Historicizing Heritage

About

“When heritages collide could well be the name of our current era.” 

Historicizing Heritage, a weekend workshop sponsored by the Folger Institute and hosted by West Virginia University, convened two days after the tragedy at Uvalde, Texas. If participants began their week poised to examine a variety of constructions of heritage – familial, ethnic, regional – and to consider what attachments to heritage constructions allow individuals and communities to reveal, desire, perpetuate, or protest, by Thursday we found ourselves reeling from another instance of our peculiar American heritage of gun violence. It would be an understatement to say this affected the trajectory of the conversations over the next two and a half days.

Each participant in the workshop had been invited to “bring” with them some artifact of intangible cultural heritage during the weekend. As defined by UNESCO, such an artifact could be a (tangible, in fact) object, instrument or craft; or it could be a word, a ritual, a place, a practice, a thought. Director of the workshop Carolyn Dinshaw began the plenary by introducing her chosen artifact: Gun Violence.

 “A heritage that is not to be celebrated, but is rather soaked in tears…. My artifact makes abundantly clear [that] heritage-making is deeply contrary. When heritages collide could well be the name of our current era.”

Conflict, collision, colonial violence - these concepts were present in the initial proposal to the Folger Institute to make this workshop a part of their scholarly program schedule. On my mind at the time were the appropriations and weaponizations of medieval heritage by white supremacist groups. Heritage as it is mobilized in these contexts is not contrary to a further definition of intangible heritage offered by Vladimir Hafstein in the book Making Intangible Heritage, and yet there is an (understandable) impulse to spotlight and celebrate the “bonds that tie” rather than the collisions that harm: 

"These cultural practices and expressions ... have been selected to represent the diversity of human creative powers. Chosen because they give aesthetic form to deeply held values, they speak of skill and competence, of bonds that tie, and of different relationships to history, society, and nature. They testify to various ways people tend to previous generations, to other people, and to the universe." (1)

While sharing her observations on UNESCO’s methods, linguist and plenary panelist Mary Louise Pratt stressed the importance of investigating heritage transmission : “Through what relationships, what institutions, what pedagogical practices and value structures” does heritage move? “These formulations can help societies figure out how to proceed when heritage becomes a field of civilizational struggle. How would UNESCO identify, or how could communities identify, intangible heritages that are harming or destroying them?”

In my first drafts for the Historicizing Heritage proposal, I used language about the “misuse” of heritage for purposes of violence and intimidation, careless, I think, of what the workshop helped me recognize, which is that we are less than honest with ourselves when we consider violence and/or calls to violence a “misuse” of heritage. Historically, violence is constitutive of heritage. That’s true of the histories and heritages of nations, faiths, identity groups the world over.

“One of the issues when it comes to discussing anything that's a product of of institutions – whether they be political, whether they be academic, whether they be social – is that those institutions are built on so much violence – the epidemic violence of colonization, the gratuitous violence of chattel slavery, the genocidal violence of indigenous peoples – that so much has been lost or rendered absent; that the ways of speaking and constructing and codifying these things outside of this anti-black, anti-indigenous white supremacy structure simply do not exist.”

-Panelist and scholar Matthieu Chapman

Matthieu Chapman’s presentation on day two of the workshop felt to me like a call to action. At the same time, it was a necessary reminder to me – a tenured white professor guaranteed the membership benefits of the oppressive class that reinforces the white supremacist structure to which Chapman was speaking – not to assume the competence of my efforts to identify a heritage’s “bonds that tie” as wholly salutary or wholly pernicious. Etymologically, a bond is “a binding or uniting power or influence.” Our bonds are covenants. And they are fetters. 

In our preparatory materials for the workshop, we read about UNESCO’s commitment to safeguarding heritage. But as the weekend commenced, we were thinking of the need to be kept safe from heritage. Our collection is a record of longing for safekeeping: to be kept safe; to safeguard our stories; to keep each other safe. Violence is present in that longing: the violence we mourn, and the violence we commemorate as a key element in stories of struggle for rights and recognition. The uncomfortable or unfamiliarly abstract additions to our collection of artifacts, then, are not interruptions or outliers preventing the coherence of a digital exhibit that would otherwise be all apple cider and Jon Denver covers. The collisions are part of the construction. The collisions construct. 

-Christine Hoffmann, Professor - English, West Virginia University

 

This project is presented with financial assistance from the West Virginia Humanities Council, a state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations do not necessarily represent those of the West Virginia Humanities Council or the National Endowment for the Humanities.