, rather than by more precisely described agency.

Green ends her presentation of the three key texts by pointing out a paradox. These works, as well as the entire ‘memory boom’, make clear that ‘in the rapidly changing world of the last half of the twentieth century, connections that made memory meaningful as a means of explaining the present had been severed, but at the same time individuals and societies turned to their material heritage to construct their own sense of indigenousness and narrative continuity’ (Green 2008: 102). However, while all three authors addressed the issue of memory in contemporary society, the overall picture appeared quite anarchic and fragmented. To what extent, Green asks, do lieux de mémoire and heritage reflect ‘collective memory’ (Green 2008:102f)?

Despite the openness, or even anarchy, of the field, a main target of explorations of cultural and social memory in the last three decades has been the situation in modern societies. In their different ways, the works seek to investigate what has happened to memory after some supposed rupture with ‘tradition’, ‘organic memory’ or the like caused by modernity. More specifically, this modernity often is associated with processes of nation building. The memory, memorials, symbols and so on that are investigated are most often related to national cultures and the construction of national identities. This way of constructing and using collective memory has been of great importance, but it has also given the processes of nation building a kind of paradigmatic status in memory studies and made theories developed to understand national memory spill over into the investigation of other and more general cultural memory concerns.

Another aspect concerns the numerous attempts to distinguish heritage and cultural memory from ‘history proper’, not least in the early works in the field. For the three authors presented by Green, this has been a key question. In these debates, the idea of history itself is rarely examined; history is quite simply equated with modern, source-based scholarship. Even this ties the debate to modernity, as it presupposes the existence of the modern academic discipline of history. What has been discussed is cultural memory and heritage and their relation to the history produced by academic work and in scholarly contexts. The terms are most often seen in a hierarchy, with history towering at the top and the more problematic categories of memory and heritage inhabiting the lower rungs. Sentiment, eclecticism, present-mindedness or even blunt ignorance have been among the features pointed out as distinctive to these somewhat suspect categories. As indicated by Green, the hierarchy is more or less openly related to questions of class and power relations. In more recent literature on cultural memory, this obsession with the distinctions between memory and history seem to have faded away, possibly due to an increased self-confidence among students and authors in the field (e.g., Erll and Nünning 2010).

In his investigation of the conceptual history of ‘heritage’, historian Bernard Eric Jensen focuses on largely the same foundational texts as Green, but he also refers to Ralph Hewison’s book The Heritage Industry. Britain in a Climate of Decline, from 1987. Hewison saw the interest in heritage as a nostalgic attempt at returning to a glorious national past and described how a growing heritage industry was transforming the entire British society into a gigantic museum (B.E. Jensen 2008: 38; Hewison 1987). Contrasting Samuel explicitly with Hewison, Jensen’s presentation gives a clearer picture of the political implications of this debate. Samuel’s response to the critics of heritage – from Hewison, Lowenthal and others – appears as a determined defence of a more democratic history. Samuel’s reason for choosing memory rather than history as his generic term was a definition of popular history, academic history writing and the heritage industry as different expressions of the same cultural memory work (B.E. Jensen 2008: 38f).

Even if other precursors also may be found, the work of French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs is commonly recognized as a main influence behind the interest in cultural memory. In his work Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire from 1925, Halbwachs argued that memory was fundamentally social and, bearing this in mind, coined the term ‘collective memory’. Despite the still ongoing debates about whether or how memory can be collective, how shared memories are constructed and transmitted, where the agency lies in the processes, as well as a number of other questions raised by Halbwachs’ work (see, e.g., Young 1993; Warring 1996; Erll and Nünning 2010; Olick, Vinitzky-Seroussi and Levy 2011), he must be credited for having introduced the study of memory as significant to the understanding of culture and society. The influence from Halbwachs is also the reason why the German historian scholars Aleida and Jan Assmann have made memory the key concept in their work on a cultural theory (J. Assmann 1995). The project of Assmann and Assmann aims at developing an entirely new way of theorizing culture, built on the twin concepts of Cultural and Communicative Memory (J. Assmann 1995; A. Assmann 2011; see also B.E. Jensen 2005/2006). The starting point for this work is a realization of the fundamental differences between collective memory that is based on simple everyday interaction, be it by oral transmission or embedded in cultural practices, and that which is institutionalized and transmitted by ritual or media. In their terminology, the first is called communicative memory, while Cultural Memory is reserved for the second. The two forms are presented in sharp contrast to one another (J. Assmann 1995). The communicative dimension has however been given relatively little attention in the subsequent work of Assmann and Assmann. Their contributions to a further development of the theory have been centred on the institutionalized and mediatized aspects and, hence, on the concept of Cultural Memory. The term ‘culture’ in this concept is not identical with the current anthropological use of the word, but is delimited to culture as ‘monument’, that is the staged, stylized and institutionalized high culture. Astrid Erll thus has pointed out that ‘“Cultural Memory” does therefore not describe all manifestations of “memory in culture”; rather it represents a subset of this: the societal construction of normative and formative versions of the past’ (Erll 2011: 30, italics in original).

The work of Aleida and Jan Assmann is distinguished by a far more profound historical perspective than the works cited above. Hence, their theories on memory as a cultural force are not tethered to modernity and the processes of nation building, but have a far wider scope. As an Egyptologist, Jan Assmann has done highly influential work on the impact of Egyptian religion on the development of Judaism, basing his argument on the ideas of religion as cultural memory. As a professor of English literature, one of the important contributions of Aleida Assmann is her distinction between the two forms of memory as ars and vis respectively. The first term refers to memory as art or technology, going back to the topology of ancient mnemonics. The second concerns memory as a force and its potentiality to change and transform. Assmann contrasts the two by saying that as vis, ‘memory is not a protective container but an immanent power, a driving force that follow its own rules’ (A. Assmann 2011: 20). Of particular relevance to the discussions in this book is her argument that the understanding of memory as ars was eclipsed by the concept of memory as vis during the latter part of the eighteenth century, meaning also that ‘the spatial paradigm of mnemotechnics gave way to a temporal focus’ (A. Assmann 2011: 21). This change can then be used as a basis for a historical typology of memory cultures (cf. Erll 2011: 35) that corresponds well with the development described by Koselleck in his work on the concept of history and the experience of time (below).

Despite the common origin in Halbwachs and a general consensus about the influence of the major works from the 1980s and 1990s, no common understanding exists of the social and cultural aspects of memory. Also, despite the agreement that memory is closely interwoven with such concepts as identity and heritage, no clear theories describe these relationships. Furthermore, as both Green and Jensen point out, there is a high degree of terminological variety. Even if ‘collective memory’ is often used as a generic term, different scholars prefer to qualify this original Halbwachsian concept by replacing it with terms like ‘collected memories’, ‘mnemonic practices’, ‘cultural memory’, ‘imagined communities’, ‘invented traditions’, ‘theatres of memory’, ‘sites of memory’, ‘social remembering’ and ‘collective remembrance’ (Green 2008: 106, cf. also Erll and Nünning 2010: 2f).

One reason for this plurality, or apparent confusion, is most likely that even if the study of memory now is established as an important issue in the historical and social sciences and has become an international and interdisciplinary field marked by great vitality, it involves scholars and disciplines with rather different interests and concerns. It is not obvious that, say, studies of trauma and studies of history didactics are interested in memory in the same way or that scholars working with political history focus upon the same dimensions of memory as those working with art. Despite recent attempts at presenting memory studies as one field, now in the process of consolidating itself (Erll and Nünning 2010; Olick, Vinitzky-Seroussi and Levy 2011), it is not self-evident, for example, that historical and sociological investigations of memory share the same concerns. The awareness that memory is not merely individual, that it is an important aspect of both culture and society and that changes and transformations in memory can be studied historically has led to significant reorientations in cultural theory and to the development of new conceptual frames. Nonetheless, this does not necessarily imply that the rather broad and general interest in memory – in society at large as well as among scholars – is one and the same thing or that this interest should amount to one, coherent field of study with a strict and concise terminology.

A theoretically well-informed analysis of this complex picture has been carried out by Astrid Erll. She points out that ‘cultural memory’ always implies figurative meaning, and underscores that ‘there are two different uses of tropes in cultural memory studies which should be distinguished: “cultural memory” as metaphor and as metonymy’ (Erll 2011: 97). Metonymically, she argues, cultural memory concerns remembering ‘as an individual act, when the focus is on the shaping force that sociocultural surroundings exert on organic memory’. Metaphorically, on the other hand, the term ‘memory’ creates ‘linguitic images for the organized archiving of documents, for the establishment of official commemoration days, or for the artistic process of intertextuality’ (Erll 2011: 97). Erll’s important point is that even if these two forms of collective memory can be separated analytically, they continuously influence one another through their interplay of the individual and collective levels. They do not empirically exist without each other. Her conclusion is that ‘the “cultural” memory of individuals and the cultural “memory” of social groups and societies are two possible ways to describe (and study) “memory in culture”’. Neither of the areas thus constituted can be viewed exclusively, because the cognitive and the social level only can be understood through their interaction with another (Erll 2011: 101). According to Erll, cultural memory as an umbrella term thus can be defined as ‘the sum total of all processes (biological, medial, social) which are involved in the interplay of past and present within sociocultural contexts’ (Erll 2011: 101).

Seeing heritage and heritage studies as part of the more general interest in memory thus represents an important contextualization, but it does not supply a distinct theoretical framework or more clear-cut empirical definitions. The perspective rather makes clear that the interest in heritage is one part of a larger pattern characterized by other ways of relating to the past than those conceptualized by more traditional historical terminology. One common denominator in memory studies in general, and heritage studies in particular, is the attempt to explore and understand these ways of relating to the past, accompanied by a recognition that the concept of ‘history’ alone is insufficient for doing so. The contemporary focus on heritage, commemorations, memorials and so on thus may be seen as the expression of a specific relationship between past and present, characteristic of our time. Correspondingly, the developments of memory and heritage studies as academic fields are attempts at coming to terms with these ways of living with the past and of understanding the cultural experience of temporality that lies behind it.

Such ‘ways of living with the past’, or rather the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Heritage and Cultural Memory
• Chapter 2. In Search of Ancient Heroes
• Chapter 3. Antiquarianism and Epistemic Virtue
• Chapter 4. Ruins and Time
• Chapter 5. Mediaeval Monuments
• Chapter 6. Museums to Preserve Our Past
• Chapter 7. Monuments and Memorials
• Chapter 8. Cultural Property, Cultural Heritage
• Chapter 9. Heritage and Presentism
• References
• Index