Orhan Pamuk's 2008 novel, The Museum of Innocence, narrates a love story exploring themes of unstable identities, affective objects, and obsessive collecting set against the background of social ...change in Turkey and its manifestation in the urban landscape of Istanbul. In his museum of the same name, which opened in 2012, and its catalog, The Innocence of Objects, Pamuk articulates a clear political agenda through his “Modest Manifesto for Museums,” which expresses deep suspicion of the relationship between the narratives of the past told through grand museums and the power of the state. Pamuk's valuing of the everyday—the quotidian materiality of ordinary human lives—can be read as a critique of the concept of heritage significance and a reimagining of the field of heritage and museums where the material traces of the past are not uprooted from their neighborhoods but cared for at home and curated with love. I suggest that Pamuk's Museum of Innocence imagines a utopian future for heritage and museums that is centered on the constitution of empathic, materially mediated experiences of the everyday, particularly of joy, love, and happiness, emotions rarely encompassed or made visible through the frame of heritage. Pamuk's concern with experience and emotion, rather than representation, and with the vibrant materiality of objects, rather than representative collections, links to the scholarly shift in interest from what heritage might mean to what it might do.
High-fidelity imaging methods such as laser scanning and digital photogrammetry have captured public and professional audiences in a flurry of optimistic discourse about their capacities as forms of ...preservation and of archaeological recording and interpretation. With technical finesse and mastery, endangered heritage can, it is argued, be captured, re-materialized, and recovered from the forces that threaten it. As the plot concerning our ‘digital futures’ thickens, we discuss here an experimental project that offers an oblique approach to the practice of 3D visualization, one that subverts the dominance of neutral, technical field engagements. We examine digital materiality by exploring digital heritage objects as both method and site of ethnographic encounter. Orbiting the ruins of Asinou, an abandoned village in the Troodos Mountains of Cyprus, with our ‘low-tech’ equipment, we sought to observe the conditions of the ‘in-between’ of two makeshift forms, each as ‘real’ as the other. We focus our thinking on the tensions of translation that play on the surface of our technically crude digital assemblages, as spaces of generative potential for speculations about encounters with emerging digital materialities, their affective capacities and status as future heritage objects.
Markers of memory and identity are increasingly manifested in urban landscapes in forms both literal and material. In cities with settler colonial origins, archaeology has become a frequent means by ...which these markers are produced. Archaeological remains conserved in situ - frozen in an urban 'time slice'- embed genealogies and narratives of origins in the layered fabric of the city.
This special issue of Public History Review considers how places, landscapes, remains and objects - in the past and in the present - produce identity and memory. The material world both reflects and ...shapes sensory, affective and embodied experiences of memory and identification. Current thinking about heritage and the archaeology of the recent past challenges archaeological paradigms, advocating a new, ethnographic approach centred on the meaning of the past and its remains in the present. This work opens up an exciting new space for discussion and debate about archaeological, historical and heritage work concerned with memory and identity.
Aviation has played an important part in shaping Australia’s culture and history through the course of the twentieth century. Australia embraced aviation from its earliest days, eagerly responding to ...its potential to cover a challenging country, to bring far-flung communities closer and to provide services that could not be delivered any other way. Add the romance of pioneer heroes, the vital role of aviation in wartime and the capacity to deliver aid to people in need in Australia and beyond, and it is clear why aviation is at the heart of Australia’s recent history. This book aims to set out the major themes that characterise Australia’s aviation history for a broad audience and to provide a foundation for a broader discussion, and for further research, about how aviation transformed Australia. Connecting the Nation is a vital and timely introduction to the history of civil aviation in Australia as we prepare for the centenary of civil aviation services in 2020.
Controversy around the celebration of Captain Cook as a founding father of the Australian nation is not new, but dates back to the nineteenth century when his first statues were raised. The latest ...plans made by Australia’s government to celebrate the 250th anniversary of his so-called discovery of the continent has sparked renewed controversy which is linked to global debates about the contemporary value and meaning of civic statues to heroes associated with Indigenous dispossession, colonialism and slavery.
Last Drinks at the Hibernian (Frederick & Ireland 2016) is a collaborative art work that explores what happens when archaeological materials are reconstituted as art and how the 'creative turn' might ...swivel archaeology's critical lens back onto its own practices and materialities. This creative engagement explores the history and political economy of Australian archaeology, particularly historical archaeology, in order to understand how archaeology is an affective and aesthetic framing of materials, as well as an epistemology for knowledge production about the past from materials in the present. Approaching archaeology as a set of generative practices, 'ways of seeing' and making, we wonder how entangled these sensibilities towards material remains might be and what effect this entanglement has on how heritage is generated, and how the past is represented and remembered through images and things.
The notion and possibilities of (in)significance arose in 2015 when we developed an idea for a one-day symposium titled '(in)significance: a discussion about values and valuing in heritage'. At the ...symposium, we aimed to explore the history, theory and practical application of the concept of significance and broach the idea and potential application of '(in)significance'. Based on the level of interest generated, this special edition of the International Journal of Heritage Studies was developed in order to build upon some of the thinking and discussion that arose from these experiments. Together, the six papers presented here explore a broad range of approaches to significance and value as enacted in different parts of the world and at different scales: from the local, to the national and the international.
PDF
