Beyond edutainment

I write these lines in late September 2020, before the fateful US presidential election and before any of us have any idea what lingering effects COVID will have on our lives. But already we can sense some dramatic constraints on the ways in which cultural heritage has traditionally been studied, protected, and consumed. Our firsthand experience of the world outside our homes and immediate vicinity has become almost entirely virtual, received and transmitted by digital signals through audio speakers and video screens. Face masks and social distancing impede close physical contact with others and restrict or prohibit even modest gatherings. Educational institutions of every kind have been forced to alter academic schedules and adopt new rules for teaching and research. Heritage sites, museums, and, indeed, almost every kind of public cultural venue have been closed to the public or opened to drastically reduced audiences. This has led to further, more practical economic consequences: mass furloughs or outright layoffs of cultural workers; deep financial crisis for cultural organizations; and a wave of insolvency (and inevitable unemployment) for the owners and workers in businesses like hotels, restaurants, cafes, and gift shops that have long depended for their very existence on cultural tourism and cultural events.

Despite the nervously wishful hopes of the tourism industry that international travel, sooner or later, will return to normal, historic sites and museums all over the world are largely empty. While some glass-half-full heritage optimists see the present situation as a welcome solution to the problem of over-tourism at famously overcrowded cultural sites like Venice, Angkor Wat, and Macchu Pichu, they callously ignore the vital economic dependence of local communities on mass tourism by those that live in the vicinity of world heritage landmarks and even – or especially – in the vicinity of less famous and less visited sites.

Ironically, it is the heritage industry, as Robert Hewison so colorfully dubbed it, that has been largely responsible for the dangerously over-specialized cultural economy that is now fighting for its very life.Footnote ² Like Big Pharma reaping vast profits on prescription opioids that would miraculously kill temporary pain at the expense of long-term suffering and eventual suicide by overdose, long years of private and public promotion of heritage tourism as a “driver of local economic development” has irreversibly commodified countless heritage places and heritage collections as leisure-time venues. Especially in places where extractive industries have died, where once busy factories have closed, or where the collapse of traditional agriculture has left communities without sustainable livelihoods, the prospect of revenue-generating tourism to exoticized landscapes and attractively refurbished cultural monuments has appealed to those places that have nothing to left to lose but their cultural souls.

In many cases, such prospects have resulted in irrationally exuberant over-investment in airport expansion, hotel and retail construction, and the recruitment of local workers as tour guides, landscapers, maintenance personnel, salespersons, waiters, and housekeepers. Some of these risky economic gambles (often fueled by outside corporate investment or, worse, sovereign debt to international development agencies) have failed quickly, discouraging further financing for heritage tourism. In places where the gamble has been won, the profitability of hotels, bed-and-breakfast establishments, souvenir shops, restaurants, and tour companies has proved to be short-lived. Without even mentioning the damage wrought to environment and traditional lifeways by the massive influx of visitors offloaded by cruise lines and ferried in by airlines, the monoculture of heritage has left local economies dangerously vulnerable.

In those places that have suffered a sudden and heartbreaking stretch of no business since the outbreak of the COVID pandemic, the chills and trembling of sudden economic withdrawal have begun to set in. After months without revenue or income, starved infrastructure of heritage tourism will almost certainly be drastically degraded as insolvent businesses close their doors forever and their unemployed workers find other ways to make ends meet. When and if COVID restrictions on travel are entirely lifted, the heritage landscape will almost certainly be different. Fewer visitor services will be offered at higher prices to those who can afford to travel to places that were, until the outbreak of the pandemic, easily and relatively cheaply accessible by group tours. With so many nations’ economies sunk into a likely depression, investment will have to come entirely from the outside. It is likely that heritage tourism will become not only more expensive but also a much more exclusive, status-enhancing pastime, that will concentrate both the heritage experience and its revenue in many fewer hands.

Museums seem to be suffering a fate similar to that of heritage sites. With in-person visits and fundraising events suspended or drastically restricted, museums of all sizes and subjects have turned to the virtual to keep their patrons focused on the museum’s mission, even if they cannot visit physically. Precious operating funds have been invested in virtual exhibitions, virtual gallery talks, and even virtual fundraising galas to create an impression of virtual normalcy. But the clock is ticking. Time is not on the side of the virtual for museums and other cultural institutions that have based their very existence not only on ticket sales and school group visits but also, more importantly, on gift shops, cafes, cafeterias, and special events.

Layoffs and furloughs are all too common; a survey of museum directors conducted in July 2020 by the American Alliance of Museums revealed that a full 30 percent of all American museums would probably not survive the pandemic.Footnote ³ And even if that predicted rate of closure does not rise with the continuing spread of COVID well into the fall and at least the first half of 2021, this would represent approximately 12,000 museums across the United States permanently closing their doors. Similar surveys conducted by the Network of European Museum Organizations, the International Council of Museums, and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) have suggested a similarly dismal outlook for the survival of museums around the world.Footnote ⁴ And here is the disturbing difference between museums and heritage sites: while heritage sites will probably be preserved (albeit without extensive infrastructure or conservation programs), the closure of museums will, in many cases, mark the end of their existence as discrete cultural institutions. Collections may be dispersed or deaccessioned and sold to private collectors to finance their liquidation. Their distinct identities and cultural missions will be gone.

Indeed, the entire cultural sector in all of its traditional manifestations has grown dangerously dependent on in-person participation on weekends and evenings, on vacations, and often far away from home. More important, this visitation is based on the vicarious consumption of preserved artifacts and structures, whose preservation and curation are time-consuming and expensive. With private philanthropy now concerned with more immediate priorities for post-COVID recovery and public funding for tourist-less culture dramatically reduced, it would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that the international culture sector as presently constituted teeters on the verge of collapse. And despite all of the brave talk of sustainable tourism, resilience thinking, and community engagement, I suspect that some of our most basic modes of cultural heritage practice must necessarily change.

Beyond preservation

What modes am I talking about? Mass cultural tourism, clearly. Commodification of heritage images and heritage-inspired products, probably. But perhaps the most important, and overlooked, change of mode, I predict, will be to the concept of “heritage” itself. That concept, as the name suggests, is firmly based on the principle of physical preservation and expert curation, drawn from the principle of family inheritance. In the most basic sense of wills and probate lists, that which is bequeathed from ancestors to inheriting descendants often possesses the form of material goods that are the embodiment of family social status. Maintaining these family assets to pass on to future generations has always been seen as both moral and social imperatives. Similarly, the sheer physicality of cultural heritage – whether as artifacts, artistic representations, or architectural assemblages – has long been seen like other legacies explicitly regulated by law and tradition – as the measure of its value and the locus of its authenticity. In this respect, we are still laboring under the conception of “monuments” articulated by the great Austrian art historian Alois Riegl at the turn of the twentieth century.Footnote ⁵ Riegl’s epoch-making 1903 preservationist manifesto “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Essence and Development” stressed what later scholars, such as Mike Gubser, have termed “time’s visible surface”– namely, the inherent authenticity of material with the patina of the past.Footnote ⁶ Indeed, in such foundational texts as the 1965 Venice Charter and the 1972 World Heritage Convention, “original fabric” has come to take on a quasi-sacred significance.Footnote ⁷ And although the 1994 Nara Document on Authenticity expanded the basis of determining whether a monument’s fabric was indeed original, there is still something inherently and unchangingly material in the way in which we conceive of cultural heritage.Footnote ⁸

Yet despite well-meaning rhetoric from international organizations and national governments about uniting for heritage to preserve it from destruction, are we really any closer to achieving that goal than we were in 1960 when UNESCO undertook its unprecedented international effort to save the monuments of Nubia from the rising waters of the newly formed lake created by the Aswan High Dam? In today’s tsunami of natural upheavals, sea-level rise, melting permafrost, wildfires and massive deforestation, resource extraction, infrastructural development, looting, and politically inspired vandalism of antiquities sites, there is simply not enough money or expertise available to physically preserve or even conserve the enormous extent of cultural heritage that is being destroyed every year. Of course, there will always be funds to restore celebrity monuments like the Cathedral of Notre Dame. But the vast majority of physical remains from the human past are ephemeral or buried, and the weakening of environmental regulations in the United States and other neoliberal economies makes our inherited legal and administrative instruments for protecting sensitive historical and archaeological sites increasingly ineffective for the vast extent of material heritage.

Caitlin DeSilvey’s brilliant demonstration of alternatives to dutiful preservation in her book Curated Decay offers an insightful perspective on the value of material heritage in an age when the natural forces of decay in some places simply cannot be overcome.Footnote ⁹ Her emphasis on recognizing and documenting the processes of physical transformation of sites and artifacts over time displaces physical preservation as the primary goal in cases where it cannot be achieved. In her call to “look beyond loss,” she outlines a form of heritage appreciation and research that is not a zero-sum game of “saving” or “losing.” Through a series of vivid studies of heritage sites in various states of abandonment, deterioration, and environmental degradation, she suggests that decay does not necessarily strip a heritage element of its meaning, nor does preservation necessarily preserve it. In the increasing number of cases where decay and destruction cannot be avoided, we must acknowledge change as the inevitable entanglement of natural forces and human designs. Global climate change is ripping away structures on coastlines, thawing organic materials buried in permafrost for centuries, and turning exposed earthen architecture to dust. Unlike De Beers’s diamonds, many material monuments are not forever. We must come to recognize that only the tiniest fraction of culture heritage can be saved from decay and that even the most meticulous conservation of a heritage site or object offers only the illusion of timelessness.

Beyond nostalgia

And that brings me to another theme that I believe will be critical to the future of cultural heritage. Beyond its focus on the physical, there is a bundle of unfillable yearnings and habitual behaviors that stand in the way of the kinds of transformations that life in the COVID era requires. We can trace those behaviors to the giants of nineteenth-century antiquarianism, John Ruskin and Eugene Viollet le Duc. And despite their differing philosophical approaches to architectural conservation,Footnote ¹⁰ both shared a Romantic fascination with the past as a refuge from the present. The belching smokestacks and cramped factories, teeming slums, and urban crime and class conflict seemed to these leading aesthetes and their followers to represent the triumph of barbarity over a purer and more harmonious past. And this separation of the morally superior past from the benighted present has remained with us. The world-destroying potential of climate change and the social reorganization wrought by COVID (and the known unknowns of future pandemics) will call into question some inherited behavioral approaches to cultural heritage. To my mind, four of the most striking are the use of cultural heritage (1) to stimulate personal consumption; (2) to enforce civic norms and social regimentation; (3) to engineer greater revenue-generating urban residential patterns; and (4) to serve as an essentialized source of contemporary group identity. My contention is that these cultural heritage behaviors are becoming obsolete or, at the very least, counter-productive to the creation of a more resilient and equitable twenty-first-century global society that faces challenges that it has never known before.

Branding and consuming cultural heritage is often an expression of nostalgia for an idyllic and idealized premodernity. Whether that means visiting an ancient site or an exotic locale – or, for that matter, a historically themed mall or amusement park – heritage tourism that features the look or feel of “pastness,” as Cornelius Holtorf has termed it, has become an increasingly popular leisure time activity, competing with as much with other recreational venues (such as seaside resorts, ski slopes, zoos, and nature tours) for visitor revenue.Footnote ¹¹ Likewise merchandise associated with, or imitative of, traditional symbols or iconic heritage not only opens the way for dubiously motivated cultural appropriation but is also subject to the market forces of our algorithm-driven market economy, with the most popular, cheapest, and most frequently purchased heritage merchandise driving out the rest. And with COVID severely limiting international travel and travelers’ access to traditional artisans and performers, commercial control of the distribution of these heritage expressions is more likely to grow in importance. This instrumental use of heritage as a driver of economic development is therefore less likely to be local than Internet driven, transforming it into more of a discretionary purchase of personal experience or décor than a resonant or even well-informed expression of collective and civilizational memory.

Identifying cultural heritage with a normative identity has been another central trait of heritage practice at least since the rise of the nation-states of Europe, when the patrimony of each nation was believed to represent a timeless and homogeneous constellation of attributes that developed over the millennia from the mists of prehistory to the glories of the present day. Each monument, artistic style, local dish, and, of course, language was seen as an embodiment of the genius loci and of the citizens themselves. And although multiculturalism has already struck a severe blow to the idea of national heritage as being unambiguous and uniform “patriotic history,” the rising wave of authoritarianism across the world has returned it to official favor. What is more, this kind of top-down determination of heritage significance can be used to detect disloyalty and heresy. The time is long past when cultural heritage was taught in schools as a lesson in citizenship, even though the nation-state is still the responsible authority in determining things like nominations to UNESCO’s World Heritage List. But there is an even more important point to be made about the continued use of heritage as a tool for political legitimacy. As new claimants to heritage sovereignty emerge among marginalized and Indigenous communities, the “poison pill” of heritage orthodoxy can be used to marginalize internal political opponents and rivals. Laurajane Smith’s concept of the authorized heritage discourse is not the exclusive tool of the familiar imperialist and colonialist suspects; rather, it is a potentially useful instrument of domination in every political and religious power play.Footnote ¹²

Restoring historic city centers as themed residential and retail spaces is a planning strategy with far-reaching social and demographic consequences – not all of them positive. Calculated in economic benefit alone, the meticulous restoration of storefronts to their original design and the adaptive reuse of abandoned factories is often profitable. Real estate values rise. Foot traffic and business increases. Or at least that is how it used to be before the COVID pandemic. But the cost of this economics is usually the dispossession of long-time residents, usually from poor and marginalized communities, whose presence in the older and inevitably run-down areas of town is a common phenomenon all over the world. The phenomenon of gentrification, widely studied and roundly condemned in many quarters, has an additional effect. Though considered to be a form of historical preservation, it preserves only the outermost sheel of historical structures, filling them with contemporary residential units and national brand name outlets, which reveals only as much of the district’s history as brochures and informational panels can describe. As yet another manifestation of heritage-based theming, urban revitalization ironically plays to the appeal of nostalgia and the allure of timeless “authenticity” to radically transform the character of the neighborhood or historic district and to conceal the very real changes that brought it about.

Casting off the burden of officialized heritage to seek legitimation in new collective histories is a hallmark of our era of identity politics. Since at least the 1960s, newly independent nations, domestic countercultures, diasporic communities, racial and ethnic minorities, and Indigenous groups all over the world have rejected the dubious benefits of the heritage melting pot to assert collective identities worthy of respect and political rights. Often these emergent heritage identities come into conflict with existing national and supranational heritage authorities on issues of repatriation, treatment of human remains, and investigations of places held sacred by the emergent groups. Although the recognition of new heritage rights and perspectives is framed as an exercise of tolerance and inclusion, the opposite is sometimes the case. With the progressive fragmentation of cultural heritage into smaller autonomous units of authority, the chances of direct conflict between political goals and worldviews have increased. Ayodhya, Jerusalem, the Kasubi Tombs in Uganda, and the ruins of the Temple of Preah Vihear on the Cambodian-Thai border all demonstrate that claims to heritage as identity are potential sources of conflict, not guarantees of tolerance.

I must point out here that cultural heritage has increasingly come to incorporate intangible traditions along with material culture and the built environment. Yet, here too, nostalgia maintains its grip on the imagination. The Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity established by the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage is filled with colorful crafts, games, and rituals that evoke the premodern cultural expressions of their nominating countries, but they carefully avoid including the deepest and most persistent elements of global intangible heritage: power, inequality, cruelty, poverty, war, and hatred.Footnote ¹³ Yes, exotic cuisine and colorful folk customs are included, but like the commemorated built environment and individual heritage objects, they do not fully represent the inherited cultural traditions that have shaped the world in which we live.

COVID and global climate change have challenged our most basic conception of cultural heritage as timeless survivals from the past. With few exceptions, it sanctifies certain places, structures, and objects from earlier eras as inherently significant, admirable, valuable, and almost always good. The idea of cultural heritage’s value as intrinsic and unchanging is, I would suggest, neither relevant nor resonant in our current era of dramatic cultural and environmental change. It holds us back from recognizing that change itself is the only historical constant. We can never go back to trying to freeze time through dutiful preservation, imagining that it will help us restore an imaginary Eden of social stability.

From products to process

So where are we headed? Is our inherited cultural heritage practice doomed to be largely discredited and abandoned by all but its most fervent acolytes? Will it be remembered as a medieval-like cult of relics that offered the faithful a “touch of eternity,” as the religious historian Peter Brown termed it, in bones, stones, and tattered souvenirs of saints’ lives?Footnote ¹⁴ Certainly, some familiar techniques of preservation will continue, for there will always be special places from the past to which significant memories and moral lessons cling. Some of them may attract enough funding to ensure physical preservation. But those select few should not be confused, pars pro toto, with cultural heritage. For there are countless places and things that evoke significant memories and moral lessons – some fleeting, some surviving for generations and others for millennia. The impact of the COVID pandemic has been to demonstrate clearly that what we have traditionally considered to be cultural heritage leaves out the vast majority of humanity’s creative expressions that deserve to be remembered. What is more, officialized cultural heritage practice has privileged certain treatments of material culture, without which they are considered to be either “not” cultural heritage or cultural heritage that has been “lost.”

What we must aim for – and what, I believe, will emerge as a major theme of cultural heritage initiatives in the post-COVID era of even more dramatic climate change – will be an emphasis on processes of collective memory rather than things. Localism will be an increasing element in cultural heritage appreciation. With the end (or substantial reduction) of international tourism’s giant carbon footprint, cultural heritage will be where people live, not where people visit. Meaningful local memories will become more resonant and powerful than expert-defined “outstanding universal value.” Just as the memorable Council of Europe’s 2002 teaching toolkit Europe from One Street to the Other helped schoolchildren in Europe’s inner cities learn about heritage by finding it all around them – in their own neighborhoods with its most memorable events and personalities – heritage will be seen less as an aesthetic or patriotic exercise and more as a participatory community activity.Footnote ¹⁵ But it will not be meant to define a uniform identity. It will replace the linear timeline, illustrated by architectural styles and historic birthplaces, with a network of interconnections. A world heritage list of the most “significant” and “important” heritage places will give way to a planetary silk road, in which all places are essential components of the whole.

As an ongoing process, every participant in a locally based, yet globally aware, approach to cultural heritage would contribute memories and cultural traditions, trying to respond to, or fill in the gaps and unspoken assumptions of, the others, calling to mind issues of significance that the others have ignored or omitted. Like a social network of memory, community initiatives would be woven together both in person and virtually. Expert data drawn from archaeology and architectural history would combine in creative ways with local lore, artistic creativity, children’s drawings, and neighborhood photos and smartphone videos to express an ever-deepening representation of cultural heritage in many places – simultaneously. Slickly designed visitor centers and virtual flybys of iconic monuments lack roots – at the grassroots. They are more entertainment than civic discussion. One, maybe two, occasionally three visits to a heritage site or museum that features an expensive interactive kiosk will capture the interest of the local visitor. And with the future volume of one-time visiting tourists in considerable doubt, active participation on the local level can ensure the long-term vitality and creativity of the process of cultural heritage.

Culture and cultural heritage, in this perspective, are ways of seeing, ways of perceiving values and ethics, not merely a collection of venerated buildings, landscapes, and things. Their place in public discourse is no less important than other debates about social policy, development issues, environmental policy, or immigration restrictions – all of them based on an evolving understanding of how the past may be useful to shaping a better present and future. And, today, with an ever-increasing circle of stakeholders with recognized rights to tell their own stories, all of the community-centered heritage protest actions that we see taking place today – toppled statues along with new monuments erected to commemorate old injustices – represent a rejection of the timeworn concepts of authenticity and tradition imposed from on high. As Robert Graves’s autobiography – and, indeed, all of his writings – have articulated so clearly, profound change, almost always unanticipated, is the engine of both history and culture. And if the sudden descent of the COVID-19 pandemic and the looming threats of economic upheaval and climate change have taught us anything about the future of cultural heritage, it is that the human necessity for creative, ever-changing, participatory reflection on the past – rather than dutiful, change-denying preservation – is likely to be its dominant paradigm.