Inaugural conference: Association of Critical Heritage Studies: “Re-theoretisation of heritage”

5-8 June, 2012
Gothenberg, Sweden
Deadline for abstracts: 28 January 2012

Below are calls for papers on two different sessions for the conference.

Call for papers: Critical Heritage Studies: The Ethnographic Perspective

Anthropologists, as well as cultural geographers and sociologists, have assembled a considerable body of ethnographic work on cultural heritage. Through methods such as participant observation, interviews, and multi-sited research, they have investigated how people live with heritage and how heritage institutions, professionals, and interpreters go about their daily business. They have been particularly interested in the articulation of conscious self-representation and not-so-conscious everyday practices, including the resistant and subversive ones. Yet more than anything else perhaps, they have documented the sheer variety of voices and interests surrounding heritage: professional heritage managers, custodians, spokespeople, owners, practitioners and all those who are affected by, or hope to profit from, heritage and heritage policies in one way or another. Ethnography therefore allows for richer analysis, detailed narratives, and deeper probing of heritage matters, both of the celebratory discourse of official institutions and of those very critical analyses in the social sciences and humanities that take the exclusionary and exploitative effects of heritage for granted.

In this panel, we wish to take stock of the ethnographic approach to heritage. What is to be gained by ethnographic research that cannot be achieved through other methods, and further, where are its limitations?

In which specific ways is ethnographic research combined with other methods, and which combinations are most productive? In research settings, how do heritage ethnographers position themselves vis-à-vis researchers trained in other academic disciplines, and furthermore as ‘experts,’ when any pronouncement on heritage and its effects will impact communities, stakeholders, and laypeople deeply committed to the heritage in question? We invite contributions grounded in ethnographic experience in heritage research, but also broader reviews of the field and its methodological, political and moral aspects.

To submit an extract:

Please send a title and abstract of no more than 250 words to both convenors by 28 January.

Contacts:

Kathryn Lafrenz Samuels, North Dakota State University
(.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address))

Christoph Brumann, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle
(.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address))

Call for papers: When ‘the rest’ enters ‘the West’: Heritage in a Postcolonial Age

Since the beginning of modernity, international heritage tourists’ travel routes have typically led from “the West” to “the rest” of the world (“the West and the rest”, cf. Stuart Hall). In the last few years, however, the expansion and lower cost of travel opportunities on the one hand, and the economic upturn in parts of the global “East” and “South” on the other hand, have made western destinations accessible for more and more people from the former “rest of the world” in the framework of leisure-time travelling.

This session enquires whether and how western-influenced patterns of world order, constructions of identities, as well as interactions in tourist space change when “the West” no longer tours “the rest”, as has been practiced for centuries, but when “the rest” starts to knock on Western doors in order to consume locally, now in the role of tourists to be served,

-      their own heritage in the western world, and/or

-      “the West” in the variety of its local heritages.

With which consequences, re-establishing or thwarting existing power relations between cultures, will heritage(s) in these touristic settings be (re-)negotiated and (re-)experienced?

Particularly welcome are empirically oriented papers that examine the interaction of specific groups in tourist settings, such as travelers (from the global “South”/“East”), those visited (in the “West”) and those active in the service sector. Also very welcome are theoretically informed papers that criticize central concepts of heritage (tourism) studies – such as the tourist gaze, authenticity, experiential vs. educational tourism – for reproducing the West-rest-paradigm, or that challenge the West/rest dichotomy still noticeable in much heritage re­search.

In a nutshell, this session aims to bring together papers that take diverse “the rest and the West”-scenarios in the field of heritage tourism as a point of departure in order to

-      a) critically reflect the “West-rest-paradigm” in the field of heritage research,

-      b) sketch out new categories of scientific thinking and

c) set out to work on a new, postcolonial heritage research agenda.

Please send a title and abstract of no more than 250 words to Sybille Frank (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)) by 28 January 2012.