Mind the practice gap: improving the interface between theory and practice

• Posted on July 26, 2011

Last month I went first to an excellent academic conference on heritage issues, where people critiqued the role of the state and other agencies in heritage practice (in many interesting ways). A few days later I went on to an excellent workshop for a group of heritage practitioners, where people were looking (in many interesting ways) for good models of heritage conservation and management by practitioners and the state. But I wasn’t entirely happy at the end. The best work on both sides does of course contribute to the field but the week’s experience highlighted a problem I have been discussing with colleagues since my days at Robben Island Museum: the gap between theoretical critique of heritage practice and critical heritage practice itself.

I’m concerned about the issue because I believe that humanities research can and should be useful beyond the realm of academic debate. I feel that the lack of attention to the practice gap inhibits productive discussion about how to improve both academic discourse and heritage practice. The problem needs to be urgently addressed, or the energy poured into critical analysis and heritage practice will eventually circulate in separate universes, missing an opportunity to cross-fertilize each other.

The practice gap is if anything more marked than inter-disciplinary boundaries in academia. It is driven not only by different methodologies, vocabularies and epistemologies, it is also driven by differences in organizational location, access to information and different personal interests.

For example, a heritage practitioner is often employed by (or contracted to) a heritage institution or agency. Their professional training, pride in the job, loyalty, or fear of losing future work influences what they say, and can say, in public. They usually cannot afford to fully deconstruct the heritage construct, or in the worst cases it is not evident to them. They are paid to do the job, to clean the bottles on the shelf, not to wonder why the job exists at all and who brought in the bottles anyway. Even where critical reflection is encouraged, practitioners are constrained because to some extent their professional reputation depends on their ability to take a stand on the interpretation of an object or a site, for example. Nevertheless, I believe that the best practitioners find a way to hold these contradictions within the frame of ethical, critical practice. With an insider’s understanding of fractures, debates and accidental decisions within institutions, they may understand the complexity of the interplay between politics and heritage work, but often cannot write about it or act outside of its constraints. Unfortunately they generally do not have the time (or in fact the incentive) to speak within the academic discourse, and not all have been trained in the academy. If they do, the issues under discussion often seem to relate only tangentially to their own needs.

Academic commentators have an important role to play because they can say important, difficult, challenging things about heritage practice, but it is often forgotten that they are also located within institutions, facing a different kind of institutional pressure. Academics in critical heritage studies have had to distance themselves from an existing professional discourse as well as to show they have risen above politics and popular perceptions for critical distance. This may have driven a focus on a few key ideas, encouraging the replication of numerous case studies of ‘invented traditions’ to prove an established point of critical analysis, that nationalistic heritage discourses do not conform to historical ‘reality’. Theoretical debate is good, and case studies are important, but perhaps to date the purview of the field has been too narrow. There has been a marked neglect of the role of heritage in international politics, for example, and too little attention has been paid to the problems of engaging with these highly politicized discourses, the possibility of intervening in them in a critical way, instead of just analyzing them.

This is, hopefully, the next step. A few encouraging recent trends may help to bring academic analysis closer to the concerns of practitioners. There is hope in a growing academic focus on understanding local politics, audiences and their experiences of heritage; there is also hope in the trend towards interviewing practitioners anonymously about the political issues they cannot voice publicly. A more comparative approach to heritage studies should be encouraged; this may help analysts to ask not only ‘why was this done?’ but also ‘why was that not done?’. But the gap remains wide. Some of the best academics in the field today speak through their own practical experience in the heritage field, but as pressure builds to publish or perish, the opportunities and the rewards for undertaking practical experience in the heritage field may diminish.

What is needed on both sides is a willingness to discuss the dimensions and origins of the practice gap and whether incentives exist to address it. We have to explore – critically but constructively – what a critical heritage practice might look like, how it would address professional, political and institutional constraints, whether it is possible to move in that direction, and if so, what areas of research or shifts in professional discourse would be most useful in encouraging such a move. We also have to look closely at what academic research is currently being done in the field, and why.

Harriet Deacon has had experience on both sides of the fence. She trained as an academic historian and worked on a number of large research projects, but has also worked in a museum (Robben Island Museum) and been a consultant in the heritage field. She did some policy work as well as some heritage impact assessments and conservation management planning in South Africa. Most recently, she has been based in the UK, working mainly on how the Intangible Heritage Convention is being implemented in various countries around the world.