Rivista "IBC" XXVII, 2019, 4

Dossier: Heritage explorations across Europe

musei e beni culturali, dossier /

Critical heritage studies and Italian tradition: a necessary meeting

Maria Pia Guermandi
[IBC]

Even a quick glance at the programme of the next international conference of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies (London, 26-30 August 2020) is sufficient to get an idea of the breadth, in methodological and interdisciplinary terms, of this branch of critical studies dedicated to heritage, as well as its profound commitment to addressing the issues of contemporary society.
" Futures" was deliberately chosen as the title of the London conference, which aims to discuss and analyse, among other things, the future impacts of climate, ecological, economic and social change on heritage and how cultural heritage can take on an active and positive role in the creation of future socio-political and environmental scenarios.
While critical heritage studies have been recognised as an autonomous, albeit composite, branch of study for only about ten years, heritage studies in the modern sense of the term can be dated back to the 1980s. They originated with a series of studies that began to investigate, though from very different perspectives, the phenomenon of the construction and accessibility of heritage. Among them, it is definitely worth mentioning: The Past is a Foreign Country by David Lowenthal and The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger and, on the French side, Les lieux de Mémoire by Pierre Nora and the studies by Pierre Bourdieu on cultural capital and the critique of taste.
Heritage thus began to be seen as a social construction, simultaneously a product and producer of modernity.
The development of heritage studies was strongly influenced by constructivist social thought. The processes of formation of cultural heritage were interpreted as the result of a mediation among often conflicting interests in contemporary society.
Starting from the 1990s, while there was a broader multidisciplinary approach on a methodological level, heritage studies were focused on analysing the subject of heritage understood in the “official” sense, as then interpreted by UNESCO, which expressed a universalist ideology in its World Heritage List. A mostly monumental, ancient heritage endowed with such characteristics as uniqueness, “authenticity” and a high aesthetic and historical significance, but above all an expression of Western “values” as defined by a caste of experts (archaeologists, art historians and museologists), exclusively entrusted with defining and managing heritage through what has been described in critical heritage studies as “authorized heritage discourse” (AHD, Smith 2006).
In close connection with the development of post-colonial studies, heritage studies have thus deconstructed AHD, interpreted as a tool of Western cultural hegemony. In this process, not coincidentally, studies deriving from non-European cultures – Australian and South American in particular – have gained increasing weight.
The “material turn” that has characterised human and social sciences since the start of the millennium and attributed a new centrality to objects and their interactions with man today constitutes the epistemological frame of reference, albeit not an exclusive one, of so-called c.h. studies. It has drawn both on actor-network theoryas developed by Latour, and the new ecology elaborated by Morton, as well as, in general, object-oriented ontologies.
This evolution on the theoretical level has gone hand in hand with a simultaneous expansion of the concept of heritage, which no longer has any limits in terms of form or manifestation, time or ownership, so much so that by now the traditional distinctions – nature/culture, material/immaterial, past/present and even preservation/loss – have gradually been blurred until disappearing completely.
In contrast with the perspective of AHD, which considers heritage as a collection of objects and monuments endowed with intrinsic value – mostly aesthetic or historical – from the standpoint of c.h. studies, heritage may be likened to a process whereby we construct, reconstruct and mediate social and cultural identities, values, memories and meanings that help us to make sense of the present. 
As it is active on a symbolic level and involved in the legitimisation of historical and cultural narratives, heritage is always immaterial, political and conflictual, the fruit of non-random choices and selections.
In line with such assumptions, the research axes of c.h. studies are related to fundamental contemporary themes. Starting from the Anthropocene. On this subject, c.h. studies generally share the same view regarding the failure of the sustainability paradigm, so much so that some scholars prefer to talk about the “era of destruction”. Accordingly, phenomena tied to the loss of heritage are investigated by focusing not only on their inevitability, but also on their potentiality to give rise to new values and unexpected forms of meaning. The so-called “unruly” heritage of unintentional monuments and “involuntary” relics such as nuclear or other types of waste are analysed from a similar perspective; they are considered “heritage” that stands in contrast with the heritage resulting from voluntary selection controlled by man.
Finally, there is an evident correlation with decolonial studies on a phenomenon – colonialism – which continues to have an influence on many levels, and to which the so-called archaeology of the “contemporary past” offers instruments and studies of great interpretative effectiveness.
Generally speaking, what is emerging from c.h. studies as a whole is an interpretative framework for addressing cultural heritage that is more ecologically aware, less anthropocentric and definitively oriented towards transcending Western interpretative schemes.

In Italy, the response to this hermeneutic effervescence has been very weak up to now. The lack, by now persisting for decades, of an updated approach to heritage studies in our scientific tradition is undoubtedly one of the causes that has enfeebled the debate surrounding our cultural heritage, a debate fixated on a few repetitive leitmotivs, such as, for example, the supposed dichotomies between protection and exploitation, public and private, centralism and autonomy.
Whatever may be the reasons for our tardiness – and they are manifold – while in the rest of the world, both in the West and elsewhere, heritage studies have deliberately embraced elements not only of anthropology and ethnology, but also of a broad range of disciplines, from human geography, to cognitive or political sciences, to tourism and border studies, just to name a few, in Italy heritage studies continue to be dominated by traditional humanistic disciplines (from art history to archaeology).
The contribution of social sciences to the interpretation of heritage is not yet conceived in a systematic manner, reflecting the lack of dialogue between anthropology and humanistic disciplines that has characterised our academia since the 19th century and does not yet seem to have been overcome.
Given our conspicuous backwardness in this field, it is all the more imperative that we seek to broaden the horizon of the Italian tradition, which, for example, still considers the need for a profound decolonisation of interpretative instruments, from archaeological reconstructions to museum exhibitions, to be of marginal importance.
With our participation in the  European CHEurope project ( see Kristiansen), the Istituto per i Beni Culturali has ventured into this area of study in order to address, with new tools and updated cultural perspectives, one of the fundamental issues of our time, namely, that of historical city centres, which are now impacted, both in Italy and throughout Europe, by the phenomena connected to overtourism, with all the social, urban and cultural ambiguities they imply (see Bugalski).
In addition to focusing on this issue, CHEurope proposes, through the research of its 15 young researchers, the thematic and methodological breadth characteristic of c.h. studies: from the subject of migrants to that of climate change, from digital archives to the use of heritage as a therapy for improving psychological resilience and well-being.

References & Additional Reading

Smith, L. 2006, Uses of Heritage, Londo n: Routledge .

Harrison, R. 2012, Heritage: critical approaches, London : Routledge .

González-Ruibal, A. 2018, An Archaeology of the Contemporary Era, London : Routledge.

Kristian Kristiansen explaining Tanum rock carvings during CHEurope kick-off meeting, June 2017.