by Emma Waterton
Co-authored with Steve Watson
This paper examines the power of “the visual” in representations of culture and heritage tourism. While the visual is... more
This paper examines the power of “the visual” in representations of culture and heritage tourism. While the visual is fundamental to the ways material culture is represented, the focus on objects and artifacts has obscured the very processes that animate and privilege them in the production of heritage. As a result, material culture is classified and categorized, placed in temporal sequences and variously interpreted without much thought as to its social and cultural contexts. In this paper, we seek to relocate “heritage” in relation to aesthetics and the inherent value of the object. Our purpose is to examine visuality as a key part of the process by which cultural heritage is produced and which, in turn, enables visual culture to be “read” as a narrative of identity, politics and power. Using examples from England and the Greek island of Rhodes, we suggest that heritage representations sustain an understanding of nationhood that privileges the cultural symbols of particular social groups. In effect, these representations promote a narrative of national history and identity that excludes others in both populations. The significance of this research lies in its denial of the aesthetically reductive in heritage and its consequential centering of process and power. Inevitably, such analysis leads to a very critical understanding of heritage as material culture with the visual as an important means of revealing the meaning latent in display.
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