Holding Heritage to Account

In today’s blog I include the second part of my talk for the International Conference on World Heritage, which was held in Korea in early September. The overall title was ‘World Heritage. Old Newness’, and my talk was entitled ‘Cultural Heritage as ‘Memory Event. The Case of Dansaekhwa’. In this second part, I widen the focus of my reflections to consider the crisis in the idea of ‘heritage’ in the West, and how it might relate to the idea of heritage in Korea.

 In my country, Great Britain, heritage is big business. We use the term ‘heritage industry’ a lot. In fact, it’s been argued that the entire island is one great ‘heritage’ theme park.  Here’s an example of some of my heritage from near where I grew up in East Sussex in the south of England:

This is Bodiam Castle, built between about 1380-85. It still looks in remarkably good condition, doesn’t it? The interior, however, is a gutted ruin. Bodiam Castle is now owned by the National Trust, which looks after around 300 properties, and also manages great swathes of the British landscape, like this, the series of chalk cliffs on the South Downs overlooking the English Channel known as the Seven Sisters, also near where I grew up:

In relation to the arts, the National Trust website proudly announces: “no other organisation conserves such a range of heritage locations with buildings, contents, gardens and settings intact, nor provides such extensive public access.”  Recently, however, the Trust became another victim of the on-going and increasingly crazy culture wars. In 2020 it published a policy review paper that addressed its properties’historical relationships to the slave trade and colonialism. As the UK’s  Guardian newspaper’s website reported on November 12th 2020, the review paper “explored how the proceeds of foreign conquest and the slavery economy built and furnished houses and properties, endowed the families who kept them, and in many ways helped to create the idyll of the country house. None of this is news to most people with a passing acquaintance with history, and the report made no solid recommendations beyond the formation of an advisory group and reiterating a commitment to communicating the histories of its properties in an inclusive manner.” (1)

But it caused quite a furore. People on the political right, in particular, saw the Trust’s apparently guilt-ridden questioning and pathetic attempts at atonement  as reprehensible evidence that  its “ leadership has been captured by elitist bourgeois liberals”, as a letter from a group of enraged Members of Parliament put it -  by people who were “coloured by cultural Marxist dogma, colloquially known as the ‘woke agenda’.”

What this little scandal reveals is the fact that the idea of ‘heritage’ is in crisis, at least in the West. The Guardian article goes on to mention the academic Patrick Wright, author of the best-selling On Living in an Old Country who, writing in 1985, described the National Trust as having been created as a kind of “ethereal holding company for the spirit of the nation”. But he was critical of this ideal, and his special target was the Prime Minster of the time, Margaret Thatcher, and her efforts to co-opt a certain image of Britain to help maintain her hold on power. Today, post-Brexit and in the light of the so-called ‘woke agenda’,  the issues Wright raised back then have become even more pressing. Take Chartwell, Winston Churchill’s family home, which is also not far from my hometown:

Chartwell’s historical associations with the slave trade made it one of the Trust’s targets. As The Guardian noted, within the concept of heritage places “are easily mythologised as Britain’s soul, places in which tradition and inheritance stand firm against the anonymising tides of modernity. They are places of fantasy, which help us imagine a rooted relationship to the land that feels safe and secure. As Wright pointed out, this makes the project of preserving them necessarily defensive, and one that doesn’t sit well with the practice of actual historical research – which contextualises, explains and asks uncomfortable questions.”

The issue pivots on the problem of inheritance. Who in the present decides what is worth celebrating in the past, and how can they be held to account? What can or should be politely ignored or forgotten, and what must be condemned? At its worst, ‘heritage’ is an anodyne way of referring to the ownership of the past by the powerful in the present, who use it to help consolidate their position through permitting those with little or no power to enjoy some of the nation’s patrimony on the weekend without upsetting the status quo, while also allowing them to avoid dealing with the kinds of moral qualms and ambiguities that characterize the rest of their lives.  Of course, there are far more positive ways to describe heritage. For example, that it a social category dedicated to countering the alienating effects of modern existence through providing the possibility of resonant relationships to the past. 

I’m not sure to what extent the Republic of Korea should be engaging  in the kind of mea culpa correctional process now going on in the West. Should you also be actively exposing the extent to which, for example, many of your admired Confucian scholars condoned slavery and the brutal subordination of women? Or is the Republic of Korea at a different stage of cultural development, or developing on a significantly different path, and so introducing  ‘Western’ principles of social justice would actually be a new form of cultural colonialism?  The context for the celebration of Korean heritage today is the legacy of Japanese colonization, rapid westernization, and an ideologically divided people. These facts demand a unique attitude to heritage to which everyone should be sensitive. The situation is very different to Britain, whose heritage nests within a far more unbroken and triumphalist story, one that is now in dire need of revision. Perhaps in Korea, the cultural situation demands a rather less uncompromising and aggressive relationship to its heritage. 

Then again, the universality of the principles of justice now   being employed to judge the past seems unquestionable.  Slavery, the subjugation of women, these do seem morally repugnant wherever you stand –  at least, if you’re standing in an open society that Is dedicated to maximizing the possibilities of human flourishing,  at least in principle.   But do we want to be reminded of these dreadful things - the past’s legacy of cruelty and woe - every time we visit our nation’s’ heritage. Must we always say, as Walter Benjamin did as the Nazi’s closed in, ‘There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.’ Won’t it ruin our day out?    

But it is in this context that artists could be very useful. Their ‘unofficial’ view on things may help to enliven heritage. They don’t shy away from the truth, but they’re also not (or should not be) hanging judges standing on the moral high ground and passing judgement. Through perceiving the present’s similarities and differences from the past in more than a reactionary and traditionalist sense, but also in taking more than a stance of hostile deconstruction and critique, artists can show how to resist   institutional sclerosis.

Notes:

(1)  (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/12/national-trust-history-slavery?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other&fbclid=IwAR2Ar4xEPtJ17i7QHdZZnMS8lCbb48T6TsOL8nMqU7jwb4QOnvCM-dd8bbs)All images courtesy of the National Trust.

Images courtesy of the National Trust.