Baillie, Britt, Afroditi Chatzoglou, and Shadia Taha (2010). ‘Packaging the Past: the...

51Heritage Management, Volume 3, Issue 1, Spring 2010, pp. 51–72.Copyright © 2010 Left Coast Press, Inc. All rights reserved.

Packaging the PastThe Commodification of Heritage

Britt Baillie, Afroditi Chatzoglou, and Shadia Taha

Britt Baillie, ([email protected]); Afroditi Chatzoglou, ([email protected]); Shadia Taha, ([email protected]), Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3DZ, England

Abstract The commodification of cultural heritage has been vilified by the heritage community. This attitude has resulted in a lacuna of knowledge about how it operates in the heritage context. Yet, heritage is increasingly subject to commodification and the topic can no longer be ignored. Creating a synthesis of the arguments and case-studies presented at the 9th Cambridge Heritage Seminar entitled Packaging the Past: The Commodificiton of Heritage, this article seeks to re-evaluate the process of commodification and explore its consequenc-es (negative and positive) on cultural heritage. Through a critical engagement with the historical development of the concept of commodification, this article explores what changes have occurred since Hewison’s seminal 1987 volume The Heritage Industry. We emphasize investigating the issues of emotion, agency, entertainment, authenticity, legality, value, and memory in this context.

Resumen La comunidad del patrimonio cultural ha vilipendiado la comodifi-cación. Esta actitud ha resultado en una laguna de conocimiento de la manera en que funciona la comodificación en el contexto del patrimonio. Sin embargo, el patrimonio se encuentra cada vez más el sujeto de la comodificación, y ya no se puede ignorarlo. Este artículo pretende reconsiderar el proceso de la comodi-ficación, y explorar sus consecuencias (negativas y positivas) para el patrimonio cultural. Al mismo tiempo constituye una síntesis de los argumentos y estudios presentados en el “9th Cambridge Heritage Seminar - Packaging the Past: The Commodification of Heritage.” Por medio de analizar el desarrollo histórico del concepto de la comodificación, este artículo evalua los cambios que han occur-rido desde la obra seminal ‘The Heritage Industry’ (Hewison, 1987). Esta investig-ación destaca los temas de la emoción, el entretenimiento, el papel del individuo como agente de la creación y del consumo, la autenticidad, la legalidad, el valor y la memoria en este contexto.

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52 BRITT BAILLIE, AFRODITI CHATZOGLOU, AND SHADIA TAHA

The Past with a Price Tag

Heritage features in movies, on billboards, in computer games, and in ad-vertising. Heritage sites are increasingly seeking to boost both visitor num-bers and revenue. Calls from national authorities for museums to cater to popular sentiments as a means to keep them economically and socially viable are frequently heard. For some visitors and heritage managers, the difference between the gift shop and the museum experience is diminishing. Heritage interpretation, until recently, accommodated élite interpretations of the past — a past which many people have felt excluded from. This new inclusive approach to heritage, which has embraced commodification, has meant that more people are now engaging with the past. However, there are inherent dangers in the commodification of heritage sites if it leads to their “dumbing down” or if their value is seen to exist only in financial terms.

It is requisite upon us, as heritage professionals, to explore new ways of understanding our experience of heritage and society in today’s rapidly chang-ing world. This was the aim of the 9th Cambridge Heritage Seminar, Packaging the Past: The Commodification of Heritage held at the McDonald Institute, University of Cambridge. This event brought together twelve speakers and six poster presenters, who used the forum to share their current research.

Hewison’s influential The Heritage Industry of 1987 blamed the develop-ment of this “industry” in Britain on Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s en-couragement of free markets, privatization, and cuts in public spending in the 1980s (Hewison 1987:9). He thought the emergent “Heritage Culture” was the product of social failure: “instead of manufacturing goods, we manufac-ture heritage.” His book was the subject of great debate when first published. Now, twenty years on, the Cambridge Heritage Research Group selected the theme of the commodification of heritage for the 2008 seminar in order to discuss the challenges and the changes the past two decades have presented to Hewison’s model.

For a decade, the Cambridge Heritage Seminar has been creating oppor-tunities for researchers, policy-makers, academics, heritage practitioners, and others to network in a multi-disciplinary forum. This year’s seminar explored what it means to commodify heritage, and whether or not it is (still) useful to use the term commodification in a heritage context, bearing in mind that the term was originally derived from a specific Marxist interpretation of econom-ics. The seminar was arranged in three sessions, Marketing Culture, Dealing

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THE COMMODIFICATION OF HERITAGE 53

with Dark Heritage, and Owning the Past. These sessions were cross-cut by the leitmotifs of emotion, agency, entertainment, authenticity, legality, value, and memory. This article discusses these leitmotifs.

In Das Kapital, Marx defines commodity, first as an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human desires. Commodities are princi-pally intended for exchange, products that emerge only in the institutional, psychological, and economic conditions created by capitalism (Marx 1859:1). Commodities have use value and social value. The fetishism for commodities transforms social relationships into relationships between people and com-modities or money. The Oxford English Dictionary defines commodity as: “products or substances that can be traded, bought or sold; valuable qualities” (Oxford English Dictionary 2006:150). This definition demonstrates that the notion of commodity has expanded since Marx. Today, a commodity is any-thing for which there is demand, but which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across the market. One characteristic of a commodity is that its price is determined as a function of its market as a whole.

At the 2008 Cambridge Heritage Seminar, Cornelius Holtorf — lecturer at the University of Kalmar (Sweden) and author of Archaeology as Brand, and From Stonehenge to Las Vegas (2005) — opened by challenging the current conception of the commodification process. He pointed out the shift from the concept of commodity as product to commodity as service. For Holtorf, com-modification refers to the transformation of relationships, formerly untainted by commerce. It acts almost as a form of colonization of previously non-mar-ket goods/services; it results in putting a price tag on heritage and selling it.

The word commodity, from the Latin commoditas, refers to the appropri-ate measure of something; a fitting state, time or condition, a good quality, efficaciousness or propriety, advantage, or benefit. In Marx’s mid-nineteenth century Critique of Political Economy the notion of commodity became de-fined as a force capable of transforming the social world. Though classical economists had introduced the terms use value and exchange value, Marx went a step forward by introducing surplus value — the difference between the value of products of labor and the cost of producing that labor — the la-bor’s subsistence (Marx 1859:6). In 1923, Frankfurt School theorists moved away from a focus on labor to an emphasis on Kulturkritik — culture then became a key feature of their theories on capitalism.

The “culture industry” refers to the mass-consumption of standardised cultural products by individuals. This theory identifies individuals as both the

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subject and the object of the social world — i.e., both as agents and the acted upon. This strain of thought later developed into materialization. Under this theory, capitalism creates cultural commodification which satisfies the needs of what Adorno terms pseudo-individualization — the need to believe that there is product differentiation when capitalism ensures that all products are essentially the same. Hewison introduced the notion of nostalgia for past ex-periences as the core function of the heritage sector. Today the emotional experience provided by heritage sites has become a vital part of the econo-my. The experience economy theorists capture this when they describe how the public engages in and pays for experiences (Pine and Gilmore 1999:2). Pine and Gilmore predict that companies in the future, in what they call the “Dream Society,” will be selling emotions and telling stories; products will have to appeal to our hearts, not to our heads (Holtorf 2007:9). In this “Dream Society” Pine and Gilmore envision an economy no longer be based on the purchase of products, but rather on the purchase of the experiences created through the interaction between customers and the products. In other words, they predict that in the “Dream Society” materiality will no longer be the es-sence of consumption.

Heritage and Entertainment

Organized tourism started as early as the 19th century, but the scale of pres-ent-day commodification is new. In 19th century France, Germany, and Eng-land, tourism became a sizable industry and a popular leisure activity. These early 19th century origins of the concept of heritage commodification was argued by Astrid Swenson — a post-doctoral fellow of the Cambridge Victo-rian Studies Group and of Darwin College, Cambridge — in her paper Picnic parties, London noise, and vulgarity: debates about the commercialization of heritage in nineteenth century France, Germany and Britain. Swenson was persuasive in arguing that while the “heritage industry” might be a relatively new label, the debate about the consequences of packaging the past is not a new phenomenon. Worries and fears about the dangers of the effects of com-modification on authenticity were present as early as the 19th century.

Google the words heritage and entertainment and you will get page after page of events, ranging from heritage theatre, medieval entertainment, rural heritage, etc. Pine and Gilmore (1999:25) state that in the new economic era, businesses stage memorable experiences that are enjoyable, entertaining, and

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educational. Today, the quality and value of the experience provided deter-mines the price that can be charged. People have the means to pay for en-tertainment (although this might shift with the current economic downturn) and heritage sites compete for visitors, thus trying to offer value to the experi-ences that they are marketing. There is a demand for cultural heritage and no short supply of cultural commodities.

Kaylan Bhandari — an expert on Nepalese heritage management — paused to reflect on heritage management in Scotland (where he is undertaking his PhD) in his paper Touristification of cultural heritage, a case study of Robert Burns. He described how the Scottish poet — like Shakespeare and Jane Aus-ten before him — was made into iconic heritage figure, and a tourist prod-uct. Scottish Tourism and Culture Minister Patricia Ferguson, speaking at an opening of the Burn’s annual festival said “Robert Burns is an international beacon of Scotland’s Cultural life, and generates enormous revenues for Scot-land - nearly £160 million annually.” One could ask what is wrong with making the high arts available to all especially if the revenue that it generates is fed back into the local economy.

Holtorf argues that archaeology has become an attractive and widely recognized brand, valued by many people who are in turn willing to spend money on it. He persuades that we should appreciate the high demand of heritage in the market economy (Holtorf 2007:7). He sees archaeology as more concerned with modern popular culture than with the study of the past. Does popularizing culture degrade its value as has been claimed so many times in the past, or does it only do so in the eyes of the so-called “culture vultures”?1

Annie Gray, an archaeology PhD candidate at the University of York, put her experience of working for Past Pleasures — the United Kingdom’s largest supplier of costumed guides — under the microscope in her paper Was Henry VIII a vampire?2 Challenging perceptions or ‘hamming it up’ through live in-terpretation of Hampton Court Palace. She shares Holtorf ’s view that there is nothing wrong with interpreting the past through live performance. For her, the commodification of the past through a purchased performance it is not just about accessibility, it is about making the events popular and attractive to a wider range of audience(s). Holtorf and Gray argue not only that if you do not charge customers for their heritage experiences they do not value it; but also that charging entrance fees increases the visitor’s perceived quality of the experience.

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Holtorf asserts that people are interested in a “good” story, not historical accuracy. However, if we only tell dramatic stories we might be in danger of distorting and trivializing history. Surely, if it is only vivid stories people are after then they will go to the cinema, the book store or turn on their televi-sions. Perhaps the appeal of archaeology is more than just a “good” story, and includes the perceived authenticity and veracity of said story. Heritization has always been a selective process in terms of designation, management, and in-terpretation policies. Commodification enhances the level of selectivity and can distort the past rendering it uncritical, untrue, bland, boring, and wholly without the ability to shock or scandalize.

Has the past been trivialized? Is it possible to be critical and popular at the same time? Can heritage be entertaining and educational at the same time? Swenson noted that even in the 19th century clubs and societies offer-ing leisure activities attracted far greater numbers than those offering more theoretical or high culture. Why would this have changed? The presentations

Figure 1a. A mock excavation by stuffed animal archaeologists taken through the window of a department store in Cologne. Photograph by Geoff Carver.

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made at the Packaging the Past seminar agreed that commodification is a characteristic that is here to stay and that rather than shunning it, we should follow Holtorf and Gray’s lead and embrace it — but also know where to draw the line.

Commodification and Memory

Heritage sites are the ultimate reduction of the dimensionality of time. Through these sites the past blends into the present, flattening into an omni-present now in which history loses its weight as it increases in familiarity. Terdiman and Sturken claim that the connection between collective memories and objects has been institutionalized and exploited in the form of trade in souvenirs, and through the manufactured experience of heritage sites (Sturken 2007;Turdiman 1993). This is perhaps nowhere more true than in the case of dark heritage sites.

The papers presented on the dark heritage of the Battle of the Boyne, Ire-

Figure 1b. An archaeology excavation. Can heritage be entertaining and educational at the same time? Can entertainment educate people in a casual and fun way? Or will it distort the past? Is heritage becoming nothing more than entertainment through the process of its commodifica-tion? If so, what is wrong with entertaining people? Photograph by Britt Baillie.

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land (O’Reilly and McManus), the occupation of the Channel Islands during World War II (Carr) and the holocaust experience (Van der Laarse), dem-onstrated a serious challenge to the pro-entertainment model presented by Holtorf and Gray. The costumed guides and Las Vegas rides that Gray and Holtorf persuaded were beneficial to most heritage sites could cause distress and trauma for many survivor communities connected to dark heritage sites. Traumascapes, like the ones described by the three presenters, lend them-selves to a different form of heritization than most sites — at least while the wounds are open and/or fresh.

Gilly Carr, a lecturer in archaeology at the University of Cambridge whose recent research specialises in the archaeology of the German Occupation of the Channel Islands presented a paper entitled: Don’t mention the war? Mar-keting the German occupation in the Channel Islands of Alderney, Jersey and Guernsey. She brought up the unusual legacy of the Second World War in Alderney. All but six of the islanders left Alderney before the Germans invad-ed. Then, the Nazi organization Todt, built four concentration camps on the island to hold Jewish, Polish, and Russian prisoners. Carr’s paper underlined that the concentration camps on Alderney, due to their lack of relation to the current inhabitants of the island, have entirely resisted commodification and today remain unmarked ruins on an island which struggles to forget. The mere presence of these sites mar the narrative of resistant Britain — as the island as a whole was abandoned to the “enemy.”

Rob Van der Laarse, lecturer at the University of Amsterdam and head of the War Heritage and Memory - a dynamic perspective on the future of World War II program, presented a paper entitled, The Holocaust experience: World War II’s traumascapes and the paradox of authenticity. In line with Adorno, he suggested that when sites of the Second World War are turned into heri-tage they merely produce sentimental products which replaced the more dif-ficult approaches to this type of past (Adorno 2001). In this light, it would have been interesting to explore the approach to dark heritage promoted by the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, which seeks to use dark heritage sites to promote dialogue and debate amongst visitors.

The use of dark heritage sites to tame dark memories and promote rec-onciliation was a topic discussed in O’Reilly and McManus’ paper entitled Heritage Tourism and the commodification of contested spaces: Ireland and the Battle of the Boyne. The Battle of the Boyne site, when opened this year, will cater to competing heritages in the context of the Northern Ireland Peace

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Process. Ruth O’Reilly and Gerry McManus, who have both lectured and writ-ten extensively on the region explained that while the battle itself took place in 1690, the memory of it lives on in the ethno-religious tensions which have plagued Ireland ever since. Paradoxically, as the site is surrounded by and vis-ited in conjunction with less contested sites like Newgrange, Monastarboice, and Mellifont Abbey, its heritization might help to neutralize the explosive discourse which envelopes the battle site today. However this begs the ques-tion, by neutralizing the site are we merely changing it from milieux de mem-oire to a futile lieux de memoire?

Initially, some visitors come to these dark heritage sites to connect to the memory or to the trauma that these places embody. The containment of the trauma through museumification however, helps these sites to become loci of forgetting — for as soon as an event is memorialized and commemorated the onus is off of the individual to remember. Commodified dark heritage sites allow the visitors who consume them to see the present-day culture, in which they are immersed, as distant from both history and contemporary politics. The experience which these sites provide enables a ‘tourist’ relationship to history: visitors can feel good about paying to visit and purchasing souvenirs

Figure 2. Tourists at the ‘tamed’ Auschwitz. Is selling a dark past the best way to commemorate the victims of these sites? Photograph by Hans Citroen.

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at these sites without having to engage in the economic, social and political causes of the events which took place there (Sturken 2007). In order to appeal to a paying audience, these sites provide visitors with the comforting notion that the contested past is “safely dead” and therefore does not require the visi-tor to engage in further critical thought or political action.

The cases presented at the seminar raised the issue that heritage manag-ers feel the need to re-write dark heritage to be able to sell it to audiences as a popular attraction. At Auschwitz, the memory of the site was written by the communist government in an effort to valorize the Soviet involvement in World War II. Since Poland became a part of the free market however, this site has been repackaged as a tourist site — complete with the ritual of visitors taking the obligatory smiling photos at the Arbeit macht Frei (Work shall set you free) entry.

The commodification of memory at these sites packages the past and in-serts a boundary between past and present. It is this boundary which allows visitors to smile and act as tourists at these commodified sites — memory is made safely dead, or just another experience to buy. As Alan Beardworth and Alan Brynman stated, memory goes through a process of “quasification” at commodified heritage sites (quoted in Holtorf 2005:140). Here visitors pre-tend that they are embroiled in an experience (in this case a traumatic one) that is outside the modern context, while they in fact remain safely rooted in precisely that modern context.

Agency Outside of the Agencies

Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism suggests that the process of commodi-fication divorces human agents from awareness of their social relations; im-plying that they become alienated from their own social activities of produc-tion and consumption of commodities. Commodity fetishism ensures that neither the exploiters nor the exploited are fully aware of the position that they occupy as the commodity itself obscures their political positions. Ador-no stresses that commodified heritage is produced for and creates a duped mass audience. Yet, as commodity exchange has become an increasingly cen-tral organizing principle for all sectors of society, the balance between the exploiters and the exploited has subtly begun to shift.

Jonathan Zilberg, recently a visiting research fellow at the Smithsonian and prolific writer on Zimbabwean stone sculpture, highlighted in his paper

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how the artists who make the Shona sculptures created what Adorno would have termed “a false need” for their products, thereby securing themselves a market. As the Shona manufacturing process was a reinvented tradition, the artists were not exploited — the normal model for the appropriation of art from non-western contexts — but were rather exploiting the market. Yet, in a paradoxical twist of the tale, the consumption, and therefore value placed onto these objects by the foreign trade led to a re-evaluation of the sculptures in Zimbabwe itself and an increase in local consumption. Furthermore, the local sculptors again became the exploited when international corporations began to market and mass produce their un-copyrighted designs.

Agency in the commodification process is no longer unidirectional. As consumers become increasingly exposed to advertising and product types, they have also become more reflexive and semiotically literate. Carr’s paper stressed that the islanders of Alderney have the power to resist both the com-modification and even the presentation of the island’s dark heritage. This implies a democratization of the heritization process in which local non-ex-perts can push for or against the development of commodified heritage. Gray suggested that rather than being duped by the live interpreters, visitors to Hampton Court (e.g., consumers) were able to maintain interpretive distance from “faux Tudor individuals” (e.g., costumed interpreters). She says that visi-tors engaged in the moment through a form of play in which they interacted with the interpreter and asked questions. Through this activity the visitors remained conscious of the fact that they are not in the past, yet they were happy to make believe that the interpreter was from the past. This practice enabled them to learn from the interpreter and have fun during their value added visitor experience.

Black Market Commodification

The sale of antiquities is the most ancient manifestation of the commodifica-tion of heritage. Looting, theft, destruction of cultural heritage, trafficking, and sale of cultural material is a subject which remains of great concern to ar-chaeologists today. The sale of illicit cultural material has grown into an inter-national antiquities trade and a thriving business, with a turnover believed to be in the billions of pounds. With the rise in art as an alternative investment, growing demand fetches record prices for artifacts at auction houses and pri-vate sales. The index shows a favorable performance for art versus stocks and

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bonds (Shvartsman 2004:1). The lawyer Laura Pastor, reflexively questioned her previous role as an intern at Christies in her paper The role of auction houses in the commodification of cultural heritage: a case study: the sale of paleontological items by auction houses. She highlighted that the illegality of the market itself often enhanced the perceived value of the object, resulting in illegally traded objects fetching higher prices.

Conversely, until 2003, the use and abuse of intangible heritage re-ceived much less interest than looting. Multi-national corporations exploit traditional knowledge belonging to Indigenous communities without shar-ing the economic benefits with them. Corporations use reproductions of na-tive designs on mass-produced clothing, textiles, T-shirts, coasters, tables, rugs, furniture, souvenirs, and also exploit their music, drawings, and medi-cal knowledge. Native peoples are often unaware of their rights. The threat from globalization, the 21st century advancement in technology, and the nature of the market all make it easier to copy, modify, and produce cheap replicas of Indigenous art — all this makes it easier for corporations to ex-ploit native communities. Globalization, commodification, and the rise of the market economy have raised legal questions with regard to copyright protec-tion, patents, and trademarks. The effect of globalization on native commu-nities is a double- edged sword. On the one hand, it raises local awareness, and enhances local identity and local culture; it provides opportunities to ac-cess knowledge and information about cultural heritage on a global scale; and helps to promote the diversity of cultures. On the other hand, modernization and industrialization pose a threat to traditional cultures as they disrupt and sometimes replace traditional ways of life.

Indigenous people, minority groups, and UNESCO recommend that the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage be subject to the international hu-man rights framework, rather than intellectual property law (Vidoljak 2005:23). Hence, a clearer definition of the concept of cultural heritage has replaced the notion of cultural property (UNESCO Doc.161 EX/15, Annex 3, paragraph 1). The objective of the UNESCO WHAT convention is to encourage the recogni-tion and understanding of cultural goods and services as vehicles of identity, value, and meaning. The presence of these qualities in Indigenous art implies that traditional designs must not be treated as ordinary consumer goods.

According to von Lewinski, one of the factors that led to this change in definition is the increased awareness of Indigenous peoples who realized that

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their exploitation was made possible by the statutes of intellectual property law (von Lewinski 2003:1). According to intellectual property law, Indigenous knowledge resides in the public domain. Intellectual property law is designed to protect the property rights and economic interests of individuals. Indig-enous people have made it clear that “the concept of property and especially individual property is alien and antithetical to their collective value uses” (Posey 1998:211).

Brown argues that “pragmatic ethical protocols,” and “codes of ethics and standards of practice” are better alternatives to merely expanding intel-lectual property rights laws (Brown 1998:212). Yet, these alternatives have frequently proven to be unenforceable. In addition, Brown criticizes the law for placing limits on the free exchange of information. Others criticize the new approach to intangible heritage fearing it will fossilize the culture it is trying to protect. However, without the protection provided by the law, global corporations will continue to exploit native communities for their own economic benefit.

Figure 3. A street market, Harari, Zimbabwe. How will the attempts of global companies to control Indigenous art affect local art and artist? Will human rights laws succeed in protect-ing local cultures and communities from exploitation? Will there be a rise in legal proceedings regarding copyright protection, patent and trademarks of Indigenous knowledge? Photograph by Jonathan Zilberg.

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The issues of trade-marking Indigenous motifs were presented by Zilberg in his paper entitled The case of Shona sculpture from Zimbabwe: sprits for sale and the Benhura War. He gave an example of a Shona artist fighting a legal case against the mass production and commodification of his work by global corporations. Zilberg’s paper raises two questions, first what will be the effect of Western companies on native art? Second, what will be the effect of native artists increasing utilization of new intangible heritage laws?

Emotions Tapped

We observe an increasing awareness of the need for heritage interpretation to engage with the visitors’ emotional intelligence. Today, the emotions produced and evoked through heritage interpretation are marketed and discussed to an unprecedented degree. As Holtorf highlighted, heritage sites are engaging with the experience economy, attempting to package emotional and mem-orable experiences for the public which money could not — but now can — buy. The importance attached to emotions in heritage interpretation has even lead Chittaro, Ranon, and Corvaglia to try to recreate the emotional response to heritage being destroyed by an earthquake in their computer simulations (Chittaro et al. 2006).

One member of the audience at the seminar mentioned how he had been subjected to a mock Nazi interrogation by a group of artists. This audience member felt exploited by this display and explained how he felt that this type of experience would be wholly out of place at a heritage site. Van der Laarse, on the same note, examined the cases where authors who wrote about their Holocaust experience, were later proved to have had nothing to do with the Holocaust. Some readers felt demoralized by this (mis)use of the past whilst others felt that, although the authors themselves had not been there, they had captured the true emotion of the experience. Van der Laarse questioned whether or not a similar form of emotional exploitation is taking place at Ho-locaust sites. As an example, he discussed Auschwitz where, unbeknownst to most visitors, the emotional experience of the site has been enhanced through partial reconstruction.

Carr noted that in the Channel Islands, the story of the minority of island-ers who collaborated with the Germans is not told. This is partially due to the difficulties in determining what exactly constitutes collaboration, yet shying away from the issue only presents a seemingly doctored version of the past.

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It has been suggested that some stories are simply too emotionally hard to digest and therefore commodify at heritage sites. It was pointed out that the willingness to engage with some emotional themes at dark heritage sites is initially avoided but later can become common place. Grey put forth the case in which live interpreters are now being called upon to present slavery at sites in the UK. In response, Charlotte Andrews argued that at slavery sites, the white majority has deemed that the topic is now ready for discussion, but on their terms — not on the terms of slave descendants. Andrews suggested that this type of presentation is perhaps another form of exploitation of slaves, in this case an emotional one to capitalize on their past pain.

Some heritage professionals question whether or not the evocation of emo-tions at dark heritage sites would at all be possible in a world that is increas-ingly driven by market forces. How and why would people want to buy the dark emotion that these sites elicit? Yet, Lennon and Foley (2000:2) argue that it was precisely the pilgrimages to death sites in the past that are the true origins of modern tourism. This attraction continues to survive as visitor numbers to dark heritage sites continue to increase. Are people going merely to be expunged of negative feelings, to take comfort in the fact that they were not involved in the creation of atrocity? Or have these sites become nothing more than another sto-ry commodified through depictions in film, books, and heritage sites? Holtorf suggests that visitors want to engage in the emotionally charged experiences that these sites offer so that they can walk away feeling that they have emotion-ally gained “something” from the experience. The sale of pieces of the Berlin Wall to tourists suggests that the commodification of dark heritage serves an-other purpose. It allows visitors to take a piece of the past home, to connect in a private manner with the defining emblems of our time.

If one glances into a visitors’ book, one can glean that most visitors muster little more than to pen “saddened” following their visit to a dark heritage site. Heritage interpretation only evokes weak emotional responses. This type of response enacts a private rhetoric that pushes visitors away from public — and hence political — deliberation. The presented papers showed that dark heri-tage sites can reduce the political complexity of the event which they me-morialize to a simple notion of tragedy. The sites have marketed fear while selling the comforting notion that the other is bad or evil while the visitor (if a member of the majority culture in the nation presenting the site) is the heir of the innocent. The commodification of dark heritage sites can help to sanitize them and remove their shock value.

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Who Owns the Past?

Authenticity is part of our continual process of compromise between the various dimensions — psychological, cultural, social, technological, and nat-ural — of our experience (Spooner 1988:221). Authenticity does not depend on objective attributes, but on our perception of value. Material objects have different meanings in different cultural contexts; they are commodities, and symbols at the same time. Donna Yates, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge who specialises in the heritage of the Andean past, presented a paper entitled El retorno del sol: invention, commodification and co-option of solstice ceremonies in the Andes. In this paper, she developed an account of how Bolivian and Peruvian Indigenous people used the “reinvented and commodified festivals” to create their own cultural identity. Despite the fact that white academics have reinterpreted Indigenous ceremonies, local com-munities have different explanation for the rituals. Through participation they express religious and political messages.

Both Yates and Zilberg examined the commodification process conducted by Westerners in the cultural context of the Indigenous Other. Through this process local people become disenfranchised from interpreting their own past. Therefore local communities have lost the social and cultural meanings of their practices which are transformed to meet the desire of Western curios-ity. Yet, one must bear in mind that static material culture too, is never a sim-ple reflection of a living society which has continuous and dynamic traditions that adapt to serve their shifting social, religious, political, economic needs.

In the case of Latin America, both the Peruvian and Bolivian ceremonies were reinvented in the modern times by Western rulers. The Peruvian Inti-Raymi ceremony is controlled by the government and is derived from the written interpretations of historic Peruvian culture as seen through the eyes of the white conquistadors. The Bolivian Willkakuti celebration was pieced together from the people’s collective memory. The Peruvian ceremony is static, merely a pageant with a script, whereas the Bolivian ceremony is as-sociated with myths from the Indigenous culture and is dynamic, religious, and political. In the latter case, it is obvious that religious ceremonies can be re-appropriated by Indigenous people to fight against racial oppression and exploitation. The festivals become a political tool used against Western eco-nomic hegemony. Authentic versions of Indigenous ceremonies or outright historical re-enactments as described in Annie’s Gray paper indicate that

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commodified and packaged interpretations for tourists are not necessarily negative; they can be used as symbolic tools for Indigenous empowerment and/or as means of educating and entertaining the public.

Indigenous people in Zimbabwe experienced the consumption of their culture and the commodification of their religious artifacts by Western con-sumers. This situation has, nevertheless, strengthened the pride of the Shona through cultural nationalism. The commodification of the sculptures which had lost their value for the Shona but which were re-valued by Western col-lectors has meant that black Zimbabweans have now themselves re-valued this tradition.

Globalization is today’s dominant paradigm expressed in the form of Coca- colonization or Disneyfication (Jackson 1999:97). Products such as Coca-Cola are intended for global distribution. Disneyfied cities, designed to bring the global to the local in the form of tourists, prioritize tourist development over the complex needs of the local communities. This issue was analyzed in

Figure 4. Solstice ceremony, 2005, Bolivia. The archaeologist Hugo Eusebio Avalos works for the National Museum. Religious ceremonies are introduced by foreigners in an effort to promote tourism. What do the ceremonies mean to Indigenous people? How is their cultural identity affected? Photograph by Donna Yates.

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Benjamin Morris’s account: Against Authenticity, Disneyfication and the Reinvention of New Orleans. This Cambridge PhD student whose research examines post-Katrina New Orleans used his paper to examine whether or not the reconstruction process in the wake of the hurricane would have a homogenizing effect on the city. Morris supports the idea that the concepts of authenticity and commodification exist outside our ideas of them. Academ-ics, researchers, and policy makers are part of the industry that generates both authenticity and inauthenticity. We must look very carefully how we con-struct these concepts. Morris also noted that the commodification process can be further analyzed through post-structuralism and psychoanalytic ap-proaches. The idea of commodification invokes fear but at the same time a commodified space requires fear in order to exist.

Concluding Thoughts

Perhaps the world is slipping into what Lash and Urry (1987) have termed “disorganized capitalism,” in which what was solid about capitalism — the

Figure 5. People marching in support of musicians in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. How authentic can any reconstruction of the cultural sectors of the city be? Photograph by Benjamin Morris.

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state, cities, class, and industry — is disappearing . Rather than social class defining consumption, consumption defines social class. Holtorf stressed that in the commodified heritage it is the consumer who chooses from a myriad of available experience products to buy into a heritage. Through this action, or rather this selective transaction, people are creating their own lives and identities (Holtorf 2005:8).

The Packaging the Past seminar provoked a sense that now is the time to follow in Hewison and now Holtorf ’s lead to further explore the idea that com-modities and therefore heritage sites have become what Appadurai (1988:5) terms “things in motion,” capable of illuminating the human and social con-text which underlies their valuation and social role. We should move beyond the reification of heritage as priceless and the myth that the commodification of heritage can only be seen as a necessary evil. Now we can start to investi-gate the empowering, as well as disadvantaging force that the commodifica-tion process can have for both heritage producers and consumers.

Notes

1. The term “culture vulture” refers to individuals who have been socialized into appreciating arts and heritage from a young age. These individuals are usually white, upper middle class, and well educated. Later in life these individuals become avid readers and regularly visit museums, galleries and heritage sites.

2. Henry Fitzroy, Henry VIII’s illegitimate son, was portrayed as a vampire in the 2007 television program Blood Ties. This program spurred a series of questions about the royal vampires from members of the public.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Dr. Marie-Louise Sørensen for her support of the Her-itage Research Group. In addition we would like to thank Professor Barker for allowing us to use the McDonald institute to host this seminar. Furthermore, thanks are due to all that lent us a hand with the preparation especially Nisha Doshi and Eisuke Tanaka. Finally we would like to thank all the speakers as well as Dr. Gilly Carr and Tera Pruitt for their help with proof reading. All photographs come from the private collections of their photographers and are used with their permission.

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