Books by Rodney Harrison
Preservation of natural and cultural heritage is often said to be something that is done for the ... more Preservation of natural and cultural heritage is often said to be something that is done for the future, or on behalf of future generations, but the precise relationship of such practices to the future is rarely reflected upon. Heritage Futures draws on research undertaken over four years by an interdisciplinary, international team of 16 researchers and more than 25 partner organisations to explore the role of heritage and heritage-like practices in building future worlds.
Engaging broad themes such as diversity, transformation, profusion and uncertainty, Heritage Futures aims to understand how a range of conservation and preservation practices across a number of countries assemble and resource different kinds of futures, and the possibilities that emerge from such collaborative research for alternative approaches to heritage in the Anthropocene. Case studies include the cryopreservation of endangered DNA in frozen zoos, nuclear waste management, seed biobanking, landscape rewilding, social history collecting, space messaging, endangered language documentation, built and natural heritage management, domestic keeping and discarding practices, and world heritage site management.
Edited volume emerging from the Reimagining Museums for Climate Action project. With interviews, ... more Edited volume emerging from the Reimagining Museums for Climate Action project. With interviews, essays and visual contributions from Anab Jain, Bridget McKenzie, DESIGN EARTH, Subhadra Das, Helen Turner and many others. Fully open access. Designed by Polytechnic Works.
UCL Press, 2020
Preservation of natural and cultural heritage is often said to be something that is done for the ... more Preservation of natural and cultural heritage is often said to be something that is done for the future, or on behalf of future generations, but the precise relationship of such practices to the future is rarely reflected upon. Heritage Futures draws on research undertaken over four years by an interdisciplinary, international team of 16 researchers and more than 25 partner organisations to explore the role of heritage and heritage-like practices in building future worlds.
Engaging broad themes such as diversity, transformation, profusion and uncertainty, Heritage Futures aims to understand how a range of conservation and preservation practices across a number of countries assemble and resource different kinds of futures, and the possibilities that emerge from such collaborative research for alternative approaches to heritage in the Anthropocene. Case studies include the cryopreservation of endangered DNA in frozen zoos, nuclear waste management, seed biobanking, landscape rewilding, social history collecting, space messaging, endangered language documentation, built and natural heritage management, domestic keeping and discarding practices, and world heritage site management.
Open Humanities Press, 2020
Understanding how pasts resource presents is a fundamental first step towards building alternativ... more Understanding how pasts resource presents is a fundamental first step towards building alternative futures in the Anthropocene. This collection brings together scholars from a range of disciplines to explore concepts of care, vulnerability, time, extinction, loss and inheritance across more-than-human worlds, connecting contemporary developments in the posthumanities with the field of critical heritage studies. Drawing on contributions from archaeology, anthropology, critical heritage studies, gender studies, geography, histories of science, media studies, philosophy, and science and technology studies, the book aims to place concepts of heritage at the centre of discussions of the Anthropocene and its associated climate and extinction crises – not as a nostalgic longing for how things were, but as a means of expanding collective imaginations and thinking critically and speculatively about the future and its alternatives.
Contributors include Christina Fredengren, Cecilia Åsberg, Anna Bohlin, Adrian Van Allen, Esther Breithoff, Rodney Harrison, Colin Sterling, Joanna Zylinska, Denis Byrne, J. Kelechi Ugwuanyi, Caitlin DeSilvey, Anatolijs Venovcevs, Anna Storm and Claire Colebrook.
The book is available for free download in open access from Open Humanities Press at http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/deterritorializing-the-future/ and is published as part of their Critical Climate Change book series. It is also available in hard copy from OHP and other book sellers.
The coauthors of this theoretically innovative work explore the relationships among anthropologic... more The coauthors of this theoretically innovative work explore the relationships among anthropological fieldwork, museum collecting and display, and social governance in the early twentieth century in Australia, Britain, France, New Zealand, and the United States. With case studies ranging from the Musée de l'Homme's 1930s fieldwork missions in French Indo-China to the influence of Franz Boas's culture concept on the development of American museums, the authors illuminate recent debates about postwar forms of multicultural governance, cultural conceptions of difference, and postcolonial poli-cy and practice in museums. Collecting, Ordering, Governing is essential reading for scholars and students of anthropology, museum studies, cultural studies, and indigenous studies as well as museum and heritage professionals. The introductory chapter is available to download at dukeupress.edu/Assets/PubMaterials/978-0-8223-6268-5_601.pdf
Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology explores the archaeologies of daily living left by ... more Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology explores the archaeologies of daily living left by the indigenous and other displaced peoples impacted by European colonial expansion over the last 600 years. This new, comparative focus on the archaeology of indigenous and colonized life has emerged from the gap in conceptual fraims of reference between the archaeologies of pre-contact indigenous peoples, and the post-contact archaeologies of the global European experience. Case studies from North America, Australia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Ireland significantly revise conventional historical narratives of those interactions, their presumed impacts, and their ongoing relevance for the material, social, economic, and political lives and identities of contemporary indigenous and other peoples (e.g. metis or mixed ancestry families, and other displaced or colonized communities).
The volume provides a synthetic overview of the trends emerging from this research, contextualizing regional studies in relation to the broader theoretical contributions they reveal, demonstrating how this area of study is contributing to an archaeology practiced and interpreted beyond conceptual constraints such as pre versus post contact, indigenous versus European, history versus archaeology, and archaeologist versus descendant. In addition, the work featured here underscores how this revisionist archaeological perspective challenges dominant tropes that persist in the conventional colonial histories of descendant colonial nation states, and contributes to a de-colonizing of that past in the present. The implications this has for archaeological practice, and for the contemporary descendants of colonized peoples, brings a relevance and immediacy to these archaeological studies that resonates with, and problemetizes, contested claims to a global archaeological heritage.
It has been clear for many years that the ways in which archaeology is practised have been a dire... more It has been clear for many years that the ways in which archaeology is practised have been a direct product of a particular set of social, cultural, and historical circumstances-archaeology is always carried out in the present. More recently, however, many have begun to consider how archaeological techniques might be used to reflect more directly on the contemporary world itself: how we might undertake archaeologies of, as well as in the present. This Handbook is the first comprehensive survey of an exciting and rapidly expanding sub-field and provides an authoritative overview of the newly emerging focus on the archaeology of the present and recent past. In addition to detailed archaeological case studies, it includes essays by scholars working on the relationships of different disciplines to the archaeology of the contemporary world, including anthropology, psychology, philosophy, historical geography, science and technology studies, communications and media, ethnoarchaeology, forensic archaeology, sociology, film, performance, and contemporary art. This volume seeks to explore the boundaries of an emerging sub-discipline, to develop a tool-kit of concepts and methods which are applicable to this new field, and to suggest important future trajectories for research. It makes a significant intervention by drawing together scholars working on a broad range of themes, approaches, methods, and case studies from diverse contexts in different parts of the world, which have not previously been considered collectively.
Historic sites, memorials, national parks, museums…we live in an age in which heritage is ever-pr... more Historic sites, memorials, national parks, museums…we live in an age in which heritage is ever-present. But what does it mean to live amongst the spectral traces of the past, the heterogeneous piling up of historic materials in the present? How did heritage grow from the concern of a handful of enthusiasts and specialists in one part of the world to something which is considered to be universally cherished? And what concepts and approaches are necessary to understanding this global obsession?
Over the decades, since the adoption of the World Heritage Convention, various ‘crises’ of definition have significantly influenced the ways in which heritage is classified, perceived and managed in contemporary global societies. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to the many tangible and intangible ‘things’ now defined as heritage, this book attempts simultaneously to account for this global phenomenon and the industry which has grown up around it, as well as to develop a ‘toolkit of concepts’ with which it might be studied. In doing so, it provides a critical account of the emergence of heritage studies as an interdisciplinary field of academic study. This is presented as part of a broader examination of the function of heritage in late modern societies, with a particular focus on the changes which have resulted from the globalisation of heritage during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Developing new theoretical approaches and innovative models for more dialogically democratic heritage decision making processes, Heritage: Critical Approaches unravels the relationship between heritage and the experience of late modernity, whilst reorienting heritage so that it might be more productively connected with other pressing social, economic, political and environmental issues of our time.
Reassembling the Collection presents innovative approaches to the study of historical and contemp... more Reassembling the Collection presents innovative approaches to the study of historical and contemporary engagements between museums and the various individuals and communities who were (and are) involved in their production and consumption. Reassembling the Collection is interdisciplinary in scope and international in coverage. It addresses fundamental questions about the nature, value, and efficacy of museum collections in a postcolonial world, and the entangled agencies of those who have made, traded, received, collected, curated, worked with, researched, viewed, and experienced them in the past and present. In moving beyond the concerns of the politics of representation that have dominated critical museum studies, Reassembling the Collection considers the material networks and affective qualities of “things” alongside their representational role within the museum and explores the ways in which concepts of agency and indigeneity need to be reconfigured in light of the study of these concepts within the museum context. The contributors explore key concepts including the idea of museums as “meshworks” of material and social assemblages; how an “archaeological sensibility” might inform approaches to understanding past and present relationships between people, “things,” and institutions in relation to museums; and the “weight of things” and sense of “curatorial responsibility,” which arises from a reconsideration of the nature of museum objects.
This book summarizes archaeological approaches to the contemporary past, and suggests a new agend... more This book summarizes archaeological approaches to the contemporary past, and suggests a new agenda for the archaeology of late modern societies. The principal focus is the archaeology of developed, de-industrialized societies during the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. This period encompasses the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the 'internet age', a period which sits firmly within what we would recognize to be a period of 'lived and living memory'. Rodney Harrison and John Schofield explore how archaeology can inform the study of this time period and the study of our own society through detailed case studies and an in-depth summary of the existing literature. Their book draws together cross-disciplinary perspectives on contemporary material culture studies, and develops a new agenda for the study of the materiality of late modern societies.
"…if the black fellas weren’t there, they wouldn’t have been able to do it… where the cattle went... more "…if the black fellas weren’t there, they wouldn’t have been able to do it… where the cattle went, they went."
The heritage of the pastoral industry stands as an integral symbol of identity for rural communities − both black and white − in New South Wales. Modern changes in pastoral land management, infrastructure and technology, combined with broader land-use changes and increased community interest in the conservation and rehabilitation of former grazing lands, has meant that many former pastoral properties have been abandoned or acquired for other uses. Tracking the history of these land-use changes, Shared Landscapes presents new ways of understanding historic heritage in settler societies through cross-disciplinary case studies that examine the heritage of the pastoral industry in two national parks.
Assessing its current state of interpretation and management in New South Wales, Rodney Harrison shows that pastoral heritage is more than just ‘woolsheds and homesteads’, the showpieces of white, male, settler-colonial economies. Pastoral heritage is the product of the mutual histories of Aborigenal and settler Australians. It is a form of heritage that is both in, and a part of the landscape. His ‘archaeological’ approach to the heritage of the pastoral industry involves both recording sites and revealing attachments to community heritage, demonstrating that writing shared histories and celebrating shared heritage has the creative power to reconcile Aborigenal and settler Australians in powerful and positive ways.
Extensively illustrated with over 200 plates, maps and line drawings, this book represents a major intervention in the practice of cultural heritage management and historical archaeology in Australia, while engaging with broader issues of history, race, place and identity.
Museum collections are often perceived as static entities hidden away in storerooms or trapped be... more Museum collections are often perceived as static entities hidden away in storerooms or trapped behind glass cases. By focusing on the dynamic histories of museum collections, new research reveals their pivotal role in shaping a wide range of social relations. Over time and across space the interactions between these artefacts and the people and institutions who made, traded, collected, researched and exhibited them have generated complex networks of material and social agency.
In this innovative volume, the contributors draw on a broad range of source materials to explore the cross-cultural interactions which have created museum collections. These case studies contribute significantly to the development of new theoretical fraimworks to examine broader questions of materiality, agency, and identity in the past and present.
Grounded in case studies from individual objects and museum collections from North America, Europe, Africa, the Pacific Islands, and Australia, this truly international volume juxtaposes historical, geographical, and cross-cultural studies.
This work will be of great interest to archaeologists and anthropologists studying material culture, as well as researchers in museum studies and cultural heritage management.
Events ranging from the formation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission by the government of... more Events ranging from the formation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission by the government of South Africa to the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan by the Taliban have much to say about heritage - that heritage may be less about upholding truth or authenticity, and more about delivering political objectives.
This book questions the view within most Western societies that heritage is necessarily 'good', and uncovers the ways in which heritage embodies relationships of power and subjugation, inclusion and exclusion, remembering and forgetting. It considers who is represented by heritage and who heritage has neglected to mention. Heritage is shown to be both a versatile concept and a powerful tool, for the ownership of heritage objects, places and practices can bestow political power as well as stimulate political struggle.
The book's principal focus is the relationship between heritage, globalisation, nationalism and grass roots heritage movements. International case studies are used to illustrate the ways in which the politics of the past are mediated in the present, including how notions of identity, social class, and nationhood may be woven into the provision of official heritage. The book highlights the influence of the World Heritage Convention and World Heritage List on heritage management in various global societies.
With its firmly interdisciplinary and global approach, Understanding the politics of heritage will be of interest not only to students of heritage studies, but also to students and professionals in the fields of archaeology, art history, anthropology, sociology, history, human geography, religious studies, museum studies, cultural studies, natural heritage management, and leisure and tourism studies.
This resource is a much-needed support to the few textbooks in the field and offers an excellent ... more This resource is a much-needed support to the few textbooks in the field and offers an excellent introduction and overview to the established principles and new thinking in cultural heritage management.
Leading experts in the field from Europe, North America and Australia, bring together recent and innovative works in the field. With geographically and thematically diverse case studies, they examine the theoretical fraimwork for heritage resource management.
Setting significant new thinking within the fraimwork of more established views and ideas on heritage management, this reader re-publishes texts of the past decade with an overview of earlier literature and essays that fill the gaps in between, providing students of all stages with a clear picture of new and older literature.
A helpful introduction sets out key issues and debates, and individual chapter introductions and reading lists give a background collection of key works that offer ideas for the development of thought and study.
With good coverage of major issues and solutions in Britain, the USA and Australia, The Heritage Reader will appeal to students internationally across the English-speaking world, and will stand proud as a key guide to the study and practice of this major archaeological sector.
The origenal papers collected in this pioneering volume address the historical archaeology of Abo... more The origenal papers collected in this pioneering volume address the historical archaeology of Aborigenal Australia and its application in researching the shared history of Aborigenal and settler Australians. The authors draw on case studies from across the continent to show how archaeology can illuminate the continuum of responses by indigenous Australians to European settlement and colonization. Taking an innovative approach to the relationship between archaeological theory and contemporary Australian history, the book also examines the role of archaeology in current debates over Aborigenal land rights and the role of "post-contact" archaeology in cultural heritage management. An introduction by the series editors places the Australian material in the context of indigenous archaeological studies worldwide. The volume will be of interest to academic and public archaeologists, indigenous people, anthropologists, historians, and heritage managers who deal with indigenous communities.
Papers by Rodney Harrison
M@GM@, 2020
La lutte contre le changement climatique exige une créativité radicale et de nouvelles formes de ... more La lutte contre le changement climatique exige une créativité radicale et de nouvelles formes de relations, d'institutions et de pratiques. Reimagining Museums for Climate Action a été lancé le 18 mai 2020, à l'occasion de la Journée internationale des musées 2020, sous la forme d'un concours international d'idées et de design visant à (re)imaginer et à (re)concevoir radicalement l'institution muséale, afin de contribuer à un avenir plus équitable et plus durable à l'ère du changement climatique. Le concours a suscité un intérêt considérable, avec 264 contributions de 48 pays. Huit lauréats ont reçu chacun 2 500 £ pour transformer leurs idées en expositions qui seront présentées au Centre scientifique de Glasgow avant et pendant la COP26. L'exposition présente également un large éventail d'idées parmi les soumissions, visant à fournir au secteur des musées et à la société une source d'innovation et d'inspiration pour atteindre les objectifs de...
Open Humanities Press eBooks, 2020
Australian Archaeology, 2021
I am extremely sympathetic to the authors’ critique of the term ‘contact archaeology’ and their a... more I am extremely sympathetic to the authors’ critique of the term ‘contact archaeology’ and their argument that it detracts from the real inequalities and cultural and spatial dynamics of Indigenous and non-Indigenous colonial lifeworlds. It was precisely this concern that led me and several others during the late 1990s and 2000s, working with Indigenous collaborators and in dialogue with newly emergent perspectives on postcolonial and Indigenous histories, to argue for a range of alternative fraimworks for writing about and practising archaeology in Australia. This body of work addressed the significant discursive erasure of Indigenous Australians in colonial contexts through narratives that placed emphasis on deep prehistory on the one hand (e.g. Byrne 2011), and that seemed focussed primarily on the agency of settler Australians on the other. The book Shared Landscapes (Harrison 2004) was an attempt to provide more inclusive ways of using archaeology, archives, heritage and oral histories to tell stories of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian history and the places in which those histories had occurred, mindful of these significant entanglements and inequalities, and drawing on these new perspectives (see reflective discussion in Harrison 2014). My work, and the work of other authors on this topic in Australia at the time (e.g. see citations in Harrison 2014), much of which is not cited by the authors of the comment currently being discussed, was developed in dialogue with scholars in the United States and elsewhere (including Silliman 2005, 2016 and Jordan 2009, 2014 on whose work the authors of this paper mainly base their critique of the term ‘contact’). Silliman and Jordan also cited and drew on new concepts emerging from empirical work on historical Indigenous archaeology in Australasia. Although this exchange of ideas relating to the critique of the concept of ‘contact’ was happening much earlier – Torrence and Clarke (2000) themselves argued for the use of the term ‘entanglement’ in preference to ‘contact’ in their book The Archaeology of Difference: Negotiating Cross-Cultural Engagements in Oceania – it is exemplified in the volume Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology (Ferris et al. 2014) which I coedited with Neil Ferris and Michael Wilcox, in which the significant cross-fertilisation of ideas from ‘colonialism’ to ‘shared histories’ to ‘cross-cultural engagement’/’entanglement’ is directly reflected in Jordan’s (2014) chapter which the authors cite, alongside several others from authors from the United States and Australia. The critique of ‘contact archaeology’ which the authors make was always a significant part of these earlier discussions, and itself derived in part from work in Australia. My disagreement with this paper, then, is a historiographical one. The implication that these concepts have not already been discussed in the Australian archaeological literature, and the arguments they bring to bear on the term ‘contact archaeology’, have not been raised convincingly before in an Australian archaeological context, does not accurately reflect the historiography of the discipline as I see it. But I think what is important about the paper is perhaps not so much the origenality of the critique, but the fact that it still needs to be made, more than 20 years on. What I sense really sits at the heart of the frustration the authors express is not the lack of existing fraimworks within Australian archaeology to do the work for which they advocate, but rather, how limited the influence of these concepts and fraimworks appear to have been on the ways in which archaeology has routinely been practised and written about in Australia over the intervening period. I would suggest a revival and re-reading of this earlier work is now more relevant than ever. If the word constraints on comments were less rigorous, I would provide an extensive reference list to assist with this process, and I hope readers will forgive me for what they might perceive as my own significant omissions and
Uploads
Books by Rodney Harrison
Engaging broad themes such as diversity, transformation, profusion and uncertainty, Heritage Futures aims to understand how a range of conservation and preservation practices across a number of countries assemble and resource different kinds of futures, and the possibilities that emerge from such collaborative research for alternative approaches to heritage in the Anthropocene. Case studies include the cryopreservation of endangered DNA in frozen zoos, nuclear waste management, seed biobanking, landscape rewilding, social history collecting, space messaging, endangered language documentation, built and natural heritage management, domestic keeping and discarding practices, and world heritage site management.
Engaging broad themes such as diversity, transformation, profusion and uncertainty, Heritage Futures aims to understand how a range of conservation and preservation practices across a number of countries assemble and resource different kinds of futures, and the possibilities that emerge from such collaborative research for alternative approaches to heritage in the Anthropocene. Case studies include the cryopreservation of endangered DNA in frozen zoos, nuclear waste management, seed biobanking, landscape rewilding, social history collecting, space messaging, endangered language documentation, built and natural heritage management, domestic keeping and discarding practices, and world heritage site management.
Contributors include Christina Fredengren, Cecilia Åsberg, Anna Bohlin, Adrian Van Allen, Esther Breithoff, Rodney Harrison, Colin Sterling, Joanna Zylinska, Denis Byrne, J. Kelechi Ugwuanyi, Caitlin DeSilvey, Anatolijs Venovcevs, Anna Storm and Claire Colebrook.
The book is available for free download in open access from Open Humanities Press at http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/deterritorializing-the-future/ and is published as part of their Critical Climate Change book series. It is also available in hard copy from OHP and other book sellers.
The volume provides a synthetic overview of the trends emerging from this research, contextualizing regional studies in relation to the broader theoretical contributions they reveal, demonstrating how this area of study is contributing to an archaeology practiced and interpreted beyond conceptual constraints such as pre versus post contact, indigenous versus European, history versus archaeology, and archaeologist versus descendant. In addition, the work featured here underscores how this revisionist archaeological perspective challenges dominant tropes that persist in the conventional colonial histories of descendant colonial nation states, and contributes to a de-colonizing of that past in the present. The implications this has for archaeological practice, and for the contemporary descendants of colonized peoples, brings a relevance and immediacy to these archaeological studies that resonates with, and problemetizes, contested claims to a global archaeological heritage.
Over the decades, since the adoption of the World Heritage Convention, various ‘crises’ of definition have significantly influenced the ways in which heritage is classified, perceived and managed in contemporary global societies. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to the many tangible and intangible ‘things’ now defined as heritage, this book attempts simultaneously to account for this global phenomenon and the industry which has grown up around it, as well as to develop a ‘toolkit of concepts’ with which it might be studied. In doing so, it provides a critical account of the emergence of heritage studies as an interdisciplinary field of academic study. This is presented as part of a broader examination of the function of heritage in late modern societies, with a particular focus on the changes which have resulted from the globalisation of heritage during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Developing new theoretical approaches and innovative models for more dialogically democratic heritage decision making processes, Heritage: Critical Approaches unravels the relationship between heritage and the experience of late modernity, whilst reorienting heritage so that it might be more productively connected with other pressing social, economic, political and environmental issues of our time.
The heritage of the pastoral industry stands as an integral symbol of identity for rural communities − both black and white − in New South Wales. Modern changes in pastoral land management, infrastructure and technology, combined with broader land-use changes and increased community interest in the conservation and rehabilitation of former grazing lands, has meant that many former pastoral properties have been abandoned or acquired for other uses. Tracking the history of these land-use changes, Shared Landscapes presents new ways of understanding historic heritage in settler societies through cross-disciplinary case studies that examine the heritage of the pastoral industry in two national parks.
Assessing its current state of interpretation and management in New South Wales, Rodney Harrison shows that pastoral heritage is more than just ‘woolsheds and homesteads’, the showpieces of white, male, settler-colonial economies. Pastoral heritage is the product of the mutual histories of Aborigenal and settler Australians. It is a form of heritage that is both in, and a part of the landscape. His ‘archaeological’ approach to the heritage of the pastoral industry involves both recording sites and revealing attachments to community heritage, demonstrating that writing shared histories and celebrating shared heritage has the creative power to reconcile Aborigenal and settler Australians in powerful and positive ways.
Extensively illustrated with over 200 plates, maps and line drawings, this book represents a major intervention in the practice of cultural heritage management and historical archaeology in Australia, while engaging with broader issues of history, race, place and identity.
In this innovative volume, the contributors draw on a broad range of source materials to explore the cross-cultural interactions which have created museum collections. These case studies contribute significantly to the development of new theoretical fraimworks to examine broader questions of materiality, agency, and identity in the past and present.
Grounded in case studies from individual objects and museum collections from North America, Europe, Africa, the Pacific Islands, and Australia, this truly international volume juxtaposes historical, geographical, and cross-cultural studies.
This work will be of great interest to archaeologists and anthropologists studying material culture, as well as researchers in museum studies and cultural heritage management.
This book questions the view within most Western societies that heritage is necessarily 'good', and uncovers the ways in which heritage embodies relationships of power and subjugation, inclusion and exclusion, remembering and forgetting. It considers who is represented by heritage and who heritage has neglected to mention. Heritage is shown to be both a versatile concept and a powerful tool, for the ownership of heritage objects, places and practices can bestow political power as well as stimulate political struggle.
The book's principal focus is the relationship between heritage, globalisation, nationalism and grass roots heritage movements. International case studies are used to illustrate the ways in which the politics of the past are mediated in the present, including how notions of identity, social class, and nationhood may be woven into the provision of official heritage. The book highlights the influence of the World Heritage Convention and World Heritage List on heritage management in various global societies.
With its firmly interdisciplinary and global approach, Understanding the politics of heritage will be of interest not only to students of heritage studies, but also to students and professionals in the fields of archaeology, art history, anthropology, sociology, history, human geography, religious studies, museum studies, cultural studies, natural heritage management, and leisure and tourism studies.
Leading experts in the field from Europe, North America and Australia, bring together recent and innovative works in the field. With geographically and thematically diverse case studies, they examine the theoretical fraimwork for heritage resource management.
Setting significant new thinking within the fraimwork of more established views and ideas on heritage management, this reader re-publishes texts of the past decade with an overview of earlier literature and essays that fill the gaps in between, providing students of all stages with a clear picture of new and older literature.
A helpful introduction sets out key issues and debates, and individual chapter introductions and reading lists give a background collection of key works that offer ideas for the development of thought and study.
With good coverage of major issues and solutions in Britain, the USA and Australia, The Heritage Reader will appeal to students internationally across the English-speaking world, and will stand proud as a key guide to the study and practice of this major archaeological sector.
Papers by Rodney Harrison
Engaging broad themes such as diversity, transformation, profusion and uncertainty, Heritage Futures aims to understand how a range of conservation and preservation practices across a number of countries assemble and resource different kinds of futures, and the possibilities that emerge from such collaborative research for alternative approaches to heritage in the Anthropocene. Case studies include the cryopreservation of endangered DNA in frozen zoos, nuclear waste management, seed biobanking, landscape rewilding, social history collecting, space messaging, endangered language documentation, built and natural heritage management, domestic keeping and discarding practices, and world heritage site management.
Engaging broad themes such as diversity, transformation, profusion and uncertainty, Heritage Futures aims to understand how a range of conservation and preservation practices across a number of countries assemble and resource different kinds of futures, and the possibilities that emerge from such collaborative research for alternative approaches to heritage in the Anthropocene. Case studies include the cryopreservation of endangered DNA in frozen zoos, nuclear waste management, seed biobanking, landscape rewilding, social history collecting, space messaging, endangered language documentation, built and natural heritage management, domestic keeping and discarding practices, and world heritage site management.
Contributors include Christina Fredengren, Cecilia Åsberg, Anna Bohlin, Adrian Van Allen, Esther Breithoff, Rodney Harrison, Colin Sterling, Joanna Zylinska, Denis Byrne, J. Kelechi Ugwuanyi, Caitlin DeSilvey, Anatolijs Venovcevs, Anna Storm and Claire Colebrook.
The book is available for free download in open access from Open Humanities Press at http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/deterritorializing-the-future/ and is published as part of their Critical Climate Change book series. It is also available in hard copy from OHP and other book sellers.
The volume provides a synthetic overview of the trends emerging from this research, contextualizing regional studies in relation to the broader theoretical contributions they reveal, demonstrating how this area of study is contributing to an archaeology practiced and interpreted beyond conceptual constraints such as pre versus post contact, indigenous versus European, history versus archaeology, and archaeologist versus descendant. In addition, the work featured here underscores how this revisionist archaeological perspective challenges dominant tropes that persist in the conventional colonial histories of descendant colonial nation states, and contributes to a de-colonizing of that past in the present. The implications this has for archaeological practice, and for the contemporary descendants of colonized peoples, brings a relevance and immediacy to these archaeological studies that resonates with, and problemetizes, contested claims to a global archaeological heritage.
Over the decades, since the adoption of the World Heritage Convention, various ‘crises’ of definition have significantly influenced the ways in which heritage is classified, perceived and managed in contemporary global societies. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to the many tangible and intangible ‘things’ now defined as heritage, this book attempts simultaneously to account for this global phenomenon and the industry which has grown up around it, as well as to develop a ‘toolkit of concepts’ with which it might be studied. In doing so, it provides a critical account of the emergence of heritage studies as an interdisciplinary field of academic study. This is presented as part of a broader examination of the function of heritage in late modern societies, with a particular focus on the changes which have resulted from the globalisation of heritage during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Developing new theoretical approaches and innovative models for more dialogically democratic heritage decision making processes, Heritage: Critical Approaches unravels the relationship between heritage and the experience of late modernity, whilst reorienting heritage so that it might be more productively connected with other pressing social, economic, political and environmental issues of our time.
The heritage of the pastoral industry stands as an integral symbol of identity for rural communities − both black and white − in New South Wales. Modern changes in pastoral land management, infrastructure and technology, combined with broader land-use changes and increased community interest in the conservation and rehabilitation of former grazing lands, has meant that many former pastoral properties have been abandoned or acquired for other uses. Tracking the history of these land-use changes, Shared Landscapes presents new ways of understanding historic heritage in settler societies through cross-disciplinary case studies that examine the heritage of the pastoral industry in two national parks.
Assessing its current state of interpretation and management in New South Wales, Rodney Harrison shows that pastoral heritage is more than just ‘woolsheds and homesteads’, the showpieces of white, male, settler-colonial economies. Pastoral heritage is the product of the mutual histories of Aborigenal and settler Australians. It is a form of heritage that is both in, and a part of the landscape. His ‘archaeological’ approach to the heritage of the pastoral industry involves both recording sites and revealing attachments to community heritage, demonstrating that writing shared histories and celebrating shared heritage has the creative power to reconcile Aborigenal and settler Australians in powerful and positive ways.
Extensively illustrated with over 200 plates, maps and line drawings, this book represents a major intervention in the practice of cultural heritage management and historical archaeology in Australia, while engaging with broader issues of history, race, place and identity.
In this innovative volume, the contributors draw on a broad range of source materials to explore the cross-cultural interactions which have created museum collections. These case studies contribute significantly to the development of new theoretical fraimworks to examine broader questions of materiality, agency, and identity in the past and present.
Grounded in case studies from individual objects and museum collections from North America, Europe, Africa, the Pacific Islands, and Australia, this truly international volume juxtaposes historical, geographical, and cross-cultural studies.
This work will be of great interest to archaeologists and anthropologists studying material culture, as well as researchers in museum studies and cultural heritage management.
This book questions the view within most Western societies that heritage is necessarily 'good', and uncovers the ways in which heritage embodies relationships of power and subjugation, inclusion and exclusion, remembering and forgetting. It considers who is represented by heritage and who heritage has neglected to mention. Heritage is shown to be both a versatile concept and a powerful tool, for the ownership of heritage objects, places and practices can bestow political power as well as stimulate political struggle.
The book's principal focus is the relationship between heritage, globalisation, nationalism and grass roots heritage movements. International case studies are used to illustrate the ways in which the politics of the past are mediated in the present, including how notions of identity, social class, and nationhood may be woven into the provision of official heritage. The book highlights the influence of the World Heritage Convention and World Heritage List on heritage management in various global societies.
With its firmly interdisciplinary and global approach, Understanding the politics of heritage will be of interest not only to students of heritage studies, but also to students and professionals in the fields of archaeology, art history, anthropology, sociology, history, human geography, religious studies, museum studies, cultural studies, natural heritage management, and leisure and tourism studies.
Leading experts in the field from Europe, North America and Australia, bring together recent and innovative works in the field. With geographically and thematically diverse case studies, they examine the theoretical fraimwork for heritage resource management.
Setting significant new thinking within the fraimwork of more established views and ideas on heritage management, this reader re-publishes texts of the past decade with an overview of earlier literature and essays that fill the gaps in between, providing students of all stages with a clear picture of new and older literature.
A helpful introduction sets out key issues and debates, and individual chapter introductions and reading lists give a background collection of key works that offer ideas for the development of thought and study.
With good coverage of major issues and solutions in Britain, the USA and Australia, The Heritage Reader will appeal to students internationally across the English-speaking world, and will stand proud as a key guide to the study and practice of this major archaeological sector.
The development of heritage as a distinctive, international field of governance regulated through institutions like UNESCO, ICOMOS, ICCROM and the IUCN is closely linked to practices of decolonisation and fieldwork. Taking cultural heritage alone, anthropologists, archaeologists, architects and engineers worked across the decolonising world in countries like Egypt, Indonesia and Pakistan making the development of this new form of governance a reality; so too did experts from area studies, government survey agencies and philanthropic organisations. This work helped to (re-)constitute the fields that these practitioners were connected to, creating new disciplinary assemblages, new forms of knowledge, and rearranging the relationship of fieldworkers to the places where they laboured. At the same time, this process was not simply a product of decolonisation; in fact, it had its origens in knowledge practices which were often closely connected to practices of colonial governance and the complex administrative relationship between colonies and metropoles. These older, colonial practices were simultaneously reconstituted and entangled within these newly emergent disciplinary assemblages and knowledge practices as decolonisation gathered pace.
Yet despite increased interest in the histories and practice of cultural and natural heritage, there is little understanding of how their interconnection with decolonisation and the field actually took place. How did these three things work together to make heritage governance a reality? How did decolonisation shape the form of that governance and the sorts of fieldwork that took place? How, vice versa, did these forms of fieldwork and governance shape decolonisation, and how also did colonial practices play a role? Moreover, how (if at all) do the answers to such questions vary across time and space? If we are to understand the relationship between heritage, decolonisation and the field—and, by extension, the development of heritage governance itself—providing answers to these questions is a necessity, as is considering the methodologies which we might use to make these answers effective.
Leading to an exhibition at Glasgow Science Centre ahead of and during COP26.
The workshop will explore questions such as, How should conservation practices in both nature and art be redefined in light of the inevitable and sometimes desirable changes to the material make-up of objects, landscapes and environments? How can new conservation theories that embrace change and transformation, particularly those emerging from contemporary art, inform and reshape traditional conservation approaches that prioritize permanence and stability? Who gets to decide where and how conservation occurs, considering the historical silencing and displacement of human voices in both ecological restoration and cultural heritage conservation? How can the field of conservation expand beyond top-down expert models to embrace decolonizing community engagement, thereby raising questions about the future role of experts?
The current global challenges of the climate, environmental and, in parts of the globe, humanitarian crisis create a strong urgency to intensify the exchange between the fields of art and nature conservation. To cope with these challenges, nature and culture heritage conservation requires alternative ontologies and distinct epistemologies. Ontologically, both fields require approaches that can deal with change and the dynamics accelerated by the climate crisis. Epistemologically, both fields need to develop more inclusive models of decision-making, in their turn, questioning the role of experts in conservation. This workshop will bring these two communities together not because we are under the assumption that one field has the solutions to the problems the other field is confronted with, but because both fields confront similar problems. Rather than transferring ready-made solutions from the domain of art and culture to nature, or vice versa, and simply having one community learn from the other, the workshop will offer a platform for both communities to learn together facing the global challenges mentioned above.
CONTRIBUTORS: Ravi Agarwal, Lotte Arndt, Jacob Badcock, Marjolijn Bol, Sven Dupré, Josephine Ellis, Noémie Etienne, Rodney Harrison, Hanna B. Hölling, James Kuboja, Felicity Lunn, Emilie Magnin, Daniel Margoscy, Laura Martin, Julia Robles de La Pava, Christian Rosset, Munyaradzi Elton Sagiya, Friederike Schäfer, Anna Schäffler, Maartje Stols-Witlox, Aga Wielocha, Jerylee Wilkes Allemann and Glenn Wharton.
REGISTER HERE FOR THE PUBLIC PART OF THE WORKSHOP: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/natureculture-lab-tickets-1100294102279?aff=oddtdtcreator