Sensitive Pasts: Questioning Heritage in Education 9781785333057

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K Sensitive Pasts L

MAKING SENSE OF HISTORY Studies in Historical Cultures General Editor: Stefan Berger Founding Editor: Jörn Rüsen Bridging the gap between historical theory and the study of historical memory, this series crosses the boundaries between both academic disciplines and cultural, social, political and historical contexts. In an age of rapid globalization, which tends to manifest itself on an economic and political level, locating the cultural practices involved in generating its underlying historical sense is an increasingly urgent task. For a full volume listing, please see back matter

Sensitive Pasts Questioning Heritage in Education

Edited by Carla van Boxtel, Maria Grever and Stephan Klein

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

Published in 2016 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2016 Carla van Boxtel, Maria Grever and Stephan Klein This volume derives from a research programme on heritage education funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, led by Maria Grever and Carla van Boxtel. All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78533-304-0 hardback ISBN 978-1-78533-305-7 ebook

Contents

Contents

List of Illustrations Introduction.  The Appeal of Heritage in Education   Carla van Boxtel, Maria Grever and Stephan Klein

viii 1

Part I  Reflections on Heritage and Historical Consciousness19 Chapter 1.  Are Heritage Education and Critical Historical Thinking Compatible? Reflections on Historical Consciousness from Canada   Peter Seixas

21

Chapter 2. The Continuous Threat of Excess? A Cautionary Tale about Heritage Celebration and Object Veneration in the U.S.A.   Bruce VanSledright

40

Chapter 3. Antiquarianism and Historical Consciousness in the New Media Age    Chiel van den Akker

59

Part II  Experiencing Heritage and Authenticity73 Chapter 4.  Why do Emotions Matter in Museums and Heritage Sites?   Sheila Watson

75

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Contents

Chapter 5.  Dutch Dealings with the Slavery Past: Contexts of an Exhibition    Alex van Stipriaan

92

Chapter 6.  Tagging Borobudur: Heritage Education and the Colonial Past in Onsite and Online Museum Collections   Susan Legêne

108

Chapter 7.  Unlocking Essences and Exploring Networks: Experiencing Authenticity in Heritage Education Settings   Siân Jones

130

Chapter 8.  Archaeological Heritage Education and the Making of Regional Identities    Heleen van Londen

153

Epilogue Part II:  History, Heritage and the Spaces Inbetween   Brenda Trofanenko

171

Part III  Teaching and Learning about Sensitive Heritage

179

Chapter 9.  Holocaust Heritage Nearby: How to Analyse Historical Distance in Education   Stephan Klein

181

Chapter 10.  Engaging Experiences of the Second World War: Historical Distance in Exhibitions and Educational Resources    Pieter de Bruijn

199

Chapter 11.  An Intriguing Historical Trace or Heritage? Learning about Another Person’s Heritage in an Exhibition Addressing the Second World War    Geerte M. Savenije Chapter 12.  Increasing Understanding or Undermining National Heritage: Studying Single and Multiple Perspectives of a Formative Historical Conflict   Tsafrir Goldberg

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Chapter 13.  Voicing Dissonance: Teaching the Violence of the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S.A.   Alexandra Binnenkade

261

Epilogue Part III:  Taking Students’ Ideas Seriously: Moving beyond the History-Heritage Dichotomy    Keith C. Barton

280

Index289

Illustrations

Figures Figure 6.1 Screenshot of ‘My Rijksmuseum’, 1 January 2014. 110 Figure 6.2 Asian Pavilion at the Rijksmuseum. Head of a Buddha. 113 Figure 6.3 Screenshot Masterpieces National Museum of Ethnology, 1 January 2014. 118 Figure 6.4 Screenshot Europeana, 1 January 2014. 122 Figure 6.5 Screenshot Borobudur Google, 1 January 2014. 123 Figure 7.1 The nave of Glasgow Cathedral.  131 Figure 7.2 The power of touch – a young boy shows off the ceramic marble he has just discovered.  143 Figure 7.3 Dr Melanie Giles leads a workshop for Manchester Museum’s  Young Archeologists’ Club using images from ­historic postcards to create historical distance. 143 Figure 9.1 A linen shop in Alphen aan den Rijn, with Sarah and Louis van Dien (around 1940). 189 Figure 9.2 The same building, February 2012. 190 Figure 11.1 The ‘Filing Cabinet’. 221 Figure 11.2 The theme pillars. 221 Figure 11.3 Picture 3 within the Theme ‘Stories told by Dutch Families about WWII’ (drawing by Wim Euverman). Caption ­provided to the students: In 1943, several hundred Moroccan war prisoners worked as forced ­labourers for the Germans in Zeeland (Dutch province). Some of them made friends among the people of Zeeland.227 Figure 11.4 Picture 2 within the Theme ‘Stories told by Dutch Families about WWII’ (drawing by Wim Euverman).



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Caption provided to the students: Various people in the Netherlands allowed persons to hide in their homes during the Second World War. 228 Figure 11.5 The drawer of Connie Suverkropp with the Chamber Pot.230 Figure 12.1 Percentage of agreement and opposition utterances by condition.247

Tables Table 2.1 Attitudinal impulses and metaphors of heritage and history education. 43 Table 5.1 Number of pages on slavery in Dutch history textbooks per type of education. 98 Table 5.2 Number of teaching hours dedicated to slavery by 16 Dutch history teachers. 98 Table 11.1 Students in the selected triad. 223 Table 11.2 Results of the triad and the entire class regarding the interest and preservation questions in the questionnaires at the beginning of the project and after the closing lesson.232 Table 12.1 Main and interaction effects for national group, condition and time over interest in the other’s perspective.244 Table 12.2 Pre- and post-intervention scores for IO by condition and national group. 245 Table 12.3 Frequency of agreement on the question of historical responsibility for the Palestinian refugee problem by condition.246 Table 12.4 Binary regression coefficients for agreement on historical responsibility as dependent. 248

In tro d u ctio n :

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INTRODUCTIO N

The Appeal of Heritage in Education Carla van Boxtel, Maria Grever and Stephan Klein

Heritage is often associated with the current tendency of museums to stage a multi-sensory past, using a variety of objects and media in authentic and recreated environments to meet public expectations.1 The public interest in experiencing the past has also spawned a distinct type of teaching and learning: heritage education. Many schools organize visits to museums and heritage sites to provide students with opportunities to learn about the past and about how people relate to it. Educators argue that students particularly appreciate the sensory experience of entering a medieval castle, handling a historical object, listening to old songs or absorbing historical images of all kinds. All these sources serve as mediators between students and ‘the time that is lost forever’. Let us present a concrete example of what may happen during a school visit to a heritage location. In 2014, about a hundred Dutch students, aged 17 and 18, visited the In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres, Belgium.2 One of the hardest battles of the First World War was fought in this area. The museum brings the war alive with touch screens, video projections, soundscapes, personal stories and actors. When looking at a gas mask, some of the students explained to each other the awful death caused by poison gas. They not only discussed the dramatic events of the First World War but also made connections to present-day wars. One student remarked that, in 1914, young people who were willing to fight could be considered naïve. Today, with a couple of clicks on Google, the student continued, you know what Notes for this section begin on page 13.

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to expect as a soldier in Syria, but youngsters still travel voluntarily to that country to fight. At the cemetery, with the graves of thousands of soldiers who died during the battles around Ypres, the students were asked to be quiet when a moving passage was recited from Im Westen Nichts Neues. At the end of their visit, the students listened respectfully to the bugles during the ceremony under the Menin Gate Memorial where the Last Post is played at eight o’clock every evening as a tribute to the soldiers of the British Commonwealth who died during the war. Museum artefacts, buildings, monuments, traditions, customs, folk stories and other ‘heritage’ traces can be powerful resources for learning and teaching.3 The practice of integrating these sources into education, whether under the name of ‘heritage education’ or history education, needs to be questioned. An encounter with heritage as in the above example raises a variety of questions relating to its presentation and learning activities for students. For example, with what kind of educational objectives do teachers and educators approach artefacts, sites, buildings, stories and customs that are considered heritage? These approaches may range from an unquestioned (national) perspective with a strong moral message and an emphasis on emotional engagement to an explorative stance with various possible perspectives in order to balance emotions. What are the strategies of museums to enable students to ‘experience’ the past? What are students supposed to learn from active participation in a commemoration? In sum: how do historical artefacts and sites, and the narrations in which they are embedded, mediate and re-mediate the development of students’ historical interest, knowledge, competencies and meaning making? Next, there are questions on issues of perception and identity. How are students’ perceptions of heritage shaped by their knowledge, individual identity and past experiences? And vice versa: how does the encounter with heritage in education contribute to their identity? How can teachers deal with dissonance between notions of heritage held by particular students or groups of students in multicultural classrooms? Much has been written about heritage as a social and cultural process in which visitors are considered active participants instead of passive recipients. Despite the scholarly attention paid to heritage practices in the field of history, heritage and museum studies, theoretical and empirical research on teaching and learning with and about heritage is rather scarce. This is remarkable because ‘heritage education’ is an important topic for at least two reasons. First, students somehow encounter material and immaterial traces of the past in their daily lives or later when they are adults. They are thus participants in the continuous social process of selection and giving meaning to the past in which people in the present form their identities.4 Second, due to processes of mobility and migration, new artefacts, statues, monuments and museums will be constructed, while existing heritage will be renegotiated. For these



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reasons we think it is necessary for history teachers and heritage educators to reflect more on the (future) impact of new perspectives and new heritage. It is likely that the changing variety of cultural groups and memory cultures in several regions in the world will intensify existing memory battles and clashes about heritage, which may result in increasing disparities between what is taught in schools and what is handed down in families and communities.5 To sustain this reflection process, we need to address the dynamic and critical view of heritage, as developed by heritage scholars over the past decades. These authors have pointed to the risks of essentialism, conflict and exclusion.6 Indeed, heritage in its public manifestations is often conducive to sharing feelings and making identities. It is both experience and performance. But what does this mean when heritage is used in educational settings, particularly when sensitive heritage is involved? Recently, scholars in the field of heritage studies discussed how the close relationship between emotions and learning might assist understanding.7 This raises the question whether it is possible to reconcile heritage activities in which students are emotionally immersed with a disciplinary approach to the past. The application of historical thinking and reasoning skills are now central to history curricula in various countries. Can we combine the heritage type of playful or emotional ways of learning with a critical examination of historical sources, with contextualized thinking, and with critical historical argumentation that recognizes the possibility of different ways of seeing and knowing the past?8 This was one of the leading questions of the research programme Heritage Education, Plurality of Narratives and Shared Historical Knowledge we conducted from 2009 to 2014 at the Centre for Historical Culture of the Erasmus University of Rotterdam. We investigated how and under which conditions heritage education may contribute to a critical understanding of history and culture, acknowledging a dynamic notion of heritage. We focused on the use of heritage in the Netherlands related to the secondary school subject of history and more particularly on the sensitive histories of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and the Second World War / Holocaust. Our assumption was that when sensitive history is involved, the questions we raised above concerning the use of heritage as a resource for teaching and learning become most salient. We explored the disciplinary foundations, goals and approaches of heritage education and analysed how the past is addressed. Our research programme was divided into three projects: 1) disciplinary concepts and attitudes and views of history teachers and heritage professionals; 2) heritage education resources, including exhibitions; and 3) perspectives of students and classroom interaction. Project 2 also explored English heritage resources, as we expected to learn from recent developments in England (UK). Based upon the results of the research programme, we formulated benchmarks for

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a dynamic and professional use of heritage as a resource for history teaching and learning.9 In June 2013, we arranged an international presentation of some outcomes of our research under the heading ‘Tangible Pasts? Questioning Heritage Education’ in Rotterdam. We aimed to reflect on the uses of heritage in museums, schools and digital environments by scholars in history, narrative theories, heritage studies and educational sciences, and practitioners from the field of heritage education and school history. We exchanged ideas about the apparent public need to be on the spot, to touch the monumental, and the way museums and heritage institutes stimulate the ‘experience trend’. Despite - or perhaps due to - the digitalization and virtualization of historical representations, the yearning for a ‘tangible past’ remained.10 The question then is how we can reconcile this tendency with critical historical thinking and reasoning? We also discussed the term ‘heritage education’ itself, as we had discovered that this term has diverse meanings and connotations - positive and negative ones - in different countries. This book is a direct result of ‘Tangible Pasts’: that is, the selected contributions have been thoroughly reworked and edited into chapters. In this volume we approach heritage practices not only through the lens of theories on heritage and history, but we add a history education perspective as well. Particularly, we use theories on historical thinking and consciousness as a main goal of history education. Both in the research programme itself and our presentation of outcomes, the two umbrella concepts of ‘historical distance’ and ‘multiperspectivity’ were crucial in theorizing and analysing heritage education practices. Historical distance is an interesting theoretical concept here because it problematizes educational practices exactly where they seem to conflate past and present and ignore or underestimate the time dimension. No less important is the concept of multiperspectivity because acknowledging distance in the dimensions of time and engagement is what supports critical historical thinking and is at the core of the notion of dynamic heritage. However, it has become clear that the concepts of ‘authenticity’ and ‘identity’ also supported a better understanding of the appeal of heritage in educational settings. Several chapters discuss authenticity as museums and other heritage institutes increasingly promise visitors an exciting experience of the past as ‘vivid’, ‘real’ and ‘nearby’, using, for instance, material relics, visual displays and re-enactments. Here questions are raised concerning heritage as inherently authentic or as culturally constructed through time. The concept of identity often pops up because museums and other heritage institutes implicitly or explicitly express or support various identity claims. This is why historical representations are sometimes contested or can be interpreted as biased, evoking resentment, disputes or even violent conflicts. When confronting



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students with such representations in educational settings it may be difficult for educators and teachers to avoid the imposition of a ‘closed narrative’ of the past, with certain meanings.11 This also goes for meanings that may seem self-evident in democratic societies. With regard to dramatic episodes in history, such as the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade or the Second World War, it may be clear who is good and who is bad. But how sure can we be when we educate about the past? In many instances heritage education uses authentic or semi-authentic artefacts to evoke emotions and to help students imagine the cruelty of past events in terms of victims and perpetrators.12 These activities often adopt a modern humanitarian point of view, including a moral message as a given rather than as an issue to be discussed in historical terms. This function of heritage education as a more authentic and personal way of learning about the past, supporting national and other group identities, needs to be questioned when it is to be used more dynamically as a resource for learning to think historically. The chapters in our volume are arranged into three parts. Part I contains theoretical reflections on the relation between the use of heritage in history education, the disciplinary approaches to the past and the concept of historical consciousness by Peter Seixas, Bruce VanSledright and Chiel van den Akker. Part II deals with ways in which heritage is unlocked in museums and at historical sites and how they affect what is experienced and learned. Sheila Watson, Alex van Stipriaan, Susan Legêne, Siȃn Jones and Heleen van Londen address the role played by emotions, experiencing authenticity and identity. Brenda Trofanenko discusses these chapters in an epilogue. Part III focuses on teaching and learning about sensitive heritage, with Stephan Klein, Pieter de Bruijn, Geerte Savenije, Tsafrir Goldberg and Alexandra Binnenkade exploring issues of historical distance and multiple perspectives in concrete practices of heritage and history education. Keith Barton reflects on these chapters in a second epilogue. We continue this introductory chapter with a discussion of the term heritage education approached from a dynamic perspective. Then we introduce the two umbrella concepts of historical distance and multiperspectivity and explain how they are used in the theoretical and empirical chapters in this volume. In doing this, we will also go into the related concepts of authenticity and identity. Finally, we present some conclusions.

Heritage Education: A Dynamic Perspective ‘Heritage education’ is not a self-evident phenomenon. Inspired by critical heritage studies, we conceive of heritage as a continuous process of construction, conservation, management and interpretation in which people refer to

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the past with a view to the future, aiming to construct a historical identity in the present.13 In 2006, the Council of Europe defined heritage education as a teaching approach based on cultural heritage, incorporating active educational methods, cross-curricular approaches and partnerships between professionals from the fields of education and culture, and employing the widest variety of methods of communication and expression.14 The Council of Europe emphasized the following aims: to raise young people’s awareness of their cultural environment and the necessity of protecting it, and to promote mutual understanding and tolerance. We do not know, however, whether heritage education as it is practised in European countries actually reflects these characteristics and aims. In the Dutch, and to some extent English, context of our research we use the term heritage education to refer to educational practices in which heritage is a primary instructional resource for teaching and learning with the aim to improve students’ understanding of history and culture.15 In our research programme about heritage education we focused on educational trips to museums, memorial centres, historic sites, trails and monuments. In this research programme, as we explained above, we focused on the following question: under which conditions may heritage education contribute to the critical understanding of history and culture while acknowledging a dynamic notion of heritage? Educators and scholars in the field of history and museum education have long discussed the potential educational value of tangible and intangible remains of the past.16 These remains are considered rich resources, which not only stimulate interest and the historical imagination, but can also strengthen time consciousness and the ability to think historically.17 Most teachers will recognize that historical objects and stories can easily trigger students’ curiosity and make abstract historical phenomena more concrete and imaginable. But there is more. When historical objects and artefacts are used in museums, for example, even young children can discover differences and similarities between the past and the present, and they can be encouraged to identify aspects of continuity and change in history. Museums and heritage organizations also point to the potential of active, embodied and multi-sensory experiences as ways to provoke thought. Climbing the tower of an old church, participating in hands-on activities or playing a role and dressing up in the traditional garb of people in the past are examples of ‘bodily’ experiences that can support cognitive processes.18 For learning, however, the way in which certain remains of the past are embedded in a narrative to create meaning in the present is significant. Does the narrative sustain an existing form of collective memory or does it use remains of the past more dynamically? In the former case, students will be more or less forced to appropriate particular meanings, whereas in the latter case meaning in the present is part of a negotiation process and is, therefore,



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seen as dynamic and subject to development, adaptation or even rejection. Learning about how heritage constitutes personal and collective identities has recently gained more attention in history education literature and history curricula. For instance, one of the key learning objectives of the examination programme in Dutch upper secondary education is an understanding of the changing significance of the past for different groups of people, both in the past and in current society, and a recognition of present motives, values and expectations when people make moral judgments about the past. These objectives are based on a dynamic notion of heritage, in which the meanings of the past are constantly being negotiated and change over time.19 Other scholars in Germany, Belgium, Denmark and Norway have developed educational methods to approach memory culture related to heritage in history teaching.20 They describe competencies students should develop in order to be able to de-construct narratives about the past and their meaning in the culture of history and remembrance. Such competencies include the ability to question, analyse, compare and reflect on different forms of remembrance with regard to a particular historical event.

Historical Distance and Multiperspectivity The journalist who reported on the school trip to Ypres observed that the First World War was ‘tangible’ and ‘nearby’ in Ypres. This supposed appeal of heritage brings us to the concepts of historical distance and multiperspectivity. The past can be presented as close and familiar, or as more distant and strange. This is not an either / or issue, however, because experiencing and learning about time is triggered in complex ways by heritage and heritage educational materials. Influenced by other studies, we have defined the concept of historical distance in our research as a configuration of temporality and engagement.21 Temporality refers to the dual character of time (subjective experienced and objective measurable time) and the temporal approaches to the past (diachronic and synchronic). Engagement alludes to the degree of affection, moral commitment and identification with the past. Every specific configuration of temporality and engagement generates a degree of ‘distancing’.22 An important, related concept of historical distance is multiperspectivity. The value of a more or less complete ‘immersion’ in the perspective of a person in the past is a much debated issue by scholars in the field of history education. It is referred to as historical perspective taking or historical empathy and seen as an approach to help students gain a better understanding of past situations and actions. It goes without saying that it is impossible to really step into the shoes of people living a hundred years ago.

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Various heritage practices do make it easier, however, to imagine a world of the past with real characters.23 But the power of heritage to stimulate the imagination is not truly acknowledged when it is not followed up and used to raise historical questions, such as why people acted the way they did or whether people acted differently. It is important to build such questioning into educational practices to enhance historical understanding from multiple perspectives. The different perspectives of soldiers, civilians and doctors, for example, contribute to a richer understanding of the Second World War, resulting in a deeper sense of historical reality.24 However, because major armed conflicts and genocides such as the Second World War and the atrocities of the Holocaust involve a complex and sensitive past, teachers and educators have to reflect carefully how to deal with ‘immersion’ regarding the perspectives of victims, bystanders, resistance fighters, collaborators and perpetrators. This also applies to the history of the TransAtlantic Slave Trade. Teaching from the perspectives of enslaved people, slave-holders, traders and abolitionists in a global context instead of only from a white-national one requires not only knowledge about this past but also about its current sensitivity among some groups of students. In other words, although our viewpoint is that multiperspectivity enhances historical understanding, with respect to these sensitive pasts the use of heritage as a primary source of instruction has a chance to succeed only after careful preparation and evaluation. As heritage is always someone’s heritage, those who present and teach should be aware of potential processes of exclusion. Heritage often sustains ‘grand narratives’ of nations, and various people may be marginalized in the creation and management of such heritage. So when heritage is used as a resource to learn about the past, it is important to ask what perspectives are included. Multiple perspectives are present not only at the level of historical actors or historical interpretations, but also at the level of attributing meaning owing to the diverse backgrounds of students as readers, visitors and viewers.

Reflections on Heritage and Historical Consciousness In Part I, both Peter Seixas (chapter 1) and Bruce VanSledright (chapter 2) address the question of whether it is possible in an educational setting to reconcile heritage with the application of critical historical thinking. Their (initial) doubt is not surprising. David Lowenthal, in particular, has criticized what he calls the heritage obsession, stressing the uncritical and patriotic aims of heritage in contrast with the distanced intents of the historical discipline.25 Generally, heritage is unfathomable because it ‘appeals to people’s senses and emotions’.26 For instance, with respect to battlefield sites and military war



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heritage in museums, local and regional tourist offices tend to emphasize the spectacle of battles and strategic warfare in order to appeal to the public’s need to experience the ‘real thing’. This kind of heritage marketing of war violence, suffering and death focuses on emotional utilization rather than on exploring the complexities of the past and its layers of meaning. Nor is there room for collaborators, bystanders or war failures. Over the years, however, educational scholars have emphasized that in order to develop historical understanding, students need to engage in the type of thinking and reasoning that is characteristic for the discipline of history and shaped by the disciplinary conventions for collecting, analysing, presenting and evaluating information about the past. In his chapter, VanSledright discusses the implications of situations in which the nationalistic (emotional) impulse is strong and shapes not only heritage production but also history education. He shows that critical thinking about objects requires sophisticated epistemic beliefs. Yet Peter Seixas considers that reconciliation between heritage education and critical historical thinking is possible, if celebrations of national heritage are open to critique and if history education enables students to deal with the historical complexity in the public realm. Although we have become increasingly aware of our distance from the past and of how those who lived in other periods were ‘in a foreign country’ where values and beliefs were radically different from our own, Seixas also assumes that the rise of historical consciousness has not undermined our natural relation to the past.27 Similar to Seixas, Chiel van den Akker (chapter 3) emphasizes that a sense of loss of the past is a prerequisite for historical consciousness, yet he presents another, more radical view of the role of historical consciousness in the age of new media. Referring to the philosophy of media theorist Wolfgang Ernst, he observes that, whereas museums have traditionally tried to narrate the past, in the age of new media they can also function as an archive, registering and describing objects rather than historicizing and narrating them. New media allow for a more participatory and personalized engagement with sites and artefacts from different times and places displayed side by side. Museums can be considered as an archival space for people to explore out of curiosity. The bond between narrative, collecting, and historical consciousness, which defined the museum for the last two centuries, is thus broken.

Experiencing Heritage and Authenticity The chapters in Part II elaborate issues of historical distance and multiperspectivity in heritage and heritage education practices. The experience of

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authenticity and emotions are important aspects of experiencing the past as close and familiar. Siȃn Jones (chapter 7) shows that authenticity is considered a complex construct in recent studies, as it is not an intrinsic feature of a historical object but is produced and negotiated in specific cultural and historical contexts. She explains that the experience of authenticity creates forms of engagement that are promising for education and can also be the start of higher-order thinking skills, such as historical contextualization and inquiry. According to Jones, heritage objects and related practices and performances have the power to ‘bring something of the past into the present’ and sustain relations across time and space. Both Siȃn Jones and Sheila Watson (chapter 4) show how the sense of a nearby past can be related to processes of identification, which are also accompanied by emotional responses. Watson works from the idea that emotions are also culturally conditioned and argues that we need to know more about how emotions affect learning processes in museums. Several chapters discuss the challenges of including multiple perspectives. Van Stipriaan (chapter 5) reports on the making of an exhibition on the contested past of slavery and its legacy and how to present a balanced and inclusive story. He uses a dynamic notion of identity, by emphasizing that people can consider themselves inheritors of more than one national history, and of local and world history at the same time. Van Stipriaan gives the example of the ‘Black & White’ exhibition in 2013–2014 at the Tropen Museum in the Netherlands, which presented questions and dilemmas concerning the memory of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and slavery. He shows that the idea of ‘black’ and ‘white’ perspectives is complicated and that a questioning approach in a museum exhibition can work well when dealing with contested histories. Susan Legêne (chapter 6) discusses the notions of colonial, shared and world heritage in relation to museum collections. She argues that the metadata of virtual collections of objects, when used in heritage education, should be critically examined as they may hinder multiple perspectives on the colonial past. Museum objects should not only be considered as heritage but also as historical sources in order to understand the mechanisms that turn objects into heritage. Heleen van Londen (chapter 8) addresses archaeological heritage. She explains how historical landscapes and buildings need to be made visible for the public to enable them to learn about history in such a way that the public is made aware of their historical significance. She also shows that there can be a fine line between raising awareness and manipulation. Archaeologists are hardly aware of their role as mediators in the processes of producing meaning and identity creation, because of their focus on the preservation of the archaeological record. Moreover, a critical reflection of heritage education seems lacking in Public Archaeology.



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In her epilogue after Part II, Brenda Trofanenko shows that ideas and concepts used in critical heritage studies – and increasingly by scholars in the field of history and history education – such as identity, emotions, authenticity, place, and dissonance, are helpful to better understand the practice and the potential of learning ‘through heritage’. She highlights the productive potential of what results from the distinct break between history and heritage and their associated disciplines.

Teaching and Learning about Sensitive Heritage The authors in Part III shed more light on the construction of historical distance and multiperspectivity in heritage education materials and activities and show how learning processes can be affected by students’ identity. Stephan Klein (chapter 9) and Pieter de Bruijn (chapter 10) use the concept of historical distance to analyse heritage education materials and activities and museum exhibitions. Klein introduces an analytic framework in which the concept of historical distance is described as a continuum in the dimensions of time, person, imagination, place and engagement. Klein shows that heritage educators and history teachers use various ways of distancing at the same time and illustrates this with an educational project called The War Nearby, which uses a local historical environment as the basis for learning about the Holocaust. Museums also use a variety of strategies that can be analysed using the concept of historical distance. Pieter de Bruijn studied the exhibitions and educational materials of two Second World War museums in England and the Netherlands. He explains that a museum exhibition can enhance temporal or spatial proximity, for example, by using personal stories connected to objects, on the one hand, while educational activities encourage students to take a more detached stance and engage in historical inquiry, on the other. Both Klein and De Bruijn suggest that some historical distance is needed – if not in the displays themselves, then at least in the educational resources and the learning process afterwards – to constrain presentist thinking and enhance the exploration of multiple perspectives and critical inquiry. How students experience the past and attribute meaning is affected not only by the way in which the past is represented by heritage institutions, but also by the learners’ knowledge, identity, current circumstances and past experiences. Students may be inclined to connect certain past events to present-day conflicts or identify with certain individuals in the past because of their own background. In her case study, Geerte Savenije (chapter 11) shows how processes of identification and distancing are at work in a group of Dutch secondary school students of immigrant descent, engaged in a project

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that presents traces of the Second World War as Dutch heritage. She claims that it must be taken into account that students have multiple and shifting identities and that there are no self-evident relationships between constructed meanings and identity. The students’ discussions provided opportunities for reflecting on criteria that can be used in attributing significance and on the impact of one’s ethnic background. Tsafrir Goldberg (chapter 12) reports the results of a study in which Jewish-Israeli and Arab-Israeli secondary school students investigated and discussed the controversial Israeli war of independence, a focal point of national heritage and commemorated as the ‘birth of the nation’. Goldberg shows that, when studying the same narrative, minority and majority students reach different conclusions and maintain different views. Engaging students in the diverse communities’ perspectives on heritage, however, can promote intergroup dialogue and mutual understanding. Goldberg compared the effects of a conventional, a critical-disciplinary and an empathetic-narrative approach. In the empathetic approach, there appeared to be a significant increase in the Arab-Israeli participants’ interest in the other people’s perspective. In the studies of both Savenije and Goldberg, students were invited to explore and discuss multiple perspectives and to attribute meaning themselves. Alexandra Binnenkade (chapter 13) argues that when memory is sensitive, as with the violence of civil rights movements in the United States or the heritage of the Holocaust, teachers often adopt an educational approach in which they evoke emotions in order to transmit specific values and attitudes to students. However, this may result in a ‘duty of emotions’ which are not neutral in terms of gender, race, class or politics. Furthermore, Binnenkade argues that multiperspectivity is more than simply presenting sources from different viewpoints in the past. Teachers also need to discern multiple present perspectives on how the past is dealt with and anticipate their effects. When students are stimulated to verbalize how they attribute significance, meanings can be negotiated. In his epilogue to Part III, Keith Barton questions the possibility and desirability of asking students ‘to set aside’ their present concerns and ­identities. He makes a plea for more open-ended learning processes.

***** What conclusions can we draw so far? First, the use of heritage in educational settings can serve a variety of implicit and explicit objectives: not only stimulating students to appreciate a particular heritage, to identify with certain historical actors and to appropriate a national ‘grand narrative’, but also developing students’ historical knowledge and understanding of processes of



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continuity and change, and cause and consequence. Some objectives even aim at developing students’ competency to de-construct such narratives and formulate historical questions based upon their own curiosity. This variety of objectives generates a whole range of heritage education practices, which is also reflected in the practices that are discussed in this volume. Second, the concepts of historical distance and multiperspectivity help us to analyse and reflect upon heritage education practices and to evaluate their correspondence with a dynamic notion of heritage. In this volume, historical distance and multiperspectivity are related not only to key concepts in history and history education, such as historical consciousness, but also to authenticity and identity. In order to better understand how history and heritage education contribute to historical understanding, it is fruitful to study and theorize on these practices from the disciplines of history, history education and heritage studies. Third, if heritage professionals, educators and teachers approach heritage from a dynamic perspective, then its use is compatible with the aim to enhance historical understanding and critical historical thinking as conceptualized by scholars in the field of history education. This requires educators to possess knowledge of historical thinking and reasoning and to understand processes of identity formation. The chapters in this volume illustrate the difficulties and opportunities in finding a dynamic interaction between closer and longer distancing, greater and lesser engagement and in making room for exploring multiple perspectives. Several authors consider it important to achieve some balance between proximity and historical distance in order to engage students’ historical interests, knowledge and skills, and to offer them opportunities to explore multiple perspectives and attribute and negotiate meanings. A final conclusion is that, if we do not acknowledge that people apparently have a need to experience the ‘real’ material traces of the past and a longing to be on the spot ‘where it all happened’, then we ignore a fascinating and important source of historical interest, which is the starting-point for any kind of historical understanding and consciousness.

Notes 1. This introduction is partly based on the text of the research programme Heritage Education, Plurality of Narratives and Shared Historical Knowledge, funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, conducted by Maria Grever and Carla van Boxtel (2009–2014). Researchers in this programme were Pieter de Bruijn, Stephan Klein and Geerte Savenije. 2.  ‘De waanzin van Ieper door puberogen’ [The Madness of Ypres through Adolescents’ Eyes], De Limburger, 18 October 2014.

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3.  In 2003 UNESCO adopted a convention that recognized intangible cultural heritage as an integral aspect of heritage significance. Intangible heritage was defined as ‘The practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills – as well as the instruments, objects, artefacts and cultural spaces associated therewith – that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage’ (UNESCO, Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, 32nd Session of the General Conference, Paris, 29 September–17 October 2003). 4.  For this conceptualization of heritage see L. Smith, Uses of Heritage, New York, 2006, 2, 11. 5.  E. Zerubavel, Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past, Chicago and London, 2003, 1–10; M. Grever, ‘Plurality, Narrative and the Canon’, in Beyond the Canon: History for the Twenty-First Century, eds M. Grever and S. Stuurman, Basingstoke, 2007, 31–47. 6.  J. Tunbridge and G.J. Ashworth, Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict, Chichester, 1996. 7. B. Trofanenko, ‘Affective Emotions: The Pedagogical Challenges of Knowing War’, Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 36 (2014): 22–39; A. Witcomb, ‘Understanding the Role of Affect in Producing a Critical Pedagogy for History Museums’, Museum Management and Curatorship 28 (2013): 255–271. 8.  Historical thinking and reasoning are conceptualized in J. van Drie and C. van Boxtel, ‘Historical Reasoning: Towards a Framework for Analysing Students’ Reasoning about the Past’, Educational Psychology Review 20 (2008): 87–110; W. Schreiber et al., Historisches Denken: Ein Kompetenz-structurmodell, Neuried, 2006; P. Seixas, ‘Scaling Up’ the Benchmarks of Historical Thinking: The Vancouver Meetings, 14–15 February 2008, Vancouver, BC; S. Lévesque, Thinking Historically: Educating Students for the Twenty-first Century, Toronto, 2008; P. Seixas and T. Morton, The Big Six Historical Thinking Concepts, Toronto, 2013. 9.  For benchmarks see M. Grever and C. van Boxtel, Verlangen naar Tastbaar Verleden: Erfgoed, Onderwijs en Historisch besef [Longing for Tangible Pasts: Heritage, Education and Historical Consciousness], Hilversum, 2014, 116–120. For other recommendations, see P. de Bruijn, ‘Bridges to the Past: Historical Distance and Multiperspectivity in English and Dutch Heritage Educational Resources’ (PhD dissertation, Erasmus University of Rotterdam, 2014) and G. Savenije, ‘Sensitive History under Negotiation: Pupils’ Historical Imagination and Attribution of Significance while Engaged in Heritage Projects’ (PhD dissertation, Erasmus University of Rotterdam, 2014). 10.  See Grever and Van Boxtel, Verlangen naar Tastbaar Verleden, 9–19. 11.  S. Klein, ‘Teaching History in the Netherlands: Teachers’ Experiences of a Plurality of Perspectives’, Curriculum Inquiry 40 (2010): 614–634. 12. See, for example, I. Davies, ed., Teaching the Holocaust: Educational Dimensions, Principles and Practice, London, 2000. 13.  G.J. Ashworth, B. Graham and J.E. Tunbridge, Pluralising Pasts: Heritage, Identity and Place in Multicultural Societies, 2007, 1–5, 54–67; Smith, Uses of Heritage, 3. 14.  L. Branchesi, Heritage Education for Europe: Assessment and Future Prospects. Summary of the Evaluation Report, Strasbourg, 2004, 31. 15.  M. Grever and C. van Boxtel, ‘Introduction: Reflections on Heritage as an Educational Resource’, in Heritage Education: Challenges in Dealing with the Past, eds C. van Boxtel, S. Klein and E. Snoep, Amsterdam, 2011, 9–13. For a definition related to the enhancement of historical consciousness, see Grever and Van Boxtel, Verlangen naar Tastbaar Verleden, 20. 16. For example, in the experience-based educational movement and pleas for local history education. See J.H.B. Plymouth, ‘The Teaching of Local History’, History 69 (1933): 1–10; G.E. Hein, ‘John Dewey and Museum Education’, Curator 47, 4 (2004): 413–427; G. Preston, ‘The Value of Local History in the School Curriculum’, Teaching History 1 (1969): 87–91.



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17. C. Baron, ‘Understanding Historical Thinking at Historic Sites’, Journal of Educational Psychology 104 (2012): 833–847; M. Felton and D. Kuhn, ‘“How do I Know?” The Epistemological Roots of Critical Thinking’, The Journal of Museum Education 32 (2007): 101–110; A. Marcus, J. Stoddard and W. Woodward, Teaching History with Museums: Strategies for K-12 Social Studies, New York, 2012; G. Savenije, C. van Boxtel and M. Grever, ‘Learning about Sensitive History: “Heritage” of Slavery as a Resource’, Theory & Research in Social Education 42, 4 (2014): 516–547; D. Spock, ‘Imagination: A Child’s Gateway to Engagement with the Past’, in Connecting Kids to History with Museum Exhibitions, eds D.L. McRainey and J. Russick, Walnut Creek, 2010, 117–136. 18.  M.H. Immordino-Yang and A. Damasio, ‘We Feel, therefore we Learn: The Relevance of Affective and Social Neuroscience to Education’, Mind, Brain and Education 1 (2007): 3–10. 19.  C. van Boxtel, M. Grever and S. Klein, ‘Heritage as a Resource for Enhancing and Assessing Historical Thinking: Reflections from the Netherlands’, in New Directions in Assessing Historical Thinking, eds K. Ercikan and P. Seixas, New York, 2015, 41–52. 20.  H. Bjerg, A. Körber, C. Lenz and O. von Wrochem, Teaching Historical Memories in an Intercultural Perspective: Concepts and Methods, Berlin, 2014. 21.  M. Grever, P. de Bruijn and C. van Boxtel, ‘Negotiating Historical Distance: Or, How to Deal with the Past as a Foreign Country in Heritage Education’, Pedagogica Historica 48 (2012): 876. 22.  Idem, 876. See also M.S. Phillips, ‘Distance and Historical Representation’, History Workshop 57 (2004): 123–141. 23.  On this issue, see also De Bruijn, ‘Bridges to the Past’, 30–37. 24.  For more on the epistemological and social arguments for using multiperspectivity in the context of history education, see M. Grever, ‘Dilemmas of Common and Plural History: Reflections on History Education and Heritage in a Globalizing World’, in History Education and the Construction of National Identities, eds M. Carretero, M. Asensio and M. RodriguezMoneo, Charlotte NC, 2012, 87. 25.  D. Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 26.  L. Lixinski, Intangible Cultural Heritage in International Law, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 7. 27.  H.-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method (J. Weinsheimer & D.G. Marshall, Trans. Second, Revised ed), London and New York, 2004 (1975), 283.

References Ashworth, G.J., B. Graham and J.E. Tunbridge. Pluralising Pasts: Heritage, Identity and Place in Multicultural Societies, London, 2007. Baron, C. ‘Understanding Historical Thinking at Historic Sites’, Journal of Educational Psychology 104 (2012): 833–847. Bjerg, H., A. Körber, C. Lenz and O. von Wrochem. Teaching Historical Memories in an Intercultural Perspective: Concepts and Methods, Berlin, 2014. Branchesi, L. Heritage Education for Europe. Assessment and Future Prospects: Summary of the Evaluation Report, Strasbourg, 2004. Davies, I., ed. Teaching the Holocaust: Educational Dimensions, Principles and Practice, London, 2000. de Bruijn, P. ‘Bridges to the Past: Historical Distance and Multiperspectivity in English and Dutch Heritage Educational Resources’ (PhD dissertation, Erasmus University of Rotterdam, 2014).

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‘De waanzin van Ieper door puberogen’ [The Madness of Ypres through Adolescents’ Eyes], De Limburger, 18 October 2014. Felton, M. and D. Kuhn. ‘“How do I Know?” The Epistemological Roots of Critical Thinking’, The Journal of Museum Education 32 (2007): 101–110. Gadamer, H.-G. Truth and Method (J. Weinsheimer and D.G. Marshall, Trans. Second, Revised ed), London and New York, 2004 (1975). Grever, M. ‘Plurality, Narrative and the Canon’, in Beyond the Canon: History for the TwentyFirst Century, eds M. Grever and S. Stuurman, Basingstoke, 2007, 31–47. ———. ‘Dilemmas of Common and Plural History: Reflections on History Education and Heritage in a Globalizing World’, in History Education and the Construction of National Identities, eds M. Carretero, M. Asensio and M. Rodriguez-Moneo, Charlotte NC, 2012, 75–91. ———, P. de Bruijn and C. van Boxtel. ‘Negotiating Historical Distance: Or, How to Deal with the Past as a Foreign Country in Heritage Education’, Pedagogica Historica 48 (2012): 873–887. ——— and C. van Boxtel. ‘Introduction: Reflections on Heritage as an Educational Resource’, in Heritage Education: Challenges in Dealing with the Past, eds C. van Boxtel, S. Klein and E. Snoep, Amsterdam, 2011, 9–13. ——— and C. van Boxtel. Verlangen naar Tastbaar Verleden: Erfgoed, Onderwijs en Historisch besef [Longing for a Tangible Past: Heritage, Education and Historical Consciousness], Hilversum, 2014. Hein, G.E. ‘John Dewey and Museum Education’, Curator 47, 4 (2004): 413–427. Immordino-Yang, M.H. and A. Damasio. ‘We Feel, therefore we Learn: The Relevance of Affective and Social Neuroscience to Education’, Mind, Brain and Education 1 (2007): 3–10. Klein, S. ‘Teaching History in the Netherlands: Teachers’ Experiences of a Plurality of Perspectives’, Curriculum Inquiry 40 (2010): 614–634. Lévesque, S. Thinking Historically. Educating Students for the Twenty-first Century, Toronto, 2008. Lixinski, L. Intangible Cultural Heritage in International Law, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Lowenthal, D. The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Marcus, A., J. Stoddard and W. Woodward. Teaching History with Museums: Strategies for K-12 Social Studies, New York, 2012. Phillips, M.S. ‘Distance and Historical Representation’, History Workshop 57 (2004): 123–141. Plymouth, J.H.B. ‘The Teaching of Local History’, History 69 (1933): 1–10. Preston, G. ‘The Value of Local History in the School Curriculum’, Teaching History 1 (1969): 87–91. Savenije, G. ‘Sensitive History under Negotiation: Pupils’ Historical Imagination and Attribution of Significance while Engaged in Heritage Projects’ (PhD dissertation, Erasmus University of Rotterdam, 2014). ———, C. van Boxtel and M. Grever. ‘Learning about Sensitive History: “Heritage” of Slavery as a Resource’, Theory & Research in Social Education 42, 4 (2014): 516–547. Schreiber, W., A. Körber, B. von Borries, R. Krammer, S. Leutner-Ramme, A. Mebus, A. Schöner and B. Ziegler. Historisches Denken: Ein Kompetenz-structurmodell, Neuried, 2006. Seixas, P. ‘Scaling Up’ the Benchmarks of Historical Thinking: The Vancouver meetings, 14–15 February 2008, Vancouver, BC. ——— and T. Morton. The Big Six Historical Thinking Concepts, Toronto, 2013. Smith, L. Uses of Heritage, New York, 2006. Spock, D. ‘Imagination: A Child’s Gateway to Engagement with the Past’, in Connecting Kids to History with Museum Exhibitions, eds D.L. McRainey and J. Russick, Walnut Creek, 2010, 117–136.



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Trofanenko, B. ‘Affective Emotions: The Pedagogical Challenges of Knowing War’, Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 36 (2014): 22–39. Tunbridge, J. and G.J. Ashworth. Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict, Chichester, 1996. UNESCO. Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, 32nd Session of the General Conference, Paris, 29 September–17 October 2003. van Boxtel, C., M. Grever and S. Klein. ‘Heritage as a Resource for Enhancing and Assessing Historical Thinking: Reflections from the Netherlands’, in New Directions in Assessing Historical Thinking, eds K. Ercikan and P. Seixas, New York, 2015, 41–52. van Drie, J. and C. van Boxtel. ‘Historical Reasoning: Towards a Framework for Analysing Students’ Reasoning about the Past’, Educational Psychology Review 20 (2008): 87–110. Witcomb, A. ‘Understanding the Role of Affect in Producing a Critical Pedagogy for History Museums’, Museum Management and Curatorship 28 (2013): 255–271. Zerubavel, E. Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past, Chicago and London, 2003.

Carla van Boxtel is professor of History Education at the Research Institute of Child Development and Education and the Amsterdam School for History, University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands). She is also director of the Dutch Center for Social Studies Education at the same university. She was – together with Maria Grever – research leader of the research programme Heritage Education, Plurality of Narratives and Shared Historical Knowledge (2009–14). Her main research interest is the learning and teaching of history in schools and museums, with a focus on the improvement of students’ historical reasoning. She published in international peer reviewed journals, such as Cognition and Instruction, Journal of Curriculum Studies and Educational Psychology Review. Maria Grever is professor of Theory and Methodology of History, and director of the Center for Historical Culture, Erasmus University Rotterdam (the Netherlands). She was programme leader of several research projects, such as Paradoxes of De-Canonization (2004–06) with Siep Stuurman and Heritage Education, Plurality of Narratives and Shared Historical Knowledge ­(2009–14) with Carla van Boxtel, both funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. Currently she leads the research programme War! Popular Culture and European Heritage of Major Armed Conflicts (2015–19). She published several co-edited books, (co-authored) monographs and many chapters and articles in journals, such as Paedagogica Historica, British Journal of Educational Studies, Journal of Curriculum Studies and Gender & History. Stephan Klein is a lecturer of history teaching and historical culture at ICLON – Leiden University Graduate School of Teaching (the Netherlands). He was a postdoctoral researcher in the programme Heritage Education,

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Plurality of Narratives and Shared Historical Knowledge (2009–14) at Erasmus University Rotterdam and project leader of the valorisation project Slave Trade in the Atlantic world (www.atlanticslavetrade.eu). He is advisor and editor of history textbooks for upper secondary education and has published on history teaching, historical thinking, and early modern Dutch republicanism in a.o. Curriculum Inquiry, Teaching History and the (Dutch) Journal of History. His current research interests include colonialism, slavery and ­maritime travelling.

Part I

Reflections on Heritage and Historical Consciousness

CHAPTER

1

Are Heritage Education and Critical Historical Thinking Compatible? Reflections on Historical Consciousness from Canada Peter Seixas

Introduction: A Dialectic, not a Dichotomy David Lowenthal has supplied a clear, dichotomous definition of the difference between history and heritage as approaches to the past. History, according to Lowenthal, is universally accessible and testable. Heritage is ‘tribal, exclusive, patriotic, redemptive, or self-aggrandizing’. Heritage counts ‘not on checkable fact but credulous allegiance’.1 One of the questions posed by this volume is whether, in educational settings, it is possible to reconcile heritage with the application of historical thinking skills. If Lowenthal’s distinction were the whole story, then the answer would be a simple no. However, the question points to other characteristics of heritage education that make the answer more complex. Key aspects, distilled from the Dutch literature, include the valuing of relics and historic sites, and the sensory ‘experience’ of the past that contact with relics and sites can generate.2 Along with the value of relics and sites comes a focus on preservation. But perhaps most crucial in the values of the heritage project is a notion that these objects and sites belong to ‘us’, that is, to a group defined either by nation, region, ethnicity or family. It is this belonging of ‘the tangible past’ that gives heritage the power to confer and confirm group identities. ‘Heritage’ is, in this sense, ‘inheritance’: a past that is bequeathed to ‘us’ (however defined), and that we, therefore, have an obligation to preserve for those who come after us. These are powerful Notes for this section begin on page 35.

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affective forces. Indeed, we might call the individual and social impulses to approach the past in these ways the ‘heritage imperative’, which acquires its power from the quest for identity in an unstable, rapidly changing world. As Maria Grever et al. have written, ‘Heritage refers to direct encounters, emotions and veneration, not to arguments or examination’.3 In Canada, while the heritage imperative is alive and well, the particular heritage elements described in the Dutch literature have not coalesced into a single educational agenda with an organized body of advocates. For more than a century, Canadian history education has been characterized by curricula that attempt to promote either imperial or national (including Quebecois) identities. But they have not generally been associated with the ‘tangible past’ of physical objects. Indeed, imperial history education was specifically about a history (British) that is ‘ours’ even if it is not ‘here’. Over the past few decades, these curricula (all under provincial educational jurisdiction) have gradually been infused with more multicultural and regional emphases, in a constant negotiation with a quasi-national story of Canada. However, these changes have not been accompanied by a different approach to the material past. Two developments in Canada recently brought heritage and history head to head. First, a Conservative government (defeated in 2016), with an active and powerful Minister of Canadian Heritage, oversaw the expansion and re-branding of Canada’s national museums, while cutting support for the national archives and local museums.4 Thus, the successful Canadian War Museum (opened in 2005) is now joined by the Canadian Museum of History (formerly the Canadian Museum of Civilization). There was also unprecedented planning and funding for a series of national commemorations: the War of 1812, Canadian Confederation, 1867, and the battle of Vimy Ridge, 1917, to which Canadian troops made a significant contribution. One might see these developments as a major move towards promotion of a national heritage that is more potent in countering regional and global identities. At the same time, there was a remarkably successful national campaign, whose epicentre was the Historical Thinking Project (HTP), for building critical historical thinking into school curricula. In one form or another, over the past four or five years, explicit definitions of historical thinking have been incorporated into the school curricula of a majority of Canadian provinces, and into most of the new school history textbooks.5 The latter development, at first glance, appears to be on the other side of the critical history/heritage imperative divide, perhaps even opposed. An exploration of the contemporary situation in Canada can serve as the beginning of a discussion of the relationship of these two big ideas. Do they fit together? Can they? Should they?



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Canada’s Story Canada’s status as a nation is, like many others in the twenty-first century, complex. For those wishing to promote a heritage agenda infused with emotion, this poses a problem. Within the borders of the sovereign state of Canada lies the francophone nation of Quebec (formally recognized as such by Parliament in 2006) as well as multiple aboriginal peoples’ ‘First Nations’. While it is thus a multinational state, its non-Quebecois, non-Aboriginal citizens do not have a nation other than Canada to call their own. On top of this, Canada’s rates of immigration – approximately a quarter of a million annually since 2006 – are among the highest in the world.6 For those who look to a variant of heritage education to solidify a coherent Canadian identity that belongs to all of ‘us’, this demographic situation might lead either to redoubled efforts, or to abandoning the project altogether.7 National narratives potent enough to consolidate identities rely on at least three elements. First, there must be characteristics and values that can be credibly claimed as having persisted over the vicissitudes of time.8 A people well defined by language and ethnicity has a significant advantage here. A nation defined by its civic ideals has a different kind of challenge. Canada does not fit in the former group, yet does not obviously possess a set of distinctive and persistent civic ideals either. In such a situation, national identity may reside for most citizens in the unstable symbols and icons of popular culture, with obscure, if any, historical reference (viz. the widely embraced beer commercial, ‘I am Canadian’.9 A consensually held point of national origin is a second element in the creation of a potent national narrative. Again, this is problematic for Canada. First Nations claim their presence on their lands ‘from time immemorial’. This mythic claim poses the challenge of the relationship of myth to history and heritage. In any case, Aboriginal migrations and settlement potentially give Canada a long history, though one that is problematic in terms of its modern identity.10 Quebec celebrates its own national origin with Champlain’s founding of the colony in 1608.11 The origin of Canada is often traced to Confederation in 1867, but, as Barbara Messamore has pointed out, not much really changed at that point: the date does not mark a new moment in Canadian autonomy and self-government; it was not the point at which French and English Canada came together constitutionally (the Act of Union had done so in 1840); nor was it the point at which separate colonies united – only Nova Scotia and New Brunswick joined the previously united Canada East and West.12 The successful resolution of threats, struggles, wars and conflicts, and the heroes responsible for them, comprise a third element necessary for a good

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national story. Thus, the Canadian contribution to a victory at the Battle of Vimy Ridge in 1917 is widely remembered within Canada as a moment of national self-definition. But it, too, has an ephemeral quality, in that it rests on the proposition that others outside of Canada recognize this victory as a key turning point in the First World War, which they do not. In 2012, the Conservative Canadian government innovatively promoted the War of 1812 as the origin of Canadian national identity. What the nation is not is crucial in defining what it is, and wars provide clear and concrete answers. The enemy – the United States – is what we are not. But commemorations of 1812 as the origin of Canada were problematic. In retrospect, ambiguity surrounds not only the ‘victory’ but also the protagonists at the time: Alan Taylor has called it ‘the civil war of 1812’, pointing to deeply divided loyalties on both sides of the border.13 Moreover, as Taylor points out, the British war against the American Republicans resulted in the ascendancy of anti-democratic elements in the Canadian colonial regimes, political stultification, and economic retardation, at least until the anti-elitist Rebellions of 1837: hardly a proud moment upon which to base a definition of national identity. But the Conservatives were onto something: moving beyond 1812, there are many opportunities to define Canada against its closest ally and largest trading partner, the United States. Indeed, Canada as ‘not-the-United-States’ most perfectly satisfies the quest for identity as continuity over time in the face of change (whether the United States had surfeits of democracy in the eighteenth century, or imperial ambitions in the nineteenth and twentieth, or private healthcare and uncontrolled guns in the twenty-first). Yet even this is a paradoxical definition for Canada, in view of Americans’ geographic and cultural proximity across an undefended border.

National Identity, Tradition, Heritage, History and Historical Consciousness: A Theoretical Exploration As this brief account of the conundrum of Canadian identity suggests, the discussion of the relationship between heritage and history requires the introduction of some other key terms. The value of heritage in the modern era is its potential to convey and define collective identities. We see this clearly in the resources devoted to the preservation and display of objects in museums, the restoration of historic sites and buildings, and the climatecontrolled care of founding documents. National monuments and memorials located in political centres are designed to inspire contemplation and awe at the persistence not so much of the power of a particular administration, government or regime, but of an underlying identity which has managed to survive and triumph over external threat, adversity and injustice.



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When they work as they are meant to, they link the individual visitor to a larger collective that has persisted from some moment of origin in the past through struggles into the present. Their visceral solidity, scale and mass, moreover, appear to promise continuity into the future. The Washington Mall, London’s Parliament Buildings, Tiananmen Square and, yes, Canada’s Parliament Hill, all function in this way. Protest marches and demonstrations, as well, gravitate towards these sites because they express the national identity materially and spatially. When the nation goes off course, when leaders have seized illegitimate power, when there are wrongs to be righted, these become the loci of public expression and conflict. The concept of tradition works in the same way as national identity in its embodiment of continuity in the face of change. At any given moment in time, tradition’s power rests on its claim to persistence and longevity. And yet, dispassionate historical investigation challenges much of what popular culture presents as long-established: tradition is, in fact, the product of slow accretions of change over time, if not outright invention.14 But the more people experience the conditions of life as changing, the more they grasp for something that appears not to. Tradition, like heritage, consists of ideas, customs and things that are handed down within a community across generations, establishing a natural-seeming, continuous line through time, maintaining identities and familiar patterns of life.15 Traditions are thus the practices that hold collective identities together. The most important quality of a tradition is to seem not to have changed. By contrast, historical consciousness arises in the ‘unnatural’ state of modernity, where ties that bind generations and communities are torn asunder by capitalist relations of production, political and technological change, and the displacement of migrant populations: all that is traditionally solid melts in the modern air. Historical consciousness is the awareness that tomorrow’s world cannot replicate yesterday’s. Ossified, unreflective tradition will be inadequate as a guide for understanding and living in that kind of future. In Gadamer’s words, historical consciousness is ‘very likely the most important revolution among those we have undergone since the beginning of the modern epoch … a burden, the like of which has never been imposed on any previous generation’. And what is this burden? It is ‘the privilege of modern man to have a full awareness of historicity of everything present and the relativity of all opinions’.16 Understanding our distance from the past, and being aware that those who lived in other periods were ‘in a foreign country’, whose values and beliefs were radically different from our own, creates this ‘relativity of all opinions’. Because we understand that those forebears could not see beyond their own limited world-views, we come away from the study of the past with the realization that those who come after us will look back on our ‘enlightened’ era as similarly limited and partial.

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And so, paradoxically, historical consciousness liberates its subjects from tradition, at the same time that it demonstrates to them that they are not free at all. Even modern, historically conscious people remain immersed in the changing course of history, whose traditions – i.e., beliefs, customs, understandings of the world – are, in some fundamental way, impervious to critical, distancing analysis. In looking at the past, we can never escape the lenses of our own historical moment: they’re all we have to look with. Gadamer frames this paradox in terms of disciplinary history: ‘Has the rise of historical consciousness really divorced our scholarship from this natural relation to the past?’, to which he answers, no.17 The modern historian, reading texts from times past, peers through the lenses and blinders of her own time – she cannot help it. The historian, too, is thus immersed in tradition, that is, immersed in the situation of her historical moment that she can gain perspective on only with tremendous limitations. Gadamer proves his point by noting that when we, today, examine the work of historians from earlier eras, we see that they are so obviously and completely (no matter how brilliant) shaped by the historical moment in which they researched and wrote. They cannot and do not stand outside of the flow of tradition in which they are immersed. ‘At the beginning of all historical hermeneutics, then, the abstract antithesis between tradition and historical research, between history and the knowledge of it, must be discarded’.18 If ‘tradition’ forms a ‘natural relation’ to the past in which collective identities are apparently passed unproblematically from generation to generation, then ‘heritage’ can be seen as the practices that aim to solidify those relations in times when tradition changes too quickly. Pierre Nora similarly located the need to construct lieux de memoire at the moment when milieux de memoire disappeared. In his briefest and most poetic (in Arthur Goldhammer’s translation) formulation: ‘Memory is constantly on our lips because it no longer exists’.19 Both Gadamer and Nora have attempted to sketch the relationships between the disciplinary practices of critical history and the everyday understandings of the past, present and future that provide orientations in time in the culture at large (among which ongoing collective identities are central). While both start from the differences, like Carl Becker’s classic ‘Everyman his own historian’, they all point in different ways towards an intersection.20 To recapitulate the argument: the continuity of tradition supplies the bonds of community solidarity, both horizontally at a given moment in time, and vertically, across generations. As long as tradition’s changes are less apparent than its continuities, it can function in this way. Modernity’s pace of change, the mixing of different cultural groups, and, since the late twentieth century, the dizzyingly accessible global exposure provided by new technologies, pose seemingly crippling threats to ‘natural’ tradition. Historical



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consciousness arises in this context, promising a degree of freedom from traditions, a critical lens that includes change – even radical change – in the past, and thus into the future. The flip side of that freedom is instability and uncertainty, Gadamer’s unprecedented ‘burden’. But historical consciousness does not free its subjects from history: rather it offers the possibility of an orientation in a profoundly disorienting era of accelerating change. There is nevertheless the ubiquitous phenomenon of communities, including nations, turning to the materials and symbols of heritage in order to define their identities, and maintain – or reconstruct – a sense of continuity in the face of modern upheaval. Carl Becker wisely told historians to pay attention to popular concerns. Who will tell the non-historians why they need to learn from historical practices in order to orient themselves in relation to past and future, at a time when ‘natural’ tradition no longer works so well? This is the distinctive role of history education. School history provides an opportunity, through deliberate policy initiatives, to have an impact on how the public understands the past, by demonstrating for young people how a critical approach to the past can, in contemporary cultural conditions, provide the most powerful tools for orienting ourselves in time. There are a number of initiatives aimed in this direction.21 They miss the mark, however, if they only supply the tools without addressing the identity issues, what Rüsen calls the orientation of practical life in time, and which heritage and tradition, either within schools or outside of them, target so directly.22 Coming at the history/heritage problem from the other direction, commemorations and museums provide another kind of opportunity for the intersection of heritage practices and critical history. Returning to the Canadian context, bringing a critical, disciplinary component to public celebrations and museum renovations could provide a series of events and institutions that are more historically meaningful than the beer commercials and Olympic flag-waving. The next two sections explore the dialectic between critical history and the heritage imperative from two different directions. First, we look at quintessential heritage practices, seeking opportunities for critical history education. Next, we look at critical history education, to suggest how it might satisfy heritage needs.

Commemoration and Musealization in Canada: Heritage and the Need for a Critical Lens The Canadian government spent $30 million on commemorating the War of 1812, an event that had previously occupied very little space in public

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memory.23 The ‘Prime Minister’s Message’ on the government of Canada’s website on the War of 1812 commemorations read thus: I invite all Canadians to share in our history and commemorate our proud and brave ancestors who fought and won against enormous odds. As we near our country’s 150th anniversary in 2017, Canadians have an opportunity to pay tribute to our founders, defining moments, and heroes who fought for Canada.24

These two sentences efficiently demonstrate the function and method of heritage. Its purpose is to unite ‘all Canadians’, by asking them to consider those who fought in 1812 as their ‘ancestors’, if not by familial lineage (which would exclude most present-day Canadians), then through the constructed continuity of the nation. (Of course, if the country is celebrated as being 150 years old, as the next sentence suggests, then it stretches things to call those who fought in 1812 as fighting for ‘Canada’, which did not have any attributes of nationhood at the time.) They fought ‘against enormous odds’ and sacrificed for us, so we should ‘pay tribute’. In this construction, a collective debt unites us. Their fights were ‘defining moments’, i.e., they defined a nation, in opposition to an enemy.25 For the purposes of heritage, time can be collapsed: the less that change is highlighted, the firmer is the identity that it defines. On the following page, the Prime Minister’s statement continued: The War helped establish our path toward becoming an independent and free country, united under the Crown with a respect for linguistic and ethnic diversity. The heroic efforts of Canadians … helped define who we are today, what side of the border we live on, and which flag we salute.

Independence, the respect for linguistic and ethnic diversity, and a Canadian flag are all late twentieth-century developments projected backwards to help define a continuous national identity. On the other hand, there is truth to the claim that ‘the Canada we know today would not exist had the invasions of 1812–15 not been repelled’: Canada achieved definition by not being the United States. On the same pages, Minster of Canadian Heritage James Moore reinforced the Prime Minister’s message of continuous and coherent identity over time: ‘Today we tell the stories of Canadian heroes to illustrate our history and values … These heroic efforts tell the story of today’s Canada – an independent and free country in a constitutional monarchy with its own parliamentary system’. A third message, from Peter Kent, Minister responsible for Parks Canada, including historic sites, ramped up the message, departing even further from a historical approach, in order to portray national solidarity where there was no nation, and an imagined continuity across two hundred years of change: ‘These powerful places vividly tell the story of how a fiery,



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tense and uncertain conflict brought forth unity of purpose, bravery and perseverance … It is a remarkable shared history that helps us connect with our roots, values and aspirations as a nation’. This is a far cry from Alan Taylor’s Civil War of 1812: ‘the War of 1812 was a civil war between competing visions of America: one still loyal to the empire and the other defined by its republican revolution against that empire. But neither side would reap what it expected from the war…’26 How did these ideas get filtered into educational materials beyond the Ministry’s own website? One first step along the way to the classroom can be seen in materials published by Historica-Dominion Institute (HDI), one of several organizations funded by the Ministry in order to promote Canadian history education in general, and with special funds to promote the commemoration of the War of 1812. In a series of six- to twelve-page glossy, magazine-style booklets, HDI picked up on the ideas from the politicians, and, without dampening the celebratory tone, adds a layer of critical questioning.27 Focusing on a one-page spread allows a view into the structure, the tone and the stance of this classroom resource. The spread on pages 8 to 9 is entitled ‘The War of 1812 and Canadian Identity’. It opens with a quotation from popular historian, Pierre Berton: ‘History gave the conflict short shrift; and yet for all its bunglings and idiocies, it helped determine the shape and nature of Canada’, and then comments: ‘It has often been said that while Canada didn’t know exactly what it was after 1812, it knew what it wasn’t – an American conquest’. Unlike the politicians, Berton includes some irony. There is bungling, idiocy, short shrift from historians; but in the end there is a great country. The resource goes on to talk about the amorphous nature of ‘identity’, and asks related questions: ‘What role has the War of 1812 played in shaping Canada and its identity?’ ‘What role does mythology play in our appreciation of history?’ This – a quotation, a short comment, and a couple of questions – typifies the structural composition of the two-page spread and indeed, the booklet series. This structure provides room for celebration, couched in a mild layer of questions that appear to include some open educational critique but, for the most part, do not poke too hard. ‘Discussion questions’ on the facing page invite students further into an analysis of the practices of heritage: One historian, Alan Taylor, has made the argument that ideas such as Canadian identity or nationalism are notions that have been added on to our interpretation of the war to suit our own times. In other words, few people at the time of the War of 1812 considered this to be a part of Canadian identity… Do you think the war has been used to suit our own purposes today?… Compare the promotion of the War of 1812 commemoration of the Canadian government to that of the American government. What differences strike you, and what might explain them?

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These kinds of questions represent a promising opening, a small step towards what a team of German researchers call an ‘orientation competence’, where commemoration and cultural memory more generally is held under scrutiny in school.28 In this way, the heritage imperative is addressed with a critical edge. A section called ‘quotation analysis’ provides four recent quotations, including an excerpt from Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s ‘which side of the border’ speech, all celebrating the war in one way or another. The text instructs students to comment ‘on the source of the quotation as well as what it says about Canada and its identity’. Here the form of critical history education receives a tip of the hat in this sourcing exercise, although most of the material that students have to work with tilts rather towards the Ministry’s celebratory mission. The Conservative government saw the 1812 commemorations as the first step in a crescendo of heritage activities building up to the 150th commemoration of Confederation (1867) in 2017. A related initiative was announced by Minister of Canadian Heritage James Moore on 16 October 2012. This would entail a make-over of one of Canada’s largest museums (the Canadian Museum of Civilization) with a new name, the Canadian Museum of History, in Gatineau, Quebec, across the river from Ottawa. With a federal contribution of $25,000,000 towards the budget (additional private funds would be solicited), the ‘new’ museum would be relatively cheap, as museums go. In the politician’s announcement, ‘history’ was absorbed into heritage, and put into the service of a national identity. The purpose was ‘to celebrate our history and those achievements that define who we are as Canadians’. The museum re-make would be a celebratory redefinition of a unitary Canadian identity. The renovation would, Moore promised, ‘provide the public with the opportunity to appreciate how Canada’s identity has been shaped over the course of our history’. The first two sentences of the introduction to the Canadian Museum of History, as they appeared prior to the opening, are worth considering in their entirety: The Canadian Museum of History will present the national narrative of the history of Canada and its people. With a renewed focus on the connections between past and present in the shaping of Canada and Canadians, the Museum will explore the major themes and seminal events and people of our national experience by bringing history to life and providing the public with a strong sense of Canadian identity.29

The phrase ‘the national narrative’ stands out, to anyone immersed in the discipline, but even more to Canadians: who determines ‘the’ narrative, and how, when we are so aware of a multiplicity of historical narratives,



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when a leading survey textbook, History of the Canadian [plural] Peoples, for instance, is in its fifth edition.30 Phrases such as ‘connections’ between past and present, ‘our’ national history, ‘bring history to life’, and a ‘strong sense of Canadian identity’ promise a clear heritage orientation for the history museum. Further on, the Museum promises to ‘bring individuals into direct contact with the touchstones of our history’. The purpose of such contact is spelled out: ‘Preserving and presenting our nation’s history is vitally important to national life and to our national sense of self’. The purpose of history, then, is to define and build Canadian identity. And what is the ‘Canadian identity’? According to Mark O’Neill, the Museum’s president and C.E.O., Canada is not like any other country: it is ‘economically viable … based on fairness and justice, and … promotes the participation of all of its citizens. That is the great Canadian story’. The museum will include the ‘events, places and people who influenced who we are as Canadians’: history, again, is defined by its contributions to identity. (Note the contrast to Herbert Butterfield’s ‘Whig history’, where significance is defined by contributions to progress.) How, then, would the defining ‘events, places and people’ be selected? Who would decide on ‘the defining chapters in our country’s history?’ During the autumn and winter of 2012–2013, two initiatives were designed to give Canadians a sense of contributing to the answers. Interactive webpages, called ‘My History Museum’, allowed Canadians to respond to the following questions: ‘What is the Canadian story? What stories and objects should go into the museum? Who has shaped our country? Whose perspective would you use?’, among others. These were closed choice questions, but provided space for comments and additions. In addition, there were sixteen ‘round-table’ or ‘kiosk’ consultations held across the country between November 2012 and January 2013, where people responded to the same questions in person. The web results, including comments, were posted after the site closed.31 This input, not surprisingly, has a different flavour from the statements of the government officials. The question ‘Who has shaped our country’ generated a lot more sentiment for oppositional leaders than for traditional nation builders: feminist pioneer Nellie McClung at 541, contemporary environmental activist David Suzuki at 476, and Metis rebel Louis Riel at 531, vs. 390 for John A. Macdonald (the first prime minister) or 141 for Sir William Van Horne, Canadian Pacific Railroad magnate. ‘Whose perspective would you use?’ trended in similar directions. ‘Aboriginal communities’ (243) were the winners. But ‘the Museum’s experts’ (219) came second. While there were expressions of support for broad public input, the role of professionals who had devoted their lives to historical research and presentation was also valued.32

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Here we have the museum gathering diverse interpretations on historical significance and asking who should interpret the past and ‘tell the story’. It seems a relatively small step from there to inviting the public to undertake critical examinations of historical significance and interpretation. Whether or not the museum would make that its next step was not clear; this is less likely if the heritage and identity goals articulated by the government and museum officials are pursued single-mindedly.

History Education: Critical Historical Thinking and its Context: Heritage, Traditions, Identities The Historical Thinking Project is based at the University of British Columbia, but aims at educational change across Canada. Its home page flies a slogan-banner, ‘Promoting critical historical literacy for the 21st century’.33 A single sentence offers the rationale for young people’s learning history: ‘Students need to meet the challenge of understanding their own lives in the historical context of past decades, centuries and millennia’. These two ideas, ‘critical historical literacy’ and the students’ understandings of their own lives, frame the project’s approach, and potentially set up complex relationships between past and present. In this project, no explicit attention is paid to the promotion of group identities, or the preservation of inherited traditions. The trajectory of critical historical investigations would tend towards showing identities and traditions as complex, historically contingent, variegated and malleable. The framework for historical thinking in the project consists of six second-order concepts.34 They include historical significance, primary source evidence, continuity and change, cause and consequence, historical perspective taking, and the ethical dimension of doing history. There is neither room nor need here to explore each in detail.35 Rather, the task here is to suggest how they intersect with the heritage imperative. How do they deal with the tensions between ‘our’ inheritance and disinterested history, between affective engagement and rational rigour, between proximity and distance, between immediacy and mediation? To put it somewhat differently, how and where do questions of tradition and identity arise in this conceptual framework?36 Historical significance: how do we decide what is important to learn about the past? A powerful explication of historical significance can be located between two obviously inadequate descriptions: immediate personal interest (‘it is historically significant because I am interested in it’) and objectively defined significance (‘it is historically significant for all times and all peoples’).37



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Contemporary concerns, or what Rüsen calls ‘interests’, are the contemporary concerns and issues that demand a historical investigation in order for us to understand them.38 These might be nature, nation, gender, justice, welfare, or war, about which historians (and hopefully students) are likely to have deep ethical and political commitments. A quick glance at the table of contents of any major historical journal or the book titles in its reviews reveals the prevalence of historical research that springs from such contemporary concerns.39 Particular people, events and things from the past achieve their significance as the historian (or student) links them to a larger narrative that sheds light on the issue.40 The historian’s account can help to orient us in relation to how the present has come to be, clarifying similarities and differences across time, and thereby generating an open-ended sense about the limits and possibilities of change.41 Looking back to Gadamer: The real fulfillment of the historical task is to determine anew the significance of what is examined. But the significance exists at the beginning of any such research as well as at the end: in choosing the theme to be investigated, awakening the desire to investigate, gaining a new problematic.42

Understood in this way, the concept of historical significance forms a bridge between present and past, one that connects without collapsing temporal distance. It is similarly a bridge between deeply felt collective interests and engagements in the present, and remote antecedents in a foreign past. Gadamer’s choice of ‘the theme to be investigated’ (a choice located in and, to some degree, determined by the present) sets the terms for the historical particulars that will emerge as significant through the c­ onstruction of the narrative. This allows for historical significance to change over time. Both of the Canadian Museum of History’s open-ended questions to the people of Canada, and the plumping of Canadians’ responses about Aboriginal peoples, whose place in the older stories of nation-building are most in need of revision in our own era, make sense in view of this conception of historical significance. Historical perspective taking: to what degree can we understand the viewpoints of those who lived in the ‘foreign country’ of the past? Like the problem of historical significance, that of historical perspective taking provides an opportunity to consider how a critical historical approach deals with the heritage imperative, not through outright rejection, but with a feint and negotiation. Perspective taking means ‘attempting to see through the eyes of people who lived in times and circumstances sometimes far removed from our present-day lives’.43 In order to do so, we use the detritus that has survived over time, as well as that which has been meticulously preserved, but, as David Lowenthal has laid out in exquisite detail, none of this survives the ravages of time in its original form. Penises get broken off

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Greek statues, but that’s just a painful tip of the iceberg. Old texts are never now as they were when written, notwithstanding climate-controlled, lightshielded vaults that may have provided their protection. Language, society, politics, and with them, the meanings of words, have changed. What words meant in their original contexts must be meticulously reconstructed, not read literally, as if the passage of time counted for nothing. Two phrases from the American Bill of Rights, ‘the right to bear arms’ and ‘a well-regulated militia’, exemplify the disastrous consequences of failing to note the distance between life at the time the words were written and our own circumstances today. A critical historical stance includes an awareness that one never encounters objects or texts from the past as if they give us immediate access to their historical meanings. How, then, to reconstruct the ideas, meanings and feelings of historical actors from distant times, when we are so immersed in our own historical milieu? As with the problem of historical significance, the problem of historical perspective taking leads into a complex negotiation between past and present. A self-conscious awareness of our own positions, ideologies and frames of reference can help in limiting the degree to which we impose them ahistorically onto the objects of our study. Being aware that we stand at a distance from our forebears, that every reading of the past is an interpretation, that there is no immaculate perception generates a tentative humility entirely appropriate to an age of uncertainty. Following Gadamer, we are never in a position to escape our ‘traditions’, our own moment of time. Our lenses are the only lenses we have: without them we are blind. These ideas from critical history can inform heritage commemorations, museum displays and school history, cautioning designers and teachers against moulding the past directly to the shape of present needs or eliding the differences between then and now, but rather maintaining a respectful dialogue and grappling with multiple interpretations across an ultimately unbreachable divide. Will the public be able to handle such uncertainty, such complexity? That is the world we live in; schools are the place to prepare them for it.

Conclusion In a world of accelerating mobility, distraction and dislocation, the heritage imperative offers a simple but alluring promise of roots, solidarity, belonging and identity. But it is precisely the forces that generate the imperative that make ahistorical heritage solutions inadequate in the twenty-first century. Heritage would segment ‘ours’ from ‘not ours’ and lay special claim, privileged knowledge, exclusive access, to the former. It would help



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us to feel good by separating ‘us’ from ‘them’. Collapsing past and present, it dangles the promise of preservation and tradition as solutions to accelerating change. In our own era, these are false promises: the world is headed in the opposite direction. ‘Ours’ and ‘not ours’ are mingling; ‘we’ and ‘they’ are cohabitating; tradition’s edifices are crumbling. What young people need to comprehend about identity is not a question of purity of blood or spirit, but of heterogeneity and multiplicity. Under these conditions, only an understanding of malleability and change over time will satisfy the quest for roots. Solidarity will have to be built on a platform both more global and more local than the nineteenth-century nation. In such a world, a vision for heritage and history education starts to take shape. It is based on developing understandings of history’s disciplinary tools and critical practices, while addressing the urgent questions posed by the needs for heritage and identity. If it is done right, the answers to those questions will be more open, complex and contested than they have ever been. Celebrations of national heritage will be open for critique; monuments will be sites of debate and contestation; museum exhibits will be self-reflexive; and school curricula will enable students to deal with this historical complexity in the public realm. Herein lies the potential for a reconciliation between heritage education and critical historical thinking.

Notes 1. D. Lowenthal, Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Industry and the Spoils of History, New York, 1996, 120–121. To be fair, though I use this as a set-up to draw the distinction, nobody – including Lowenthal himself – sees these as completely dichotomous. 2.  C. van Boxtel, S. Klein and E. Snoep, eds, Heritage Education: Challenges in Dealing with the Past, Amsterdam, 2011. 3.  M. Grever, P. de Bruijn and C. van Boxtel, ‘Negotiating Historical Distance: Or, How to Deal with the Past as a Foreign Country in Heritage Education’, Paedagogica Historica 48, 6 (2012): 878. 4. The commemorative campaigns described in this chapter were created by the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, which was soundly defeated in an election on 19 October 2015. 5. P. Seixas and J. Colyer, Annual Report of the Historical Thinking Project, 2013, 6–7; www.historicalthinking.ca under ‘Research and Reports’ (accessed 8 May 2013). 6. The total population during that period was in the mid-30 millions. Citizenship and Immigration Canada, ‘News Release – Canada continued to welcome a high number of immigrants in 2011’, Ottawa, 2 March 2012; www.cic.gc.ca/english/department/media/ releases/2012/2012-03-02a.asp 7.  See W. Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, Citizenship, Oxford, 2001; and A. Smith, ‘Seven Narratives in North American History: Thinking the Nation in Canada, Quebec and the United States’, in Writing the Nation, ed. S. Berger, New York, 2007, 63–83.

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8. For an insightful exploration of historical identity as the challenge of persistence through changes over time, see C. Lorenz, ‘Towards a Theoretical Framework of Comparing Historiographies: Some Preliminary Considerations’, in Theorizing Historical Consciousness, ed. P. Seixas, Toronto, 2004, 25–48. 9.  www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRI-A3vakVg (accessed 7 January 2014). 10. J. Ralston Saul has attempted to redefine Canada as a ‘Metis nation’, a mix of Aboriginal, French and English, in Fair Country: Telling Truths about Canada, Toronto, 2008. See also G. Bouchard on defining old and new nations: Genèse des Nations et Cultures du Nouveaux Monde, Montreal, 2000. 11.  On history, memory and narrative in Quebec, see J. Létourneau, A History for the Future: Rewriting Memory and Identity in Quebec, Montreal, 2004. 12. B. Messamore, ‘Teaching Confederation: The Problem with Simple’, paper presented at the Association for Canadian Studies/OHASSTA, Toronto, 23–24 November 2012. 13.  A. Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies, New York, 2010. 14.  E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger, eds, The Invention of Tradition, New York, 1983. 15.  A. Margalit locates the ‘ethics of memory’ in the obligation to remember past generations as part of an ongoing community contract that will be fulfilled by being remembered by those in the future. A. Margalit, The Ethics of Memory, Harvard, 2002. 16. H.G. Gadamer, ‘The Problem of Historical Consciousness’, in Interpretive Social Science: A Second Look, eds P. Rabinow and W.M. Sullivan, Berkeley, 1987, 89. 17. H.G. Gadamer, Truth and Method (J. Weinsheimer and D.G. Marshall, Trans. Second, Revised ed.), London and New York, 1975/2004, 283. 18.  H.G. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 283, italics in the original. Thanks to Heather E. McGregor for bringing my attention to these pages of Truth and Method. 19. P. Nora, Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past (A. Goldhammer, Trans.), New York, 1996, 1. 20.  C. Becker, ‘Everyman His Own Historian’, American Historical Review 37, 2 (1932): 221–236. 21.  E.g., Reading Like a Historian in the United States; the new Australian National Curriculum; the Historical Thinking Project in Canada. 22. J. Rüsen, Studies in Metahistory, Pretoria, 1993, specifically Chapter 9, ‘Paradigm Shift and Theoretical Reflection in Western German Historical Studies’. Also see A. Megill, ‘Joern Ruesen’s Theory of Historiography: Between Modernism and Rhetoric of Inquiry’, History and Theory 31, 1 (1994): 39–60. In the 1990s, key historians of popular memory – in the United States, J. Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century, Princeton, 1992, and in Britain, R. Samuel, Theatres of Memory, London: Verso, 1994 – saw vernacular heritage efforts in a positive light as the democratization of history. I am discussing government-initiated, national heritage campaigns, which have a substantially different spin. 23.  M. Deschner, ‘The “Right” Thing to Do: Reconfiguring the War of 1812 to Shape Collective Memory and Identity’ (Unpublished undergraduate paper, McGill University, Montreal, 2012). 24. www.1812.gc.ca, accessed 17 April 2013. The language of the website has been toned down considerably since then. 25.  For a comparative study of politicians in relation to history education, see A. Wilschut, ‘History at the Mercy of Politicians and Ideologies: Germany, England and the Netherlands in the 19th and 20th Centuries’, Journal of Curriculum Studies 42, 5 (2010): 693–723. For a full analysis of the War of 1812 commemoration campaign, see Deschner, ‘The “Right” thing to Do’: On commemorations and national identity, see Bodnar, Remaking America; also J.R. Gillis, Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, Princeton, 1994.



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26. Taylor, The Civil War, 12. 27.  Historica Dominion Institute, The War of 1812 Education Guide, Toronto, 2012. 28. A. Koerber, ‘From Historical Consciousness to Historical Competencies – and Beyond? The Development of German History Didactics’, paper presented at Historicising the Uses of the Past, Oslo, 2008, 63. 29.  See www.civilization.ca/about-us/canada-history-museum (accessed 30 April 2013). 30.  M. Conrad and A. Finkel, History of the Canadian Peoples, Toronto, 2008. 31.  www.civilization.ca/myhistorymuseum (accessed 1 May 2013). This section of the website has since been taken offline. 32.  A similar split was revealed in the survey-based research in M. Conrad, K. Ercikan, G. Friesen, D. Muise, D. Northrup and P. Seixas, Canadians and Their Pasts, Toronto, 2013. 33.  www.historicalthinking.ca (accessed 7 January 2014). 34. P. Lee and R. Ashby, ‘Progression in Historical Understanding Ages 7–14’, in Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History: National and International Perspectives, eds P. Stearns, P. Seixas and S.S. Wineburg, New York, 2000, 199–222. 35.  The fullest exploration of the project’s concepts is in P. Seixas and T. Morton, ed, The Big Six Historical Thinking Concepts, Toronto, 2012. 36. For recent analyses of students’ negotiation of heritage narratives, see S.A. Levy, ‘How Students Navigate the Construction of Heritage Narratives’, paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco, 27 April 2013, and G. Savenije and C. van Boxtel, ‘Imagining the Slavery Past and Attributing Significance Using Heritage’, paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco, 28 April 2013. 37. On historical significance, see L. Cercadillo, ‘Significance in History: Students’ Ideas in England and Spain’ (PhD dissertation, Institute of Education, University of London, 2000); C. Counsell, ‘Looking Through a Josephine-Butler Shaped Window: Focusing Pupils’ Thinking on Historical Significance’, Teaching History 114 (2005): 30–36. 38. Rüsen, Studies in Metahistory. 39. Perhaps ‘springs from’ suggests a more direct route than is often the case. Much research springs more directly from historiographic debate. But when historiographic debates lose touch entirely with contemporary concerns, they become merely antiquarian. 40.  ‘Shedding light’ is not synonymous with drawing timeless ‘lessons’ from the past, the classic ‘historia magistra vitae’. 41.  This is Rüsen’s ‘functions of orientations in life’, to which the discipline of history contributes. 42. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 283. 43.  Seixas and Morton, The Big Six, 138.

References Becker, C. ‘Everyman his Own Historian’, American Historical Review 37, 2 (1932): 221–236. Bodnar, J. Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century, Princeton, 1992. Bouchard, G. Genèse des Nations et Cultures du Nouveaux Monde, Montreal, 2000. Cercadillo, L. ‘Significance in History: Students’ Ideas in England and Spain’ (PhD dissertation, University of London, 2000). Citizenship and Immigration Canada. ‘News Release – Canada Continued to Welcome a High Number of Immigrants in 2011’, Ottawa, 2 March 2012; www.cic.gc.ca/english/ department/media/releases/2012/2012-03-02a.asp

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Conrad, M., K. Ercikan, G. Friesen, D. Muise, D. Northrup and P. Seixas. Canadians and Their Pasts, Toronto, 2013. Conrad, M. and A. Finkel. History of the Canadian Peoples, Toronto, 2008. Counsell, C. ‘Looking Through a Josephine-Butler Shaped Window: Focusing Pupils’ Thinking on Historical Significance’, Teaching History 114 (2005): 30–36. Deschner, M. ‘The “Right” Thing to Do: Reconfiguring the War of 1812 to Shape Collective Memory and Identity’ (Unpublished undergraduate paper, McGill University, Montreal, 2012). Gadamer, H.G. ‘The Problem of Historical Consciousness’, in Interpretive Social Science: A Second Look, eds P. Rabinow and W.M. Sullivan, Berkeley, 1987, 82–140. ———. Truth and Method (J. Weinsheimer and D.G. Marshall, Trans. Second, Revised ed.), London and New York, 1975/2004. Gillis, J.R. Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, Princeton, 1994. Grever, M., P. de Bruijn and C. van Boxtel. ‘Negotiating Historical Distance: Or, How to Deal with the Past as a Foreign Country in Heritage Education’, Paedagogica Historica 48, 6 (2012): 873–887. Historica Dominion Institute. The War of 1812 Education Guide, Toronto, 2012. Hobsbawm E. and T. Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition, New York, 1983. Koerber, A. ‘From Historical Consciousness to Historical Competencies – and Beyond? The Development of German History Didactics’, Paper presented at Historicising the Uses of the Past, Oslo, 2008. Kymlicka, W. Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, Citizenship, Oxford, 2001. Lee, P. and R. Ashby. ‘Progression in Historical Understanding Ages 7–14’, in Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History: National and International Perspectives, eds P. Stearns, P. Seixas and S.S. Wineburg, New York, 2000, 199–222. Létourneau, J. A History for the Future: Rewriting Memory and Identity in Quebec, Montreal, 2004. Levy, S.A. ‘How Students Navigate the Construction of Heritage Narratives’, paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco, 27 April 2013. Lorenz, C. ‘Towards a Theoretical Framework of Comparing Historiographies: Some Preliminary Considerations’, in Theorizing Historical Consciousness, ed. P. Seixas, Toronto, 2004, 25–48. Lowenthal, D. Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Industry and the Spoils of History, New York, 1996. Margalit, A. The Ethics of Memory, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Megill, A. ‘Joern Ruesen’s Theory of Historiography: Between Modernism and Rhetoric of Inquiry’, History and Theory 31, 1 (1994): 39–60. Messamore, B. ‘Teaching Confederation: The Problem with Simple’, paper presented at the Association for Canadian Studies/OHASSTA, Toronto, 23–24 November 2012. Nora, P. Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past (A. Goldhammer, Trans.), New York, 1996. Rüsen, J. Studies in Metahistory, Pretoria, 1993. Samuel, R. Theatres of Memory, London: Verso, 1994. Saul, J.R. Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada, Toronto, 2008. Savenije, G. and C. van Boxtel. ‘Imagining the Slavery Past and Attributing Significance Using Heritage’, paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco, 28 April 2013. Seixas P. and J. Colyer. Annual Report of the Historical Thinking Project, www.historicalthinking. ca under ‘Research and Reports’ (accessed 8 May 2013). Seixas, P. and T. Morton, eds. The Big Six Historical Thinking Concepts, Toronto, 2012. Smith, A. ‘Seven Narratives in North American History: Thinking the Nation in Canada, Quebec and the United States’, in Writing the Nation, ed. S. Berger, New York, 2007, 63–83.



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Taylor, A. The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies, New York, 2010. van Boxtel, C., S. Klein and E. Snoep, eds. Heritage Education: Challenges in Dealing with the Past, Amsterdam, 2011. Wilschut, A. ‘History at the Mercy of Politicians and Ideologies: Germany, England and the Netherlands in the 19th and 20th Centuries’, Journal of Curriculum Studies 42, 5 (2010): 693–723.

Peter Seixas is professor in the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy at the University of British Columbia (Canada), where he is also the founding Director of the Centre for the Study of Historical Consciousness. His edited collections include New Directions in Assessing Historical Thinking (2015) with Kadriye Ercikan, Theorizing Historical Consciousness (2004), and Knowing, Teaching and Learning History: National and International Perspectives (2000) with Peter Stearns and Sam Wineburg. He held the Canada Research Chair in Historical Consciousness from 2001 to 2014.

CHAPTER

2

The Continuous Threat of Excess? A Cautionary Tale about Heritage Celebration and Object Veneration in the U.S.A. Bruce VanSledright

But if it is to be expected that nationalist leaders will if necessary contrive a synthetic or ersatz culture for their states, it is all the more necessary that the [historical investigator] should be forever alert to distinguish between a genuine culture generating a genuine nationalism, and a trumped-up nationalism generating the pretense or illusion of a [unified] culture. —David Potter, ‘The Historian’s Use of Nationalism and Vice Versa’ History education, or what passes for it in the U.S.A., has long been dominated by a celebratory story of nation-state development, what James Wertsch and Kevin O’Connor have termed ‘the freedom-quest narrative’, and Michael Kammen simply calls a heritage phenomenon.1 The quest and its heritage accoutrement (e.g., national park sites, relics from the American past, museum exhibitions) appear to operate as powerful beacons in an ongoing effort to preserve a particular version of the nation’s collective memory. Yet, on many fronts, it remains a contested memory. The shifting vicissitudes of identity and cultural politics make it so. As its population grows increasingly brown and black, and less white and European, many ethnic U.S. whites see their cultural dominance slipping away. While the brutal clashes of the 1990s culture wars seem to have ebbed, the sites of contest have only shifted somewhat and the struggle is as strong Notes for this section begin on page 54.



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as ever, just more subtle. It now pivots, for example, on the future of a free American public education, on the thinly-veiled racist question of whether the nation’s first black president was fit enough to lead the country, on the front lines of efforts to destroy collective bargaining rights and pass right-towork legislation, and on the palatability of economic ideologies that increase socioeconomic inequality and appear designed to protect historic privilege. The demographic evolution coupled with an unresolved ethno-racial past generates scuffles over whose story gets told, which characteristics of the U.S. nation-state memory will dominate. A wistful, amnesia-bound, ‘nostalgic impulse’ in the U.S., one that often translates into a powerful push to resuscitate the significance of white (ethnic Anglo-Saxon) heroes/heroines and their accomplishments, generates enormous pressure to continually bar heritage celebration from being enriched by a critical history education. This pressure, the nostalgic memory that guides it, and the commodification of ‘all things heritage’ results in detrimental consequences for the history education of American students. Although in Western Europe in general, and The Netherlands perhaps in particular, heritage is defined and practiced differently, parallels to the U.S. experience exist (e.g., the Dutch Canon). These parallels suggest the possibility that similar pressures might turn history education into little more than celebratory forms of collective memorialization that can be bent to serve some interests over others. What is necessary, then, to prevent collective memorialization, and its heritage-practice subsidiaries in The Netherlands (and elsewhere), from slipping into the excesses that characterize such practices in the U.S.A.? The answer likely lies in the creation and/or ­maintenance of a robust, critical education in history. However, a paradox lingers. On the one hand, in a powerful liberal democracy such as the U.S.A., with its peculiar immigration and ethnoracialized past, the need for a critical history education is arguably the most acute. Yet, on the other hand, the excesses of heritage celebration remain the most difficult to arrest. Put differently, the more that history education is needed, the more it seems to be thwarted. This essay explores some salient characteristics of the paradox with a view toward understanding how to enable a critical history education while preventing it from inheriting the excesses made so viscerally attractive by heritage practices.

Some Assumptions Before proceeding, I want to be clear about the assumptions I will make regarding the relationship between heritage and history education. My ­understandings of these two related yet different cultural phenomena are

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influenced by my reading and rereading of the literature on their characteristics. My sense of history and a history education (in its best sense) are shaped by numerous scholars, the least of whom are R.G. Collingwood, Peter Novick, Natalie Zemon Davis, Peter Lee and Richard Brown.2 My sense of the heritage phenomenon shares much with work by cultural historians Michael Kammen and John Bodnar, and geographer David Lowenthal.3 The latter’s work has been particularly influential. My own teaching-learning, classroombased research programmes also have been telling in that they have borne out empirically much of the theoretical work of the latter scholars I just noted. First, in what follows, I speak of a history education as one in which students learn how to think about the past in ways that allow them to understand it as deeply as possible. By that I mean they learn to approach the objects from the past, its remnants so to speak, as not the past itself, but only as potentially boisterous stories and texts4 that can tell us in the present more or less about what the past was like. I use the term ‘objects’ very broadly in what follows. I think of a text or a textbook as an object, for example. I think of archaeological artefacts (e.g., Egyptian sarcophagi), and pictures and paintings from the past as objects as well. Fictionalized history-based television and film dramas and census records and oral histories are all objects on my reading of them here. I assume that children can learn to analyse those objects carefully and intimately with a view to assuming that they must be consumed critically and carefully, that how they might be understood depends upon our current positionalities, our historicized selves, and the context in which those objects were created. Objects serve as sources of identification with the past, yet must be analysed critically because they are not to be merely worshipped as the past itself. Objects are vehicles through which our ancestors can be understood more deeply. Furthermore, I assume that the path backward into the past is mediated by its objects, but that they do not reveal the past in any unequivocal way, that one’s perspective, that others’ perspectives on them, play a discerning and consequential role. Critical strategic tools and procedural concepts are a necessary part of a history education, of historical understanding, in order for us to overcome the threat of being beguiled into mistaking the past’s residual objects for the past itself. Critical distance must accompany proximal attention. A genuine history education, as I am referring to it here, bears all of these hallmarks. Although I see history and heritage educations as inextricably linked and mutually dependent, following David Lowenthal,5 I understand them to be driven by fundamentally different impulses and sets of attitudes with respect to the past. If history – as in the history education to which I have alluded – is about critical analysis, synthesis, and contextualized understanding, heritage education is far less so. Heritage education, at least the way it



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Table 2.1  Attitudinal impulses and metaphors of heritage and history education. Heritage Education

History Education

Close proximal relations with the past Creation of a visceral empathy Selective omissions Zealously positive Collective memorializations Celebratory Pursues a progressive narrative Prone to nationalistic tendencies Patriotic and parochial Object worship as method Relevance through instinctive  identification

Distant relations with the past Empathy as historical contextualisation Inclusive and particularistic History, warts and all Analytically critical Skeptical Pursues both progressive and   degenerative narratives Cosmopolitan Investigation/inquiry as method Relevance via deeper, more careful accounting that fosters understanding

is practiced in the U.S.A., is about celebration, collective memorialization, allegiance to very particular storylines, reverence for the objects of the past that align with those stories, the joys of belonging to the collective, and identification with it. In the U.S.A., it is about the nation-state above all else, about creating the illusion that the nation-state can house all vernacular histories under its roof with a minimum of fuss. It is about closeness, proximity, everyday empathy with the past – not any old past, but a collective one framed around only the stories the nation (‘we’) wishes to tell about who it is (‘we are’) and seeks to become. Its agenda is nostalgically selective, positive and celebratory, and it omits by intention.6 Whereas, in a history education, history strives to be more consciously perspicacious, cosmopolitan, and less amnesia ridden. Table 2.1 attempts to lay out some of the differences that I am assuming demarcate the otherwise porous boundaries that separate these two phenomena. Having said all this, I wish to add three additional points. First, I am well aware that history and a history education, no matter how honestly they attempt to achieve their primary impulses and desires, certainly fail to live up to the promise. David Potter’s essay, from which the opening quotation was taken, is a treatise on the ways in which heritage’s frequent nationalistic impulses can blind even the most committed, careful and sceptical historical investigator.7 David Lowenthal also repeats this message.8 Second, a related point is that a history education can be easily converted to heritage education if nationalistic impulses are strong and threats to unity and sociocultural cohesion seem omnipresent within a nation-state. For this reason,

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many nations, perhaps especially the U.S.A., pass heritage education off as a history education every day.9 Finally, I am also aware that I am casting my argument in what some might construe to be a rather exaggerated, dichotomous way, with heritage practices poised on one side and a critical history education arrayed contrary to it. Nations take up the former whereas historians pursue the latter, and there is no point of intersection. I undertake this approach only to make my case more clear, to tease out differences that I think matter. However, I conclude by making a plea to consider how heritage and history intersect and depend on one another, and why it is important that they do. With these assumptions and points in mind, I devote the middle portion of the chapter to this matter of the issue of confusing the two, what I see are some of the consequences of doing so, and why trying to locate and maintain some educational boundaries between them is important.

Object Worship and Heritage Education in the U.S.A. Heritage education promotes a form of object worship. It does so perhaps unintentionally, but the effect is the same: in heritage education, objects from the past are to be touched, revered, venerated and worshipped for the ways in which they connect us here in the present with a past we yearn for nostalgically. They help us identify with our communities of interest, either local or national ones.10 Presumably they teach us how to identify ourselves, to demarcate the boundaries between us and others, however we choose to define others. This is especially important in a world whose spaces and temporal frames are foreshortened by rapid-travel possibilities and high-speed communication technologies, a new world that often exposes our sense of anomie. The heritage phenomenon depends crucially on objects from the past. A genuine history education does also, but does so in different ways. That difference and its consequences for an education is what I want to explore. I want to examine how the veneration of objects in the ubiquitous heritage accoutrement all around us influences the possibility of a genuine history education of the sort I described in the foregoing. I undertake this examination through the lens of my work over the past decade on the relation between heritage practice and history education and on the nature of epistemic beliefs and epistemic cognition in coming to make sense of the past.11 First, a bit more about heritage practice and its concern with objects as a stage-setting manoeuvre. Clearly, there are many positive outcomes associated with coming to understand and perhaps even worship objects from the past. Heritage practice does indeed cultivate a sense of identity with chosen forbearers. It brings



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the long-lost pass close to hand, close to the touch. It makes that absent past feel real. It begs a visceral reaction. It assists in helping us understand or at least provides the comforting illusion that we have now understood the people who have gone before us, those we wish to celebrate as heroes: Abraham Lincoln or William of Orange. To see and touch Lincoln’s top hat or the site of William of Orange’s assassination is almost to see, hear and touch Lincoln or William himself. For students in school, such objects and places breathe life into wistful but otherwise mundane stories. Yet, despite these potential benefits, in our work on epistemic beliefs in history, we have found that a steady diet of a heritage education breeds a deep devotion to the idea that the past and objects from the past are one and the same. This idea, it turns out, is a very problematic one for learners. But why does it have to be a difficult problem for a genuine history education to overcome? This was just the sort of research question that animated our work for more than a decade. Richard Brown – the one-time director of the Amherst History Project, a project that attempted for about fifteen years (during the 1960s and 1970s) to remake the way teachers taught history in the U.S.A., to remake it into a genuine history education – tells a story about one of the more significant hurdles the project faced.12 He notes that it was not that the teachers and students they worked with did not know something about the  past. Rather, they did not really understand what history was. He alludes to the fact that teachers, for example, had confused objects from the past with history, instead of seeing them as they were, as mute objects. Those chunks of residue held little meaning in themselves. The human mind needed to mediate them, tell stories about them, imbue them with meaning. As soon as that meaning-making process began, inquirers into the past began to do history. However, because teachers were so used to thinking that the objects of the past were history, they remained rather oblivious to the practice of meaning-making, the practice of extracting meaning from them, the human acts of putting narratives around those objects. They tended to fixate on the objects and to believe that the objects spoke the past to them in some sort of unmediated way. In short, they had never really learned to take their own meaning-making acts seriously and took the narratives for granted. The same was true for their students, and their teaching practices continually reinforced this relationship among those students. They seemed to be saying: The past’s objects speak in their own words. We must listen in order to hear them, and we must teach our students to listen, sit quietly and pay attention to their stories. In the end, the objects’ apparent meanings trumped the knower’s meaning-making efforts and spoke the past back to them, or so it seemed.13

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All this should probably come as little surprise, at least in the U.S.A. As far as I can tell, a genuine history education has never truly been a part of the educational landscape in the pre-collegiate years.14 For over a hundred years now, that terrain has been composed almost exclusively of object veneration. In a nation state comprised of many peoples, with a rich past filled with first tribes and then waves of immigrants – some voluntary and others forced – unum has appeared to be relentlessly threatened by a vast and noisy pluribus. The perceived threat has been met in schools in particular with conscious decisions to venerate objects of a particular past, the objects of heritage that emerge from the Anglo-Saxon colonizers of middle North America.15 Children learn of those objects before they ever enter school through trips to heritage theme parks, local museums, and sites of historic preservation.16 School experiences in what is rather loosely called history class in the U.S.A. reinforce the importance of those objects. The standard textbook, an object itself, is filled with stories that convey the idea that the past is but little more than a combination of objects stitched together through narrative tropes, and these tropes are somehow provided by the objects themselves.17 It is all to be memorized and repeated as a form of object worship, in an exercise that allows one to be able to claim ownership in the tribe of ‘we the people’ of the U.S.A. For the young, this is and remains the consistent selection, obtainable in the marketplace of heritage education’s concern with the objects from the past that it passes along as history itself. Read any state’s standards for studying history to see the evidence. A genuine, critical history education has been unable to find solid ground within this steady, excessive march toward object veneration. It seems barred – by the rush of the curricular pace and the sheer weight of all the objects, especially textual objects – from teaching its lessons about the importance of knowers learning to critically mediate those objects, becoming sceptical of the meanings others give them, learning to think about them in new ways, rather than merely succumbing to the power of their visceral delights, as David Lowenthal might say. Two different examples might illustrate this power and the identity capitulation it induces. Researcher and English teacher Donna LeCourt collected and carefully analysed the literacy autobiographies of 46 of her graduate and undergraduate students for her doctoral dissertation work. She later produced a book that includes a detailed accounting of her work. She observes over and over again how much the discourse of the texts (objects) her students had read (and written themselves) held power over the shaping of their identities, from the students’ early text experiences right up through their college years. At one point she remarks, ‘In all [their autobiographical] discussions … one image remains – that of taking in a text from the outside in such a way that



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it shapes thinking and perspective so that the writers of these autobiographies become part of the text. The text [as object] and the self become conflated in a single space’. Later she adds, ‘What is more surprising is the lasting effect on identity the autobiographies point to in their pasts, implying that identifications do not always function as “temporary attachments” or as fluidly as … our theories presume’.18 The second example is specific to school history in the U.S.A. Researchers Wineburg and Fournier asked groups of 10- and 12-year-old boys and girls to draw pictures of pilgrims, settlers and hippies after reading short texts about each group.19 Both boys and girls showed a marked tendency to draw images of pilgrims and settlers as males. But when imagining hippies, the boys tended to draw males, and the girls tended to draw females. The researchers suggested that drawings were influenced in the case of the hippies by the propensity children have to create images that reflect their own gender, about which there is an extensive literature documenting it. However, those long-observed results did not explain what happened when  the children drew images of settlers and pilgrims. The researchers conjectured that the ways children have read about the past in school, especially through traditional textbook accounts, shaped a view of the past that placed males in positions of accomplishment. Females receded into the background. Textbooks in the U.S.A. typically tell many stories about pilgrims and settlers, but are relatively silent about hippies. In the former two cases, characterization (understood via drawings) reflected the power of the text to shape identifications, whereas in the other case, the children’s response went beyond that shaping force in ways more consistent with research on how children are prone to draw gender-centric images when asked. The power of the past’s objects to shape identity has intensified also due to the appearance in recent years of a heritage industry. Capitalism has this apparently unstoppable capacity to commodify everything in its path. Objects from the past are no exception it turns out. They are marketed and bought and sold on any number of fronts, from the artefacts sold at U.S. National Parks to those found in historical museum gift shops. We can buy them and take them home, mount them on the plate rail in the kitchen or on the fireplace mantle. Heritage and its objects are everywhere it seems. But despite them, the past they convey remains ephemeral; the objects really have no deep, fully contextualized meaning without experiences designed to help knowers more fully understand them and their originators. Objects may be important in shaping identity allegiances, but this is more a simple presentist exercise than a historized one. Object veneration and worship is easy. A genuine, critical history education turns out to be difficult. It involves unnatural, counterintuitive

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cognitive acts, as Sam Wineburg puts it.20 It compels serious mental attention, deliberativeness, steady practice, and rigorous cognitive heavy lifting. In the U.S.A., we have chosen easy. And easy is reinforced by recurrent worries over E Pluribus Unum on the one hand, and on the other, by a marketplace designed to make easy affordable to the point of expected excess, even though that market does so, we could argue, without malice.

Epistemic Beliefs and Cognitive Impasses So again, why is the threat of easy excess a problem for a genuine history education to overcome? It boils down, our research work teaches us, to an issue of the epistemic beliefs it appears to ingrain. Objects from the past and the meaning collective memorialization gives them stand outside the learner. They are a gateway to the past but only a gateway. To understand them requires this mental heavy lifting. History education researchers often think of that space as involving deliberate acts of historical contextualization, of understanding the past on its own terms, of understanding how our ancestors thought.21 In order to learn to contextualize the past in the sense that, say, Collingwood describes it (i.e., to understand how our ancestors thought), students of the past must learn how. Doing so goes far beyond visceral and routine everyday empathy, the sort that students in the U.S.A. learn in their experiences with heritage objects.22 Learning to contextualize the past may well be one of the most difficult of cognitive tasks.23 Yet it might also be at the heart of a genuine history education. But object veneration and the threat of its excesses can be a significant impediment to history education’s success. Here is one set of reasons why. Heritage education and the memorialist veneration it places on objects teaches powerful lessons about how knowers are to position themselves, not only with respect to the past, but also with regard to their epistemic relation to it. Knowers in heritage education are repeatedly taught to look at objects as both history and the past, to trust that those objects speak the past without complaint. The epistemic lesson is that the knower, the learner, and her cognition are unnecessary. Doing history is unnecessary. All that is required is to look to the objects. Under this programme, the knower is reduced to a passive witness.24 However, to understand the past, to contextualize it as Collingwood suggests, requires the capacity to think critically about that past, to take measure of the objects and to actively (re)mediate their meaning.25 Doing so is difficult work. It requires procedural knowledge and a set of cognitive strategies (the stuff of a genuine history education), the least of which involves some



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very specific forms of intimate reading. In short, historical consciousness demands a very active and involved knower, not the passive recipient that heritage education and its threat of object-worship excess cultivates. Objects from the past can speak in multiple ways about that past. Many of these ways of speaking appear in troubling conflict with one another. For instance, no fewer than six (and possibly more) high-profile, but different explanations about what caused the Great Depression have emerged from the work on object residue by historical investigators. Why so many about a singular event? Because the objects from the past (accounts, graphs of change in supply and demand, material artefacts such as pictures of bread lines) must be sifted and converted into evidence that can be used to make claims about what caused the Great Depression and why. And the evidence obtained from those objects does not speak univocally. It turns out to be impossible to force them. Investigators imbue them with meaning differently. History, as distinct from the past, is the business of an active, engaged knower thinking hard about what the past’s objects mean, using a set of learned, but frequently counterintuitive strategies, special tools, and judgment criteria to discipline her mind into a deeper understanding. If she has been taught (even unintentionally) to distrust her active sense-making capabilities, to instead trust the objects to speak clearly and simply, history becomes impossible.26 Understanding suffers. Our decade-long research programme invited large numbers of (heritage-­ by-default) history teachers in the U.S.A. to participate in the task of reading and studying sets of conflicting objects (e.g., textual accounts, paintings and engravings) surrounding particular events.27 They struggled, over and over again, to surmount the challenge of knowing what to make of those objects when they were arrayed together side by side. Simultaneously, we gathered data about the nature of those teachers’ epistemic beliefs: where they thought historical knowledge came from and how it was warranted. The more epistemically confused and inconsistent the beliefs, the more teachers struggled with the task.28 We puzzled for a long time as we tried to make sense of what these forms of correlative data were saying to us. Our bottom-up theory suggests that these adults – some of them pedagogical experts – expected the objects to tell them a singular story, to speak clearly in ways that would let them produce a definitive explanation of the event in question, one they could teach their students. When the objects failed them, they also failed, often telling us that they could not arrive at any conclusion because the task was too difficult, the past and its residual objects defied them. At this precise point, they could not do history. History could not begin, because they were not equipped with the tools necessary to proceed any further.

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Poignant Outcomes What made this outcome so poignant for us was the realization that if history was not possible for these expert pedagogues, how could it become possible for their students? You cannot teach what you do not know yourself. These adults, who were also recipients of the U.S. version of a continuous heritage education had never learned to coordinate the role of knower with what could be known about the past. The excesses of heritage education had trumped the possibilities of a genuine history education for them, and they were very likely destining their students to the same result. What was even more agonizing was that we were conducting this research as independent evaluators, charged with assessing the success of various programmes designed precisely to help those teachers better coordinate their epistemic beliefs. We would assess the teachers’ beliefs going into the programme and again at its conclusion. We witnessed almost no change. The teachers tended to begin and end in related places, in various degrees of epistemic inconsistency, without the capability to satisfactorily coordinate beliefs about how much to trust objects versus how much to trust their own interpretive power over those objects as engaged knowers and meaning makers. When we had opportunities to talk about these issues with some of them, they registered no small amount of cognitive frustration. Much of it went like this: ‘This is really new and interesting, to wrestle with the past this way. But it seems so impossible, so hopeless because it’s so difficult to make sense of it. There’s got to be a truth in there somewhere. If only we could find that definitive object (an account) from the past to set the record straight’.29 These teachers were saying the same thing that other history teachers had been saying to Richard Brown and his colleagues almost fifty years before. Half a century of attempts to arrive at a genuine history education had produced little change. The constant through it all was the presence of a pre-eminent heritage education, an attempt by the nation state – coupled more recently with its free-market partners – to define the terms of allegiance to it through worship of its venerated objects. To look at state standards for learning in 2010 was to see the same object menu that existed in 1960 in the U.S.A. The textbook story (as a principal schoolhouse object and learning tool), although expanded and fiddled with at the borders and margins, remained the same unalloyed story of a great nation rising progressively from its humble but heroic beginnings to its zenith as the world’s political, economic and military leader. Ironies, conflicts and degenerations were disguised as lessons of greatness, as object lessons in overcoming limitations.30 Teachers who had been taught as students to trust and revere the objects from the past through heritage education excesses, to come to think of the



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past as a catechism to be memorized, were busy teaching their own students to do the same. Even the work of assiduous professional developers who wanted them to learn what history was and how it was done seemed virtually powerless in undoing the solid hold a heritage education had on those teachers and on their epistemic beliefs. Repeatedly learning to (over)trust that objects from the past will tell you what that past means had produced knowers who were unable or reluctant to do the hard work of making more critical sense of those objects. The teachers often held so firmly to their inconsistent beliefs that countering them was rarely successful, an ironic result in that the teachers reported their beliefs to be unsatisfying. On some occasions, we witnessed and gathered data on a few teachers who registered what seemed like bright-light epistemic moments. But even those presented troubling outcomes. These teachers would arrive at a much more conscious conclusion that the objects indeed did not convey the past unequivocally, that others were quietly busy imbuing them with meaning in heritage rich environments, and that those meanings served presentist, patriotic, parochial or primarily self-serving ends. They would announce that it was the more expert knower, the critical historical investigator, who needed to do the work. But still, without adequate, learned tools to do that work, the teachers would then swing rather rapidly to an opposite pole (from naïve objectivism to naïve relativism), suggesting that, since the past must be interpreted, the investigator or consumer possessed every right to put his or her particular spin on things in whatever way he or she wished. They moved from having a subliminal overtrust in objects to tell us the truth about the past to being a consciously overactive knower, conjuring up tales that tended to be impervious to the evidence extractable from the objects, all in one swift flip. And off they would go thinking that history was the result of a bit of reading the objects from the past followed by some mere opinion formation –an ‘anything goes’ carnival. Sometimes we would hear them talk to their students that way.

Epistemic Consistency The goal of these programmes we studied, at least by design, was to help teachers arrive at a level of coordination of beliefs, a type of epistemic consistency. Rather than overtrusting the objects from the past, present all around them through heritage phenomena, or engaging a wildly overactive knower who took unacceptable interpretive license, programme developers sought to equip the teachers with a toolkit that would allow them to reason carefully from evidence, to build defensible claims even in the presence of often conflicting objects. We called such an epistemic stance criterialism, for its

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reliance on disciplinary tools and conceptual understandings that animate the work of those who have successfully obtained a genuine history education and operate from more consistent, stabilized, coordinated beliefs.31 Movement to a stabilized criterialist position involved no small feat of educational re-engineering and was mostly unsuccessful. As teachers graduated from the programmes, the data we collected on six different programme iterations, involving more than 750 history teachers, showed that, with a handful of exceptions, they departed with as unstable a set of epistemic beliefs as they had held when they entered. Many teachers left muttering like the Norwegian delegate to a symposium on history teaching in Europe in 1995, reported on by David Lowenthal. That delegate ‘insisted [that] there must be some data bank of fixed historical truths on which we could all entirely rely’, so as to stabilize our epistemic belief systems and calm our worries about reading the past’s objects wrongly.32 Such a data bank of trusted object(ive) meanings would presumably then make teaching the past so much easier. Thinly buried in this request is the desire for a past whose venerated heritage objects reveal that past fully and without equivocation. No such objects exist because they all require a knower to grant them meaning (and meaning making is tricky when the objects’ meanings often reside in conflict with one another on closer inspection). The knower’s epistemic obligation in doing so is to understand them within historical context, while refraining from giving herself excessive interpretive license over them – again, distance accompanying proximal attention. It seems to me that a heritage education traffics in both: offering the illusion that objects can speak the past clearly (in present, visceral and unmediated ways) while subtly encouraging a form of excessive interpretive privilege. It is probably what makes it so compelling and its invitation so difficult to resist. Heritage, at least as it is practiced in the U.S.A., often suggests that we can have it both ways. But this is hardly a recipe for epistemic consistency and impasses to deeper understanding lurk at every turn because of it.

Concluding Thoughts Heritage and history inextricably depend on one another. Doing history requires the careful study of the past’s residual objects; without those objects, there is no history, only inchoate memory. On the other hand, heritage object celebration and self-identification with them requires the gift of careful historical interpretation that it obtains from history. Yet, a deep understanding of the past and ourselves as private and world citizens depends also on how they balance each other. Heritage’s principal flaw is that it is prone to celebratory excess without historical consciousness.



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History’s flaw is that, in its pursuit of distance and careful, critical analysis, it renders itself inaccessible and/or irrelevant. Heritage’s chief accomplishment is that it helps us imagine that we can anchor our identities, and it makes us feel good about ourselves in the simplest and most ebullient ways. History’s chief accomplishment is that it helps us deepen our understanding of ourselves and others in complex but not always pleasant forms (as Michael Kammen might say, warts and all). From where I sit in the U.S.A., knowers young and older receive almost solely a heritage education. Americans are astonishingly ignorant of history.33 We practice forms of amnesia that can be breathtaking. Americans are chronically imbalanced epistemically. This is in no small measure a consequence of the rich regimen we consume of the products of the heritage phenomenon. As near as I can tell, the only known present antidote to the excesses of and imbalances that follow from a heritage education is a genuine, critical history education, the one epitomized (but far from perfectly) by the practices of expert historians. In concluding, I make a plea that the two – history and heritage educations – come to exist in partnership and in intellectual harmony with each other as much as is possible. Currently the only place for most knowers to receive a genuine history education is in school. But the heritage programme of the nation state coupled with the for-profit heritage industry begins its work on the young and naïve well before that history education can typically begin. And, if our empirical data is any indication, it achieves considerable success to the point where it is very difficult to find a genuine history education unless one goes to graduate school, so thoroughly do the celebratory sensations of heritage practices (both in school and out) trump the tough mental work of history education. To arrest this process will require very skilful, knowledgeable history teachers who work from stabilized, criterialist epistemic positions which they can teach their students. It will require a much earlier effort to balance out the excesses of heritage with that of a genuine history education. It will require very conscious efforts to distinguish the heritage phenomenon and its goals from a critical history education and its goals (see Table 2.1). And it may well require the nation state to give up its politically inspired penchant for insisting that students receive only more of the feel-good illusions and identity allegiances that heritage practices typically induce. All of this is a tall order, one not easily accomplished. Two great powers are arrayed against it: nationalism, on the one hand, and capitalism, with its relentless press to commodify the past, on the other. However, I believe that the next generation and the ones that follow it deserve (need? desire?) a genuine, critical history education. Otherwise we pay the price of inordinately high consequences, such as growing and untenable gaps between rich

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and poor, polarizing provincial strife that results in inaction in the face of crucial problems, increasing intolerance, racism and alienation, and the slow destruction of meaningful democratic habits. With these concerns in mind, I am hoping that the Dutch programme of heritage education, as well as the programmes of others, bring to bear an equally powerful history education alongside those heritage practices and thereby become exemplars for others to emulate.

Notes 1. J.V. Wertsch and K. O’Connor, ‘Multi-voicedness in Historical Representation: American College Students’ Accounts of the Origins of the U.S.’, Journal of Narrative and Life History 4 (1991): 295–310; and M. Kammen, ‘History is Our Heritage: The Past in Contemporary American Culture’, in Historical Literacy: The Case for History in American Education, ed. P. Gagnon, Boston, 1989, 138–156. 2.  R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, Oxford, 1946/1993; P. Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession, Cambridge, 1988; N. Zemon Davis, ‘On the Lame’, American Historical Review 93 (1988): 572–603; P. Lee, ‘Putting Principles Into Practice: Understanding History’, in How Students Learn: History in the Classroom, eds M.S. Donnovan and J. Bransford, Washington, 2005, 31–78; R. Brown, ‘History as Discovery: An Interim Report on the Amherst Project’, in Teaching the New Social Studies: An Inductive Approach, ed. E. Fenton, New York, 1966, 443–451, and ‘Learning How to Learn: The Amherst Project and History in the Schools’, The Social Studies 87 (1996): 267–273. My argument in what follows shares common ground with Michael Merry’s position. See his ‘Patriotism, History and the Legitimate Aims of American Education’, Educational Philosophy and Theory 41 (2009): 378–398, in particular page 394. 3. M. Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture, New York, 1991; J. Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century, Princeton, 1992; D. Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History, Cambridge, 1998. 4.  I also use stories and texts in the broadest way possible here, to include the story that a pottery shard or a painting or an ancient sewing needle might tell us, what we might read into them, in addition to texts delivered, say, in schoolbook form. 5.  See Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade. 6. Michael Olneck notes how textbook authors frequently cast officialized American memories as ones in which controversial and seemingly divisive historical figures – Malcolm X would be a good example – serve as ‘contributors’ to solving American problems. Specific divisive acts and controversial remarks are omitted in service of this ‘contribution’. This allows writers to protect the celebration-inspired arc and thematic structure (e.g., relentless progress) of a particular collective memory they wish to revere. The textbook as object carries this memory. See M. Olneck, ‘Americanization and the Education of Immigrants, 1900–1925’, American Journal of Education 92 (1989): 398–423. 7.  See Potter, ‘The Historians’s Use’. By historical investigators here I am referring not only to historians, as David Potter was, but also to more novice-like investigators who can be taught early on the cultural and disciplined ways of thinking and understanding that expert historians possess and pursue if they are provided with the sort of genuine, critical history education I have described.



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8. Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade, especially Chapter 5. 9. See Bruce VanSledright, ‘Narratives of Nation-State, Historical Knowledge, and School History Education’, Review of Research in Education 42 (2008): 109–146. For another, somewhat different treatment of this issue together with the role global capitalism plays in it, see Kai Nelson, ‘Toward a Liberal Socialist Cosmopolitan Nationalism’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies 11 (2003): 437–463. 10. Kammen, Mystic Chords; Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade; and Potter, ‘The Historian’s Use’. 11. L. Maggioni, B. VanSledright and P. Alexander, ‘Walking on the Borders: A Measure of Epistemic Cognition in History’, Journal of Experimental Education 77 (2009): 187– 213; L. Maggioni, P. Alexander and B. VanSledright, ‘At the Crossroads: The Development of Epistemological Beliefs and Historical Thinking’, European Journal of School Psychology 2 (2004): 169–197; B. VanSledright and K. Reddy, ‘Changing Epistemic Beliefs? An Exploratory Study of Cognition Among Prospective History Teachers’, Revista Tempo e Argumento 6 (2014): 28–68; B. VanSledright, The Challenge of Rethinking History Education: On Practices, Theories, and Policy, New York, 2011, Chapters 2 and 4 especially; and B. VanSledright, In Search of America’s Past: Learning to Read History in Elementary School, New York, 2002. 12.  Brown, ‘Learning How to Learn’. 13.  For more on the idea of textual objects creating a ‘reality effect’ through their ‘referential illusion’, see, for example, R. Barthes, ‘The Reality Effect’, in French Literary Theory Today, ed. T. Todorov, Cambridge, 1968, 11–17. 14.  We might even argue that college graduates rarely receive a serious history education. 15.  For examples, see VanSledright, ‘Narratives of Nation-State’. 16.  See the many examples in Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade. 17.  R. Paxton, ‘A Deafening Silence: History Textbooks and the Students Who Read Them’, Review of Educational Research 69 (1999): 315–339. 18.  D. LeCourt, Identity Matters: Schooling the Student Body in Academic Discourse, Albany, 2004, 66 and 69. 19. J. Fournier and S. Wineburg, ‘Picturing the Past: Gender Differences in the Depiction of Historical Figures’, American Journal of Education 105 (1997): 160–185. 20. S. Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past, Philadelphia, 2001. 21.  See Collingwood, The Idea of History. 22. See, for example, R. Ashby and P. Lee, ‘Children’s Concepts of Empathy and Understanding in History’, in The History Curriculum for Teachers, ed. C. Portal, London, 1987, 62–88; and D. Shemilt, ‘Beauty and the Philosopher: Empathy in History and Classroom’, in Learning History, eds A. Dickinson, P. Lee and P. Rogers, London, 1984, 39–84. 23. For treatments of the issue of contextualization, see, for example, A. Reisman, ‘Reading Like a Historian: A Document-Based Curriculum Intervention in Urban High Schools’, Journal of Curriculum Studies 30 (2012): 86–122; P. Seixas, ‘Conceptualizing the Growth of Historical Understanding’, in The Handbook of Education and Human Development: New Models of Learning, Teaching, and Schooling, eds D. Olsen and N. Torrance, Oxford, 1996, 765–784; and VanSledright, The Challenge of Rethinking History Education, Chapters 3 and 4. 24.  See L. Maggioni, ‘Studying Epistemic Cognition in the History Classroom: Cases of Teaching and Learning to Think Historically’ (PhD dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park, 2010). 25. Collingwood, The Idea of History. 26.  See, for example, Lee, ‘Putting Principles Into Practice’. 27. See B. VanSledright, K. Meuwissen and T. Kelly, ‘Oh, the Trouble We’ve Seen: Researching Historical Thinking and Understanding’, in Research Methods in Social Studies  Education: Contemporary Issues and Perspectives, ed. K. Barton, Greenwich, 2006,

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207–233; B. VanSledright, L. Maggioni and K. Reddy, ‘Promises and Perils in Attempting to Change History Teachers’ Practices: Results From an 18-Month Teaching American History Grant Intervention’, paper presented at the American Educational Research Association Conference, Vancouver, BC, April 2012; B. VanSledright and L. Maggioni, ‘Preparing Teachers to Teach Historical Thinking? An Interplay Between Professional Development Programs and SchoolSystem Cultures’, in The Handbook of Research on Professional Development for Quality Teaching and Learning, eds, T. Petty, A. Good, and S. M. Putman, IGA Global, Hershey, PA, 2016, 255–282; and B. VanSledright, P. Alexander, L. Maggioni, T. Kelly and K. Meuwissen, ‘Examining Shifts in Teachers’ Epistemologies in the Domain of History’, paper presented at the American Educational Research Association Conference, San Diego, CA, April 2004. 28.  For more on this line of research, as well as other studies that indicate similar results, see B. VanSledright and L. Maggioni, ‘Epistemic Cognition in History’, in The Handbook of Epistemic Cognition, eds J. Greene, W. Sandoval and I. Braten, Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2016, 128–146. 29. Ibid. 30.  For a cogent treatment of how this works, see Olneck, ‘Americanization and the Education of Immigrants’. 31.  Maggioni, et al., ‘Walking on the Borders’; VanSledright and Maggioni, ‘Epistemic Cognition in History’. 32. Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade, 112. 33.  See Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory.

References Ashby, R. and P. Lee. ‘Children’s Concepts of Empathy and Understanding in History’, in The History Curriculum for Teachers, ed. C. Portal, London, 1987, 62–88. Barthes, R. ‘The Reality Effect’, in French Literary Theory Today, ed. T. Todorov, Cambridge, 1968, 11–17. Bodnar, J. Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century, Princeton, 1992. Brown, R.H. ‘History as Discovery: An Interim Report on the Amherst Project’, in Teaching the New Social Studies: An Inductive Approach, ed. E. Fenton, New York, 1966, 443–451. ———. ‘Learning How to Learn: The Amherst Project and History in the Schools’, The Social Studies 87 (1996): 267–273. Collingwood, R.G. The Idea of History, Oxford, 1946/1993. Davis, N.Z. ‘On the Lame’, American Historical Review 93 (1988): 572–603. Fournier, S. and S. Wineburg, ‘Picturing the Past: Gender Differences in the Depiction of Historical Figures’, in American Journal of Education 105 (1997) 160–185. Kammen, M.K. ‘History is Our Heritage: The Past in Contemporary American Culture’, in Historical Literacy: The Case for History in American Education, ed. P. Gagnon, Boston, 1989, 138–156. ———. Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture, New York, 1991. LeCourt, D. Identity Matters: Schooling the Student Body in Academic Discourse, Albany, 2004. Lee, P. ‘Putting Principles Into Practice: Understanding History’, in How Students Learn: History in the Classroom, eds M.S. Donnovan and J. Bransford, Washington, 2005, 31–78. Lowenthal, D. The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History, Cambridge, 1998.



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Maggioni, L. ‘Studying Epistemic Cognition in the History Classroom: Cases of Teaching and Learning to Think Historically’ (PhD dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park, 2010). ———, P. Alexander and B. VanSledright. ‘At the Crossroads: The Development of Epistemological Beliefs and Historical Thinking’, European Journal of School Psychology 2 (2004): 169–197. ———, B. VanSledright and P. Alexander. ‘Walking on the Borders: A Measure of Epistemic Cognition in History’, Journal of Experimental Education 77 (2009): 187–213.Merry, M. ‘Patriotism, History and the Legitimate Aims of American Education’, Educational Philosophy and Theory 41 (2009): 378–398. Nelson, K. ‘Toward a Liberal Socialist Cosmopolitan Nationalism’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies 11 (2003): 437–463. Novick, P. That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession, Cambridge, 1988. Olneck, M. ‘Americanization and the Education of Immigrants, 1900–1925’, American Journal of Education 92 (1989): 398–423. Paxton, R. ‘A Deafening Silence: History Textbooks and the Students Who Read Them’, Review of Educational Research 69 (1999): 315–339. Potter, D. ‘The Historian’s Use of Nationalism and Vice Versa’, American Historical Review 67 (1962): 924–950. Reisman, A. ‘Reading Like a Historian: A Document-Based Curriculum Intervention in Urban High Schools’, Journal of Curriculum Studies 30 (2012): 86–122. Seixas, P. ‘Conceptualizing the Growth of Historical Understanding’, in The Handbook of Education and Human Development: New Models of Learning, Teaching, and Schooling, eds D. Olsen and N. Torrance, Oxford, 1996, 765–784. Shemilt, D. ‘Beauty and the Philosopher: Empathy in History and Classroom’, in Learning History, eds A. Dickinson, P. Lee and P. Rogers, London, 1984, 39–84. VanSledright, B. In Search of America’s Past: Learning to Read History in Elementary School, New York, 2002. ———. ‘Narratives of Nation-State, Historical Knowledge, and School History Education’, Review of Research in Education 42 (2008): 109–146. ———. The Challenge of Rethinking History Education: On Practices, Theories, and Policy, New York, 2011. ———, P. Alexander, L. Maggioni, T. Kelly and K. Meuwissen. ‘Examining Shifts in Teachers’ Epistemologies in the Domain of History’, paper presented at the American Educational Research Association Conference, San Diego, CA, April 2004. ——— and L. Maggioni. ‘Epistemic Cognition in History’, in The Handbook of Epistemic Cognition, eds. J. Greene, W. Sandoval and I. Braten, New York, 2016, 128–146. ——— and L. Maggioni. ‘Preparing Teachers to Teach Historical Thinking? An Interplay Between Professional Development Programs and School-System Cultures’, in The Handbook of Research on Professional Development for Quality Teaching and Learning, eds T. Petty, A. Good, M. and S.M. Putman, IGI Global, Hershey, PA, 2016, 255–282. ———, L. Maggioni and K. Reddy. ‘Promises and Perils in Attempting to Change History Teachers’ Practices: Results From an 18-Month Teaching American History Grant Intervention’, paper presented at the American Educational Research Association Conference, Vancouver, BC, April 2012. ———, K. Meuwissen and T. Kelly. ‘Oh, the Trouble We’ve Seen: Researching Historical Thinking and Understanding’, in Research Methods in Social Studies Education: Contemporary Issues and Perspectives, ed. K. Barton, Greenwich, 2006, 207–233. ——— and K. Reddy. ‘Changing Epistemic Beliefs? An Exploratory Study of Cognition Among Prospective History Teachers’, Revista Tempo e Argumento 6 (2014): 28–68.

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Wertsch, J.V. and K. O’Connor. ‘Multi-voicedness in Historical Representation: American College Students’ Accounts of the Origins of the U.S.’, Journal of Narrative and Life History 4 (1991): 295–310. Wineburg, S. Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past, Philadelphia, 2001.

Bruce VanSledright is professor at the Department of Reading and Elementary Education, University of North Carolina at Charlotte (U.S.). He researches the teaching and learning of history among children, adolescents, and adults in the United States. He is particularly interested in how policymakers make decisions to frame the official history curriculum and design tests of learners’ knowledge of it. Most recently he has concerned himself with the influence of those decisions on learners’ epistemic beliefs, co-authoring a review chapter in the inaugural edition of the Handbook of Epistemic Cognition.

CHAPTER

3

Antiquarianism and Historical Consciousness in the New Media Age Chiel van den Akker

The present takes its form from the future, and, by the time it has that form, it is past. —Arthur Danto, Narration and Knowledge The German media theorist Wolfgang Ernst, who is trained as an historian and classicist, pleads for a data-oriented sense of the past, in which artefacts from different times and places exist side by side in the eyes of the viewer, in an order of co-presence. Additionally, he argues that the task of the museum is to teach its visitors how to cope with information. The display of objects ‘should no longer be subjected to the paradigm of historical narrative’.1 One consequence is that the special relation between collecting, historical ­consciousness and narrative, which defined the museum for the last two centuries, no longer holds. In this chapter, I will evaluate this claim, which has been argued for by others too. To assess its plausibility, I will distinguish between the antiquarian and the romantic sense of the past. The latter is associated with a feeling of loss, historical consciousness, the historical sublime and narrative interpretation. The former, by contrast, is associated with data, the order of co-presence, curiosity and detailed description. I will argue that the data-oriented sense of the past reveals an antiquarian outlook on the museum and our relation with the past, which is at odds with the romantic sense of the past. I conclude with some general observations on what this means for teachers and curators. Notes for this section begin on page 69.

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The Future Orientation of Historical Consciousness The American philosopher Arthur Danto defines historical consciousness as the awareness of living through events that are known to be part of a story which later will be told.2 This definition takes the future prospect of telling afterwards what the present has been as essential to historical consciousness. Historical consciousness therefore, surprisingly perhaps, is future orientated. What we live through now only becomes history in the future, when our present has become past and we look back on what has been and is no longer. This is as true of our personal history as it is of the history of the social order to which we belong. In retrospect we select and emphasize certain actions and events, relating them in many ways, thus narrating what was significant from our point of view. When pondering past lives, we should be aware that the lives we study only became history in the future of those lives. Our retrospective view does not cancel out the prospective view we and others once had. To be sure, there are important differences between understanding one’s own life and that of others. One such is that the story I can tell about my life will never contain its ending and afterlife, if there is any, whereas past lives can truly be viewed in retrospect, including their possible afterlife. The structure of historical consciousness in Danto’s definition is a narrative structure.3 The narrative, as Danto’s fellow narrativist philosopher of history Louis Mink puts it, is a cognitive instrument that is to be distinguished from theory. With a narrative we make the flux of experience intelligible, aligning and re-aligning the succession of events in such a way that the ensemble of interrelationships constitutes a single comprehensive whole. Mink formulates the distinction between narrative understanding and theoretical understanding as follows: On the one hand, there are all the occurrences of the world – at least all that we may directly experience or inferentially know about – in their concrete particularity. On the other is an ideally theoretical understanding of those occurrences that would treat each as nothing other than a replicable instance of a systematically interconnected set of generalizations. But between these extremes, narrative is the form in which we make comprehensible the many successive interrelationships that are comprised by a career.

A career of a person or object is the ensemble of social relations in which that person participated, voluntarily or not, during its existence. It is not only persons that have a career; material objects too can be said to have a career, even if that history is what people have done with or because of it. A particular watch, for example, may be ‘produced, shipped, stored, displayed, purchased, used; it may be given and received, lost and found, pawned and



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redeemed, admired and cursed, responsible for a timely arrival or missed appointment’.4 The career of an object, its biography, is something we ‘attach’ to the object in retrospect. Or more precisely, it is in virtue of a historical narrative that such a career comes into view in the first place. This is obviously true not only of objects. Life itself has the form of a narrative only if it is the subject of a story we tell ourselves about it later. Our memories of what has been require a narrative structure if they are to be part of our selves. There is no such thing as ‘history-as-it-was-lived’, the untold story which historians need to uncover and retell.5 What we live through now only becomes history in future retrospection, when we or someone else retroactively aligns events using a narrative structure.

Historical Consciousness and a Sense of Loss We may also think of the future orientation of historical consciousness in another sense. In the first sense as stated above, we look differently on our present in the future. In the second sense it is our responsibility to collect and preserve both the material (tangible) and immaterial (intangible) remains from the past for future generations. These two senses are closely related and the first sense explains the second, for we have such responsibility precisely because we do not know the contents of future retrospection and want to provide future generations with the ingredients to allow such retrospection. In both these senses, the historical past is not to be identified with all that existed prior to the present. The past is historical insofar we care about it. And we do not care about it because it is distant, separate and different from our present, although the past is all these things: we care about the past because it is lost, or in danger of being lost and forgotten. The historical past is all what has been and is no longer, and by extension, all what we have been and are no longer. These related terms (in italics), thoroughly discussed by several authors, make up the concept of historical consciousness. Historians have shown that this specific reflective understanding of the past with its future orientation, after slumbering for several decades, surfaces in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Romantic movement, when songs suddenly whispered the voices of a distant past, fairy tales and legends were being collected, and decaying structures turned out to be evocative ruins. Man and the world he inherited were historicized. Historical consciousness awakened, literally, in the sense of being a central term of the vocabulary to describe the newly gained consciousness. This crucial and formative episode is well documented and studied and there is no need to rehearse that here.6 Instead I will emphasize the relevance of the sense of loss of the past in relation

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to the notion of historical consciousness, for that contrasts with, as we will see, our current media age, in which sites and artefacts from different times and places exist side by side, simultaneously, in an order of co-presence. The historian Susan Crane, focusing on early nineteenth-century Germany, introduces the topic of historical awakening with the help of Karl Blechen’s (1798–1840) painting Gotische Kirchenruine [Gothic Church in Ruins] of 1826. The painting does not depict the romantic wanderer, as is sometimes thought; Crane sees in it an icon of the early nineteenth century’s preservation efforts. Preservationist rhetoric of this era often addressed a figurative sleeper who represented the dormant force of local collectors waiting to be wakened into awareness of the need for historical collection. Asleep in the midst of his own treasure, somnolently unaware of its value, Blechen’s sleeping man can only dream of history.7

Crane makes a distinction between the experience of the historical sublime by early nineteenth-century collectors and their desire to communicate and share this deeply personal experience. The experience of the historical sublime was the shock and awe one felt whilst roaming a ruin, visiting an old building, pondering a work of art, or holding an ancient document. These material objects and sites brought about a revelation of a distant, separate and different past: a past that had been and was no longer. And it was these revelations that turned out to be so overwhelming. Even though such experiences are impossible to preserve and replicate, collecting objects and locally preserving historic sites would make it possible for many to appreciate historical revelations.8 Individual emotional responses to sites and artefacts thus led to a sharing of historical awareness that, in the words of Crane, ‘compensated for the sense of loss of the past’.9 History was communicated and shared through museums and historical sites open to the public; historical associations disseminated manuscripts, drawings and journals; and history became an academic discipline. This sharing of history was, so Crane emphasizes, aimed at sharing historical revelations rather than at instructing about  (German) history.10 It was a means to come to terms with the past one had lost. This sense of loss of the past holds the individual experience of the historical sublime and the shared historical awareness together. The artefact or ruin provoking the experience of the historical sublime is not the object of that experience; rather, the object is the revelation of the past that has been and is no longer brought about by the artefact or ruin. For it is this historical revelation that causes the feeling of shock and awe. Without the sense of a past one has lost, the individual subjective experience of the sublime – the feeling of shock and awe – is impossible. All of this helps us understand why Frank Ankersmit’s description of the historical sublime in terms of derealization and dissociation is so appropriate.11 We can put it as follows. This world, that is, the world in which the artefact or ruin is encountered, is not



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the world to which the artefact or ruin belongs; the world the artefact or ruin belongs to is gone and hence no longer real. The revelation of the past that has been and is no longer brought about by the artefact or ruin thus gives a feeling of dissociation or de-realization from the present in which the artefact or ruin is encountered. At the moment of de-realization, the revelation of the past (meaning) becomes an (individual) experience (feeling) of shock and awe. We may further add that this way the historical sublime itself can be historicized and understood in relation to the social change it exemplifies. This is not to say that the experience of the historical sublime was only possible during Romanticism; it is to say that such experience is only possible when there is a sense of loss of the past.

Co-presence and the Impulse of Curiosity I wonder if we take a leap from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, simply passing over what possibly happened in between, and leave the age of Romanticism to enter the age of new media, is this special relation between a sense of loss, historical consciousness, collecting, the sharing of history through museums and historical sites, and historical narrative still intact? Not if we are to believe the media theorist Ernst. He argues for a data-oriented sense of the past and agrees with those theorists who claim that in the age of new media, the database takes the place of the narrative.12 As we will see, such dataoriented sense of the past reveals an antiquarian outlook on the museum and our relation with the past, which is at odds with the romantic sense of the past. It is irrefutable that the use of information technology in and by museums provides new ways of accessing and relating to the past. New media allows and demands a more interactive, participatory and personalized engagement with sites and artefacts. But it is equally true that it can be used to strengthen rather than to weaken already existing modes of presenting history and heritage. To answer the question how information technology affects our understanding of and relation to the past, I will contrast the antiquarian with the romantic sense of the past, and make this contrast as stark as possible.13 In an essay on the museum in the age of new media, Ernst states that: The museum should no longer be subjected to the paradigm of historical narrative, displaying instead its proper, archaeological, discontinuous, and modular mode of assembling words and objects. The task of the postmodern museum is to teach the user how to cope with information. This recalls the very origin of the museum as inventory of the world in combination with the notion of a universal library, a text-related space where semiotics inventorying operations made the world readable.14

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According to Ernst, the museum should operate as a database: as a series of discrete items that can be (re)arranged, retrieved, browsed, combined, enriched, sampled and manipulated. Such a museum is an inventory of the world, which is made accessible by means of registers and indexes.15 This view stands in stark contrast to the romantic view on the museum which we met above and which emphasizes how past remains bring about an historical revelation of a past that is lost, and require historical consciousness to be understood in a certain way. However, the view does help us understand why teaching how to cope with information is the task of the museum in the age of new media, rather than teaching how to cope with a past that is no longer, which was the goal of preserving from the nineteenth century onwards. If we would limit our understanding of the effects of information technology on the museum to the question of what happens to the narrative, its dismissal would hardly make any sense. After all, there is ample evidence for digital storytelling and we have no reason to doubt that stories help us to interpret and value objects. Several onsite and online museum initiatives and research projects have demonstrated that. Such projects do not study sets of data with the aim of finding patterns in it, as many digital humanities pro­ jects do. Rather, they start with the study of cases, with people, objects and events, and end with their narrative interpretation. This approach is typical of cultural heritage institutions that aim to provide and improve the access to their collections.16 The narrative cannot be dismissed so easily and there is no a priori reason to associate new media with counting (zählen) rather than with recounting (erzählen), as Ernst suggests.17 The binary system is as much a numeral system as it is a notational system, a system of signals as much as a system of signs, and a system to calculate as much as a system to symbolize. However, the dismissal of narrative is plausible if we understand it from the perspective of antiquarianism. Ernst rejects the narrative after associating it with a sequence of chronologically ordered objects. Thus he situates himself in the antiquarian tradition,18 for the antiquarian aims to study the past systematically rather than chronologically, bringing out its minute details instead of arriving at some panoramic narrative interpretation of it. (Philosophers of history will quickly point out that narratives require us to understand the ensemble of interrelations between events rather than their chronological sequence. However, this does not alter the fact that all historical narratives present a chronological succession of events in time, even if the meaning of those events depends on their relation with other events rather than on their position in some chronological sequence.) The antiquarian registers, arranges, classifies and describes, following the scientific methods and standards of observation of his time. He loves the unusual, the obscure and the disparate, the minute details of the past, and follows his own instincts and interests, because for him, learning is an end in



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itself. This enables us to understand why Ernst’s data-oriented sense of the past entails a return to the impulse of curiosity. He writes: The digital wonderland signals the return of a temps perdu in which thinking with one’s eye (the impulse of curiositas) was not yet despised in favor of cognitive operations. Curiosity cabinets in the media age, stuffed with texts, images, icons, programs, and miracles of the world, are waiting to be explored (but not necessarily explained).19

In a digital culture, the objects and testimonies of the past, Ernst argues, once chronologically separated and linearly ordered, are linked by digital combinations in an order of co-presence (Gleichzeitigkeit).20 According to this order, everything exists in in an eternal present tense, because everything exists side by side in the eyes of the viewer, as Ann Rigney puts it.21 Rather than the historical sublime, it thus appears that in the age of new media, we are primarily driven by the impulse of curiosity. This ends the museum’s two centuries old alliance with historicism.22 Rooted in German Romanticism, historicists believe that true historical knowledge is only acquired through the retroactive alignments of events, from which developments over time can be abstracted, which in turn are to be represented in a narrative. Therefore, curiosity is a way around historicism.23 Pushing the distinction between the antiquarian and romantic sense of the past to its limits, we may argue that on the level of the individual, curiosity is our present-day equivalent of the historical sublime. Although very different experiences, both the impulse of curiosity and the impulse of the historical sublime determine the nature of the relation to sites and artefacts. The former results in explorative search, a quest for the unusual and obscure, systematic examination and topological surveys, the satisfaction of personal interests, and the acquisition of knowledge for its own sake. The latter results in retroactive alignment and narrative interpretation, historical revelation, a feeling of loss, and a sense of what has been and is no longer. Associated with these individual experiences are two distinctive desires to share. In the new media age, we share with our contemporaries what it is that we like, instead of sharing what it is that we want to preserve for future generations. In both these instances, we communicate and share that with which we identify ourselves. The concept of identity will therefore help us gain a better understanding of this claim, and bring us to the heart of the matter. This we turn to now.

Historical Beings and Contemporaries The distinction between past, present and future is for a historical conscious being not simply a chronological distinction, a matter of determining what happened before and comes after: it is first and foremost a distinction in

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modality. The present is to be identified with a contemporaneous point of view, the past with a retrospective point of view, and the future with a prospective point of view. From a contemporaneous point of view, the world is simply as it appears to us. Our beliefs are transparent to ourselves: we read the world through them, as Danto puts it.24 Our prospective point of view is an extrapolation of our present hopes and fears. The retrospective point of view, by contrast, sees the past world from without. We do not see the past world as then contemporaries saw it; we see their world as a way of seeing the world, as Danto argues. We read as it were their beliefs. Persons and periods have an interior and exterior, he writes: The interior is simply the way the world is given. The exterior is simply the way the former becomes an object to a later or another consciousness. While we see the world as we do, we do not see it as a way of seeing the world: we simply see the world. Our consciousness of the world is not part of what we are conscious of. Later perhaps, when we have changed, we come to see the way we saw the world as having an identity separate from what we saw, giving a kind of global coloration to the contents of consciousness.25

When a period, or more accurately, a form of life, is over and has ‘exposed its outward surface’, then its members have entered a new world.26 The irreversibility of such entrance and the loss of the old identity that accompanies it, makes one, as Ankersmit formulates it, become what one is no longer.27 How are we to understand this? Ankersmit is not very clear about this. Therefore, I propose the following. I am who I am for myself, as Hegel taught us. What I take myself to be need not only be recognized by others, but also by myself in others. If someone takes and treats me in accordance with what I take myself to be, then I recognize myself in what that someone does and says. Recognition (Anerkennung) is in other words a reciprocal relation.28 Self-consciousness, Hegel states, ‘only achieves its satisfaction in another self-consciousness’.29 Obviously, we cannot recognize ourselves in the human beings who lived in the past, for there is no reciprocal relation possible. There is, however, a sense in which we recognize ourselves in our former selves, in what we are no longer. Setting forth a former self that one has lost before oneself is to present and take oneself as a historical being. That is what needs to be recognized by and in others and what is achieved by communicating and sharing history.30 Again we see the importance of the sense of loss of the past, which is central to the romantic relation to the past. This sense of loss, we argued, holds the individual experience of the historical sublime and the shared historical awareness together. Curiosity is a different experience altogether. It treats what is seen as transparent, as a means to read the world. In agreement with the order of co-presence (Gleichzeitigkeit), the eternal present tense in which objects exist side by side in the eyes of the viewer, the impulse of



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curiosity treats everything from a contemporaneous point of view. Narratives do not oppose the order of co-presence inasmuch as they are taken to be ensembles of interrelations between events rather than chronological, linear sequences of events; the order of co-presence does, however, oppose the historical retrospective narrative,31 which understands the past from without, as a form of life which has grown old, as Hegel once famously phrased it.32 The order of co-presence with its associated contemporaneous point of view does not imply that the past, present and future are abolished. It does imply, however, that the past is no longer taken to be different, separate and distant from the present and future, as the romantic sense of the past has it. Or, to put it in the idiom of Reinhart Koselleck: the horizons of experience (past) and expectation (future) no longer diverge and distance themselves from one another.33 As a consequence, the order of co-presence rejects the central historicist insight of Romanticism to measure the past by its standards only rather than by present standards. Incidentally, this explains why immersive simulations are so characteristic of our time and a central concern of heritage institutions these days.34 By providing a sense of experiencing the past as then contemporaries experienced it, immersive simulations withhold us from experiencing a break between the past and the present, between what we were then and are no longer. The antiquarian favours systematic study above chronology, detailed description above panoramic narrative interpretation, and registering above historicizing. His eye for the minute details of the past, the unusual and disparate, and his positivist stance towards the examination of objects, leave no room for a sense of loss, historical revelation, retrospection, and narrative interpretation. This makes the claim that teaching how to cope with information is the objective of the museum in the new media age plausible. The antiquarian collects and carefully examines the non-literary and literary evidence of the past, not to learn to cope with a past that is no longer, as early nineteenth-century collectors did, but to display his learning as an end in itself, satisfying his personal interests and love for curiosities. This further supports the claim we made earlier. In the age of new media age, we share with our contemporaries what we like rather than what we want to preserve for future generations.35 We are who we are for ourselves, we said. Sharing what we like is our current means of setting forth for ourselves who we are. In our day and age, we reduplicate ourselves with the help of information technology.

Conclusion The reader may criticize me for drawing too strong a contrast between the antiquarian and the romantic sense of the past, and for presenting them as

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mutually exclusive alternatives, which perhaps they are not. He may also criticize me for the limited historical context I provided of these senses of the past, which turns them into heuristic rather than historical concepts. For instance, I have not discussed the development from antiquarianism to history in early modern Europe, nor how the former influenced the latter, without ever fully ceasing to exist. However, even if the reader feels reluctant to accept some of the claims made in this chapter, I hope he still accepts that the distinction between the antiquarian and the romantic sense of the past is useful to reflect on the museum and our relation to the past in our current digital culture. It has not been my intention to present a choice between two mutually exclusive senses of the past. One reason is that we cannot live in other times than we in fact do, so in that sense, there is never a choice to make. We have historical consciousness and a desire to preserve and share the past for the reason of coming to terms with its being lost. If that reason dwindles, then presumably, so will our sense of the past that is best accommodated to satisfy such desire. Is this something we should regret or worry about? Maybe. I believe that the antiquarian love for the disparate, the obscure, the unusual, the minute details of the past, the topological survey, and the systematic scientific observation, following his idiosyncratic interests and desire to accumulate knowledge for its own sake, is in agreement with what new media does and has to offer. Therefore, rather than learning to cope with a past that is no longer, which is the goal of preserving from the nineteenth century onwards, the museum’s task is to teach its users how to cope with information. In this, educators and heritage professionals have an important task, especially since the present-day stream of information can be overwhelming, overly biased, disparate, multiple-voiced, unsupported by evidence, and deceiving. Information technology allows for a more personalized, interactive and curiosity driven engagement with museum collections. The separate tasks of registering and display, knowledge production and education, collecting and exhibiting, merge into one: registering is putting on display; the person producing knowledge is the person being educated; and what is collected is exhibited at the same time. This obviously also affects the tasks that educators and curators set themselves, for they are, presumably, expected to facilitate these processes of co-production and co-curation. All this being said, as long as we feel the loss of the past, we will have a need for retrospective historical narratives, to know what has been and is no longer, and by extension, of what we have been and are no longer, in order to cope with its being lost, and to refine our sense of acting on reality.36



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Notes 1.  W. Ernst, ‘Archi(ve)textures of Museology’, in Museums and Memory, ed. S.A. Crane, Stanford, 2000, 18. 2.  A. Danto, Narration and Knowledge, New York, 1985, 342–343. 3.  This has also been emphasized by historians, for example by Jörn Rüsen in his ‘Historical Consciousness: Narrative Structure, Moral Function, and Ontogenetic Development’, in Theorizing Historical Consciousness, ed. P. Seixas, Toronto and London, 2004, 69. 4. L.O. Mink, ‘Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument’, Historical Understanding, Ithaca and London, 1987, 185–186. 5.  Mink, ‘Narrative Form,’ 186 and 188. This is a much debated issue that I cannot do justice to here. For a view opposing Mink, see David Carr, who argues that narratives are lived in being told and told in being lived. D. Carr, ‘Narrative and the Real World: An Argument for Continuity’, History and Theory 25, 2 (1986): 126. An analysis of the debate between Carr and Mink is offered by F.R. Ankersmit, Meaning, Truth, And Reference in Historical Representation, Ithaca and London, 2012, 34–40. 6.  See, for example, L. Jensen, J. Leerssen and M. Mathijsen, eds, Free Access to The Past: Romanticism, Cultural heritage and the Nation, Leiden and Boston, 2010; P. Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, 2004; and R. Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. and intr. Keith Tribe, New York and Chichester, 2004. 7.  S.A. Crane, Collecting and Historical Consciousness in Early Nineteenth-Century Germany, Ithaca and London, 2000, 1. 8. Crane, Collecting, x–xii. I take the historical sublime to be nothing more than what is said about it in this chapter. Cf. Crane, Collecting, 25–31. 9. Crane, Collecting, 37, my emphasis. On this sense of loss, see also ibidem, 111–114. It is also a central theme in Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present and in F.R. Ankersmit, ‘The Sublime Dissociation of the Past: Or How to Be(come) What One Is No Longer’, History and Theory 30, 3 (2001): 295–323. 10. Crane, Collecting, 94. 11.  Ankersmit, ‘The Sublime Dissociation of the Past’, 302, 310–311. 12.  L. Manovich, ‘Database as Symbolic Form’, Convergence 5, 2 (1999): 80–99. For a similar argument, see M. Stevens, ‘Virtuele Herinnering. Kunstmusea in een Digitale Cultuur’ (PhD dissertation, Nijmegen, Radboud University, 2009). 13. On antiquarianism, see A. Momigliano, The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography, Berkeley, Los Angeles and Oxford, 1990, 54–79. 14.  Ernst, ‘Archi(ve)textures’, 18. 15.  Ernst, ‘Archi(ve)textures’, 17–18, 23–24, and 32. These themes are also taken up in W. Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive, ed. and intr. Jussi Parikka, Minneapolis and London, 2013, and in W. Ernst, Signale Aus der Vergangenheit: Eine Kleine Geschichtskritik, Munich, 2013. 16.  C. van den Akker, M. van Erp, L. Aroyo, et. al., ‘From Information Delivery to Interpretation Support: Evaluating Cultural Heritage Access on the Web’, Proceedings of the 5th Annual ACM Web Science Conference, New York, 2013, 431–440. http://dl.acm.org/citation. cfm?id=2464491. 17. Ernst, Digital Memory, 126. Cf. Digital Memory, 147–157. After emphasizing that the word tellan originally meant ‘to put in order’, which applies both to counting and recounting (148), Ernst distinguishes chronicles from narratives (148–152) and rejects the narrative in favour of the description (153) to conclude that in the digital age there is a ‘reentry of narrative as calculation’ (156). 18.  Ernst, ‘Archi(ve)textures’, 18, 29–30. Ernst also associates his data-oriented sense of the past with antiquarianism. See his Digital Memory, 43–44.

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19. Ernst, ‘Archi(ve)textures’, 30. On this return to curiosity, see also M. Henning, Museums, Media and Cultural Theory, New York, 2006, 143–154. 20.  Ernst, ‘Archi(ve)textures’, 29–30. Ernst, Signale aus der Vergangenheit, 90. 21.  A. Rigney, ‘When the Monograph is no Longer the Medium: Historical Narrative in the Online Age’, History and Theory 49, 4 (2010): 115. 22.  The plausibility of this claim is strengthened by Stephan Bann’s observation that the paradigm of historicism, which dominated the display of art and artefacts in museums for two centuries, weakened in the last decades of the twentieth century. See S. Bann, ‘The Return to Curiosity: Shifting Paradigms in Contemporary Museum Display’, in Art and its Publics: Museum Studies at the Millennium, ed. A. McClellan, Malden and Oxford, Blackwell, 2003, 120. 23.  Or, as Stephan Bann has it in his Ways Around Modernism, New York and London, 2007, 103ff, curiosity is a way around modernism. 24.  A. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Common Place: A Philosophy of Art., Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, 1981, 206. 25. Danto, Transfiguration, 163. 26. Danto, Transfiguration, 207. 27. Ankersmit, ‘The Sublime Dissociation’, 302, 307–308. See also F.R. Ankersmit, ‘Danto, History, And the Tragedy of Human Existence’, History and Theory 42, 3 (2003): 303. 28.  G.W.F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, Frankfurt am Main, 1986 [1807]), 144– 146. On the reciprocal relation of recognition, see also R.B. Brandom, ‘The Structure of Desire and Recognition: Self-consciousness and Self-constitution’, Philosophy & Social Criticism 33, 1 (2007): 127–150. Ankersmit does not take this reciprocal relation into account. Cf. his ‘The Sublime Dissociation’, 306. 29. ‘Das Selbstbewußtsein erreicht seine Befriedigung nur in einem anderen Selbstbewußtsein’ (Hegel, Phänomenologie, 144). An extensive discussion of this thesis is offered by R.B. Pippin in his Hegel on Self-Consciousness: Desire and Death in the Phenomenology of Spirit, Princeton and Oxford, 2011, 54ff. 30.  There is an intriguing remark by Jörn Rüsen that reads: ‘Historical consciousness evokes the past as a mirror of experience within which life in the present is reflected and its temporal features revealed’ (Rüsen, ‘Historical Consciousness’, 67). We now know what Rüsen might (and should) mean by it. 31.  Retrospection as being essential to historical narratives is the central theme of Danto’s Narration and Knowledge. See also my ‘The Exemplification Theory of History: Narrativist Philosophy and the Autonomy of History’, Journal of the Philosophy of History 6, 2 (2012): 236–257. 32.  G.W.F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts oder Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse: Mit Hegels eigenhändigen Notizen und den mündlichen Zusätzen, Frankfurt am Main, 1989, 28. 33. Koselleck associates historical consciousness with modernity and explains both together in terms of a distancing of experience (past) and expectation (future). See Koselleck, Futures Past, in particular 263–270. 34.  M. Gever and C. van Boxtel, Verlangen naar Tastbaar Verleden: Erfgoed, Onderwijs en Historisch Besef, Hilversum, 2014, 9–10. 35.  The contemporaneous point of view of the order of co-presence does not contradict the ‘contemporary surge of heritage’. To the contrary. Although the activities we associate with ‘heritagization’ are meant to preserve the past, the ‘surge for heritage’, as François Hartog observes, is characterized by its ‘presentist nature’, and that means, amongst other things, that the past is preserved for ourselves rather than for future generations. ‘Preserving the past for ourselves’ I associated with the order of co-presence and the antiquarian sense of the past. F. Hartog, ‘Time and Heritage’, Museum International 57, 3 (2005): 14 and 16. On the



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‘presentist’ nature of ‘heritagization’, its tension with historical consciousness, and the implications of that tension for heritage education, see M. Grever, P. de Bruijn and C. van Boxtel, ‘Negotiating Historical Distance: Or, How to Deal with the Past as a Foreign Country in Heritage Education’, Paedagogica Historica 48, 6 (2012): 873–887. 36.  The latter is the historian’s task according to Wilhelm von Humboldt. See his ‘On the Historian’s Task’, History and Theory 6, 1 (1967 [1821]): 60.

References Ankersmit, F.R. ‘The Sublime Dissociation of the Past: Or How to Be(come) What One Is No Longer’, History and Theory 30, 3 (2001): 295–323. ——— ‘Danto, History, And the Tragedy of Human Existence’, History and Theory 42, 3 (2003): 291–304. ———. Meaning, Truth, And Reference in Historical Representation, Ithaca and London, 2012. Bann, S. ‘The Return to Curiosity: Shifting Paradigms in Contemporary Museum Display’, in Art and its Publics: Museum Studies at the Millennium, ed. A. McClellan, Malden and Oxford, 2003, 117–130. ———. Ways Around Modernism, New York and London, 2007. Brandom, R.B. ‘The Structure of Desire and Recognition. Self-consciousness and Selfconstitution’, Philosophy & Social Criticism 33, 1 (2007): 127–150. Carr, D. ‘Narrative and the Real World: An Argument for Continuity’, History and Theory 25, 2 (1986): 117–131. Crane, S.A. Collecting and Historical Consciousness in Early Nineteenth-Century Germany, Ithaca and London, 2000. Danto, A. The Transfiguration of the Common Place: A Philosophy of Art, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, 1981. ———. Narration and Knowledge, New York, 1985. Ernst, W. ‘Archi(ve)textures of Museology’, in Museums and Memory, ed. S.A. Crane, Stanford, 2000, 17–34. ———. Digital Memory and the Archive, ed. J. Parikka, Minneapolis and London, 2013. ———. Signale Aus der Vergangenheit: Eine Kleine Geschichtskritik, Munich, 2013. Fritzsche, F. Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History, Cambridge Massachusetts and London, 2004. Grever, M., P. de Bruijn and C. van Boxtel. ‘Negotiating Historical Distance: Or, How to Deal with the Past as a Foreign Country in Heritage Education’, Paedagogica Historica 48, 6 (2012): 873–887. ——— and C. van Boxtel. Verlangen naar Tastbaar Verleden: Erfgoed, Onderwijs en Historisch Besef [Longing for a Tangible Past: Heritage, Education and Historical Consciousness], Hilversum, 2014. Hartog, F. ‘Time and Heritage’, Museum International 57, 3 (2005): 7–18. Hegel, G.W.F. Phänomenologie des Geistes, Frankfurt am Main, 1986 [1807]. ________. Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts oder Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse: Mit Hegels eigenhändigen Notizen und den mündlichen Zusätzen, Frankfurt am Main, 1989. Henning, M. Museums, Media and Cultural Theory, New York, 2006. Jensen, L., J. Leerssen and M. Mathijsen. Free Access to The Past: Romanticism, Cultural Heritage and the Nation, Leiden and Boston, 2010. Koselleck, R. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. and intr. Keith Tribe, New York and Chichester, 2004.

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Manovich, L. ‘Database as Symbolic Form’, Convergence 5, 2 (1999): 80–99. Mink, L.O. ‘Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument’, in Historical Understanding, eds B. Fay, E.O. Golob and R.T. Vann, Ithaca and London, 1987, 182–203. Momigliano, A. The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography, Los Angeles and Oxford, 1990. Pippin, R.B. Hegel on Self-Consciousness: Desire and Death in the Phenomenology of Spirit, Princeton and Oxford, 2011. Rigney, A. ‘When the Monograph is no Longer the Medium: Historical Narrative in the Online Age’, History and Theory 49, 4 (2010): 100–117. Rüsen, J. ‘Historical Consciousness: Narrative Structure, Moral Function, and Ontogenetic Development’, in Theorizing Historical Consciousness, ed. P. Seixas, Toronto and London, 2004, 63–85. Stevens, M. ‘Virtuele Herinnering. Kunstmusea in een Digitale Cultuur’ [Virtual Memory. Art Museums in a Digital Culture] (PhD dissertation, Nijmegen, Radboud University, 2009). Van den Akker, C. ‘The Exemplification Theory of History: Narrativist Philosophy and the Autonomy of History’, Journal of the Philosophy of History 6, 2 (2012): 236–257. ———, M. van Erp and L. Aroyo, et. al. ‘From Information Delivery to Interpretation Support: Evaluating Cultural Heritage Access on the Web’, Proceedings of the 5th Annual ACM Web Science Conference, New York, 2013, 431–440. http://dl.acm.org/citation. cfm?id=2464491. von Humboldt, W. ‘On the Historian’s Task’, History and Theory 6, 1 (1967 [1821]): 55–71.

Chiel van den Akker is assistant professor of Historical Theory at the department of history of the VU University Amsterdam. His recent publications include ‘Mink’s Riddle of Narrative Truth’ in Journal of the Philosophy of History (2013) and ‘History as Dialogue. On Online Narrativity’ in BMGN – Low Countries Historical Review (2013).

Part II

Experiencing Heritage and Authenticity

CHAPTER

4

Why do Emotions Matter in Museums and Heritage Sites? Sheila Watson

All cultures have what we might call an ‘emotional scale’: appropriate emotional responses to individual and community events. Such official emotional expressions are often embedded in and enacted through a range of ceremonies and common experiences which form a process of remembering in an appropriate or publicly approved manner. This revisiting of the past provides a reminder of the ‘affect’ of the emotions associated with the events thus commemorated. The past is thus accorded an emotional register and the present is understood, in part, through feelings associated with events and individuals long ago. However, such emotions will tell as much about the present as the past. New emotions can be ascribed to past events as part of the evolving nature of historical understanding. Such emotions embody values and moralities which underpin certain types of social relations and which help to make sense of events and people in the past. It is the purpose of this chapter to explore how history museums in particular are sites of emotional expression and regulation, how they produce affective responses, and how the values associated with such emotions are expressed – in other words how they not only stimulate us to think but also to feel and what that tells us about the histories they produce and about ourselves. Thus this chapter is about what emotions do and how their evocation is used deliberately or accidently in museums, and why this should matter to us, particularly when we come to understand how people learn and understand the past. It uses examples drawn from museums in the U.K., Turkey Notes for this section begin on page 87.

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and Germany, and considers histories relating to slavery, the ethnic origins of nations and national identity, and draws on theories of historical distancing, together with the notion of empathy as a tool for learning.

Emotions It is surprising that so little attention has been paid to the ways in which museums generate emotions and how this affects learning, in particular about the past. While it has long been recognized that enjoyment is an important aid to learning and that empathy can help people understand other people’s emotions as well as their ideas, there is no comprehensive study of the emotional lives of museum visitors as they grapple with historical characters and events.1 It is understood that they need to feel welcomed and comfortable in their surroundings and that a positive attitude towards a museum visit facilitates learning. There has been some research as to how certain types of material culture, when handled by school children, can affect the senses and generate feelings.2 However, there is little understanding of the ways in which different emotional experiences can be engendered in history museums for the general visiting public, and how and why this affects what is learned. Some chapters have sought to open up this topic and this chapter seeks to add to these discussions.3 Before we go further it is important to clarify that here we are interested not in what emotions are but how they are used by institutions and visitors to facilitate understanding. The arguments are based on the premise that emotions are ‘social and cultural practices’ both in the present and in the past.4 In other words we react emotionally to certain events and objects in culturally conditioned ways and our reactions are as much to do with social relations as they are to do with individual ­emotional attitudes and predispositions.

Historical Distancing and the Myth of Dispassionate History Much historical tradition eschews in principle the idea of emotional engagement with the historical subject. Oakeshott described ‘history as a mode of enquiry and understanding in terms of an idea of past, an idea of an event and of some significant relationship to be established between events, and an idea of change’.5 In this definition the emphasis is on thinking (ideas) not emotions (feelings). Many historians train themselves to try and avoid emotional responses and this requires a form of historical distancing, a standing back and reasoning, in theory if not always in practice. They stress the distance between then and now. The implication is that if the historian, and here we



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include those who curate exhibitions, allow their emotions to affect them then they become ‘enacted upon’ as they react to their feelings and lose their impartial framework.6 In the process they may, it is assumed, become biased and unable to operate as professional historians. In theory historical distance as understood in this context acts as a regulatory practice.7 This convention also enables historians and museum professionals to avoid having to attempt the management of their own emotional responses and that of their readers and visitors. By ignoring them these practitioners can appear impartial and scientific. Drawing on the work of Ahmed who seeks to understand emotions in a national context, we can see that museums are, on the whole, selective in the ways that they encourage or discourage emotional responses from individuals.8 Many appear to adopt what Ahmed calls an evolutionary approach to the idea of emotion in that some emotions are elevated into a means of expressing a cultivated attitude, including the aesthetic which gives pleasure, and the notion of empathy which permits pity for others.9 Other emotions, such as rage, fear and disgust which, following an evolutionary interpretation, suggest weakness or primitiveness, are examined and explained to the visitor, but rarely encouraged as a visitor response. When they are evoked, such as in the National Military Museum, Istanbul, in its explanation of the Armenian massacre, an event the Turkish Government denies to have been genocide, they are evoked for political reasons, as a form of defence against such stories. Black and white photographs of mutilated Turkish bodies dominate the exhibition. They are framed within a discourse that seeks to justify Turkish military actions against the Armenians in the past while, at the same time, denying Armenian claims to be the only or main victims. As such these photographs do not necessarily achieve their aim amongst foreign visitors who are aware of different narratives and are not emotionally attached to this version of the Turkish nation’s history, but it would be interesting to examine what sort of emotions these displays elicit in native Turks, particularly as the government has made it clear that patriotic Turks should not believe the Armenian claims. Few Turkish scholars (with notable exceptions such as Taner Akçam) have recognized the Armenian version of events and those who do may find themselves accused of insulting the Turkish nation.10 Thus emotions in the museum are regulated not only by the cultural context in which they are placed but by notions of what sorts of emotions are politically permissible in museums. These decisions are framed within the context of an evolutionary pattern of development that understands the control of emotions as a form of civilized superiority. Here the historical past is suddenly vivid in the present when the visitor encounters the images of mutilated men, women and children – made all the more shocking by the infrequency with which such images are shown in

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museums, even military ones. In this example we can see that the museum chose to ‘transgress’ the accepted evolutionary order of emotional responses to encourage anger (along with shock, disgust, pity and horror) but only in a regulated political context. In contrast, such emotions can be seen as acceptable within the concept of art and aesthetic taste where affective responses are moderated by individual’s judgments based on experience and knowledge.11 Here disgust or pleasure is mediated through aesthetic judgments based on education, experience, knowledge and, in many cases, class and wealth. There are fewer such mediating conventions in history museums and thus these emotional responses are usually only deliberately provoked for specifically moral, ethical or political reasons. Thus we have seen that in museums the present imprints upon our attempts to distance the past and emotions can be used to bring the past into focus for modern political purposes. For historians such as Phillips historical distance itself emerges as ‘a complex balance that has as much to do with the emotional or political uses of the past as with its explanatory functions or its formal design’.12 Historical distance includes ‘formal, affective, ideological, and cognitive dimensions, each of which plays a role in historical representation, although often in varying degrees of intensity. Historical distance, then, is not merely shorthand for temporal distance, as in common parlance, but rather indicates a variety of strategies employed by historians to achieve effects of proximity and separation’.13 Thus, in the practices of historical distancing, topics or behaviour in the past that are deemed irrelevant today tend to be forgotten, omitted or positioned in a distant past, however long ago they took place. Alternatively, temporal distance can be used to make acceptable and even admirable certain behaviours that would be reprehensible in the society of the time. For example, eighteenth-century pirates are romanticized in fiction and in film despite the fact that they were cruel, selfish and destructive and caused innocent people pain and suffering. The traditional Western premise of understanding the past through the dispassionate lens of the present leads us to ignore the emotional affect and effect of the past upon those who experience it. How we understand the past, whether it is represented by material culture, museum displays, the latest technology, the written text, is determined by our present needs. Museums by their very nature are places where people move and talk, see, think and feel, becoming theatres of the emotion whereby the threads of materiality that link us metaphorically to the past are engaged with the senses as well as the intellect. It is this notion of feeling and its relationship to emotion that this chapter discusses. In so doing it adopts a position that all history in museums, whether apparently dispassionate or not, operates through an idea of time which understands the present through the past and thus engages with emotions regardless of the design intention.



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Authenticity In a similar way our notion of authenticity is one that appears to be dispassionate but is rooted in emotional responses to nature and material culture in all its manifestations, mediated by museum and heritage practices. So-called museum-like approaches to authenticity focus on the use of originals but the significance of the original will vary from individual visitor to visitor.14 The museum curator may judge an object to be authentic but it does not mean that the visitor will, nor will the visitor necessarily place the same values on objects as a curator. The existential authenticity idea of the postmodernists suggests that authenticity is not really to do with the objects but that it is something inside the person and that it is experience orientated and transient  – it depends on feelings, emotions, sensations, relationships and self. Thus we can interpret authenticity as something to do with the motivation and experience of visitors.15 However, there is a strong interaction between site and object and the experience of the visitor – in other words the way the object is exhibited and the values ascribed to it by the museum will affect the visitor’s engagement with it.16 Walter Benjamin’s idea of the aura of the object is an influential one that suggests its subjective and experiential nature.17 The very positioning of an object in a museum and the information provided with it gives the former status and authenticity. A brick is just a brick but if it is exhibited in the Political Museum in St Petersburg with the information that it was prised from the Reichstag building in 1945, then for Russians it is more than a brick. It is a symbol of the victory for survival in the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945.18 As a non-Russian, who was not brought up with the stories of the 20 million lost Russian lives in that war, I do not know the emotions it elicits but I am sure such a brick engenders feelings and emotions in native visitors I can only guess at. Yet evidence suggests that the public, at least in the U.K., does not understand museums in this way. In a recent survey of British museums by the Museums Association there was a consensus amongst those consulted that museums were for everyone and their most important function was an educational one. Above all they were considered to be places where people go to find information and expect museums to remain neutral. They are seen as ‘one of the last vestiges of trust (particularly in comparison to the government and the media which are seen as untrustworthy and agenda driven). The public want to keep their trust in museums by believing that they are being given unbiased and non-politically driven information’.19 This suggests that, in the U.K. at least, many visitors ‘read’ or experience the displays with relatively uncritical eyes. The ‘truth’ of what they see and learn is underpinned by the authenticity of the original objects on

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display and the authority they accord the curators and designers. Apparent distancing will be accepted as neutral though it may well be a political and emotional act. If we assume that such an attitude is not confined to the U.K. then we will begin to understand how museums, by presenting a seemingly distant past, nevertheless create a reading or experience of history that is anything but dispassionate.

How do Museums use Historical Distancing? If we take, for example, the Deutsches Historisches Museum (the German Historical Museum) in Berlin, the narrative of the development of the German nation from the German tribes opposing the Romans to the unification of Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 is told in a d­ ispassionate manner. Only occasionally do emotions intrude into the narrative, particularly at times of struggle. However, this apparently u ­ ncontroversial story is deeply political. It presents the Germans as one unified ethnic group throughout historic time. For the purpose of this chapter, we will focus on the idea of socalled full blown ethnic communities or ethnies whose members are united by shared memories and traditions. These can be defined as ‘named and ­self-defined human populations with myths of common origins, shared historical memories,  elements of common culture, and a measure of ethnic solidarity.’20 These ethnies often have members abroad and have common symbols and values. Their stories may involve self-sacrifice and are often linked to landscapes which have been defended in times past. What is important here is felt or imagined history which is crucial to a sense of group identity and creates ties to the nation.21 In the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin Germany, we find the story of the German people or ethnie, formerly divided by the postwar politics of communism, now restored to its ancient completeness by the collapse of the Soviet Empire. Here there are few ethnic minorities in its long tale of German history. Merchants, traders and immigrants from across Europe make occasional appearances but disappear into the sands of time, leaving only ethnic Germans living in the land that is now Germany, with the odd case representing Jewish Germans with their distinct cultural practices, separated from the rest of the inhabitants of Germany. This leaves visitors unsure whether these are ethnic Germans or not. We can presume that such a narrative of the ethnic origins of the nation will appeal intellectually and emotionally to many Germans where the notion of who is a German until recently relied in part on the idea of an ethnic group, prioritizing the right of return to the motherland of those born outside the nation in the former Soviet Union.22 In England, in contrast, narratives such as those in the Museum of London (perhaps the nearest thing England has to a national history museum



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of England) stress migration and multiculturalism from a very early period. This in turn appeals emotionally to the idea that the English, whilst retaining strong associations with a Germanic past, like to think of themselves as a mixture of many so-called ethnic groups. Such apparent dispassionate narratives can be found in museums all over the world. However, some institutions are paying more attention to the emotional responses their historical exhibitions elicit and are attempting to evoke emotions in a deliberate manner,23 and this affect (both sensory and emotional) can be triggered by narrative and testimonies, material culture, new media involving sound, light and text and the physical experience of the museum itself which can include sound, smells and temperature variations.24 The very nature of much historical writing, in a narrative form, whether in a book or a museum, creates a story in which the readers’ or viewers’ (in the case of material transferred to film and television) interest is held by conventions which require empathetic and emotional responses. Stories of triumph over tragedy, endurance, suffering, victory and achievement are common in historical narratives in museums. Approaches that include personal testimonies and the experiences of witnesses, popular in literature, museums and other media, also encourage empathetic responses. The postmodernist trend that sees the past from a multiple set of perspectives requires the ability to understand, if not empathize with, the different emotional states of the subject. Little research has, however, been undertaken into how visitors experience deliberate affective techniques. We can presume that they do not always work in the way in which they are intended. For example, the Imperial War Museum, North, was designed by Libeskind. It is described thus in the website: ‘Clad in aluminium, the landmark building is a visionary symbol of the effects of war. The design is based on the concept of a world shattered by conflict, a fragmented globe reassembled in three interlocking shards. These shards represent conflict on land, water and in the air’.25 Inside the building floors slope and areas are dimly lit: attempts to create some of the confusion of war. However, the intention is not always realized. The author was confused but also annoyed by the lack of signage and the dim lighting on her first visit and did not associate this experience with war but with poor design. Here the visitor has to be told what emotion is required. Then the emotion engendered is a cerebral one, understood through the mind. Moreover, confusion caused by lack of signage and sloping floors is hardly the same as the terror and visceral sense of dislocation caused by war. Having established that museums do elicit emotional responses from visitors, either deliberately or through conventions such as historical distancing that are often governed by political intentions, though these may not produce the intended emotions, we turn now to ask how and why should we be concerned with emotion as an educational tool? We have to ask ourselves:

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are emotions a good thing? Why should we care about the emotional effect museum displays have on visitors? Are they desirable in institutions that have an educational function? Is there a danger that emotions will overcome reason? Indeed, perhaps we should try and reduce the emotional impact of our exhibitions. After all it has been argued that ‘d[D]ominant traditions within both psychology and philosophy conceptualize the emotions as in conflict with, and subversive of, moral reasoning’.26 Some would go so far as to suggest that our apparent inability to control our emotions is a flaw in our evolution.27 However, recent research suggests that ‘capacities for emotional processing and empathetic responsiveness support the development of moral cognition in children and help the sustaining of moral competencies in healthy adults’,28 and thus the ability to feel as well as to think is a useful additional skill in human society. This research is counter to the arguments that moral judgments – what are right and wrong – are the ‘domain of higher, deliberative, (affect free) processes’.29 It supports another tradition that ‘intuitive emotional responses have a substantial impact on our moral judgements’.30 Langdon and Mackenzie, referring to Fitzgerald and Goldie, argue that ‘everyday moral discourse and reflection abounds with “thick” moral concepts such as shameful, kind, courageous, brutal or generous’.31 These concepts are not, as they point out, emotion free: ‘Thick concepts are descriptively fine grained, evaluative, and connected to complex social emotions and to social norms concerning appropriate behaviour’.32 They also point out that there is a danger of simplifying and separating out the rational from the emotional, and that with moral judgments we tend to ignore the reflective emotional processes that affect our moral reflection and moral agency.33 Feelings and emotions can be conceptualized as well as experienced. Empathy is a key tool for managing and regulating emotion and can be understood in various ways. It can be used to describe responsiveness toward the ‘other’ that is more in keeping with others’ feelings than with one’s own. The notion can be further refined into cognitive and affective ways of appreciating what another person might think and feel.34 It is understood to begin from the thinking process. Thus empathy is firmly associated with reason and requires an ability to imagine another’s feelings. Ravenscroft, in a study of fiction, suggests that stories can scaffold and extend our imaginative capacities to empathize with others.35 Note how there can be two levels of understanding that lead to empathy – first person (empathetic) and third person (conceptual). The first person requires imagination and uses this to produce emotional responses. The third person conceptual method may also use imagination but does this in a way that allows individuals to disassociate themselves from feelings that would otherwise be elicited by the material encountered. Thus the visit to the Imperial War Museum North and the confusion engendered by the architecture may, once it is explained, result in



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a conceptual form of empathy. However, a story in the same museum, told through the Big Picture show in which a woman talks of her experience as an unknown German Jewish Kindertransport child refugee may elicit an imaginative understanding of the bewilderment and distress she felt when she said ‘[W]hen Hitler came it became very difficult for us. The children we played with spat on us’.36 This results in an imaginative sympathy for the feelings of the child, a form of ‘hot’ empathy.37 However, this empathy does not allow us to feel exactly as that child did – we are in a safe artificial space where we can choose to engage with the sound and light show in the museum, or not. Our emotions are mediated through our current circumstances and past experiences.38 For most people fortunate enough to grow up in a tolerant society empathy here elicits feelings of sympathy for the fear and bewilderment no doubt felt by the child at the time but not that child’s specific emotions. Without the ability to enter imaginatively into the lives of others and to have emotions, ‘an ethics of impartial respect for human dignity will fail to engage real human beings’.39 However, there is no reason to think that rational and thinking engagement with the emotional states of others cannot elicit respect for them and understanding of their plight. If we apply this concept to the notion of historical distancing, where engagement with individual situations in the past, pleasant or otherwise, is made more difficult by a sense of the passage of time from the past to the present, then we can begin to understand that emotional engagement can take place in different ways – it can be both ‘thinking’ or ‘feeling’. In whatever way we theorize empathy, we can argue that emotions in the museum are not only about helping us understand the feelings and emotional experiences of those who lived in the past but are also about how we view the world through a moral lens. Some museums seek to promote themselves as places that can play an active role in supporting social justice40 and this ethical and moral purpose can be understood through the role emotion plays in the museum not only in eliciting feelings in visitors but also in encouraging them to action. Studies as to how individuals react to stories in literature suggest that emotions elicited by a story vary from individual to individual and these emotions in turn affect how the story is understood rationally,41 and we can assume these emotions therefore influence how individuals make sense of it within their moral framework. One of the most interesting findings is gender differences in emotional responses to written text. Women on the whole register more emotional responses than men and are equally capable of empathizing with male feelings as with female ones. Male readers, on the other hand, empathize more with male characters and, on the whole, express less empathy or feeling towards women in the story. Research also indicates that women show higher emotional responsivity in affective empathy.42 For both genders, if emotions of pity are aroused individuals tend

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to look back in time and react relatively passively, albeit with sympathy. If anger is aroused individuals look forward in time as though anger requires action.43 This raises interesting questions for museums. If the same pattern of empathy were repeated in individual responses to historical narratives in museums we can assume that these might be affected not only by culture but by gender. Moreover, museum exhibitions attempting to elicit changes in public attitudes and behaviour would, one might assume, do better to make their visitors angry rather than sad. Exhibitions that seek to arouse sympathy for victims but do not encourage anger against perpetrators may not make much, if any, change to an individual’s attitudes as to how they can change society to prevent such events happening again. Exhibiting pain and suffering, eliciting pity, may not be enough to make a difference in the future if museums see their role as active promoters of social, political and cultural justice. This is, of course, speculation and needs more research to discover if anger is such a powerful agent of change. However, before museums decide to invoke emotions of anger there are moral and ethical issues to consider. At the same time museums might wish to think about how different genders will respond to their stories. However, we have very little idea at the moment how and why emotions that are aroused during a visit impact upon visitors both in the short and the long term and whether or not they facilitate this kind of learning, though we may well hope that they do. We need research into this area but in the meantime we have to look to the research that has been undertaken with visitors where emotional engagement with e­ xhibitions has been examined, such as that undertaken into the impact of exhibitions to commemorate and celebrate the Act for the Abolition of Slavery in 2007.

Slavery In the West we no longer know what is the perspective from which to see the world and the past is now blurred into the present and the future is uncertain.44 Respect for authority is also questioned as well as the idea that we all share similar values45 and, one might add, common emotional responses to events. Migration has resulted in populations where the past is seen from many perspectives. However, people still approach museums with certain expectations as to how certain stories should be told which allows them to experience a traditional emotional response. Thus many British citizens have been brought up to admire Britain for its opposition to the slave trade, rather than prioritizing the suffering its traders inflicted on slaves transported to its colonies and the long-term impact of enforced migration and slavery upon the descendants of slaves. Research into the way museums commemorated the bicentenary of the abolition of the Slave Trade in Britain



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in 2007 indicated that many focused on the ‘hidden history’ of local participation in the slave trade.46 Studies of visitor responses revealed how resistant most White British visitors were to this new approach,47 exhibited as part of an attempt by U.K. institutions to acknowledge not only the abolition of the slave trade but also the involvement of many individuals in society in slavery, the economic benefits of such a trade to the perpetrators, and the impact and legacy upon those enslaved and their descendants. Responses to these exhibitions were often complex and demonstrated how uncomfortable and resistant some White British people were to new interpretations that did not correspond to their traditional emotional registers of patriotic pride. They engaged with the museum story only to be confused when their culturally conditioned emotional responses of celebration and self-congratulation were challenged. It is not surprising that the researchers found that many visitors adopted ‘strategies of disengagement centred primarily on the avoidance of feelings of responsibility, guilt and discomfort’.48 Barbara Herrnstein Smith states that when one’s deeply held personal beliefs are brought into question this can bring about a condition of ‘cognitive dissonance’: an impression of inescapable noise or acute disorder, a rush of adrenalin, sensations of alarm, a sense of unbalance or chaos, residual feeling of nausea and anxiety. These are the forms of bodily distress that occur when one’s ingrained, taken-for-granted sense of how certain things are – and thus presumably will be and in some sense should be – is suddenly or insistently confronted by something very much at odds with it. [italics in original]49

As she points out, our responses to ideas that are incompatible with our own beliefs, particularly if they elicit negative emotions such as guilt or relate to identity and dignity, will range ‘from perplexed and resentful withdrawal, to elaborate condescension, detailed counterargument, virulent attack or attempted suppression’.50 The Bicentenary had been seen as an opportunity to remind the British of the nation’s role in slavery rather than in its role in abolition and to allow Black British citizens an alternative national story. The emphasis on suffering and post-slavery discrimination and disadvantage, however well meant as a means of promoting a form of ‘politics of recognition’ whereby ‘culture, history and memory become important arenas of struggle for equity’,51 did not necessarily result in better understanding of the impact of slavery amongst sections of the target audience. It would be naive of us to attribute this White British resistance to a new message to widespread racism or prejudice. Respected individuals demanded a more traditional celebratory tone in reasoned arguments. For example, Michael Nazir-Ali, Bishop of Rochester, argued publicly that the British should not apologize for slavery but celebrate Britain’s role in helping to bring it to an end, pointing out that the Africans and Arabs all played a

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role in the development and sustaining of the slave trade.52 Academics also debated the notion of guilt and how far actions from the past could be the responsibility of the present descendants of perpetrators. For example, Bruckner abhors what he sees as a European tendency to self blame and argues that such attitudes become an obstacle to dealing with contemporary atrocities. With particular regard to the topic in question he points out that ‘taking over from Arabs and Africans it [Europe] instituted the transatlantic slave trade, but it also engendered abolitionism and put an end to slavery before other nations did’.53 Public reactions to new interpretations of the bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave trade in 2007 were, with hindsight, unsurprising, but they serve to remind us how important it is for us to understand how and why people engage emotionally with museums, and in particular how empathy can be evoked and what it can do. The example above shows all too clearly how White visitors to the bicentenary exhibitions, on the whole, were disinclined to display as much empathy for the enslaved and their descendants as the exhibition designers had hoped.

Conclusion If we return to the premise with which we began this chapter, that emotions are culturally conditioned, and apply this to history in the museum, then we need to think about how we can tell stories and exhibit objects in such a way that museum design produces the emotional responses upon which the learning desired by the museum may, as we have seen in the example above, in part, depend. Learning itself is often understood as a form of communication by which individuals make meanings.54 Emphasis is placed on the ways in which representation in the museum conveys meanings and values and how culture is contrasted and shared by this means in the museum.55 Much learning theory now assumes that learning is an active process that depends as much on the learner as the teacher.56 However, little attempt has been undertaken in museum studies literature to understand how emotions can affect this interaction. How can we develop a theory that will help us analyse and plan to elicit emotional responses in the museum, avoiding mistakes such as those made in the 2007 Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade exhibitions? Oatley, working on written texts, divides a story, a narrative in fiction (and in our case we can apply this to a historical narrative in a museum), into four kinds of structures: the event, discourse, suggestion and realization structures.57 The event structure is the way in which key events and individuals are arranged to make sense to the reader or, in the case of the museum,



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the visitor. The discourse structure is the mechanism by which the story is told, which can include individual ‘voices’ and, in the case of museums, the structure of the exhibition itself and the media chosen to convey the story. The suggestion structure recognizes the constructivist theory of learning and acknowledges that the visitor’s recognition of elements of the story will interact with their own experience, knowledge, emotions and, one might add, cultural patterns of thinking and behaviour. At this point the reader or visitor moves to the fourth structure – the realization structure. It is here that the visitor personalizes the story and reacts to any emotion they find within the exhibition, whether within their encounter with objects or in the structures used to support the narrative such as multimedia and the use of individual stories. A great deal of attention has been paid in museum studies literature to the event and discourse structures of the exhibition process but less to the emotional element of the suggestion and realization structures. This chapter suggests that the time has come to rethink this.

Acknowledgments Some of this research was facilitated by EuNaMus (European National Museums: Identity Politics, the Uses of the Past and the European Citizen), a three-year project (2010–2013) funded by the EU Seventh Framework programme, in which the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester, was a partner.

Notes 1.  E. Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and Education: Purpose, Pedagogy, Performance, London and New York, 2007, 55ff. 2.  For example, V. Golding, ‘Inspiration Africa! Using Tangible and Intangible Heritage to promote Social Inclusion amongst Young People with Disabilities’, in Museums and their Communities, ed. S. Watson, London, 2007, 371. 3.  S. Dudley, ‘Museum Materialities: Objects, Sense and Feeling’, in Museum Materialities: Objects, Engagements, Interpretations, ed. S.H. Dudley, London and New York, 2010, 1–17; S. Watson, ‘Myth, Memory and the Senses in the Churchill Museum’, in Museum Materialities: Objects, Engagements, Interpretations, ed. S.H. Dudley, London and New York, 2010, 204–223; S. Watson, ‘Emotions in the History Museum’, in Museum Theory: An Expanded Field. The International Handbooks of Museum Studies, Volume I, eds A. Witcomb and K. Message, volume editors S. Macdonald and H. Rees Leahy, 2015, 283–301, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/ book/10.1002/9781118829059. 4. S. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Edinburgh, 2008, 9. M.Z. Rosaldo, ‘Toward an Anthropology of Self and Feeling’, in Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion, eds R.A. Shweder and R.A. LeVine, Cambridge, 1987, 137–157; W.M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions, Cambridge, 2001, 331.

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5.  M. Oakeshott, On History: And other Essays, Indianapolis, 1999, 7. 6. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2–3. 7.  M. Phillips, ‘Rethinking Historical Distance from Doctrine to Heuristic’, History and Theory 50, 4 (2011): 11. 8. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion. 9.  Ibid., 3. 10. T. Akçam, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility, London, 2007. 11.  J. Otero-Pailos, J. Gaiger and S. West, ‘Heritage Values’, in Understanding Heritage in Practice, ed. S. West, Manchester and New York, 2010, 56. 12.  Phillips, ‘Rethinking Historical Distance’, 14. 13.  J. den Hollander, H. Paul and R. Peters, ‘Introduction: The Metaphor of Historical Distance’, History and Theory 50, 4 (2011): 7 (referring to Phillips, ‘Rethinking Historical Distance’). 14.  J.M. Rickly-Boyd, ‘Authenticity and Aura: A Benjaminian approach to Tourism’, Annals of Tourism Research 39, 1 (2011): 272, citing N. Wang, ‘Rethinking Authenticity in Tourism Experience’, in Tourism: Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences, ed. S. Williams, London, 1999, 210–234. 15.  Rickly-Boyd, ‘Authenticity and Aura’, 274, citing D. MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory for the Leisure Class, New York, 1976 and D. MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, Berkeley, 1999. 16.  Dudley, ‘Museum Materialities’. 17. Rickly-Boyd, ‘Authenticity and Aura’; W. Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, ed. H. Arendt, London, 1999, 211–244. 18.  Watson, ‘Emotions in the History Museum’, 292–293. 19.  Museums Association, Public Perceptions of – and Attitudes to – the Purposes of Museums in Society, report prepared by Britain Thinks for Museums Association, March 2013, 6, www. museumsassociation.org/news/03042013-public-attitudes-research-published (accessed 4 April 2013). See also Watson, ‘Emotions in the History Museum’, 288. 20. A. Smith, The Cultural Foundations of Nations: Hierarchy, Covenant and Republic, Malden and Oxford, 2008, 30–31. Italics in original. 21. Ibid. 22. Not until 2000 were laws passed to allow children of foreign born workers in Germany the right to citizenship. 23.  Watson, ‘Myth, Memory and the Senses’, 204–223. 24.  S. Watson, R. Kirk and J. Steward, ‘Arsenic, Wells and Herring Curing: Making New Meanings in an Old Fish Factory’, in Museum Making, Narratives, Architectures, Exhibitions, eds S. MacLeod, L. Hourston Hanks and J. Hale, London, 2012, 157–168. 25.  http://www.iwm.org.uk/visits/iwm-north/about (accessed 2 May 2013). See also Watson, ‘Emotions in the History Museum’. 26. R. Langdon and. C. Mackenzie, ‘Introduction: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives on Moral Cognition’, in Emotions, Imagination and Moral Reasoning, eds R. Langdon and C Mackenzie, New York and Hove, 2012, 2. 27.  A. Koestler, Janus: A Summing Up, London, 1978, cited in J.P. Forgas, ‘Introduction: The Role of Affect in Social Cognition’, in Feeling and Thinking: the Role of Affect in Social Cognition, ed. J.P. Forgas, Cambridge and Paris, 2000, 1. 28.  Langdon and Mackenzie, ‘Introduction’, 2. 29. T.I. Case, M.J. Oaten and R.J. Stevenson, ‘Disgust and Moral Judgement’, in Emotions, Imagination and Moral Reasoning, eds R. Langdon and C. Mackenzie, New York and Hove, 2012, 196. 30.  Ibid., 196.



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31.  Langdon and Mackenzie, ‘Introduction’, 8, referring to C. Fitzgerald and P. Goldie, ‘Thick Concepts and their Role in Moral Psychology’, in Emotions, Imagination and Moral Reasoning, eds R. Langdon and C. Mackenzie, New York and Hove, 2012, 219–236. 32.  Ibid., 8. 33.  Ibid., 9. 34. D.J. Hawes and M.R. Dadds, ‘Revisiting the Role of Empathy in Childhood: Pathways to Antisocial Behaviour’, in Emotions, Imagination and Moral Reasoning, eds R. Langdon and C Mackenzie, New York and Hove, 2012, 45–70; Langdon and Mackenzie, ‘Introduction’, 3. 35.  I. Ravenscroft, ‘Fiction, Imagination and Ethics’, in Emotions, Imagination and Moral Reasoning, eds R. Langdon and C Mackenzie, New York and Hove, 2012, 71–89. 36. Anon, Imperial War Museum North Guidebook, Northampton, 2010, 9. 37.  E. Peters, D. Västfjäll, T. Gärling and P. Slovic ‘Affect and Decision Making: A “Hot” Topic’, Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, Special Issue: The Role of Affect in Decision Making, 19, 2 (2006): 79–85. 38.  Watson, ‘Emotions in the History Museum’. 39.  M. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity. A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education, Cambridge, 1997, xvi, cited in Ravenscroft, ‘Fiction, Imagination and Ethics’, 73. See also Watson, ‘Emotions in the History Museum’, 286. 40. R. Sandell and E. Nightingale, Museums, Equality and Social Justice, London and New York, 2012; R. Sandell, J. Dodd and R. Garland Thomson, eds, Re-Presenting Disability: Activism and Agency in the Museum, London and New York, 2010. 41. K. Oatley, ‘From the Emotions of Conversation to the Passions of Fiction’, in Feelings and Emotions, eds A.S.R Manstead, N. Frijda and A Fischer, Cambridge, 2004, 109. 42. L. Christov-Moore, E. Simpson, G. Coudé, K. Grigaityte, M. Iacoboni and P.F. Ferrari, ‘Empathy: Gender Effects in Brain and Behaviour’, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 46, 4 (2014): 604–627. 43.  Oatley, ‘From the Emotions of Conversation’, 108–109. 44.  B. Southgate, Postmodernism in History: Fear or Freedom?, London, 2003, 13–14. 45.  Ibid., 16. 46. G. Cubitt, ‘Bringing it Home: Making Local Meaning in 2007 Bicentenary Exhibitions’, Slavery and Abolition 30, 2 (2009): 266. 47. L. Smith, ‘“Man’s Inhumanity to Man” and Other Platitudes of Avoidance and Misrecognition: An Analysis of Visitor Responses to Exhibitions Marking the 1807 Bicentenary’, Museum and Society 8, 3 (2010): 193–214. 48.  Ibid., 193. 49. B. Herrstein Smith, Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy, London, 1997, cited in Southgate, Postmodernism in History, 19. 50.  Herrnstein Smith, Belief and Resistance, xiv, 148, cited in Southgate, Postmodernism in History, 20. 51.  Smith, ‘“Man’s Inhumanity to Man”’, 194. 52. Anon, www.history.ac.uk/1807commemorated/media/reviews/dailymail.html, ‘1807 Commemorated’ website (accessed 20 March 2013). 53.  P. Bruckner, The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism, Princeton and Oxford, 2010, 28. 54.  E. Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture, London and New York, 2000, 138. 55. Ibid. 56.  Ibid.; H. Gardner, Multiple Intelligences: The Theory in Practice. A Reader, New York, 1993. 57.  Oatley, ‘From the Emotions of Conversation’, 105.

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References Akçam, T. A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility, London, 2007. Ahmed, S. The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Edinburgh, 2008. Benjamin, W. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, ed. H. Arendt, London, 1999, 211–244. Britain Thinks for Museums Association. Public Perceptions of – and Attitudes to – the Purposes of Museums in Society, 2013, www.museumsassociation.org/news/03042013-public-­ attitudes-research-published (accessed 4 April 2013). Bruckner, P. The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism, Princeton and Oxford, 2010. Case, T.I., M.J. Oaten and R.J. Stevenson. ‘Disgust and Moral Judgement’, in Emotions, Imagination and Moral Reasoning, eds R. Langdon and C. Mackenzie, New York and Hove, 2012, 195–218. Christov-Moore, L., E. Simpson, G. Coudé, K. Grigaityte, M. Iacoboni and P.F. Ferrari. ‘Empathy: Gender Effects in Brain and Behaviour’, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 46, 4 (2014): 604–627. Cubitt, G. ‘Bringing it Home: Making Local Meaning in 2007 Bicentenary Exhibitions’, Slavery and Abolition 30, 2 (2009): 259–275. den Hollander, J., H. Paul and R. Peters. ‘Introduction: The Metaphor of Historical Distance’, History and Theory 50, 4 (2011): 1–10. Dudley, S. ‘Museum Materialities: Objects, Sense and Feeling’, in Museum Materialities: Objects, Engagements, Interpretations, ed. S.H. Dudley, London and New York, 2010, 1–17. Fitzgerald, C. and P. Goldie. ‘Thick Concepts and their Role in Moral Psychology’, in Emotions, Imagination and Moral Reasoning, eds R. Langdon and C. Mackenzie, New York and Hove, 2012, 219–236. Forgas, J.P. ‘Introduction: The Role of Affect in Social Cognition’, in Feeling and Thinking: The Role of Affect in Social Cognition, ed. J.P. Forgas, Cambridge and Paris, 2000. Gardner, H. Multiple Intelligences: The Theory in Practice. A Reader, New York, 1993. Golding, V. ‘Inspiration Africa! Using Tangible and Intangible Heritage to Promote Social Inclusion amongst Young People with Disabilities’, in Museums and their Communities, ed. S. Watson, London, 2007, 358–371. Hawes, D.J. and M.R. Dadds. ‘Revisiting the Role of Empathy in Childhood: Pathways to Antisocial Behaviour’, in Emotions, Imagination and Moral Reasoning, eds R. Langdon and C Mackenzie, New York and Hove, 2012, 45–70. Hooper-Greenhill, E. Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture, London and New York, 2000. ———. Museums and Education: Purpose, Pedagogy, Performance, London and New York, 2007. Imperial War Museum North Guidebook, Northampton, 2010. Langdon, R. and C. Mackenzie. ‘Introduction: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives on Moral Cognition’, in Emotions, Imagination and Moral Reasoning, eds R. Langdon and C Mackenzie, New York and Hove, 2012, 1–14. Nussbaum, M. Cultivating Humanity. A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education, Cambridge, 1997. Oakeshott, M. On History: And other Essays, Indianapolis, 1999. Oatley, K. ‘From the Emotions of Conversation to the Passions of Fiction’, in Feelings and Emotions, eds A.S.R Manstead, N. Frijda and A Fischer, Cambridge, 2004, 98–116.



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Otero-Pailos, J., J. Gaiger and S. West. ‘Heritage Values’, in Understanding Heritage in Practice, ed. S. West, Manchester and New York, 2010, 47–87. Peters, E., D. Västfjäll, T. Gärling and P. Slovic. ‘Affect and Decision Making: A “Hot” Topic’, Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, Special Issue: The Role of Affect in Decision Making, 19, 2 (2006): 79–85. Phillips, M. ‘Rethinking Historical Distance from Doctrine to Heuristic’, History and Theory 50, 4 (2011): 11–23. Ravenscroft, I. ‘Fiction, Imagination and Ethics’, in Emotions, Imagination and Moral Reasoning, eds R. Langdon and C Mackenzie, New York and Hove, 2012, 71–89. Reddy, W.M. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions, Cambridge, 2001. Rickly-Boyd, J.M. ‘Authenticity and Aura: A Benjaminian Approach to Tourism’, Annals of Tourism Research 39, 1 (2011): 269–289. Rosaldo, M.Z. ‘Toward an Anthropology of Self and Feeling’, in Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion, eds R.A. Shweder and R.A. LeVine, Cambridge, 1987, 137–157. Sandell, R., J. Dodd and R. Garland Thomson, eds. Re-Presenting Disability: Activism and Agency in the Museum, London and New York, 2010. Sandell, R. and E. Nightingale. Museums, Equality and Social Justice, London and New York, 2012. Smith, A. The Cultural Foundations of Nations: Hierarchy, Covenant and Republic, Malden and Oxford, 2008. Smith, L. ‘“Man’s Inhumanity to Man” and Other Platitudes of Avoidance and Misrecognition: An Analysis of Visitor Responses to Exhibitions Marking the 1807 Bicentenary’, Museum and Society 8, 3 (2010): 193–214. Southgate, B. Postmodernism in History: Fear or Freedom?, London, 2003. Watson, S. ‘Myth, Memory and the Senses in the Churchill Museum’, in Museum Materialities: Objects, Engagements, Interpretations, ed. S.H. Dudley, London and New York, 2010, 204–223. ———. ‘Emotions in the History Museum’, in Museum Theory: An Expanded Field. The International Handbooks of Museum Studies, Volume I, eds. A. Witcomb and K. Message, volume editors S. Macdonald and H. Rees Leahy, Hoboken, 2015, 283–301, http:// onlinelibrary.wiley.com/book/10.1002/9781118829059 ———, R. Kirk and J. Steward. ‘Arsenic, Wells and Herring Curing: Making New Meanings in an Old Fish Factory’, in Museum Making, Narratives, Architectures, Exhibitions, eds S. MacLeod, L. Hourston Hanks and J. Hale, London, 2012, 157–168.

Sheila Watson is a senior lecturer in the School of Museum Studies at Leicester University (U.K.). She joined the department in 2003 and was formerly a school teacher and then a museum practitioner. She is currently Programme Director of the Heritage and Interpretation MA and Director of Flexible Learning. As a historian by training she is fascinated by how the past is understood and used in society. Her current research interests include emotions in museums, community participation in heritage, museums and national identity and the construction of histories in heritage sites.

CHAPTER

5

Dutch Dealings with the Slavery Past Contexts of an Exhibition Alex van Stipriaan

Confronting a nation with the less glorious, or even horrific dimensions of its history is a sensitive undertaking. Who wants to be a descendant of the bad guys? It might be even more sensitive to confront a nation with present-day legacies of such a past. Who wants to be accused of still belonging to the bad guys? Still, this is exactly what many cultural heritage workers and  educators were dealing with during their preparations of all kinds of events and productions for the 150th anniversary of the abolition of Dutch slavery in 2013. How were they to avoid simple victim and guilt schemes and to seduce people to contemplate things they would rather not think about? Of course, there are many ways to approach this problem. Much depends on who wants to present what to whom and to what purpose. Or, to be more specific, it is about representation: who speaks, how, why, and for whom? Before I present the specific case of the Black & White project at the Amsterdam Tropenmuseum, we need to understand some of the challenges involved in making public history on a contested past: slavery and its legacies. Therefore, I will address four dimensions or spheres in Dutch society where the slavery past is up against such challenges: the public sphere; the government, as representatives of the public sphere; academia, studying society and its history; and, last but not least, education and public history (museums, documentaries, magazines), presenting scholarly findings as well as popular developments. Notes for this section begin on page 105.



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The Public Sphere This is a highly heterogeneous and fluid domain, as it is characterized by a diversity of socio-economic classes, ethnicities, religions, generations and political preferences and diversified views of gender and sexuality. This diversity scatters the stories people grow up with, which makes it hard to generalize about public opinion on a nation’s past, not to mention its ­present-day legacies. Who, then, is the inheritor of a nation’s past? Is everyone living within the borders of the present-day Netherlands an inheritor of the Dutch slavery past? Or is it just the descendants of those who lived in the Netherlands in 1863, the year of Abolition/Emancipation,1 and are still living in that territory today? This means that about two-fifths of the population are as foreign to that past as any other foreigner because they immigrated sometime after 1863. Twenty per cent of the population are no more than third-generation inhabitants of the Netherlands. What complicates it even more is the fact that this last group consists of descendants of the enslaved, approximately two per cent of the Dutch population. This makes it even more doubtful that the people of the Netherlands share a common opinion about their slavery past. Nor is there any common ground amongst the native Dutch population. Many can be heard to say that their ancestors were common labourers, simple peasants, servants, in short, subalterns, who had a hard life too. So how on earth, they say, can they be considered to be the inheritors of a horrible past in which they were also victims of the ruling classes? The solution to this dilemma could be the position that once people identify with a nation, they also adopt its history, or at least the outcomes or benefits of that history, although that still is hard to imagine for those whose ancestors were enslaved. This, of course, does not mean to say that identification is exclusive in this trans-national world; on the contrary, people can be inheritors of more than one national history, and of local and world history at the same time. Until recently, the overall majority of people in the Netherlands actually had no idea about a Dutch slavery past whatsoever. This is now changing rapidly. The best indicator for this is a survey held by the most popular history magazine among representative samples of the Dutch population, asking which episode in Dutch history they found the most embarrassing.2 In the year 2000, 7 per cent put slavery/slave trade at the top of their list; this went up to 16 per cent in 2004 and rose to 24 per cent in 2008, making it the general number one of Dutch historical atrocities ever, i.e., worse than the Second World War, the ultimate benchmark in Dutch history. To this quarter of the population we can add those who think that slavery was bad,

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but that some other episode in history was worse. It is unclear how big this part is exactly, but it does mean that a substantial part of the Dutch population is aware and ashamed of the slavery past. There is, of course, also a very substantial part of the population that is either not aware of this past at all, or that is aware but not embarrassed or ashamed. An example of the latter is a statement posted on an internet forum for Dutch seniors, about Members of Parliament who addressed the theme of the Dutch slavery past in Parliament: ‘We are not responsible. Obviously they are still afflicted with a “do away with us” mentality. Let these persons resign from Parliament’.3 Public opinion, therefore, is differentiated and divided on the subject of the slavery past. It is not commonly accepted as a fact of history we all share, like the Eighty Years War against Spain or the lost football match final against Germany in 1974. The best example of the sensitivity of history that is not commonly shared is probably the recent public debate in the Netherlands on the question of whether Saint Nicolas’s helpmates, blackfaced Black Petes, are racist or not. Some say they are related to the slavery past and illustrative of Dutch racism, or at least a relic of a past that should be done away with as soon as possible. Others cling to the idea that Black Pete is part of an innocent Dutch tradition for children, who has nothing to do with racism at all and who got blackened by climbing through chimneys to give presents to children. This heated ‘debate’ has been accompanied by bomb scares and numerous death threats.

The Government The second sphere in Dutch society where challenges about the slavery past can be encountered is the institution that, in changing compositions, represents the majority of the people: the government. This, obviously, is also a problematic sphere because if a government is anything, it is inclined to engage in political opportunism and not inclined to deal with a contested past, despite itself having played a dominant role in that past. Obviously, the Dutch state provided a legal and political basis as well as the infrastructure for slavery. It was also the government that eventually, at least formally, abolished slavery. There can be no doubt at all that the Dutch government held responsibility for slavery. After 1863, however, when former enslaved people had become free citizens and former slave owners had been compensated for their lost property, the Dutch government ceased to feel any more need to deal with its slavery past in any way. This attitude only changed more than a century later when the Dutch government began to be challenged by immigrant groups from Suriname



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and the Dutch Caribbean in the late 1990s to face up to a slavery past it had facilitated for so long and that was now, in retrospect, coming to be considered a crime against humanity. In 1998, the Afro-Dutch women’s movement Sophiedela presented a petition to the Dutch Parliament called Traces of Slavery, in which they demanded a monument to commemorate slavery. Eventually, this demand was accepted by the Dutch government. After a few years of negotiations and fights between Dutch policymakers, on the one hand, and the National Platform Slavery Past, uniting a large number of Afro-Dutch associations, on the other, a national monument was erected in Amsterdam and unveiled by the Queen and the Prime Minister in 2002. One year later, the national institute for commemorating and studying the Dutch slavery past (NiNsee), funded by the government, opened its doors. A third outcome was the production of a school TV series on Dutch slavery, also funded by the government.4 One year before the slavery monument was unveiled, the Dutch Minister attending the UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, had said that Dutch slavery had been a ‘great injustice done in the past’ for which he, on behalf of the government, expressed his ‘deep remorse’. Since that day, representatives of the Dutch government have repeated these or similar words at least once every year. However, the word apology or apologies was not used once, which was mainly a matter of money. While still in Durban, the very same Dutch Minister, Roger van Boxtel, declared that ‘our Cabinet feels that paying for reparations is not a proper way to recognize that slavery was a black page in our history’.5 Paying for a monument, an institute and a TV series, however, was considered to be an instance of good governance and ‘a stimulus to improve the position of ethnic minorities in their active citizenship’.6 The times have changed rapidly since then. In 2008, the former Minister  for Integration Affairs, Rita Verdonk, an immensely popular leader of her own populist party at the time, received a lot of positive response  when  she observed: ‘They want to erect slavery monuments everywhere in the Netherlands and now they also want to abolish our Saint Nicolas  feast (because of Black Pete)!!’7 Although Verdonk retreated from the political stage, the tone of the political debate has become only tougher and more intolerant since then, and those using this rhetoric now have a substantial representation in Parliament and other political forums. The slavery past, therefore, is a far from generally accepted part of Dutch political awareness. On the contrary, one of the aims of right-wing politicians appears to be to restore a conspiracy of silence on this past. In 2012, the government withdrew its funding of the NiNsee institute, less than ten years after it had helped to found this slavery institute.8

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Academia The third sphere in the present context of the Dutch slavery past is academic research, which is also subject to intensive debate. However, it is a less fluid and more stable sphere than the previous two. At the same time, however, it is less accessible to the general public. Slavery, the slave trade, marronage and slave resistance have been studied by academic researchers in the Netherlands more or less since the 1940s/1950s. However, it was only from the 1970s that its production became more substantial. Between 1970 and 2000, two to three books and some five articles a year on average were published on slave-related topics, including quite a few PhD dissertations. Over the next decade, this has increased again. I counted at least four books a year on average as well as at least some six to seven articles a year, probably more, published in academic journals. At  present, there are at least some thirty researchers working on Dutch slavery-related topics. About one-third of these are descendants of formerly enslaved Africans, meaning that some sort of Afro-emancipation has indeed occurred in this part of academia. Of course, these figures do not say anything about the contents of what is published about the Dutch slavery past. In former publications, I have tried to show that it is possible to differentiate between a white (neo-)­colonial and a black postcolonial position in research, and that these positions are not necessarily linked to skin colour.9 Rather, they are linked to historical perspective: whose story do they mean to present, from what angle, with what kind of analysis and relating to what meta-historical narrative. This means, of course, that there is no common Dutch academic historical viewpoint in relation to the slavery past. Even the differentiation into black and white perspectives is not something that is widely agreed upon. On the contrary. Let me take myself as an example. I have been grouped by some in one corner with the most Eurocentric, white historian of slavery in the Netherlands, but this historian does not want me to be in his corner at all, and we consider each other adversaries. I have also been accused of not sufficiently stressing the economic exploitation of the enslaved, which would imply a white approach, whereas a black historian described me as an example of a white historian with a black perspective in a recent issue of a scholarly history journal.10 Obviously, the question of perspective is decisive but complicated, and there is absolutely no common approach of academia towards the Dutch slavery past. The most reassuring aspect of the debate is that as long as there is a debate ongoing, there is less likelihood of the conspiracy of silence returning to cover up this part of history once more.



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Education and Public History This dimension may be the most important because history as presented in schools and museums is meant mainly for the future generation. It has an aura of ‘truth’, legitimized as such by teachers, textbooks, curators and probably even more so by the State, as it is the State that determines the attainment targets of what children should know when they finish school. This implies that what is not taught or learned must obviously be of lesser importance. Since the 1990s, slavery has been one of the educational core goals (kerndoelen) formulated by the Ministry of Education that schoolchildren in secondary education should learn about. This has been even more formalized since a state commission formulated a national historical canon, in which ‘Slavery’ is one of the fifty so-called ‘windows’ on Dutch history. Children have to be familiar with at least three historical concepts relating to the theme of slavery: the transatlantic slave trade, plantation colony and abolition.11 So, obviously, a lot has changed since the days I went to school when only one sentence in my secondary school history book was dedicated to the Dutch slavery past: ‘Around 1860 slavery was abolished, first in the East and then in the West [Indies]’.12 One of my former students, Lucia Hogervorst, studied the way in which slavery has been presented in history school books for primary education since the 1950s.13 Very briefly, her findings were as follows: • 1950s: no mention or very briefly; often no more than one sentence • 1970s: no mention or very briefly, though a bit more than before, mainly on slavery in the U.S.A. • 1990s/2000s: mention of slavery in every textbook, substantially more and with a better balance between Dutch and North American slavery • In three of the four latest methods, personalized stories are presented to make the school children empathize with enslaved children in the past; there is also a new focus on slave resistance and marronage, and the word ‘negro’ has been replaced by ‘African’. In 2011, the Amsterdam council asked researcher Ineke Mok to investigate the attention given to slavery in secondary school history books, which showed the following outcome in Table 5.1. There are some major differences. Feniks not only dedicates the fewest pages to slavery, but most of these also focus on slavery in the U.S.A. and mention barely anything on the Dutch slavery past. The opposite is true of Memo and Sprekend Verleden, which have the most pages, with a substantial part of these being dedicated to Suriname and much fewer to the former Dutch Antilles. Obviously, it matters what book is used in school.

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Table 5.1  Number of pages on slavery in Dutch history textbooks per type of education. 2/100 = 2 of 100 pages dedicated to slavery (Africa and/or United States and/or Suriname and Dutch Caribbean); ? = no data available. Source: I. Mok, ‘Juf, was dat écht zo?’ Lessen over slavernij in het Amsterdamse voortgezet onderwijs. Report to the Amsterdam council, DMO, April 2011. History textbook

level 1 & 2 vmbo

level 2 & 3 havo

level 2 & 3 vwo

-Feniks -Geschiedenis Werkplaats -Memo -Sprekend Verleden

2/100 (2%) 2/100 (2%) 5/100 (5%) ?

2/120 (1.7%) ? 3/119 (2.5%) 11/180 (6.1%)

3/120 (2.5%) 9/180 (5%) 11/140 (7.9%) 11/180 (6.1%)

Table 5.2  Number of teaching hours dedicated to slavery by 16 Dutch history teachers. Source: I. Mok, ‘Juf, was dat écht zo?’ Lessen over slavernij in het Amsterdamse voortgezet onderwijs. Report to the Amsterdam council, DMO, April 2011. Teaching hours

Teachers

Mainly Dutch (NL) or U.S. slavery

0−1 c. 2 3−5 6−9 > 10

1 6 5 2 2

U.S. NL + U.S. NL + U.S. mainly NL mainly NL

What matters even more is the attitude of teachers towards the theme of slavery. In this small survey, sixteen teachers at Amsterdam secondary schools were asked how much time they spent on slavery (see Table 5.2). There is quite some differentiation here. Most schoolchildren in the lower level of secondary school have two years of two teaching hours of history per week, that is 160 teaching hours of history in total. This means that five hours is about 3 per cent of the total number, and ten hours between 6 and 7 per cent. The latter is quite substantial, considering that history covers not only Dutch history but also world history. Most teachers tried to enliven their classes on slavery. Three paid for class visits to the NiNsee institute, which hosted a permanent exhibition on slavery; one showed an episode of the TV series Roots; two showed Spielberg’s film Amistad; and seven showed parts, or all, of the school TV series on the Dutch slavery past made in 2002–2003. This brings us from history at school to public history in general as we know that a substantial number of adults also watch school television. Therefore, about 100,000 adults probably watched the school TV series on slavery when it was broadcast in 2003 and 2004. We know for sure how



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many people saw the new series recently produced by public television, broadcast in September and October 2011: some 650,000 on average for each of its five parts, a considerable number of viewers for what is considered to be a serious subject. These viewer numbers do not include viewers who saw the repeat broadcast during those weeks, nor the internet broadcast, nor its complete rebroadcast in 2013. It was a positive decision to produce the series and to broadcast it on prime time (Sunday evenings at 8.15 p.m.). Obviously, this does not say anything about the contents of the series, but before I spend a few words on that below, we can conclude that a lot has changed on the history of slavery in the public domain since the end of the 1990s. There were two permanent exhibitions on slavery: one at the Tropenmuseum and one at NiNsee. This last institute has now been closed down, however. The recently re-opened Rijksmuseum, which is also a national historical museum and which received spectacular reviews, has only a guiding app on colonial history including slavery. Over the past decade, quite a few temporary exhibitions have been dedicated to slavery; novels on slavery have been published, both for adults and for children; several films, documentaries, theatre plays and picture books have been produced. A substantial number of projects and events were launched in 2013, a commemoration year, but the majority of these took place in Amsterdam, much less so in the rest of the country. This brings me to some critical notes. First of all, we should raise the question of whether the silence on the Dutch slavery past has been broken. I think it has been: it is harder and harder for anyone living in the Netherlands not to have heard about the slavery past. The next question, of course, is whether the silence on this past has been broken sufficiently and definitely. Then my answer must be no, absolutely not, for both quantitative and qualitative reasons. Quantity is under threat. Not only was the NiNsee institute closed down after only nine years, but the political and economic climate is such that there is a real chance that, after all the celebrations and events in 2013, it will be hard to put slavery-related topics back on the agenda or keep them there. The example of the U.K. in 2007–2008 has shown as much.14 A qualitative threat to the way in which the Dutch slavery past is presented is the tendency to downplay it. This is the case in academia, where some stress the financial insignificance of the Dutch slave trade or the fact that it was part and parcel of the colonial project like everywhere else. Views like these can also be heard in the public history domain as well, statements such as: without a doubt slavery was very bad, but let us not forget that for a long time labourers in Europe had a bad time too. A recent example of such downplaying was evident in the TV series on slavery, which was rather unbalanced in its attention for defenders or relativists and the opposition

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against slavery and the impact of its legacies. However, I am still glad that the series was broadcast because it makes it even harder not to know that the Netherlands has a slavery past. At the same time, however, the series, which was researched for several years, shows how hard it is to present a balanced and inclusive story. Cultural heritage of the slavery past can be found in all corners of this nation, from slave-owners’ mansions and abolitionist objects down to racist ideologies and colourful paintings in museums. Meanwhile, however, the descendants of the enslaved have come to live here as well, and they have brought their legacies of this history with them. If we want to take today’s history seriously, then we should redo our presentations of this history and at least examine the question if and how it continues to influence our time. This is exactly what we tried to do when I launched an exhibition project in the Amsterdam Tropenmuseum on legacies of slavery and the relation between black and white in the Netherlands.

Black & White At a very early stage, somewhere in 2008, I asked the management of the Tropenmuseum if they would approve the staging a substantial exhibition in 2013 to tie in with the expected commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the Dutch empire in that year. They almost immediately did, for several reasons. The national slavery monument, located in the park behind the museum, has served as the heart of the Keti Koti festival every 1st of July and was expected to play an even more central role in 2013. The NiNsee institute, moreover, was housed on the other side of the street in an annex of the Tropenmuseum, which also showed a permanent exhibition on the Dutch slavery past of some 200 m², with some loans from the Tropenmuseum. Even more important perhaps was the fact that the Tropenmuseum itself had been the first museum in the Netherlands to show a permanent presentation on slavery in ‒ mainly ‒ Suriname since 1999. Another important reason was that museums in the U.K. had just finished a successful bicentennial commemoration of the abolition of the slave trade in 2008. Finally, the Netherlands were still in a state of economic prosperity and so was the museum. Reasons enough, therefore, to say yes to a ­commemorational project in 2013 and to expect it to be successful. The only signs that things might become more problematic were the emotional debates that were taking place in Dutch society on the founding of a national slavery monument and the NiNsee institute.15 The first evaluations of the British bicentennial in 2007 had also shown that expectations tended to be highly divergent. It will be enlightening to turn to some of the British experiences before we take a look at those of the museum.



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Laurajane Smith observed that although 2007 was the perfect opportunity for museums to enlighten their audiences about British slave history and debates surrounding its present legacies, they, as well as their audiences, often hesitated to touch upon such an ‘emotionally demanding, socially divisive and politically contentious’ history.16 Part of this hesitation was caused by their attempt to appeal to and educate the regular, mainly white and not-too-well-informed audience, while at the same time including an AfroBritish audience and their perspectives on the past and the present. This implied that museums could not tell the ultimate ‘truth’ about Britishness anymore but had to become forums of debate and multivocality instead. According to Smith et al., it was virtually impossible to combine all these objectives, although the attempts were impressive. At least one of the results was a heightened awareness of the complexities involved in wanting to be more inclusive and the conviction that a lot more had to be invested and researched ‒ socially as well as financially ‒ to make inclusiveness sustainable. ‘One of the key lessons learned from the Bicentenary must surely be the importance of confronting the fear of addressing dissonant and ­contested subjects’. According to Emma Waterton, Britain’s postwar shift to an ethnically very diverse society and the recent retreat from multiculturalism have resulted in the construction of a British identification with memories that say ‘don’t look back on the horrors of the past; they are not present anymore; we/you can’t undo them; we are not to blame; so instead let’s move on; we/ you have never had it so good’. This trope, as Waterton calls it, seems to be inclusive; however, it evades painful historical legacies concerning racism and the negative positioning of marginalized groups.17 Although the Dutch situation differs from the British in having had a substantial Afro population in its midst for a much shorter length of time, most of the above-mentioned dilemmas are applicable to the Dutch situation as well. When I started the project at the Tropenmuseum, therefore, I knew we would have to deal with people ‒ members of staff as well as audiences ‒ who were largely convinced that the abolition of slavery should be celebrated but who did not want to see, let alone to address, dissonant and contested subjects. When I proposed staging an exhibition on the contemporary legacies of slavery in the Netherlands instead of an exhibition on the history of slavery in the Dutch Caribbean colonies, a number of staff members responded with remarks like: ‘we don’t have a collection on that’, or ‘I can’t visualize it; it seems to be more of a book to me than an exhibition’, or ‘our museum promotes, even celebrates multiculturalism and equality, so why stimulate negative feelings?’, or ‘let’s not overdo the problem where there is hardly any problem left; we’re all Dutch now’. Some just said: ‘Maybe we could

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do an exhibition on this theme in a smaller room rather than in the main hall because it will not attract a large audience, nor can it be translated into an attractive design’. Although it remains unclear if there were also other motives behind this kind of reasoning, it is a very important one in times of crisis and substantial financial cutbacks, which, some think, can only be overcome by putting on feel-good blockbuster exhibitions. Eventually, the museum decided that if there was enough to show and the design could be made attractive enough, the subject had enough potential after all to be shown in the main hall. This was a courageous step because still not everyone agreed, but it fitted into the museum’s track record of confronting sensitive or contested issues. However, this would be the first exhibition solely dedicated to this society, focusing on ourselves. This was new to a museum that had started out as a Colonial Museum before it turned into an anthropological museum with a special focus on international cooperation, with the latter focus having more recently been replaced by popular and contemporary non-Western art.18 Despite this innovative move, discussions, obviously, were not over yet and continued to show how hard it is to make a shift from talking about ‘the other’ to reflecting upon ‘the self’. For example, the proposed title of the exhibition, ‘Emancipation in Black and White’, was not only considered too complicated – emancipation was supposed to be linked to women’s liberation, not to black and white relations – but also too suggestive of antagonism between black and white and too much polarization. This was not the policy of the museum. Another example is the ongoing debate about terminology. In the Dutch language, Africans are called black, whereas Europeans are called something close to the English ‘fair’, but almost never ‘white’. There was also debate on the use of enslaved rather than slaves, the use of the very new term AfroDutch, and when to apply a term like ‘racist’. A third category of debate was on themes. Why should we only focus on the relationship between descendants of the enslaved and their enslavers, and not include other newcomers in Dutch society, such as Indonesians, or Turkish and Moroccan immigrants? There was also a great deal of opposition to making the Saint Nicolas figure of Black Pete (Zwarte Piet) part of the exhibition’s theme. To many he is just an innocent figure in a children’s feast, who happens to be black and has nothing to do with black and white relations. Finally, black and white sexuality as a theme was omitted without much debate for fear of turning something quite complicated into something cheap and vulgar. These and other issues were not only debated by members of the museum project group who prepared the exhibition, but they were also consciously introduced to a focus group or sounding board, which had been selected from



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our own social networks and consisted of black, white, young, senior, male, female, academic and non-academic participants. While the project group was almost completely white, mostly female, and all highly qualified, this much more diverse group, in which black voices often claimed more space than white, hardly ever spoke with one voice. This showed it was fairly representative. It also complicated things, however. The sounding board group, for example, did not agree with having a project title that stressed black as being different from white. Maybe they did not find that everything was in harmony now, but felt angry or afraid of stressing the idea of first and second rate, as in the formal distinction the Dutch government makes between indigenous (native) Dutch – autochtoon – and non-indigenous (new, foreign, immigrant) Dutch – allochtoon. On the other hand, they sometimes wanted to be more explicit and give more scope to the horrors of slavery and racism and stress unequal opportunities in this society. Of particular interest were their implicit exchanges about certain issues, such as when a perspective becomes too much of a passive victim narrative, or how many perspectives can be shown in an exhibition that is meant to attract a large audience. And who is actually speaking for whom, both on the sounding board and in the subsequent exhibition? In general, the making of the exhibition was an emancipatory process in itself. After almost a year of debate, for example, it turned out that those who had been opposed to a title with black and white in it now felt that Black & White was the perfect title. The marketing team concluded that the promotion campaign should centre on provocative statements, such as ‘The word Negro is an insult’, ‘Let’s stop talking about slavery’ and ‘Whites are still boss’. Others had discovered that Black Pete might indeed be a controversial issue, and that there were differences in being black or white in Dutch society. It is hard to tell whether all the museum staff were convinced of the necessity of this exhibition. What probably helped, however, while the exhibition was going on,19 is the approach that was chosen for it. The whole project, meaning the exhibition and an intensive programme of events scheduled to take place in and around the exhibition space, centred on a rather open and inviting question, not a statement: how have relationships between black and white people in the Netherlands developed since slavery was abolished? Starting with the apartheid of slavery overseas, now living together in this society, where do we stand today? And who are ‘we’? Under this umbrella question, we formulated a number of sub-questions, such as: what and who is actually black or white? Does people’s skin colour reveal who they are? What did we see when we were looking at each other in pre-war times, when this society was still predominantly white? Do changing numbers also change relations? Does the rise of black national role models mean that colour is not an issue anymore? Do we want to look alike? Do we want to share (everything)? Do we want to make room for each other and

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take each other into consideration? And is any answer to these questions all right? What would you answer if you had the other skin colour? The paintings, objects, photos, films, audio interviews, art objects and installations we selected or produced ourselves all had this questioning atmosphere. They invited the audience to look at and to reflect upon themselves and to discuss their thoughts with others. The latter seemed to happen much more often than is generally the case with exhibitions. A very telling example in this regard is a famous picture of the Dutch national football team having lunch during the 1996 European Championship in the U.K.. The players are seated around three tables, with all the black players sitting together at one table and all the white players sitting at the two other tables. The white coach stands in the middle. This picture triggers a large number of questions and opinions. Have the white guys excluded the black guys, or the other way around? Is it only natural to be more comfortable with people who look the same as you do, and should we change this, like we have changed so many ‘natural’ things over time? Was this particular seating plan arranged from above, in this case by the coach, or was it like this every day? Do we realize how accustomed we have become to having black national heroes representing the Netherlands on the world stage? And is it like this in every sphere of Dutch society? The list of questions is endless, and so is the list of answers. Most questions were formulated by visitors themselves, and the museum did not provide any answers, although its nuanced and informative approach left little room for blatant racism.

Conclusion The Black & White project dealt with all four dimensions of Dutch society where challenges about the slavery past and its legacies could be encountered: the public sphere, from the museum staff down to the potential audience, with preconceived ideas about Dutch society and its history; the government, which obviously plays a role in black and white relations and which is also the museum’s main funding agency; academia, which provided much of the research that went into the exhibition; and, of course, the sphere of education and public history, in which the museum itself is a prominent player. The questioning rather than declarative approach of this project has worked well in attracting and connecting the different spheres that were dealing with contested histories. The government dramatically cut back the museum’s budget, on the one hand, but subsidized the Black & White project through its commemoration fund20 and even held it up as an example for others, on the other. In the public sphere, the project appeared to be



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successful as well, and the attention it received in audio-visual, written and social media was quite overwhelming. One factor which helped was that at the start of the exhibition, the question of whether Black Pete was racist or not and the underlying question of whether Dutch society was actually racist or not, resurfaced on a nationwide scale. The open and questioning approach of the project, using popular culture and art to translate complicated scholarly or political materials into familiar questions and dilemmas, as well as the accompanying events, appeared to be helpful in attracting a highly diverse audience. The questioning approach also appeared to be working on an individual level, as shown in visitor responses given in a number of interactive devices in the exhibition. These invited visitors to respond to issues such as being looked at as being ‘other’, stereotyping, the Black Pete debate (design a new one, or delete him) and particular dilemmas and statements (for instance: how acceptable is racial profiling by the police?). Responses turned out to be highly mixed and divergent. On a wall surrounding a kind of plaza at the end of the exhibition, people could stick up notes with their opinions. It was almost moving to see notes saying ‘Black Pete is racist!’ and ‘Black Pete should stay!’ hanging side by side. There is a final aspect of this project which did not work well, or rather, which was still not questioning enough. The exhibition was still in danger of presenting a white gaze at black. It did question ‘self’ – both black and white – but it hardly questioned whiteness enough. Perhaps this is a theme for the next project. In any case, this project showed that the authority of public history lies not in its ability to translate exclusive knowledge and explain how it really is or was but in its ability to ask inclusive questions.

Notes 1. Abolition is the term used for the (white) action of making a juridical end to the system of slavery; emancipation is the term used for the process of setting enslaved blacks free. 2. Historisch Nieuwsblad, July 2000, 2004, 2008. 3. www.seniorweb.nl (accessed 15 September 2011). 4. M. Balkenhol, ‘Tracing Slavery; An Ethnography of Diaspora, Affect, and Cultural Heritage in Amsterdam’ (PhD dissertation, University of Amsterdam, 2014). 5. M. Duursma, ‘Nazaten Slaven Krijgen Geen Geld’, NRC Handelsblad, 30 August 2001. 6. Vaststelling van de begroting van de uitgaven en de ontvangsten van het Ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken en Koninkrijksrelaties (VII) voor het jaar 2002. 7. R. Verdonk, Founding Speech, Trots Op Nederland, 3 April 2008, Amsterdam, www.refdag.nl/media/2008/20080404_Speech_Rita_Verdonk.pdf (accessed 10 March 2015). 8. The institute still survives due to a small subsidy of the municipal government of Amsterdam and is now generously housed in some offices of the Amsterdam Municipal Archives.

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9. For example, A. van Stipriaan, ‘Disrupting the Canon: The Case of Slavery’, in Beyond the Canon: History for the Twenty-first Century, eds M. Grever and S. Stuurman, Basingstoke, 2007, 205–219. 10. See P.D. Gomes, ‘Slavernijgeschiedenis in de Landelijke Dagbladen’, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 124, 3 (2011): 351–367, 397; P.D. Gomes, ‘If You Don’t Tell it Like it Was, it Can Never Be as it Ought To Be’, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 125, 2 (2012): 237–241; P.C. Emmer and G.J. Oostindie, ‘White is White and Black is Black and the Twain Shall Never Meet? Response to Patricia D. Gomes, Slavernijgeschiedenis in de Landelijke Dagbladen’, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 125, 2 (2012): 233–237. 11. Vaststelling van de begrotingsstaat van het Ministerie van Onderwijs, Cultuur en Wetenschap (VII) voor het jaar 2006, TK 30 300 VIII, no. 43. 12. W. Beemsterboer and C.J. Canters, Novem, Wereld in Wording, The Hague, [1954] 1971, 13th revised edn. 13. L. Hogervorst, ‘Is de Slaaf Slecht Bedeeld in het Onderwijs? Een Onderzoek naar Beeldvorming rond Slavernij in de Naoorlogse Nederlandse Geschiedenisboekjes’, Oso, Tijdschrift voor Surinaamse Taalkunde, Letterkunde en Geschiedenis 25, 2 (2006): 56–67. 14. See Museums and Society 8, 3 (2010), special issue on museums and the bicentenary of the abolition of the British slave trade. 15. See A. van Stipriaan, ‘The Long Road to a Monument’, in Facing Up to the Past: Perspectives on the Commemoration of Slavery from Africa, the Americas and Europe, ed. G.  Oostindie, Kingston, 2001, 118–123; D.M. Metz, ‘Erkennen en Herdenken: Het Nationaal Monument Nederlands Slavernijverleden Gezien in de Ontwikkeling van de Nederlandse Herdenkingscultuur’ (Unpublished MA thesis, University of Amsterdam, 2002); J.C. Kardux, ‘Slavery, Memory, and Citizenship in Transatlantic Perspective’, in American Multiculturalism After 9/11: Transatlantic Perspectives, eds D. Rubin and J. Verheul, Amsterdam, 2009, 165–179. 16. L. Smith, G. Cubitt and E. Waterton, ‘Guest Editorial: Museums and the Bicentenary of the Abolition of the British Slave Trade’, Museums and Society 8, 3 (2010): 125. 17. E. Waterton, ‘Humiliated Silence: Multiculturalism, Blame and the Trope of “Moving On”’, Museums and Society 8, 3 (2010): 130. 18. D. van Dartel, ed., Tropenmuseum for a Change!; Present Between Past and Future. A Symposium Report, Amsterdam, KIT Publishers, 2009. 19. This chapter was written during the second month of the exhibition, which lasted six more months (1 November 2013–1 July 2014). 20. Stichting Herdenking Slavernijverleden 2013.

References Balkenhol, M. ‘Tracing Slavery; An Ethnography of Diaspora, Affect, and Cultural Heritage in Amsterdam’ (PhD dissertation, University of Amsterdam, 2014). Beemsterboer, W. and C.J. Canters. Novem, Wereld in Wording [Novem, World in the Making], The Hague, [1954] 1971, 13th revised edn. Duursma, M. ‘Nazaten Slaven Krijgen Geen Geld’ [Slave Descendants do not get Money], NRC Handelsblad, 30 August 2001. Emmer, P.C. and G.J. Oostindie, ‘White is White and Black is Black and the Twain Shall Never Meet? Response to Patricia D. Gomes, Slavernijgeschiedenis in de Landelijke Dagbladen’, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 125, 2 (2012): 233–237. Gomes, P.D. ‘Slavernijgeschiedenis in de Landelijke Dagbladen’ [Slavery History in the National Newspapers], Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 124, 3 (2011): 351–367.



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———. ‘If You Don’t Tell it Like it Was, it Can Never be as it Ought to be’, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 125, 2 (2012): 237–241. Hogervorst, L. ‘Is de Slaaf Slecht Bedeeld in het Onderwijs? Een Onderzoek naar Beeldvorming rond Slavernij in de Naoorlogse Nederlandse Geschiedenisboekjes’ [Is Slavery Poorly Addressed in Education? A Study on the Representation of Slavery in Post-War Dutch History Textbooks], Oso, Tijdschrift voor Surinaamse Taalkunde, Letterkunde en Geschiedenis 25, 2 (2006): 56–67. Kardux, J.C. ‘Slavery, Memory, and Citizenship in Transatlantic Perspective’, in American Multiculturalism after 9/11: Transatlantic Perspectives, eds D. Rubin and J. Verheul, Amsterdam, 2009, 165–179. Metz, D.M. ‘Erkennen en Herdenken: Het Nationaal Monument Nederlands Slavernijverleden Gezien in de Ontwikkeling van de Nederlandse Herdenkingscultuur’ [Acknowledging and Commemorating: The National Monument to Commemorate the History of Slavery in the Development of Dutch Memory Culture] (Unpublished MA thesis, University of Amsterdam, 2002). Museums and Society 8, 3 (2010). Special issue on museums and the bicentenary of the abolition of the British slave trade. Smith, L., Cubitt, G. and E. Waterton. ‘Guest Editorial: Museums and the Bicentenary of the Abolition of the British Slave Trade’, Museums and Society 8, 3 (2010): 122–126. van Dartel, D. ed. Tropenmuseum for a Change!; Present between Past and Future. A Symposium Report, Amsterdam, KIT Publishers, 2009. van Stipriaan, A. ‘The Long Road to a Monument’, in Facing up to the Past: Perspectives on the Commemoration of Slavery from Africa, the Americas and Europe, ed. G. Oostindie, Kingston, 2001, 118–123. ———. ‘Disrupting the Canon: The Case of Slavery’, in Beyond the Canon: History for the Twenty-first Century, eds M. Grever and S. Stuurman, Basingstoke, 2007, 205–219. Vaststelling van de begroting van de uitgaven en de ontvangsten van het Ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken en Koninkrijksrelaties (VII) voor het jaar 2002. [Establishment of the Budget of Expenses and Revenues of the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations (VII) for the Year 2002]. Vaststelling van de begrotingsstaat van het Ministerie van Onderwijs, Cultuur en Wetenschap (VII) voor het jaar 2006. [Establishment of the Budget of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (VII) for the Year 2006] (TK 30 300 VIII, no. 43). Verdonk, R. Founding speech, Trots Op Nederland [Proud of the Netherlands], 3 April 2008, Amsterdam, www.refdag.nl/media/2008/20080404_Speech_Rita_Verdonk.pdf (accessed 10 March 2015). Waterton, E. ‘Humiliated Silence: Multiculturalism, Blame and the Trope of “Moving on”’, Museums and Society 8, 3 (2010): 128–157.

Alex van Stipriaan is professor of Caribbean History at the Erasmus University Rotterdam (the Netherlands). For ten years he combined this position with a curatorship at the anthropological Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam. His final project there was the exhibition Black & White, on interethnic relations in the Netherlands since the abolition of slavery in 1863. Most of his academic research focuses on the history of Suriname, cultural heritage in the Dutch Caribbean, as well as processes of creolisation in the Black Atlantic. Within these fields he published extensively on themes varying from slavery to contemporary art, and from naming systems to the concept of ‘roots’.

CHAPTER

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Tagging Borobudur Heritage Education and the Colonial Past in Onsite and Online Museum Collections Susan Legêne

‘Colonial heritage and the national past’ was the title of one of the paper sessions at the 2013 conference ‘Tangible Pasts? Questioning Heritage Education’. However, what is ‘colonial heritage’? Many collections acquired in a colonial context are entwined with the colonial past, but does this provenance determine their heritage value? A dynamic and multi-perspective  approach to heritage as proposed by Van Boxtel and ­ others requires a critical understanding of the very process of heritage formation.1 The following chapter starts with a brief elaboration on colonial connotations of museum objects in order to discuss the meaning and value of ‘colonial heritage’ as a defining concept. I then argue that the tangible, visual and audio collections in museums might  tell much more than we teach. Many museums provide virtual access to their collections via the internet. Following new  navigation pathways through linked-data, while acknow­ ledging the importance of collection documentation, will enlarge the potential of such objects as historical sources. To achieve this in an educational context, I suggest a critical approach to the metadata and to metadata enrichment of existing collection documentation, while encouraging our students’ aspirations to challenge the pre-structured ‘order of things’ that museums offer online as an index of the ‘real’ museum world.2 Heritage education can teach how colonial relations played a major role in the structuring of this order. Notes for this section begin on page 124.



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Colonial Heritage? To answer the question what is colonial heritage and what does it mean in contemporary heritage education, we can rely on the definition of heritage education that is central to this volume: ‘an approach to teaching and learning that uses material and immaterial heritage as primary instructional resources to increase pupils’ understanding of history and culture’.3 Colonial heritage, then, might refer to architectural structures like buildings, city plans, monuments in a graveyard or public square, the names of streets, country houses, parks; it exists in tangible objects, audio and visual resources and intangible cultural practices with a meaning and interpretation that – as will be argued below – is entwined with both colonial encounters in the past and with contemporary postcolonial state formation. In the context of the Netherlands, objects from colonial times are kept in the storage rooms and displays of museums of all kinds, from maritime to history museums, national and provincial or district museums, ethnography, art or open-air museums. Such heritage is also kept in private homes, as in family photograph albums, precious books or textiles and other souvenirs from or related to colonial times. Many people trace their family lineage back to overseas colonial societies, connected to histories of colonial trade and colonization, the slave trade, indentured labour, migration. The more or less intangible traces of colonial encounters have become part of everyday life in our garden designs, in performing arts, language, literature, fashion, food and many more cultural expressions. In order to investigate the very notion of colonial heritage in the context of contemporary Dutch society, I ‘selected’ a modest collection of masterpieces from colonial times in the National Museum, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The museum website allowed me to store these as ‘Rotterdam 2013’ in ‘Mijn Rijks Studio’ (My National Museum Studio). Anyone can visit this selection.4 The Rijksmuseum reopened in 2013 after almost ten years of renovation, restoration and refurbishment. My virtual collection consists of objects (including paintings and drawings) now on display in various rooms of this new Rijksmuseum with captions that mention the colonial past. The screenshot of my collection (Figure 6.1) shows a number of these objects. Among the objects selected are a model of an East India ship, gold treasures – in 1894 the spoils of war – from the island of Lombok, and an early twentieth-century design chair of Coromandel wood decorated in batik on parchment by the Dutch artist Carel Adolph Lion Cachet. It also includes a drawing in watercolour on paper by the eleven-year-old Mohammed Toha who was a witness to the second Dutch military aggression in Yogyakarta in December 1948, some nineteenth-century life-size paintings (oil on paper) of Javanese court officials, the kris of the Sultan of Panamakan (Madura),

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Figure 6.1  Screenshot of ‘My Rijksmuseum’, 1 January 2014.

donated in 1834 to Governor General J.C. Baud, a ninth-century Head of the Buddha, part of Borobudur on Central Java donated in 1948 by Mr and Mrs van de Mandele-Vermeer, and a prestigious late nineteenth-century souvenir album with photographs of sugar plantations on Java. Some of these objects will be discussed in more detail below. Each object tells many stories; on display in the various galleries of the Rijksmuseum, next to thousands of other objects, they add an imperial dimension to the national history of the Netherlands.5 This description shows that my ‘Rotterdam 2013’ selection is more or less a random choice. Many more objects connected to the colonial past could have been selected from the Rijksmuseum stores or permanent display. Fifteen other objects for instance have been inserted in ‘The history of the Netherlands in 100 objects’ as references to Dutch overseas history between 1590 and 1750, colonial expansion between 1815 and 1940 and decolonization in Indonesia after 1945.6 Do such objects from the colonial past make a colonial heritage? A closer look at my selection reveals different forms of agency that at one time, before the objects turned into collection items, were implied in their acquisition (such as travelling, fighting, excavating, drawing, commercial intercourse, killing and plundering, sexual intercourse, receiving). This focus on the actors in the colonial past shows that the notion of colonial heritage refers to a process of meaning-making of our time. It is



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obvious that the objects selected in my ‘Rotterdam 2013’ selection were not made as colonial objects, nor were they collected as colonial heritage. The sultan’s kris donated to Governor General Baud, the Borobudur Buddha head brought to the Netherlands in 1948, the chair with batik decorations made in Holland, even Mohammed Toha’s drawings of the conquest of Yogyakarta by the Dutch special forces in Yogya in December 1948 – none of these were made as nor intended to become ‘colonial heritage’, and most of these items did not even enter the Rijksmuseum because of a connotation with the colonial past. So what do we mean by colonial heritage? The two words are equally important: ‘colonial’ is a dynamic concept with many historical as well as normative connotations of a history of commerce, colonization and imperialism, whereas ‘heritage’ implies testators (erflaters in Dutch, actors in the colonial past) and heirs (erfopvolgers). Acknowledging these objects as heritage denotes a self-understanding as heirs, and thus an acceptance of the benefits, debts, claims and moral obligations connected to this heritage. Heritage education is supposed to aim at arriving at this self-understanding as heirs (nationally, as a community, individually). As Maria Grever and Carla van Boxtel put it ‘heritage education contributes to a sense of connection and belonging that is crucial for citizenship’. It focuses on developing ‘shared cultural values and the appropriation of a shared history’.7 However, if this is indeed the aim of heritage education, I would argue that we should be critical with respect to the label of colonial heritage. Applying this label today runs the risk of perceiving Dutch society at large as heirs with no understanding of who the testators, whose histories our diverse society supposedly shares, actually were. Since we know the collectors through the museum’s object documentation and the colonial archives, colonial heritage in the context of the current postcolonial Netherlands could easily become a label that puts those collectors centre stage. With them as the middlemen between the colonial past and contemporary cultural heritage, the imperial past is ‘nationalized’ by juxtaposing the objects through their acquisition data to ‘other’ heritage that has no colonial connotation. This can be illustrated with three examples from my ‘Rotterdam 2013’ selection in Mijn Rijks Studio: the design chair, the Sultan’s kris and the Borobudur Buddha head. The first object is easy: the museum knows exactly from whom we inherited the chair with batik decorations. Its provenance refers to the artist Lion Cachet, the workplace where Lion Cachet experimented with the Javanese batik technique, and the family who owned and donated the chair. The Rijksmuseum canon of art history refers us to the English arts and crafts movement, with its implicit criticism of the machine and mass-made products and their poor design, as well as to art nouveau, Jugendstil and art deco. Dutch artists like Carel Lion Cachet, Jan Toorop, Chris Lebeau and others whose work is on display in

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the Rijksmuseum deliberately applied Javanese motives and techniques, like the traditional resist dye procedure of batik, as a style that embraced empire as a valuable contribution to Dutch culture.8 In contrast to this ‘Dutch design’, in many other cases the Rijksmuseum only informs us about the middlemen as testators – those who received or appropriated the objects and made sure that these were kept for future generations. As such, the kris donated by the ruler of Pamekasan, Mangkoe Adie Ningrat, implicitly tells the story of colonial power dynamics and how traditional rulers, symbolically ‘disarmed’, paid respect to the highest colonial authority.9 Somehow these different connotations are reinforced by today’s exhibition context: the design chair is on display in the Gallery on Twentieth-century Dutch Art and Culture; the kris is in the ‘timeless’ Special Collections Gallery – a precious thing of beauty among countless others. Such an alienation is even more evident with respect to my third example, the Borobudur Buddha head of Mrs Van de Mandele-Vermeer, on display as a singular art historical masterpiece in the Asian Pavilion, which mainly displays objects owned by the Association of Friends of Asian Art (see Figure 6.2).10 The Borobudur Buddha head entered the collection in 1948. This is mentioned in the caption to the object in the display room (no mention on the Rijksmuseum website). That date, three years after the end of the Second World War, indicates why this object came to the Netherlands: following the decolonization of Indonesia, hundreds of thousands of people (compulsorily or voluntarily) left what was no longer the Netherlands East Indies, to be resettled in the Netherlands.11 Since 1991 Borobudur has been a Unesco World Heritage site; ninth-century heads of the Buddha from Borobudur, excavated and collected in colonial times, can be found in museums all over the world, from the National Museum in Jakarta to the British Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum in New York and others. In the Netherlands, as well as the Rijksmuseum, the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam and the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden hold heads and even a complete Buddha statue from Borobudur.12 In Jakarta finds from Borobudur (among which a Borobudur Buddha head with Collection number 239) refer to Indonesia’s Hindu Javanese ancient past, as they do in the British Museum, the Rijksmuseum or any other museum. The acquisition history of these sculptures is closely connected – it all started with Sir Stamford Raffles’ interim rule over Java during the Napoleonic War in Europe in the early nineteenth century (and this is also key to the narrative on the Borobudur Buddha head in A History of the World in 100 Objects by the then British Museum’s director Neil MacGregor).13 However, despite this shared history of colonial archaeology, appropriation and a gradually wider global distribution of finds, the contexts in which the objects are now kept as precious cultural heritage differ fundamentally.



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Figure 6.2  Asian Pavilion at the Rijksmuseum. Head of a Buddha. (Photo: Rene den Engelsman)

In the Rijksmuseum, colonial heritage emerges as part of Dutch history; it is the bequest of the proverbial sugar daddy whose photograph album is now on display as a reference to how the nation once earned its wealth as a colonial empire.14 If we apply the label colonial heritage to the Borobudur Buddha head and any other object acquired in colonial times, it would just

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teach the colonial past as an episode in the long history of our own nation building in Europe, not of imperialism, or of the national history of, in our case, Indonesia. The latter would require another framing of the object. Most newly independent postcolonial states from after the Second World War, like Indonesia, foster their own references to a deeply rooted past which preceded colonial state formation during the heyday of modern imperialism. Heritage education with collections in the former colonial metropole – as in the Rijksmuseum or British Museum – can try to bring this perspective to visitors of these museums by framing the objects both historically and in terms of the provenance histories attached to them.15

Colonial Collections, Colonial Heritage, World Heritage The first conceptualization of this distinction between colonial heritage, on the one hand, and collections acquired in colonial contexts, on the other, happened in the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam. This ethnographic museum had been founded in 1864 as a Colonial Museum; in 1910 it became the museum of the Colonial Institute and after Indonesian independence was re-baptized Tropenmuseum in 1950. Between the early 1990s and 2008 it went through a complete refurbishment, a process in which I was involved.16 In order to create an explicit link between the history of the museum, its building and the collections on display in the other semi-permanent galleries and temporary exhibitions, the museum developed a separate gallery on colonial society in the Netherlands East Indies around 1910. Aware of its tradition of displaying objects that ‘metonymically [stood] for the distant “others” and distant places’,17 the Tropenmuseum now intended to represent the historical context of the collectors of today’s ethnographic collections. To this end it applied to the colonizers the same mode of ethnographic display with which the museum in the past had framed those ‘others’. In this process, deemed important in order to open up new international collaboration with ‘source communities’ with respect to display strategies and exchange of objects,18 the museum deliberately created a new collection category: the ‘colonial collection’. The label of colonial collection was applied to a broad range of items in the Tropenmuseum, from colonial furniture to visualizations of the colony in paintings or photographs, from hybrid objects like a batik table cover or ‘yogya silver’ cutlery, to museum display devices made in the Netherlands (for instance casts or life-sized wax mannequins or dioramas). Samples of colonial products, equipment for colonial knowledge production (such as the compass, or physical anthropologist Paul Broca’s eye colour cards), uniforms of colonial civil servants and many other items were now categorized



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as colonial collection items as well.19 In this reclassification process, the museum discovered many objects in its stores that previously had been dismissed for collections. They had been kept because of their value as exhibition props - not authentic but made with a great deal of craftsmanship and visual appeal. Integrated into the category of colonial collections now, they became an authentic source that allowed the museum staff to see how the colonizers themselves related to the established categories of ethnography that rule the ethnographic museum stores. It turned out that over the years, unacknowledged, the colonial collection items had played a major role in establishing cohesion within the ethnographic collections, while maintaining a bond with the Dutch colonialists whose heritage the museum keeps. Thus the ‘colonial collection’ is the real colonial heritage in the Tropenmuseum collections in general. It reveals how throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century ethnographic museums collected, recorded, studied and presented their collections and other resources, not so much in an orientation towards the past implied in our contemporary notion of heritage; rather, they expressed utopian, forward-looking colonial relationships within an imperial world. Colonialism, despite its overall heavy reliance on violence and suppression, was thought to be about progress and change. Collecting was an integral part of imperialism, of getting to know, to control, to mix with the people overseas. The material objects used in this very process of academic and museological research and meaning-making confirmed this notion of progress, based in Empire utopias that also resonate in the collections of national museums like the Rijksmuseum.20 The Tropenmuseum was not of course alone in its investigation of the history and contemporary meaning of its collections.21 In 2002 the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam was among the subscribers to the Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums. The declaration acknowledges the importance of provenance, the history of collecting attached to museum objects. However, it further argues, over time objects acquired as purchase, gift or division under conditions connected to violence, war and expansion, today ‘have become part of the museums that have cared for them, and by extension part of the heritage of the nations which house them’. It continues: ‘Today we are especially sensitive to the subject of a work’s original context, but we should not lose sight of the fact that museums too provide a valid and valuable context for objects that were long ago displaced from their original source’. Since ‘museums serve not just the citizens of one nation but the people of every nation’, the declaration argues against a narrowing of the focus of museums to issues of national belonging and ownership.22 In 2005–2006, a few years after this declaration, the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden and the National Museum in Jakarta took up

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the challenge of the ‘universal museum’ declaration, and in the project ‘Indonesia, the discovery of the past’, instead of universal value, they chose the more dynamic concept of ‘shared cultural heritage’. The project consisted of a joint catalogue and exhibition at two locations in Amsterdam and Jakarta that explored ways to share an imperial past by interpreting museum collections that originated from the same historical context – Dutch colonialism in the Netherlands East Indies. Many objects that had been collected as ensembles had ended up in two different national museums, in Jakarta and Leiden respectively. What was the meaning of the common origin of those objects in the context of the current national histories of Indonesia and the Netherlands?23 The guiding notion of shared heritage led to an active ‘heritage negotiation’ among the experts in the two museums who had specific interests in this collaboration. The project aimed at a ‘sharing of not only the material objects, but of how to narrate the past as well’.24 The latter – and this is important for heritage education – turned out to be not so easy. Based on common research, the two exhibitions in Jakarta and Amsterdam nevertheless displayed the same objects with rather different story-lines with respect to both ‘history’ (narrating the past) and ‘culture’ (or the archaeology of the objects).25 In the Dutch exhibition, for example, Borobudur and Singosari sculptures were on display in the context of the above mentioned shared legacy of colonial archaeology and the study of the ancient past, whereas in Indonesia they testified to the ancient culture and deep historical roots of the contemporary Indonesian nation state. In Indonesia objects that might have been collected in the context of, for instance, war, missionary activities, explorations or the exploitation of natural resources were displayed to strengthen a discourse on national unity in diversity (with restitution issues as a subtext). Their provenance histories were not important for that message, whereas through its focus on colonial exploration and knowledge production the Netherlands highlighted a broad range of (predominantly Dutch) colonial actors as collectors. In the Dutch context, the Indonesian perspective on cultural diversity was underexposed, with Islamic culture as the (colonial) blind spot. Since its introduction in 2009, the notion of shared cultural heritage has been entertained in Dutch cultural policies that aim at international heritage collaboration.26 Meanwhile, however, and perhaps in response to changes within Dutch society at large, the collaborative shared-heritage approach now seems to turn towards a mere nationalization of the imperial past within the Netherlands. This is the focus in the new Rijksmuseum display, as argued in the previous section of this chapter. Another indication was the decision of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to cease financing the Tropenmuseum, leading to the nationalization of these collections under the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science.27 Finally it resonates in



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the National Museum of Ethnology’s catalogue Masterpieces of Rijksmuseum Volkenkunde, published in 2013. The title suggests that these collections are not just ‘kept’ in the Netherlands as counterparts to other collections elsewhere, but that they belong to the Netherlands. This is also made evident from the first page of the book that opens with the following explanation of the criteria for its selection of masterpieces: This book attests to 175 years of collecting and exploring by the Rijksmuseum Volkenkunde/National Museum of Ethnology. Out of a collection of 240,000 objects, more than 100 masterpieces were selected following diverse criteria. Some objects were chosen because of their aesthetic qualities, others because of their age, rarity, collection history or historical relevance. You will experience the pinnacle of world heritage including artistic masterpieces, products of ingenious craftsmanship, works with a religious or spiritual significance, or things that excel through their functional simplicity. The masterpieces reflect the collecting history of the museum, starting from 1837 up to the present day. The vignettes and contextual histories procure an insight into human behavior, the way people give sense to their lives, craftsmanship and creativity. In so doing, you are making an inspiring journey through the whole world.28

The opening spread visualizes this period of 175 years of collecting with a graph that shows how over time the 240,000 objects ended up in the museum (the majority of which arrived after decolonization, although those later acquisitions in many cases were collected in colonial times). The screenshot of the index page of the catalogue (Figure 6.3) shows a visual index of these selected objects, organized according to the year of acquisition by the museum. This institutional archival order turns the history of the museum proper into the epistemological framework that defines how we encounter all the evidence of ‘human behavior, the way people give sense to their lives, craftsmanship and creativity’ that the museum holds. Thus the wayang kulit puppet set, ordered by a senior civil servant in Surakarta, Central Java, in 1856 and situated in the very same year as the first ‘Indonesian’ master piece,29 precedes the famous late thirteenth-century Ganesha sculpture from Singosari, East Java, which was discovered and appropriated by the Governor of Java’s North East Coast in 1804, shipped to the Netherlands in 1819, to be formally included in the National Museum of Ethnology in 1903. A Buddhist East Javanese bronze sculpture from the thirteenth century enters the master piece collection in 1947, presumably in the wake of decolonization (in this instance, the catalogue contains no provenance information whatsoever. With reference to the original temple context of the statue it just states: ‘Most of the statues are now in the National Museum of Indonesia, in Jakarta. One of them […] ended up in the British Museum’.)30 Apparently, in this ambiguous mixture of vague references to a history of collecting, of colonial encounters and/or of an authentic artistic virtuosity, the National Museum of Ethnography chose a new direction, compared to

Figure 6.3  Screenshot Masterpieces National Museum of Ethnology, 1 January 2014.



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eight years before, with its project ‘Indonesia, the discovery of the past’ and its central notion of ‘sharing heritage’. The 2013 catalogue turns the museum into the foundation for a new classification of its collections as ‘world heritage’. Only one masterpiece in the catalogue, a Jack of hearts, a playing card used as paper money in Suriname in 1796,31 would be classified as a ‘colonial collection’ item as the category defined by the Tropenmuseum. It is exactly this colonial heritage value that turns it – an insignificant object in itself – into a masterpiece. It sits among the other masterpieces of the Rijksmuseum Volkenkunde/National Museum of Ethnology that once inspired the collectors and now can inspire us all because of their aesthetic qualities, age, rarity, collection history or historical relevance. Presented as such, the objects again seem to share more history with the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the British Museum in London than with the National Museum in Jakarta. This brief excursus aims to show how notions of colonial collection, shared heritage and world heritage work in the current national and global repositioning of the museums involved. In this dynamic context, applying the notion of ‘colonial heritage’ as an umbrella concept in heritage education runs the risk of prioritizing an interpretation of objects acquired in colonial times as the heritage of that time. It would confirm classifications of otherness rather than allow an approach that views these categorizations as ‘context dependent, relational or even redundant’.32 These collections are in the front line of a heritage negotiation both within and across national borders. This is also how they might be put to work in heritage education.

Heritage Education and the Meta-data of Colonial Encounter What can museum objects tell, what can we teach? The historical agency involved in the making of ethnographic collections has been analysed in terms of a polarity between colonizers and colonized, in terms of articulate actors and silent victims, of cultural exchange and negotiation, or of hybrid processes of inclusion and exclusion that resulted in the appropriation of certain colonial legacies and the denial of others. We cannot elaborate on this in more detail here, but just mention it to underline the potential of museum collections for a broad range of approaches to the colonial past. Any approach to heritage formation in colonial times as a colonial process is by definition a postcolonial historical practice linked to the framing of the imperial past in national frameworks, rather than a practice of commemoration, remembrance and heritage negotiation.33 The challenge to heritage education with respect to the colonial past is to transform the temporal regime of the empire utopia that guided the actual acquisition and

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interpretation of these collections into an historical awareness that allows for multiple ­perspectives on the colonial past beyond national borders. This approach prioritizes a historical discourse over a heritage discourse, also in educational contexts. It requires a critical historiography that regards the architectural structures, tangible collections, audio-visual resources and performance practices that are rooted in the colonial past as historical sources. It also requires a postcolonial source critique that does not take for granted the current position of these objects and other cultural resources in our heritage institutions. Museum collections embody a tangible relationship to the past. Approaching these sources as heritage rather than as historical sources, however, will make it very difficult to get rid of the colonial connotations implied in the knowledge regimes that have structured their place in our ‘art-culture’ system with its inherent classifications and hierarchies, and its fundamentally different types of documentation.34 Paradoxically, in order to understand colonial heritage, we must not preserve it, but get rid of the very mechanisms that have turned it into a heritage which confirms the colonizers as those in control of the future and of the past. If not, we run the risk that what we now call masterpieces in order to improve their prestige will further lose their significance for our society. Heritage education can teach us how objects from the colonial past that express colonial encounters can be found in any museum, all around the world. The Borobudur Buddha head is just one example of this. As an international canon of art and ethnography, the colonial past not only reaches ‘beyond national borders’, but it also disregards institutional divides between various types of museums, like national museums, art, ethnography, photography, open-air, maritime or local history museums. The object’s location is important, however, since each institution has other types of ‘tagging’. The institutional context has a major impact on the object documentation with respect to the age and/or functional or material aspects of the ethnographic object, the provenance of the object with regard to its collector, the artistic meaning of the object for others, the historical meaning with respect to certain events of history. Not only the colonial context but also the distribution of the collections over various types of museums has created severe biases in this information. With respect to the colonial past, museum storage rooms can be rich sources for heritage education across and beyond national borders. The museology of our time makes it pertinent to investigate this potential in connection with the new media. Many museums offer digital access to their museum stores – witness my ‘Rotterdam 2013’ collection at Mijn Rijks Studio, selected for this chapter at the website of the Rijksmuseum. Facilitated by the large-scale implementation of collection documentation systems in relational databases like Adlib or TMS, as well as by collection sites



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like Europeana,35 museums explore more and more the use of new media all along the museum’s ‘production line’, from research for exhibitions to educational programmes, from online access to the storage rooms and finally, to integration of the collection in the big data cloud of cyberspace. These new interfaces are very rewarding in educational contexts since students can make their own selections and, with much relevant information at hand, consider their choice and relate it to others. Anyone, for instance, who is interested in the Borobudur Buddha head in the Rijksmuseum can read that Susan Legêne selected this object for her ‘Rotterdam 2013’ collection, as well as who else ‘liked’ it. Each object selected creates a new node in a network.36 However, this example also shows that in terms of content, such websites inevitably also reinforce the institutional divides between museums because of all the different ‘tagging’, following the different collection documentation practices and classification systems implied in the institutional ­backgrounds of each collection website. Basically, the ‘search options’ in the metadata of a virtual collection of objects reduce the historical object documentation to general search categories. Unlike the faceted classification system of the thesaurus of the past, which provided various entries of particular textual information relevant to the museum objects, the metadata in digital databases more and more becomes a generalizing source in itself. Metadata ignore specificities but create common divisors in order to produce certain selections of objects. This is fine; we can already search many more collections than ever before, in a much shorter time, and with a lot more unexpected results. However, if, as in our case, we are interested in colonial encounters related to the making, collecting and presentation of objects, how then can we understand critically the fragmented metadata derived from the existing object documentation systems? The content of this metadata partly depends on the type of museum in which the objects are kept (art history, ethnography, national, etc.), and the ways in which this museum relates itself to the colonial past and its heritage. And as we saw in the example of both the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden that published a master piece catalogue and the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam establishing a collection category of ‘colonial collections’, it also depends on current museum policies with which metadata canonical objects are being tagged. Also relevant in this context is the virtual proliferation of access to museum collections through portals and linked-data away from the specific institutions that hold the collection. For instance, a search for Borobudur at the Europeana website produces the Rijksmuseum Borobudur Buddha Head among 438 other hits (accessed 1 January 2014; see Figure 6.4). The Buddha’s metadata in Europeana is poor: the Borobudur Buddha head in Europeana appears as one among many more related objects in other

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Figure 6.4  Screenshot Europeana, 1 January 2014.

museum collections. It sits next to Borobudur Buddha heads in Leiden and in Berlin. More specific documentation about this Rijksmuseum object is found through the direct link to the Rijksmuseum site. Heritage education implies that we teach people to actually make those ‘clicks’, to work on ‘interpretation’ rather than accept the computer’s first ‘calculation’ that resulted in the 438 Borobudur hits.37 In order to understand the archival relationship between the collected museum objects and their object documentation, not only among the museum professionals, but also in heritage education, it is important to raise awareness of the need to reflect on the link between the universalizing search results generated through the metadata in digital databases and the specificity of the ‘conventional’ documentation practices from which these are derived and to which these should provide access. This is all the more relevant since computation is used more and more to ‘enrich’ the metadata. Europeana allows specific searches with respect to the colonial past and an endless free navigation through images and sounds collections in Europe. It adds to the metadata provided by the partner institutions the option of ‘auto-generated’ tags such as ‘when’ and ‘where’. The ‘where’, in our case, automatically assigns Borobudur the Geographical coordinates of: -5.0; 120.0. At this stage, this Geo-Space indication is a modest enrichment. However, this type of auto-generated metadata opens up endless other options to look at and interpret the Borobudur Buddha



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Figure 6.5  Screenshot Borobudur Google, 1 January 2014.

head away from the documentation that predominantly frames its meaning within the institution that keeps it in its collection. This development will certainly accelerate in the near future. In that respect, heritage education not only needs to start from a dynamic heritage concept, but it also needs to constantly reflect on how we gain access to cultural heritage.38 We produce fundamentally different contexts to interpret an object according to how we encounter it. It makes a difference whether we look at a Buddha head in the Asian Pavilion of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, or whether we retrieve its image on the internet in the Rijksmuseum database, or via a Google image search, where the Buddha head as a collection item appears among countless photographs of Borobudur posted by a wide variety of institutions and people (Figure 6.5).

Conclusion Against this background, research on collection documentation enrichment is key to the development of heritage education. Knowledge of provenance histories will allow students to develop skills for user-generated narratives that provide answers to questions that do not necessarily start from normative notions of ‘shared’, ‘universal’ or ‘colonial’ heritage, while getting

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beyond the categorizations in which the objects are being kept through the original metadata. Therefore, in conclusion, museum storage rooms can tell a lot; the stories they may invoke depend on what we teach the students in terms of accessing the information, but also on how we train the computer in terms of auto-generated tags and other data enrichments. This argument on the many layers of interpretation connected to objects originating as collections in a colonial past boils down to the following recommendations with respect to the development and use of educational tools based on online access to museum collections:39 analyse applications providing online access to cultural heritage; reason about online access to cultural heritage; theorize the web. The Borobudur Buddha head shows the importance of reflection on the nature of the institutions that keep this heritage. It also shows the differences in relations between the metadata and the primary documentation of the objects in the online catalogue of different museums, in Europeana or appearing as one among countless images in a random Google search. And it indicates the impact and effects that the integration of different resources may have on user-generated narratives with respect to national histories and the colonial past. Heritage education using online educational tools may therefore also help students to explore the limits of modelling, and the effects of human-machine interaction in working with a ‘shared’ colonial past. Acknowledging the importance of these skills for both teachers and students will also encourage museums to better understand their ‘online’ responsibilities in encouraging our students’ aspirations to challenge their institutionalized pre-structured ‘order of things’ to which the colonial past has played such an important role.

Notes 1. See C. van Boxtel, ‘Heritage Education as a Resource for Learning: Opportunities and Challenges’, in Heritage Education: Challenges in Dealing with the Past, eds C. van Boxtel, S. Klein and E. Snoep, Amsterdam, 2011, 41–42. 2. This text was first presented at the conference Tangible Pasts? on 7 June 2013, Paper Session F: ‘Colonial Heritage Unveiled: Perspectives in Museum Representations’. Its research took place at VU University Amsterdam, in the NWO funded CATCH-Agora programme (2009–2014; grant 640.004.801). The other members of this multidisciplinary research team covering computer science, computational linguistics, history and museum and archival practices are Chiel van den Akker, Lora Aroyo, Geertje Jacobs, Marieke van Erp, Lourens van der Meij, Johan Oomen and Guus Schreiber. The notion of aspiration comes from Arjun Appadurai, ‘The Right to Research’, in Globalisation, Societies and Education 4, 2 (2006): 176–177. He describes the capacity to aspire as ‘the social and cultural capacity to plan, hope, desire, and achieve socially valuable goals’, and connects this to the right to research.



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3. M. Grever and C. van Boxtel, ‘Reflections on Heritage as an Educational Resource: Introduction’, in Heritage Education: Challenges in dealing with the Past, eds C. van Boxtel, S. Klein and E. Snoep, Amsterdam, 2011, 9–10. 4. This selection can be visited at: www.rijksmuseum.nl/nl/mijn/verzamelingen/­ 76831--susan-legene/rotterdam-2013. The selection was developed while working on the presentation for the conference Tangible Pasts? and objects have been added or removed, as part of my research. Since the finalization of this chapter, the selection has not changed again. 5. The Rijksmuseum, which used to have a separate historical department on the history of the Netherlands, has in its new semi-permanent display deliberately mixed objects of ‘art’ with ‘historical’ objects. The museum has a chronological order, starting in the Middle Ages up to the twentieth century. Objects related to colonial trade, colonial expansion and finally imperialism, from the sixteenth century onwards, are put on display. The dominant frame of a national history of the Netherlands has met with some criticism, as in M.  Bloembergen, H. Schulte Nordholt and M. Eickhoff, ‘Koloniale Nostalgie in Rijksmuseum’, NRC Handelsblad, 15 June 2013; C. Drieënhuizen, ‘Terug Naar Af? Het Nieuwe Rijksmuseum en de Nederlandse Koloniale Geschiedenis’, blog at the Heritage Platform of Open University, 25 April 2013, www.ou.nl/web/erfgoedplatform/terugnaar-af-het-nieuwe-rijksmuseum-en-de-nederlandse-koloniale-geschiedenis (accessed 27 November 2015); BMGN-Low Countries Historical Review Volume 129:1, 134-180 published in its ‘Forum’ four critical contributions on the new Rijksmuseum, among them a contribution on the representation of the colonial past by Marieke Bloembergen and Martijn Eickhoff, with a reply by Martine Gosselink, head of the historical collections. See www.bmgn-lchr. nl/523/volume/129/issue/1/. 6. G. van der Ham, De Geschiedenis van Nederland in 100 Voorwerpen, Amsterdam, 2013. Only one object in my ‘Rotterdam 2013’ collection also appears in Bitter Spice which discusses Dutch/Indonesian history with reference to a large number of Rijksmuseum objects: the painting by N. Pieneman of the capture of Prince Diponegoro in 1830 (SK-A-2238). H. Stevens, Bitter Spice: Indonesia and the Netherlands from 1600, Nijmegen, 2015, 58. 7. Grever and Van Boxtel, ‘Reflections on Heritage as an Educational Resource’, 12. 8. M. Wronska Friend, ‘Javanese Batik for European Artists: Experiments at the Koloniaal Laboratorium in Haarlem’, in Batik – Drawn in Wax: 200 Years of Batik Art from Indonesia in the Tropenmuseum Collection, ed. I. van Hout, Amsterdam, 2001, 106–123; J.J. Heij, Vernieuwing en Bezinning: Nederlandse Beeldende Kunst en Kunstnijverheid ca. 1885–1935 uit de Collectie van het Drents Museum, Zwolle/Assen, 2004, 67, 150, 153–154, and passim. 9. Rijksmuseum collection NG-NM-7113. 10. In English this is a Buddha’s Head. Its incorporation in the canon of art history in the Netherlands is reinforced by its Dutch name, ‘Kop van een Boeddha’ (kop is ‘a bust without shoulders’); if one acknowledges the spiritual meaning of the sculpture, this should read Hoofd (Head) of a Buddha. 11. Mrs A.C.R. van der Mandele-Vermeer was born in 1891 and died in 1988. 12. For a discussion on the Borobudur Buddha heads in the Netherlands, see J. van Beurden, The Return of Cultural and Historical Treasures: The Case of the Netherlands, Amsterdam, 2012, 57–58. 13. ‘59, Borobudur Buddha Head’, in N. MacGregor, A History of the World in 100 Objects, London, 2010, 378–384. 14. A. Supartono, ‘Re-Imag(in)ing History: Photography and the Sugar Industry in Colonial Java’ (PhD dissertation, University of St Andrews, 2015). 15. Stevens, Bitter Spice, explores the possibilities of such a reframing. 16. D. van Dartel, ed., Tropenmuseum for a Change! Present between Past and Future. A Symposium Report, Bulletin 391 of the Royal Tropical Institute, Amsterdam, 2009.

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17. Quotation from C. Harris and M. O’Hanlon, ‘The Future of the Ethnographic Museum’, Anthropology Today 29, 1 (2013): 8. 18. J. van Beurden, Partnerships in Cultural Heritage: The International Projects of the KIT Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, Bulletin 364 of the Royal Tropical Institute, Amsterdam, 2005. 19. The various subcategories of what is called the colonial collection are: (1) The ­material culture of Dutch overseas daily life in all its aspects; (2) The colonies in the Netherlands: sources, science and signs; (3) Visualization of the colonies in art, decorative arts and crafts, photography, film and museum display props. For a more elaborate discussion see KIT Tropenmuseum, Erfgoed en Toekomst: Een Werkdocument. Collectienota 2003–2007, Bulletin 355 Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen, Amsterdam, 2003, 40–­43; K. van Brakel and S. Legêne, eds, Collecting at Cultural Crossroads: Collection Policies and Approaches (2008– 2012) of the Tropenmuseum, Bulletin 381 of the Royal Tropical Institute, Amsterdam, 2008, 21–24; J. van Dijk and S. Legêne, eds, The Netherlands East Indies at the Tropenmuseum: A Colonial History, Amsterdam, 2011, 113–123. 20. S. Legêne, ‘Powerful Ideas – Museums, Empire Utopias and Connected Worlds’, in Museums and the Idea of Historical Progress, Proceedings of the ICMAH/COMCOL Annual Conference 2012 in conjunction with ICOM-South Africa, eds R. Omar, B. Ndhlovu, L. Gibson and S. Vawda, Cape Town, Iziko Museums, 2014, 15–30. 21. See for instance the ‘relational museum’ concept of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, developed between 2002 and 2005. See http://history.prm.ox.ac.uk/ (accessed 27 November 2015). 22. See http://icom.museum/fileadmin/user_upload/pdf/ICOM_News/2004-1/ ENG/p4_2004-1.pdf (accessed 27 November 2015). The declaration was signed by the Directors of nineteen museums in Europe and the U.S.A. 23. E.S. Hardiati and P. ter Keurs, eds, Indonesia: The Discovery of the Past, Leiden, Jakarta, Amsterdam, 2005. See also P. ter Keurs, ed., Colonial Collections Revisited, Leiden, 2007. 24. C. Scott, ‘Sharing the Divisions of the Colonial Past: An Assessment of the Netherlands-Indonesia Shared Cultural Heritage Project, 2003-2006’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 20, 2 (2012): 11–15. In her convincing analysis of this project she refers to the Authorized Heritage Discourse (AHD) at work in the relationship between the two museums in Leiden and Jakarta (AHD, after Laurajane Smith, Uses of Heritage, London, 2006). Her conclusion is as follows: ‘Thus, while the project advanced scholarship on the history of colonial collecting, it also afforded the opportunity for Dutch and Indonesian participants to share the divisions of the past in complex and paradoxical ways’ (Scott, ‘Sharing the Divisions’, 12). 25. Cf. Chiel van den Akker, chapter 3 in this volume. 26. GCE (Gedeeld Cultureel Erfgoed/Shared Cultural heritage) policy documents, like the policy frame 2013–2016, can be accessed at: http://www.nationaalarchief. nl/­internationaal/gemeenschappelijk-cultureel-erfgoed/programma-gemeenschappelijk-­ cultureel-e (accessed 27 November 2015). 27. In 2014, the Tropenmuseum merged with the National Museum of Ethnology and the Africa Museum into the National Museum of World Cultures. The collections and management structure merged, while the exhibition spaces at the three locations in Amsterdam, Leiden and Berg en Dal were maintained. 28. Masterpieces of Rijksmuseum Volkenkunde, Collection Series Rijksmuseum Volkenkunde/National Museum of Ethnology, Amsterdam, KIT Publishers, 2013, reverse of title page. 29. The puppet from the same wayang puppet set had been the icon of the shared-­ heritage project of Indonesia: The Discovery of the Past, as on the cover of Hardiati and Ter Keurs, 2005. 30. Masterpieces of Rijksmuseum Volkenkunde, 2013, 20 (wayang kulit; RMV series 37, collected by W.L.A.H Harloff for Royal Academy in Delft); Ibidem, 100 (Ganesha Singosari;



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RMV 1403–1681, Royal Cabinet of Curiosities); Ibidem, 150 (Amoghapasha Lokeshvara; RMV 2630–1). 31. Masterpieces of Rijksmuseum Volkenkunde, 2013, 66–67. 32. Harris and O’Hanlon, ‘The Future of the Ethnographic Museum’, 8. 33. An example of the complex mixture of a historical and commemorative approach to heritage formation is the personal memoir by J. Bussemaker, Dochter van een Kampkind: Ervaringen van een Staatssecretaris met de Oorlog in Indië, The Hague, 2011. As the vice-minister of Social Welfare, Bussemaker played an active role in shaping the policy context and providing financial means for a new heritage project in the Netherlands, called Heritage of the War, which included the War in South East Asia and the following decolonization struggle in Indonesia between 1942 and 1950. 34. Harris and O’Hanlon, ‘The Future of the Ethnographic Museum’; Ter Keurs, ed., Colonial Collections Revisited; J. Clifford, ‘On Collecting Art and Culture’, in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, Cambridge and London, 1988, 215–251. 35. Europeana is now working at a Beta version of its website. Its slogan ‘Connect, Contribute, Create – discover how we transform the world with culture’ has been removed. http://pro.europeana.eu/ (accessed 18 June 2016). See also T. Navarrete, ‘A History of Digitization: Dutch Museums’ (PhD dissertation, University of Amsterdam, 2014), 168–171. 36. The web interface also tells us who else selected these objects. For instance, the photograph album was also selected by Alexander Supartono, whom I know because of his research on colonialism through the photographs of the Javanese sugar industry. The web design thus encourages exchange among visitors. 37. I here apply Chiel van den Akker’s argument; see chapter 3 in this volume. 38. The AGORA project (2009–2013) is one of the research projects funded by the NWO (Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research) programme Continuous Access to Cultural Heritage (CATCH). It explores how the reduction of object information in the metadata of digital object databases can be used to actually open up new options for object interpretation through links between objects, between objects and events, and finally between events as such. See also C. van den Akker et al., ‘Digital Hermeneutics: Agora and the Online Understanding of Cultural Heritage’, WebSci ‘11 Proceedings of the 3rd International Web Science Conference, Article No. 10 (doi>10.1145/2527031.2527039). 39. These recommendations are a paraphrase of C. van den Akker et al., ‘Evaluating Cultural Heritage Access on the Web: From Information Delivery to Interpretation Support’, in Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Web Science (WebSci’13), Paris, 2–5 May 2013. See also L.J.B. Gazendam, ‘Cataloguer Support in Cultural Heritage’ (PhD dissertation, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 2015).

References Appadurai, A. ‘The Right to Research’, Globalisation, Societies and Education, 4, 2 (2006): 167–177. Bloembergen, M. and M. Eickhoff. ‘Een klein land dat de wereld bestormt: Het nieuwe Rijksmuseum en het Nederlandse koloniale verleden’[A small Country that is taking the World by Storm], BMGN – Low Countries Historical Review 129, 1 (2014): 156–169. www.bmgn-lchr.nl/523/volume/129/issue/1. Bloembergen, M., H. Schulte Nordholt and M. Eickhoff. ‘Koloniale Nostalgie in Rijksmuseum’ [Colonial Nostalgia in the Rijksmuseum], NRC Handelsblad, 15 June 2013.

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Bussemaker, J. Dochter van een Kampkind: Ervaringen van een Staatssecretaris met de Oorlog in Indië [Daughter of a Campchild. A State Secretary’s Experiences with the War in India], The Hague, 2011. Clifford, J. ‘On Collecting Art and Culture’, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, Cambridge and London, 1988. Drieënhuizen, C. ‘Terug Naar Af? Het Nieuwe Rijksmuseum en de Nederlandse Koloniale Geschiedenis’ [Back to the Beginning? The New Rijksmuseum and Dutch Colonial History], blog at the Heritage Platform of Open University, 25 April 2013, www.ou.nl/ web/erfgoedplatform/terug-naar-af-het-nieuwe-rijksmuseum-en-de-nederlandse-­ koloniale-geschiedenis (accessed 27 November 2015). Gazendam, L.J.B. ‘Cataloguer Support in Cultural Heritage’ (PhD dissertation, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 2015). Gosselink, M. ‘Response from the Rijksmuseum’, BMGN – Low Countries Historical Review 129, 1 (2014): 170–180. www.bmgn-lchr.nl/523/volume/129/issue/1/ Grever, M. and C. van Boxtel. ‘Reflections on Heritage as an Educational Resource: Introduction’, in Heritage Education. Challenges in Dealing with the Past, eds C. van Boxtel, S. Klein and E. Snoep, Amsterdam, 2011, 9–10. Hardiati, E.S. and P. ter Keurs, eds. Indonesia: The Discovery of the Past, Leiden, Jakarta, Amsterdam, 2005. Harris, C. and M. O’Hanlon. ‘The Future of the Ethnographic Museum’, Anthropology Today 29, 1 (2013): 8–12. Heij, J.J. Vernieuwing en Bezinning: Nederlandse Beeldende Kunst en Kunstnijverheid ca. 1885– 1935 uit de Collectie van het Drents Museum [Innovation and Reflection. Dutch Visual Art and Craft Industry from the Collections of the Drenth Museum ca. 1885–1935], Zwolle/ Assen, 2004. KIT Tropenmuseum. Erfgoed en Toekomst: Een Werkdocument. Collectienota 2003–2007 [Heritage and Future: A Working Document. Collection Nota 2003–2007], Bulletin 355, Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen, Amsterdam, 2003, 40–43. Legêne, S. ‘Powerful Ideas – Museums, Empire Utopias and Connected Worlds’, in Museums and the Idea of Historical Progress, eds R. Omar, B. Ndhlovu, L. Gibson and S. Vawda, Proceedings of the ICMAH/COMCOL Annual Conference 2012 in conjunction with ICOM-South Africa, Cape Town, Iziko Museums, 2014, 15–30. MacGregor, N. A History of the World in 100 Objects, London, 2010. Masterpieces of Rijksmuseum Volkenkunde, Collection Series Rijksmuseum Volkenkunde/ National Museum of Ethnology, Amsterdam, KIT Publishers, 2013. Navarrete, T. ‘A History of Digitization: Dutch Museums’ (PhD disseration, University of Amsterdam, 2014). Scott, C. ‘Sharing the Divisions of the Colonial Past: An Assessment of the NetherlandsIndonesia Shared Cultural Heritage Project, 2003–2006’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 20, 2 (2012): 1–15. Smith, L. Uses of Heritage, London, 2006. Stevens, H. Bitter Spice: Indonesia and the Netherlands from 1600, Nijmegen, 2015. Supartono, A. Re-Imag(in)ing History: Photography and the Sugar Industry in Colonial Java, (PhD dissertation, University of St Andrews, 2015). ter Keurs, P. ed. Colonial Collections Revisited, Leiden, 2007. van Beurden, J. Partnerships in Cultural Heritage: The International Projects of the KIT Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, Bulletin 364 of the Royal Tropical Institute, Amsterdam, 2005. ________. The Return of Cultural and Historical Treasures: The Case of the Netherlands, Amsterdam, 2012.



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van Boxtel, C. ‘Heritage Education as a Resource for Learning: Opportunities and Challenges’, in Heritage Education: Challenges in Dealing with the Past, eds C. van Boxtel, S. Klein and E. Snoep, Amsterdam, 2011, 41–42. van Brakel, K. and S. Legêne, eds. Collecting at Cultural Crossroads: Collection Policies and Approaches (2008–2012) of the Tropenmuseum, Bulletin 381 of the Royal Tropical Institute, Amsterdam, 2008. van Dartel, D. ed. Tropenmuseum for a Change! Present Between Past and Future: A Symposium Report, Bulletin 391 of the Royal Tropical Institute, Amsterdam, 2009. van den Akker, C., S. Legêne, M. van Erp, L. Aroyo, R. Segers, L. van der Meij, J. van Ossenbruggen, G. Schreiber, B. Wielinga, J. Oomen and G. Jacobs. ‘Digital Hermeneutics: Agora and the Online Understanding of Cultural Heritage’, in Proceedings of the ACM WebSci’11, Koblenz, 14–17 June 2011, 1–7 (doi>10.1145/2527031.2527039). van den Akker, C., M. van Erp, M. L. Aroyo, A. van Nuland, L. van der Meij, S. Legêne and G. Schreiber. ‘Evaluating Cultural Heritage Access on the Web: From Information Delivery to Interpretation Support’, in Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Web Science (WebSci’13), Paris, 2–5 May 2013, 431–440. van Dijk, J. and S. Legêne, eds. The Netherlands East Indies at the Tropenmuseum: A Colonial History, Amsterdam, 2011, 113–123. van der Ham, G. De Geschiedenis van Nederland in 100 Voorwerpen [The History of The Netherlands in 100 Objects], Amsterdam, 2013. Wronska Friend, M. ‘Javanese Batik for European Artists: Experiments at the Koloniaal Laboratorium in Haarlem’, in Batik – Drawn in Wax. 200 Years of Batik Art from Indonesia in the Tropenmuseum Collection, ed. I. van Hout, Amsterdam, 2001, 106–123.

Susan Legêne is professor of political history at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU, the Netherlands), and one of the programme leaders of the research cluster Global History, Heritage and Memory of the VU-research institute CLUE+ (see www.ghhpw.com). Her contribution to this volume is based on her role in the NWO-funded research team of AGORA (2009–14) covering computer science, computational linguistics, history and museum and archival practices. Before joining VU, she was the head of the Curatorial Department of the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam. She is co-editor with Bambang Purwanto and Henk Schulte Nordholt of Sites, Bodies and Stories: Imagining Indonesian History (2015).

CHAPTER

7

Unlocking Essences and Exploring Networks Experiencing Authenticity in Heritage Education Settings Siân Jones

In an extract from an ethnographic interview about Glasgow Cathedral, Margaret, a Glasgow resident of Catholic faith, offers a powerful articulation of the experience of authenticity:1 ‘I know it’s just stone [a little embarrassed], but I think it absorbs things, it’s like its alive […] It’s absorbed the presence of the people who’ve been here in the past […] Just remember, stone speaks’.2 The Cathedral provides her with a palpable sense of the people who have passed through it as a site of worship and pilgrimage. Most importantly, the presence of these people has apparently become part of the fabric of the building. It has seeped into the stone, and hence ‘stone speaks’ (Figure 7.1). For others too, the building provides a strong sense of connection across time and place. Members of the current, Protestant congregation see it as an embodiment of a community of faith, both in time and in space. Here again the tangible and the intangible intersect to provide a powerful sense of continuity and connection; as one congregation member put it, ‘the rocks remain’, whilst another talked of faith ‘seeping from the walls’. For those who work in, or on, the building, it also offers a sense of connection with the past. For Sarah, a custodian, there is a fleeting moment of communion with those who came before her, as she polishes brass worn by hands across the ages. For Peter, an Historic Scotland architect overseeing conservation work, each stone embodies the labour of those involved in the construction of the Cathedral: ‘it’s still that stone that was cut, that was taken up a rickety wooden scaffold that lots of people had probably fallen Notes for this section begin on page 146.



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Figure 7.1  The nave of Glasgow Cathedral. (Photo: S. Jones)

off, had been given the final dressing and placed in the mortar bed, and was an integral component, therefore of the thing itself, of the thing that we are trying to conserve’.3 Whereas for Historic Scotland stonemasons replacing decaying stone as part of an ongoing conservation project, the building is the incarnation of a craft tradition defined by the unchanging principles of cutting stone.4 In previous research, I have argued that the experience of authenticity is about the ability of ‘old things’ to mediate networks of relations across time and space; to connect people and places through the aura of the object which appears to retain some trace of those whose lives it has intersected with in the past.5 In this way, historic objects and the intangible qualities

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associated with them can provide a profound sense of engagement with the past, one that is experienced as genuine, deep and truthful. This is a highly affective experience that involves the conflation of past and present and the creation of feelings of intimacy, belonging and ownership. Undoubtedly it is a far cry from the historical distance advocated by historians and cultivated in their students, but it is increasingly recognized that material and immaterial traces of the past can play a useful role in education, stimulating curiosity and engagement. In this chapter, I will explore the experience of authenticity and the specific kinds of relationship it sets up with the past. I will then consider its implications for heritage education, defined as ‘an approach to teaching and learning that uses material and immaterial heritage as primary instructional resources to increase pupils’ understanding of history and culture’.6 I will argue that the experience of authenticity can create forms of engagement that are useful in the context of education, including identification, empathy, awe, wonder, contagion and revulsion. However, these also need to be mediated by an analytic and critical gaze, which can create an appreciation of significance, context and the politics of the past in the present. The discussion will be based on a synthesis of a wide range of research, including my own ethnographic research projects in Scotland.7 I will finish with a brief discussion of the education workshops embedded in the Whitworth Park Community History and Archaeology Project.8

Recent Approaches to Authenticity and Heritage Following the Oxford English Dictionary, authenticity can be defined as the quality of being authentic, truthful or genuine. It has been a central concept in the principles underpinning the collection, classification, conservation and presentation of historic objects, monuments and buildings since the nineteenth century. The overwhelming emphasis until very recently has been on the integrity or ‘true’ nature of objects defined in relation to their origins, their fabric, and the intentions of their makers.9 An authentic historical object or building is thus one that is true to its origins in terms of its date, its material, its form, its authorship, workmanship, construction, and, in many cases, its primary context and use. Subsequent additions to an object or building over time are also considered (selectively) significant in terms of the accretion of authenticity.10 This is essentially a materialist approach, which seeks to identify and maintain the authentic tangible thing in order to hand it on to future generations. Thus, a complex battery of techniques, methods and practices are marshalled to establish and maintain the authenticity of historic objects, buildings and monuments.11 Recent decades have seen the



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introduction of a more relativistic approach stressing the cultural specificity of authenticity.12 Nevertheless, the idea that authenticity is a measurable, intrinsic feature of historic objects is a persistent one, framing how we deal with the material traces of the past, particularly in European countries. My recent research with Tom Yarrow focusing on the conservation of Glasgow Cathedral by Historic Scotland illustrates the centrality of authenticity in conservation philosophy.13 The condition of the building is meticulously documented and decaying stone and mortar is subject to much discussion and analysis. Scientific techniques are applied to ascertain the mineralogical and physical properties of the original stone, to ensure that the new stones cut by stonemasons are a good geological match for the decaying stones they replace. Date marks are placed on some new stones when they are fixed in the building to distinguish them from historic ones, and cultural resource managers carefully document changes to the fabric of the building. As one put it, ‘My focus is on aspects such as authenticity […] and recording anything that we replace or lose in the process’.14 The impact of the work on the experience of visitors, congregation members and residents is mediated by public display boards, which stress the continuity and authenticity of the masons’ craft. Given the emphasis in heritage conservation on the authentic historic object, it is not surprising that the growth of the ‘heritage industry’ in the later twentieth century proved to be a challenging development for established notions of authenticity. The development of tourist-oriented heritage centres based on models and reconstructions commissioned from specialized design companies, with little in the way of historic material culture, has been extensively criticized.15 Such simulacra, it has been argued, attempt to represent the real, but can only ever offer some kind of fabrication of the past. Furthermore, the commercial nature of many of these enterprises has been linked to a commoditization of heritage, which reproduces a kind of ‘staged authenticity’ polluted by economic transaction and performance for a tourist market. As Macdonald points out, such critiques fundamentally uphold a notion of heritage as something ‘real’ and ‘genuine’, which is sullied and rendered inauthentic by the market.16 However, other critiques of authenticity have gone further, arguing that authenticity is always culturally constructed and varies according to who is observing an object and in what context.17 One of the main thrusts of this diverse literature is that authenticity is not inherent in historic objects, buildings and places. Objects, and indeed non-­material dimensions of heritage, become embedded in regimes of meaning and exchange, such as those framing heritage conservation and management,18 heritage tourism,19 and the international art market.20 Experts in various guises – connoisseurs, dealers, art historians, archaeologists, conservators and

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heritage managers – also actively produce and negotiate these regimes of value, thus mediating the authenticity of specific objects. Indeed, a number of recent studies of authenticity have even suggested that the very concept of authenticity is peculiar to the modern world.21 In the context of modernity, a new inward-looking concept of authenticity emerged in conjunction with novel ideas about the individual as an indivisible, fixed and bounded entity with a unique identity and internal essence. These important studies have resulted in more nuanced understandings of the complexity of authenticity and the ways it is produced and negotiated in specific cultural and historical contexts. However, they fail to explain the continuing power of authenticity in terms of how people experience the material traces of the past. In their most extreme form, postmodern critiques reduce authenticity to a fiction. Yet, there is, as Ankersmit points out, an aura associated with objects from the past that produce a kind of ‘historical experience’ that appears to transcend context.22 Furthermore, ethnographic research shows that the experience of authenticity plays a fundamental role in how people put heritage to work to develop and strengthen their relationships both with one another and with places.23 Thus, we need to attend to this experiential aspect and ask why people find authenticity so compelling, what kinds of social practices and relations it sustains, and what these mean for heritage education.

Experiencing Authenticity One of the key aspects of the experience of authenticity in the context of heritage is the ability of an object, building or indeed set of practices to bring something of the past into the present. For Margaret and others, Glasgow Cathedral has absorbed the presence of those that encountered it in the past, often through specific practices associated with pilgrimage, worship, or indeed craftsmanship. The rickety medieval scaffold that many laboured on and no doubt fell victim to, the trials and sacrifices experienced by medieval pilgrims, and the conflicts of the Reformation and subsequent Calvinist religious protests all contribute to its authenticity. However, ordinary, everyday objects can also embody the past and bring it forth into the present, whether through contact with famous people, as in the case of Jackie Kennedy’s faux pearls, or through the patina of wear produced by unknown generations on the tread of a stair, a door handle, or an agricultural implement. There is a sense of contagion, connection and embodiment whereupon the experience of the object is gathered and condensed, producing sensations of proximity, empathy, interconnection and even identification.



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There have been a number of well-known attempts to characterize these profound sensations brought about by contact with traces of the past. Ruskin referred to the ‘voicefullness’, which we feel in relation to historic buildings that ‘have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity’.24 In his famous essay on the work of art in an age of mechanical reproduction, Benjamin used the concept of ‘aura’ to refer to the quality that distinguishes the unique work of art from the mass produced object.25 Aura, he argued, is a quality acquired from the unique experience of the object: it is the ‘essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to the history which it has experienced’.26 Others, like Ankersmit, have highlighted the ability of ordinary, everyday historical objects to produce the sensation of a direct experience of the past that transcends context.27 Still others have drawn on anthropological concepts, suggesting that the historic object is bound up in a form of ‘inalienability’,28 whereby the object carries forward through time something of the essence of those it has encountered in the past. Notwithstanding their diverse theoretical positions, all these attempts to characterize the aura of old things centre on the qualities deriving from the unique experience of the object. In previous work, I have argued that it is the ability of objects to gather and condense experience across time that underpins the experience of authenticity.29 In particular, it is the web of relationships the object invokes with past and present people and places that is crucial to the experience of authenticity. The direct experience of an historic object can achieve a form of magical communion through personal incorporation into that network. Thus the process of negotiating the authenticity of material things can also be a means of establishing the authenticity of the self. However, the effectiveness of this process depends upon people’s ability to establish relationships with objects, and the networks of people and places these objects have been associated with during their unique cultural biographies. The materiality of objects is crucial here, as is some form of physical contact, or intimate experience of them. This is not to do with their origins, form, or provenance, in a materialist sense, but rather because the materiality of objects embodies past experiences and relationships. This leads to a powerful magical or enchanting quality, in that past experiences and relationships appear to be carried along by the object. Surface patina and other signs of age play a particularly important role in the experience of authenticity. The powerful emotional response provoked by signs of natural decay has been widely recognized in conservation philosophy, since Alois Riegl emphasized the importance of ‘age value’, in his famous 1903 essay ‘The Modern Cult of Monuments’.30 More recently, Holtorf has built on Riegl’s ideas, arguing that weathering, cracks, tears, polish and wear indicate the ‘pastness’ of a thing and thus inform our perception of its authenticity.31

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Macdonald’s application of Annette Weiner’s concept of ‘inalienable possessions’ offers a means of elaborating on these arguments.32 Inalienable possessions involve the paradox of keeping while giving, so that even while they enter into systems of social relations and exchange they are imbued with the intrinsic and ineffable qualities of previous owners. Weiner’s work centred on Melanesian systems of gift giving, in particular the Trobriand Kula system made famous in the work of Malinowski, but she also cites Western examples, including the Crown Jewels, the Elgin/Parthenon Marbles and family heirlooms.33 Such objects, imbued with the qualities of previous owners and experiences, build up ‘symbolic density’ over time, and thus play a powerful role in the authentication and legitimacy of current identities and power relations.34 As a result their ownership may be contested and they often become the site of struggles for change. As Macdonald argues, heritage appears to be an inalienable possession; ‘It is dense in history and symbolic significance and tightly bound to the identity of a particular people and/or place. It is properly kept, though its ownership may be contested’.35 It can be argued that this inalienability is at the root of the experience of authenticity, which is fundamentally bound up with the intrinsic qualities not just of past owners of historic objects, but all of the past experiences, people and places with which they have been connected. Thus, objects, such as a lock of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s hair, or the nineteenth-century Tea Clipper, Cutty Sark, have a unique and inalienable existence that is ‘imbued with all the magic of having “been there”’.36 In my ethnographic research surrounding the Hilton of Cadboll crossslab, the ‘aura’ and historical resonance of the long-lost lower section was frequently in evidence following its re-discovery by archaeologists in 2001.37 For local residents who watched it being excavated, there was a strong sense of connection and even identification with the people associated with it in the past. Touch played a powerful role in consolidating this, as illustrated by Duncan: ‘To know that my people were here and that stone is there, just to touch it you know they must have seen it, they must have touched it you know going back these years, it was like something holy, I just needed to touch it’.38 People also talked metaphorically of the cross-slab as if it were a living thing; ‘an ancient member of the community’. Through this they explored relationships of belonging and feelings of attachment, which evoked powerful sentiments. As Mhàiri, a woman in her 40s who was born and brought up in Hilton, put it, ‘you actually feel for it, you have a feeling for it. I can’t put it any other way. It’s part of your culture and therefore it’s part of the people, it’s part of the community’. She went on to explain that ‘it’s almost like being attached to rocks or the sea or it’s always been here, it’s [been] part of the place for generations’.39 It is clear from such statements that the cross-slab, in the form of the missing lower section, provides something



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akin to Weiner’s ‘cosmological authentication’.40 The relationship between community and place is essentialized through the authenticity of the object, something that is given additional weight by the excavation, which revealed the lower section in the ground, evoking primordial metaphors of soil and nourishment.41 The processes involved in the experience of authenticity are not just restricted to specific historic objects and monuments like the Hilton of Cadboll cross-slab or Glasgow Cathedral. They can also be seen at work in many other contexts, including the kind of heritage centres that came to epitomize the commoditization of heritage in the eyes of their critics. Such centres often involve living history elements, alongside a pastiche of historic objects and buildings, modern reconstructions, and sophisticated forms of digital representation. As Dicks points out in her research focusing on the Rhondda Heritage Park, the design and interpretative work involved in creating these heritage centres is often carried out by consultancy firms, who are as much at home with the Jorvik Viking Centre in York, as the White Cliffs Experience in Dover.42 Yet through her research at the Rhondda Heritage Park, Dicks shows that the commoditization of community heritage for a tourist market is frequently undercut by those who claim an association with it. In the case of Rhondda, the coal mine at the heart of the Heritage Park remains a complex arena for negotiating the politics of labour and industrial production for the ex-miners who work there as guides and interpreters. Dicks shows that by narrating memories to visitors, the former miners are involved in processes of authentication, whereby networks of relationships between objects, people and places are negotiated and reproduced.43 Visitors also seek to counter the commoditization of the heritage experience by attempting to situate themselves in relation to the narratives they encounter. Some do this through personal or family connections to mining or other industries. Others invest time and energy in establishing forms of connection and conversation with the ex-miners who act as their guides. They thus individualize the experience and counter the tendency for heritage to be transformed into some kind of generic commodity. The way in which different actors experience authenticity at heritage centres like the Rhondda Heritage Park is thus mediated by different degrees of personal investment in, and cultural proximity to, the history presented.44 As Macdonald concludes, selling the past does not necessarily bring about a loss of authenticity, as those involved seek to establish and demarcate boundaries ‘between what they regard as “true to itself” and what they do not’.45 I would add that they do this with reference to the networks of relations condensed and reproduced through the biographies of heritage objects and the practices and performances surrounding them. Ultimately the experience of authenticity is guaranteed by the ability of such objects, practices

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and performances to bring together and sustain such relations across time and space.

Heritage Education and Authenticity What then are the implications of these arguments for heritage education? How might the experience of authenticity be put to work in education contexts? Historical disciplines like archaeology and history have long been shaped by a modernist ontology whereby artefacts, monuments and texts provide evidence for a past reality that can be extracted through classificatory and scientific analysis. Sensory and emotional engagement with these objects of study was acknowledged, but at best regarded with ambivalence.46 It is only recently that the sensory experience of material traces of the past has been embraced within disciplinary practice in terms of its contribution to both interpretive and pedagogical processes.47 This shift is mirrored by the wider development of ‘heritage education’, which is defined by the cross-disciplinary use of material and immaterial traces of the past as primary instructional resources. Just as it is a hybrid of many disciplines, heritage education contributes to many aspects of the school curriculum, ranging from history, archaeology, geography, art, science, technology, and citizenship studies.48 For proponents of heritage education, its major strength lies in the potential to provide students with a vivid and direct experience of the past.49 It is the authentic trace, often though not necessarily in the form of a tangible object or place, which offers this thrill of proximity. However, this creates the risk that the past becomes conflated with the present, and that the distance required to understand the difference or foreignness of the past is lost. It also creates forms of engagement and identification that raise moral and political issues. The experience of authenticity is most powerful when it invokes feelings of identity and ownership that inevitably involve both inclusion and exclusion. As Mhairi observes of the Hilton of Cadboll crossslab: ‘it’s part of the people, it’s part of the community’. These are primordial sentiments, founded on forms of essentialism that are deeply meaningful. Yet in other contexts they can be profoundly problematic, notably when they are mobilized by sectarian, racist and nationalist ideologies. As Grever and van Boxtel point out: ‘Although heritage lessons may encourage respect for other cultures, tolerance and social cohesion, they can also help strengthen community identities, with the risk of exclusion and a reinforcement of existing social boundaries’.50 In response to this concern, Grever et al. developed a framework for heritage education based on the notion of historical distance conceived as a



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configuration of temporality and engagement.51 Historians have long been concerned with historical distance; indeed distance and perspective have been regarded as pre-requisites for historical interpretation.52 The emphasis on distance stems from a linear conception of history in which the past progresses through various stages into the present, and the greater the separation one has, the better one’s ability to understand a past society.53 Distance and detachment have thus had a privileged position, being seen as necessary requirements for the analysis, interpretation and understanding of the past. However, since the late twentieth century, the idea of the detached observer has been challenged, and there is widespread recognition of the wider set of engagements that mediate our relations to the past.54 In response new conceptions of historical thinking have emerged, which acknowledge the emotional and political uses of the past and make space for intimacy, empathy, moral commitment and identity. One area that exemplifies this shift is the new scholarly interest in popular and artistic forms of re-enactment and historical performance, often in conjunction with theories of affect.55 Nevertheless, the need to maintain a balance between distance and engagement remains an important issue for historians and those involved in heritage education.56 Grever et al. offer a dynamic model as a basis for heritage education.57 They argue that there are different degrees and forms of distancing at work, and that these are the product of different configurations of temporality and engagement.58 Temporality refers to the character of approaches to the past (subjective experienced time, objective measurable time, synchronic and diachronic approaches to time, and so forth). Engagement, in contrast, alludes to degrees of affection, moral commitment and identification with the past. Every specific configuration of temporality and engagement, they argue, leads to different relations between past and present. This model opens up the possibility of a dynamic approach to heritage education in which shifting configurations are deliberately promoted through specific pedagogical techniques. Phillips’ interesting article arguing for a reconfiguration of historical distance as a series of heuristic techniques adds additional weight to a dynamic approach. He emphasizes the ‘plasticity of distance’ and proposes that ‘historical distance encompasses the variety of ways in which we are placed in relation to the past (or – to put the case more fully – to the futures that the past makes possible)’.59 Such an approach is mirrored in heritage education by its emphasis on the significance of the past in the present, and in particular its concern with citizenship and how the future is envisioned. More practically, Phillips’ reconfiguration of historical distance as a series of heuristic techniques has important implications for history teaching in general, and heritage education in particular. If heritage education employs a range of experience-based techniques for problem solving, learning and discovery, explicit attention needs to be paid to the kinds of historical understanding,

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emotional affects, and forms of action (including moral and political) that specific material and immaterial traces of the past offer. It is clear that the experience of authenticity has an important role to play in mediating the complex dynamic relations between past and present that sit at the heart of heritage education. In short, the experience of authenticity produced through a sensory relationship with historic objects, buildings and places could be added to Phillips’ heuristic devices. It incites affection and emotion. It also triggers the imagination and confronts the student with his or her own historicity. In their psychological work on the development of children’s understandings of authenticity, Gelman and Frazier highlight the importance of sensory experiences of the object.60 This is increasingly recognized in museum studies, where the role of touch in facilitating learning has recently been highlighted.61 ‘Taking hold’ is of prime importance in the visceral experience of an object; ‘when a person has the opportunity to handle an object, they can have the feeling that the object is part of themselves or, conversely, that they are part of the object’.62 The power of touch thus highlights the element of ‘contagion’, which Gelman and Frazier argue plays such an important role in children’s early understandings of authenticity.63 The ‘law of contagion’, as they employ it, holds that objects acquire qualities from contact with past individuals (and events) that are carried with them producing subsequent affects on those who come into contact with them. These qualities and associated affects may be physical, intellectual or moral, and positive or negative in valence.64 Thus, in using touch, and other direct sensory experiences, in education contexts it is necessary to be alert to the affective responses that traces of the past are likely to incite – awe, wonder, affection, identification, dread, revulsion. Teachers and heritage educators will need to deploy strategies to contextualize these affective responses and put them to work to support problem solving, learning and discovery. The moral and political dimensions of these responses are starkly evident and it will also be necessary to employ specific techniques to explore claims of ownership and identity, and the forms of inclusion and exclusion they are predicated on. Here the networks of relations that are central to the experience of authenticity may need to be explicitly articulated and scrutinized with reference to specific historical conditions in the learning context. Finally, the biography of the historic object, building, monument or place is critical to both the experience of authenticity and the learning process. Frazier and Gelman refer to this as ‘historical path’ and argue that it is central to how young children start to understand authenticity, to how they identify the essence of a thing and associate it with a continuous trajectory through time.65 As discussed above, ethnographic research has also shown that the biographies of objects, and the networks of relations they have been embedded in, are crucial to how people experience their authenticity. In a heritage



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education context, attention to these biographical details is therefore important for the affective experience, but I suggest that it can also be put to work to promote a sense of historicity, and to produce different configurations of engagement and detachment that are crucial to the learning experience.

Authenticity and Education in Whitworth Park In what remains of this chapter66 I will explore how the experience of authenticity is put to work in the context of a community archaeology and history project, with particular attention to the production of engagement and detachment. The project concerned focuses on a public park, a form of civic space central to the urban landscape, which provides a particularly rich context for the exploration of identity politics. Whitworth Park in Manchester was opened in 1890 towards the tail end of a prolific phase of public park construction in Western European countries. In its Victorian and Edwardian hey-day, it boasted many of the features typical of public parks, such as a bandstand, a boating lake, an observatory, various shelters, formal flowerbeds, statues and a covered walkway. However, many of these were removed in the postwar period, creating a radically different landscape – a common fate reflecting changes in urban park management and funding cuts. Public parks were designed to address the problems associated with urbanization and industrialization, by providing access to nature, healthy pursuits, clean air, beauty and a sober venue for recreation.67 As a specific kind of urban space, they embodied a number of philanthropic and ‘improving’ ideals, as well as providing an arena for social control and the inculcation of middle-class values. Once part of the urban landscape, they quickly became sites of social encounter, tension and exclusion through which class, gender, civic, national and imperial identities were negotiated.68 And despite significant changes, they remain important sites for the negotiation of memory, identity and place, as well as a focus for ideas associated with health, pollution and the environment. The Whitworth Park Community Archaeology and History Project (2010–2015) was led by the Archaeology Department at the University of Manchester, and co-directed by Dr Hannah Cobb, Dr Melanie Giles and myself. The main community partner was the Friends of Whitworth Park, a group formed in 2005 with the aim of promoting the revival of the park for the benefit of the public, especially children (in keeping with the vision of its original founders).69 The project aimed to investigate the long-term social history of the Whitworth Park and its changing meaning for local communities. It also aimed to use archaeology as a way of engaging today’s residents with their urban heritage and to increase the social value of the

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Park. Through archival, archaeological, oral historical and social research, the project explored the changing role of the urban park in terms of class, consumption, citizenship, leisure, memory and place, whilst at the same time engaging people in these issues. It involved staff, students and community volunteers in archival research, two seasons of excavation, and a small-scale oral history programme. Biodiversity surveys provided another important component connecting the original ideal of access to nature with current concerns about urban green spaces. A programme of school workshops involving local primary (aged 7–11 years) and secondary schools (11–16 years) provided children and teenagers with the opportunity to excavate, process artefacts, and participate in drama-based or archival-inspired workshops. Opportunities for informal, life-long learning were also created through outreach events during the excavation seasons, and other forms of engagement such as newspapers, public talks and the project blog.70 The approaches to learning and engagement employed during the project were not explicitly designed to address the issues raised in this chapter. However, they reflect many of the characteristics that define heritage education.71 They involve a variety of practices where past material, textual and visual culture is directly used to stimulate curiosity and imagination, but also to try to enhance critical and historical thinking.72 Excavating and cleaning artefacts provided a sense of discovery, wonder and emotional engagement, as well as evoking questions and intellectual engagement (Figure 7.2). More structured hands-on sessions with excavated objects, historical maps and imagery were then used to introduce notions of temporality and encourage critical engagement. Forms of contextualization and analogical reasoning were used to explore relations between past and present,73 highlighting both the distinctiveness of life in the Victorian and Edwardian park, as well as enduring themes and issues, such as access to green space, pollution and identity. Forms of re-enactment and performance also provided important mechanisms for the learning experience. For instance, the production of park postcards by schoolchildren, based on the study of Edwardian picture postcards, facilitated analogies with modern forms of rapid communication. Drama workshops supported contextualization by encouraging children to explore the forms of play, behaviour and comportment that Victorian and Edwardian children would have experienced, thus enhancing their awareness, at a bodily level, of subtle differences between past and present. Furthermore, those leading the workshops stimulated forms of questioning, debate and dialogue in relation to these participatory exercises. Pupils thus played an active role in meaning-making through imagination, performance and practice, whilst also being encouraged to engage in critical thinking and historical reasoning. In this way differences in identity, background knowledge, disposition, interests and values can be explored.



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Figure 7.2  The power of touch – a young boy shows off the ceramic marble he has just discovered. (Photo: S. Jones)

Figure 7.3  Dr Melanie Giles leads a workshop for Manchester Museum’s Young Archeologists’ Club using images from historic postcards to create historical distance. (Photo: S. Jones)

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The experience of authenticity is central to these learning practices, situated as they are in relation to the excavations and the structures and objects these revealed.74 Here, I will highlight how the experience of authenticity informs the learning process. The objects – no matter how familiar some might be – evoke a sense of curiosity, but also intimacy and a visceral sense of engagement. Children, varying in age between 7 and 16, often respond with delight and wonder, but also a strong sense of ownership over objects that they have excavated, irrespective of whether they are mundane items like old buttons, or something more unusual like a medallion to celebrate the coronation of a monarch. As argued above, touch is very important. The ceramic cubes produced commercially for a game called ‘Jacks’ or ‘five stones’ are particularly popular. They are made for children’s hands and have a charismatic tactility. The younger schoolchildren (7–11 years) in particular spend much time rubbing their glazed surfaces, just as children must have done in the past. However, the sense of engagement created – that might simply appropriate the past to the present – is then used in the more structured workshops described above to explore what it was like to be a child in the Victorian and Edwardian periods. For instance, images from old postcards, showing children in different clothes playing in a radically different park landscape, were employed to stimulate reflection for instance on the foreignness of the past. In this way historical distance is produced and more analytical skills are developed alongside the intimacy created from the experience of authenticity. Some objects, like coins, are particularly well-suited for producing these twin effects – of distance and proximity on the levels of temporality and engagement. Patina and signs of deterioration speak to their active social lives – the pockets and purses they’ve experienced – and all the hands through which they’ve passed.75 They thus evoke a powerful sense of authenticity. But whilst such coins are instantly familiar, changes in design and denomination can produce a sense of distance, change and foreignness. Even those minted during Queen Elizabeth II’s reign often depict her at a much younger age than children are familiar with today, thus  producing a sense of temporality. The authenticity of some objects can even produce a sense of revulsion, or a conscious attempt to disconnect, as a result of the kind of ‘contagion’ discussed in the previous section. This is often the case with particularly intimate objects like a child’s belt, or items associated with grooming such as the plastic combs that we found in abundance, a product of the time when a man did not go anywhere without a comb in his back trouser pocket. Nevertheless, these feelings can also be used as a starting point for learning, encouraging pupils to consider the changing nature of personal grooming, dress and comportment, and to examine processes of continuity and change. This might result in



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r­ eflections on ethical dimensions and changing expressions of gender, class and ethnicity.

Conclusions To conclude, it is clear that the experience of authenticity – produced through contact with material and immaterial traces of the past – can be an enriching and productive component of heritage education. I have argued that the experience of authenticity is about the ability of objects to create networks of relationships across space and time. It can thus produce an active form of engagement with the past and facilitate empathy and imagination. Yet, this does not inevitably lead to a form of presentism where the past is appropriated and tamed. Indeed, quite often it is simultaneously associated with a sense of the passage of time and of the otherness of the past. Even something as apparently mundane as an early twentieth-century coin can produce these twin affects when unearthed from the ground. I suggest therefore that in heritage education, the experience of authenticity can be used to track backwards and forwards through time, creating proximity and distance, engagement and detachment. It could be argued that some objects intrinsically facilitate this more than others. Certainly different kinds of material and immaterial traces of the past will lend themselves to the production of different configurations of what Grever et al. call temporality and engagement,76 and this is something that would benefit from further research. In this chapter, I have emphasized that sensory experiences, in particular touch, can provide the basis for important heuristic techniques when combined with pedagogical strategies that encourage critical, participatory and reflective learning. Furthermore, paying attention to the biographies of historic objects, buildings and places can be an important technique in producing a sense of temporality alongside engagement. The networks of relations embodied by these traces of the past are central to the experience of authenticity, but they can also be used to develop a critical appreciation of context, thus facilitating the development of historical thinking in educational contexts as discussed by Seixas and others.77 This is important because, whilst the experience of authenticity can produce a sense of empathy and even commonality, it can also be tied to the production of more exclusive imagined communities.78 Thus heritage education needs to be attentive to how historical distance and proximity intersect with relations of power and identity in the present. These issues should not be confined to pedagogic theorizing, but also actively explored with young people in the context of heritage education projects.

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Acknowledgements This chapter draws on a number of research projects, including my research on the experience of authenticity in Scotland and Nova Scotia; an ongoing collaborative ethnographic project focusing on heritage conservation with Tom Yarrow (Durham University); and the Whitworth Park Community Archaeology and History Project, co-directed by myself, Hannah Cobb and Melanie Giles (University of Manchester). I would like to thank my research collaborators for their important insights and ideas, as well as their intellectual generosity. I am also indebted to those who participated in these projects, including ethnographic research participants, community archaeology volunteers, and school children, without whom the research would not be possible. Thanks to Historic Scotland for granting permission for research at Glasgow Cathedral. The Arts and Humanities Research Council (Ref. AH/ F004907/1) funded my initial research on the experience of authenticity. Research on conservation and authenticity at Glasgow Cathedral was funded by a British Academy Small Grant (Ref. SG100577). The Whitworth Park Community Archaeology and History Project was funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund (Ref. YH-10-05667).

Notes 1. This interview was undertaken during fieldwork focusing on the cultural significance of Glasgow Cathedral in 2011. It is part of a longer-term ethnographic project focusing on conservation work carried out by Historic Scotland in collaboration with Dr Tom Yarrow, Durham University. 2. Interview with Margaret, Glasgow Cathedral, 2011. 3. Interview with Peter, Glasgow Cathedral, 2010. 4. For a detailed analysis of the production and negotiation of the authenticity in the context of the conservation project at Glasgow Cathedral, see S. Jones and T. Gresham Yarrow, ‘Crafting Authenticity: An Ethnography of Conservation Practice’, Journal of Material Culture 18, 1 (2013): 3–26. 5. S. Jones, ‘Experiencing Authenticity at Heritage Sites: Some Implications for Heritage Management and Conservation’, Conservation and Management of Archaeological Sites 11, 2 (2009): 133–147; S. Jones, ‘Negotiating Authentic Objects and Authentic Selves: Beyond the Deconstruction of Authenticity’, Journal of Material Culture 15, 2 (2010): 181–203. 6. M. Grever and C. van Boxtel, ‘Introduction: Reflections on Heritage as an Educational Resource’, in Heritage Education: Challenges in Dealing with the Past, eds C. van Boxtel, S. Klein and E. Snoep, Amsterdam, 2011, 9–10. 7. See for example Jones, ‘Experiencing Authenticity at Heritage Sites’; Jones, ‘Negotiating Authentic Objects and Authentic Selves’; Jones and Yarrow, ‘Crafting Authenticity’. The research methodologies include semi-structured interviews and participant observation with a range of subjects who are referred to using pseudonyms. 8. S. Jones, H. Cobb, R. Colton and M. Giles, ‘“Parklife” Past and Present: The Whitworth Park Community Archaeology and History Project’, Journal of Victorian Culture



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Online, 26 March (2013): S. Jones, H. Cobb, R. Colton and M. Giles, ‘“Parks for the People”: the Whitworth Park Community Archaeology and History Project’, The Museum Archaeologist 35 (2014): 23–31. 9. M. Clavir, Preserving What is Valued: Museums, Conservation, and First Nations, Vancouver, 2002, xxi; E. Pye, Caring for the Past: Issues in Conservation for Archaeology and Museums, London, 2001, 58–59. 10. N.S. Price, M.K. Talley and A.M. Vaccaro, eds, Historical and Philosophical Issues in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage, Los Angeles, 1996, 309–311. 11. For examples see H. Cleere, ‘The Evaluation of the Concept of Authenticity in the Context of the World Heritage Convention’, in NARA Conference on Authenticity in Relation to the World Heritage Convention, ed. K.E. Larsen, ICOMOS, 2005, 57–66; Pye, Caring for the Past; D. Phillips, Exhibiting Authenticity, Manchester, 1997. 12. This shift is discussed in detail in Jones, ‘Experiencing Authenticity at Heritage Sites’. 13. Jones and Yarrow, ‘Crafting Authenticity’. 14. Interview with Kevin at Glasgow Cathedral in 2010. 15. For examples see, from diverse positions, M. Shanks and C. Tilley, Reconstructing Archaeology, Cambridge, 1997; K. Walsh, The Representation of the Past: Museums and Heritage in the Postmodern World, London and New York, 1992; P. Wright, On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain, London, 1985. For a more sympathetic recent analysis see C. Holtorf, From Stonehenge to Las Vegas: Archaeology as Popular Culture, Lanham, 2005. 16. S. Macdonald, Memorylands: Heritage and Identity in Europe Today, London, 2013. 17. C. Holtorf and T. Schadla Hall, ‘Age as Artefact: On Archaeological Authenticity’, European Journal of Archaeology 2, 2 (1999): 229–247. 18. Holtorf, From Stonehenge to Las Vegas, Phillips, Exhibiting Authenticity. 19. E.M. Bruner, Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel, Chicago, 2005; R. Handler and E. Gable, The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg, Durham, NC, 1997. 20. S. Errington, The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress, Berkeley, 1988; B. Spooner, ‘Weavers and Dealers: The Authenticity of an Oriental Carpet’, in The Social Life of Things, ed. A. Appadurai, Cambridge, 1986, 195–235. 21. See R. Handler, ‘Authenticity’, Anthropology Today 2, 1 (1986): 2–4; C. Lindholm, Culture and Authenticity, Malden, 2008; L. Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, Oxford, 1972. 22. F. Ankersmit, ‘Can we Experience the Past?’, in History-Making: The Intellectual and Social Formation of a Discipline, eds R. Torstendahl and I. Veit-Brause, Stockholm, 1996, 51. 23. For example, B. Dicks, Heritage, Place and Community, Cardiff, 2000; C. Grasseni, ‘Slow Food, Fast Genes: Timescapes of Authenticity and Innovation in the Anthropology of Food’, Cambridge Anthropology 25, 2 (2005): 79–94; Jones, ’Negotiating Authentic Objects and Authentic Selves’; S. Macdonald, ‘A People’s Story: Heritage, Identity and Authenticity’, in Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory, eds C. Rojek and J. Urry, London and New York, 1997, 155–175. 24. J. Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, London, 1849, 172. 25. W. Benjamin, Illuminations, New York, 1969. 26. Ibid., 221. 27. Ankersmit, ‘Can we Experience the Past’, 55, drawing on the work of Huizinga. 28. Macdonald, Memorylands, 114–115. 29. Jones, ‘Experiencing Authenticity at Heritage Sites’ and ‘Negotiating Authentic Objects and Authentic Selves’. 30. A. Riegl, ‘The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Essence and its Development’, translated and reprinted in Historical and Philosophical Issues in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage, eds N.S. Price, M.K, Tally and A.M. Vaccaro, Los Angeles, 1996 [1903], 69–83.

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31. C. Holtorf, ‘On Pastness: A Reconsideration of Materiality in Archaeological Object Authenticity’, Anthropological Quarterly 86, 2 (2013): 427–443. 32. Macdonald, Memorylands; after A. Weiner, Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving, Berkeley, 1992. 33. A. Weiner, ‘Cultural Difference and the Density of Objects’, American Ethnologist 21, 1 (1993): 391–403. 34. Macdonald, Memorylands, 115. 35. Ibid. 36. Macdonald, ‘A People’s Story’, 169. 37. For a full cultural biography of the Hilton of Cadboll cross-slab, see H. James, I. Henderson, S. Foster and S. Jones, A Fragmented Masterpiece: Recovering the Biography of the Hilton of Cadboll Pictish Cross-slab, Edinburgh, 2008. 38. Interview with Duncan, a local resident of the village of Hilton of Cadboll in 2001. 39. Interview with Mhàiri, a local resident of the village of Hilton of Cadboll in 2001. 40. Weiner, Inalienable Possessions. 41. For a discussion of the role of such metaphors in relation to national identities, see L. Malkki, ‘National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialisation of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees’, Cultural Anthropology 7, 1 (1992): 24–44. 42. B. Dicks, ‘The View of our Town from the Hill: Communities on Display as Local Heritage’, International Journal of Cultural Studies 2, 3 (1999): 364. 43. Ibid. 44. Dicks, Heritage, Place and Community, 220–229. 45. Macdonald, Memorylands, 135. 46. See Ankersmit, ‘Can we Experience the Past?’ for a discussion of Huizinga’s concept of ‘historical sensation’. See also J. den Hollander, H. Paul and R. Peters, ‘Introduction: The Metaphor of Historical Distance’, History and Theory 50 (2011): 1–10. 47. See for example J. Day, Making Senses of the Past: Toward a Sensory Archaeology, Carbondale and Edwardsville, 2013; M.S. Phillips, ‘Rethinking Historical Distance: From Doctrine to Heuristic’, History and Theory 50 (2011): 11–23; G. Aplin, ‘Heritage as Examplar: A Pedagogigal Role for Heritage Studies in Values Education’, Environmentalist 27 (2007): 375–383; C. van Boxtel, ‘Heritage as a Resource for Learning. Opportunities and Challenges’, in Heritage Education, eds C. van Boxtel, S. Klein and E. Snoep, Amsterdam, 2011, 40–42. 48. See Van Boxtel, Klein and Snoep, Heritage Education, and T. Copeland, ‘Citizenship Education and Heritage’, Internet Archaeology 12 (2002). 49. Grever and van Boxtel, ‘Introduction’, 10. 50. Ibid., 12. 51. M. Grever, P. de Bruijn and C. van Boxtel, ‘Negotiating Historical Distance: Or, How to Deal with the Past as a Foreign Country in Heritage Education’, Paedagogica Historica Online (2012): 1–15. 52. Den Hollander, Paul and Peters, ‘Introduction’, 2. 53. Ibid., 4; also Phillips, ‘Rethinking Historical Distance’, 14. 54. Phillips, ‘Rethinking Historical Distance’, 14. 55. J. de Groot, ‘Affect and Empathy: Re-enactment and Performance as/in History’, Rethinking History: the Journal of Theory and Practice 15, 4 (2011): 587–599. 56. See contributions to ‘Historical Distance: Reflections on a Metaphor’, special issue, History and Theory 50, 4 (2011). 57. Grever et al., ‘Negotiating Historical Distance’. 58. Ibid., 3. 59. Phillips, ‘Rethinking Historical Distance’, 22. 60. S.A. Gelman and B.N. Frazier, ‘Children’s Understanding of Authenticity’, in Telling Children about the Past: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, eds N. Galanidou and



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L.H. Dommasnes, Ann Arbor, 2007, 82–101. On adult appraisals of authenticity, see B.N. Frazier, S.A. Gelman, A. Nelson and B. Hood, ‘Picasso Paintings, Moon Rocks, and Handwritten Beatles Lyrics: Adults’ Evaluations of Authentic Objects’, Journal of Cognition and Culture 9 (2009): 1–14. 61. H.J. Chatterjee, ed., Touch in Museums: Policy and Practice in Object Handling, Oxford and New York, 2008; E. Pye, ed., The Power of Touch: Handling Objects in Museum and Heritage Contexts, Walnut Creek, 2008. 62. D. Romanek and B. Lynch, ‘Touch and the Value of Object Handling: Final Conclusions for a New Sensory Museology’, in Chatterjee, Touch in Museums, 227. 63. Gelman and Frazier, ‘Children’s Understanding of Authenticity’, 92–93. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid., 83. 66. I am indebted to my colleagues and collaborators, Melanie Giles, Ruth Colton and Hannah Cobb, for contributing to the arguments and insights discussed in this section. 67. See H. Conroy, People’s Parks: The Design and Development of Victorian Parks in Britain, Cambridge, 1991. 68. See J. Brück, ‘Landscapes of Desire: Parks, Colonialism, and Identity in Victorian and Edwardian Ireland’, International Journal of Historical Archaeology 17, 1 (2013): 196–223. 69. Other partners include Manchester Museum, the Whitworth Art Gallery, and the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Relations Centre. These organizations have forms of expertise and skill that support the public and school components. A close relationship with Manchester City Council is also a key component both in terms of providing in kind resources, and facilitating and promoting our work in the Park. See Jones, Cobb, Colton and Giles, ‘“Parklife” Past and Present’ for further details. 70. http://whitworthparklife.wordpress.com 71. Following Grever and Van Boxtel, ‘Introduction’. See also Kaat Wils, ‘Geschiedenisonderwijs en Erfgoed: Een terreinverkenning’, Hermes 14 (2010): 1–6. 72. For a discussion of the key concepts and techniques involved in promoting ‘historical thinking’, see P. Seixas and T. Morton, The Big Six Historical Thinking Concepts, Toronto, 2012. 73. J. van Drie and C. van Boxtel, ‘Historical Reasoning: Towards a Framework for Analyzing Students’ Reasoning about the Past’, Education Psychology Review 20, 2 (2008): 96. 74. The formal school workshops designed by my colleagues, Melanie Giles and Ruth Colton, in conjunction with the education team from Manchester Museum, have been discussed in R. Colton, M. Giles, H. Cobb and S. Jones, ‘Open air Learning: Schools, Education and the Whitworth Park Community Archaeology and History Project’, Journal of Victorian Culture Online (2013). 75. In this respect Romanek and Lynch note that ‘perhaps particularly when working with children, objects that have signs of handling often draw the children’s attention. If an object is cracked, if it’s damaged, if it’s stained, if it shows the finger or thumbprints of the maker (as in some ancient clay objects), the object has a resonant history, and children can become connected to this person, or inspired by the object’s story’ (Romanek and Lynch, ‘Touch and the Value of Object Handling’, 284). 76. Grever et al., ‘Negotiating Historical Distance’. 77. Seixas and Morton, The Big Six. Also Grever et al., ‘Negotiating Historical Distance’ and van Drie and van Boxtel, ‘Historical Reasoning’. 78. See on this issue particularly M. Grever, ‘Dilemma’s of Common and Plural History: Reflections on History Education and Heritage in a Globalizing World’, in History Education and the Construction of National Identities, eds M. Carretero, M. Asensio and M. RodrígezMoneo, Charlotte, 2012, 75–91.

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References Ankersmit, F. ‘Can we Experience the Past?’, in History-Making. The Intellectual and Social Formation of a Discipline, eds R. Torstendahl and I. Veit-Brause, Stockholm, 1996, 47–77. Aplin, G. ‘Heritage as Examplar: A Pedagogigal Role for Heritage Studies in Values Education’, Environmentalist 27 (2007): 375–383. Benjamin, W. Illuminations, New York, 1969. Brück, J. ‘Landscapes of Desire: Parks, Colonialism, and Identity in Victorian and Edwardian Ireland’, International Journal of Historical Archaeology 17, 1 (2013): 196–223. Bruner, E.M. Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel, Chicago, 2005. Clavir, M. Preserving What is Valued: Museums, Conservation, and First Nations, Vancouver, 2002. Chatterjee, H.J., ed. Touch in Museums: Policy and Practice in Object Handling, Oxford and New York, 2008. Cleere, H. ‘The Evaluation of the Concept of Authenticity in the Context of the World Heritage Convention’, in NARA Conference on Authenticity in Relation to the World Heritage Convention, ed. K.E Larsen, ICOMOS, 2005, 57–66. Colton, R., M. Giles, H. Cobb and S. Jones. ‘Open Air Learning: Schools, Education and the Whitworth Park Community Archaeology and History Project’, Journal of Victorian Culture Online (2013), http://blogs.tandf.co.uk/jvc/2013/03/26/open-air-learningschools-education-and-the-whitworth-park-community-archaeology-and-history-­ project/ (accessed 11 February 2015). Conroy, H. People’s Parks: The Design and Development of Victorian Parks in Britain, Cambridge, 1991. Copeland, T. ‘Citizenship Education and Heritage’, Internet Archaeology 12 (2002), http://jri. sagepub.com/content/5/1/35.full.pdf+html. Day, J. Making Senses of the Past: Toward a Sensory Archaeology, Carbondale and Edwardsville, 2013. de Groot, J. ‘Affect and Empathy: Re-enactment and Performance as/in History’, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 15, 4 (2011): 587–599. den Hollander, J., H. Paul and R. Peters. ‘Introduction: The Metaphor of Historical Distance’, History and Theory 50 (2011): 1–10. Dicks, B. ‘The View of our Town from the Hill: Communities on Display as Local Heritage’, International Journal of Cultural Studies 2, 3 (1999): 349–368. ———. Heritage, Place and Community, Cardiff, 2000. Errington, S. The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress, Berkeley, 1988. Frazier, B.N., S.A. Gelman, A. Nelson and B. Hood. ‘Picasso Paintings, Moon Rocks, and Hand-written Beatles Lyrics: Adults’ Evaluations of Authentic Objects’, Journal of Cognition and Culture 9 (2009): 1–14. Gelman, S.A. and B.N. Frazier. ‘Children’s Understanding of Authenticity’, in Telling Children about the Past: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, eds N. Galanidou and L.H. Dommasnes, Ann Arbor, 2007, 82–101. Grasseni, C. ‘Slow Food, Fast Genes: Timescapes of Authenticity and Innovation in the Anthropology of Food’, Cambridge Anthropology 25, 2 (2005): 79–94. Grever, M. ‘Dilemmas of Common and Plural History: Reflections on History Education and Heritage in a Globalizing World’, in History Education and the Construction of National Identities, eds M. Carretero, M. Asensio and M. Rodrígez-Moneo, Charlotte, 2012, 75–91. ——— and C. van Boxtel. ‘Introduction: Reflections on Heritage as an Educational Resource’, in Heritage Education: Challenges in Dealing with the Past, eds C. van Boxtel, S. Klein and E. Snoep, Amsterdam, 2011, 9–10.



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———, P. de Bruijn and C. van Boxtel. ‘Negotiating Historical Distance: Or, How to Deal with the Past as a Foreign Country in Heritage Education’, Paedagogica Historica Online (2012): 1–15. Handler, H. ‘Authenticity’, Anthropology Today 2, 1 (1986): 2–4. ——— and E. Gable. The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg, Durham, NC, 1997. Holtorf, C. From Stonehenge to Las Vegas: Archaeology as Popular Culture, Lanham, 2005. ———. ‘On Pastness: a Reconsideration of Materiality in Archaeological Object Authenticity’, Anthropological Quarterly 86, 2 (2013): 427–443. ——— and T. Schadla Hall. ‘Age as Artefact: On Archaeological Authenticity’, European Journal of Archaeology 2, 2 (1999): 229–247. James, H., I. Henderson, S. Foster and S. Jones. A Fragmented Masterpiece: Recovering the Biography of the Hilton of Cadboll Pictish Cross-slab, Edinburgh, 2008. Jones, S. ‘Experiencing Authenticity at Heritage Sites: Some Implications for Heritage Management and Conservation’, Conservation and Management of Archaeological Sites 11, 2 (2009): 133–147. ———. ‘Negotiating Authentic Objects and Authentic Selves: Beyond the Deconstruction of Authenticity’, Journal of Material Culture 15, 2 (2010): 181–203. ——— and T. Gresham Yarrow. ‘Crafting Authenticity: An Ethnography of Conservation Practice’, Journal of Material Culture 18, 1 (2013): 3–26. ———, H. Cobb, R. Colton and M. Giles. ‘“Parklife” Past and Present: The Whitworth Park Community Archaeology and History Project’, Journal of Victorian Culture Online, 26 March (2013), http://blogs.tandf.co.uk/jvc/2013/03/26/parklife-past-and-present-thewhitworth-park-community-archaeology-and-history-project/ (accessed 11 February 2015). ———, H. Cobb, R. Colton and M. Giles. ‘“Parks for the People”: The Whitworth Park Community Archaeology and History Project’, The Museum Archaeologist 35 (2014): 23–31. Lindholm, C. Culture and Authenticity, Malden, 2008. Macdonald, S. ‘A People’s Story: Heritage, Identity and Authenticity’, in Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory, eds C. Rojek and J. Urry, London and New York, 1997, 155–175. ———. Memorylands: Heritage and Identity in Europe Today, London, 2013. Malkki, L. ‘National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialisation of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees’, Cultural Anthropology 7, 1 (1992): 24–44. Phillips, D. Exhibiting Authenticity, Manchester, 1997. Phillips, M.S. ‘Rethinking Historical Distance: From Doctrine to Heuristic’, History and Theory 50 (2011): 11–23. Price, N.S., M.K. Talley and A.M. Vaccaro, eds. Historical and Philosophical Issues in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage, Los Angeles, 1996. Pye, E. Caring for the Past: Issues in Conservation for Archaeology and Museums, London, 2001. ———, ed. The Power of Touch: Handling Objects in Museum and Heritage Contexts, Walnut Creek, 2008. Riegl, A. ‘The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Essence and Its Development’, translated and reprinted in Historical and Philosophical Issues in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage, eds N.S. Price, M.K, Tally and A.M. Vaccaro, Los Angeles, 1996 [1903], 69–83. Romanek, D. and B. Lynch. ‘Touch and the Value of Object Handling: Final Conclusions for a New Sensory Museology’, in Touch in Museums, ed. H.J. Chatterjee, Oxford, 2008, 275–286. Ruskin, J. The Seven Lamps of Architecture, London, 1849. Seixas, P. and T. Morton. The Big Six Historical Thinking Concepts, Toronto, 2012.

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Shanks, M. and C. Tilley. Reconstructing Archaeology, Cambridge, 1997. Spooner, B. ‘Weavers and Dealers: The Authenticity of an Oriental Carpet’, in The Social Life of Things, ed. A. Appadurai, Cambridge, 1986, 195–235. Trilling, L. Sincerity and Authenticity, Oxford, 1972. van Boxtel, C. ‘Heritage as a Resource for Learning: Opportunities and Challenges’, in Heritage Education, eds C. van Boxtel, S. Klein and E. Snoep, Amsterdam, 2011, 40–42. van Drie, J. and C. van Boxtel. ‘Historical Reasoning: Towards a Framework for Analyzing Students’ Reasoning about the Past’, Education Psychology Review 20, 2 (2008): 87–110. Walsh, K. The Representation of the Past: Museums and Heritage in the Postmodern World, London and New York, 1992. Weiner, A. Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving, Berkeley, 1992. ———. ‘Cultural Difference and the Density of Objects’, American Ethnologist 21, 1 (1993): 391–403. Wils, K. ‘Geschiedenisonderwijs en Erfgoed: Een Terreinverkenning’ [History Education and Heritage: Exploration of a Domain], Hermes (2010): 1–6. Wright, P. On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain, London, 1985.

Siân Jones is Professor of Environmental History and Heritage at the University of Stirling (U.K.). Her research focuses on the role of heritage in the production and negotiation of meaning, memory and identity. She has also carried out research focusing on heritage conservation, particularly in the areas of professional practice, authenticity, cultural significance and social value. Her publications include: The Archaeology of Ethnicity (1997), Early Medieval Sculpture and the Production of Meaning, Value and Place (2004) and A Fragmented Masterpiece: Recovering the Biography of the Hilton of Cadboll CrossSlab (2008). She recently edited a special edition of the International Journal of Historical Archaeology on Memory, Oral History and Archaeology (2012).

CHAPTER

8

Archaeological Heritage Education and the Making of Regional Identities Heleen van Londen

In February 2001, the Groningen town council held a referendum on renovating the great market in its old historical centre and building a car park underneath the market square. The public responded en masse, with the no-voters amounting to 81 per cent. The no-voters were mostly angry with the city officials for their arrogance during the process; the officials were all in favour. It was a confrontation between the people and the town council. The underground car park meant that cars, which had mostly been banned earlier, would return to the town centre. Another car park project in the vicinity had been delayed, which had cost a fortune. The final and most influential argument against the new development, however, was the slight chance that the old church tower, the Martini tower, might suffer some subsidence. Despite all the technical reports reassuring residents that this would not happen or only fractionally so, the chance of subsidence filled the public with great emotion and was not to be overcome. It became the very image of the protest movement. Posters were produced of a sliding Martini tower. Archaeologists, meanwhile, were staggered: they felt the underground car park would destroy the old church yard, which dated back to the early medieval period, contained thousands of burials and harboured a treasure trove of information, but this argument played no role whatsoever. The reason for this was probably the lack of an organized archaeological lobby at the time. Eventually, the renovation plan was cancelled. The city council Notes for this section begin on page 163.

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had misjudged the public engagement and had been blinded by economic arguments. They had to start from scratch with a public debate.1 Historical sites and monuments in the landscape are tangible remnants of the past. As the case of the Martini tower illustrates, the public, politicians and experts all interact in a context of strong emotions relating to perceived heritage.2 Such sites, often important highlights for tourists, hold many stories. European Union (EU) Conventions, as well as national policies, aim to integrate the archaeological-historical landscape with spatial planning, a successful policy resulting in the growth and prominence of historical monuments in public space and making archaeological heritage part and parcel of the modern landscape and its development. As many archaeological sites are covered up and invisible to the public eye, it is storytelling that imbues these monuments with significance. The case of the Martini tower shows the need for archaeologists to communicate effectively and participate broadly in such processes. This chapter focuses on archaeological heritage education that is the result of integrating archaeological heritage into spatial planning. After providing an outline of archaeology as a profession, I will explain the position of archaeological education in Public Archaeology, mainly located in the Netherlands. Next, I will explain how archaeological heritage management has become formally placed within the domain of spatial planning by describing European treaties and policy. The integration into planning is a development that takes place in many European countries, but the success of such integration depends on how well (expert) knowledge is transferred and adopted in planning processes. This can be done through mapping and/ or storytelling. Planners themselves need to be influenced and motivated by experts, and sometimes by the public. Tapping into people’s fascination and creating closeness to the past then become tools that are purposely used in the planning arena. I will touch on how the academic concept of the ‘biography of landscape’ in the Netherlands has been used as such a tool to generate regional histories, as a metaphor for the long-term history of landscapes and their shifting meaning through time. I will point out that there is a demand and supply for regional histories in the light of a more general need for creating regional identities. While archaeologists aim to preserve and increase public support, on the one hand, they act within a context that is political, on the other. I conclude, finally, that experts in archaeology need to become aware that they are mediators in storytelling and that there is a need for a paradigm shift. Their stories will be consumed by the public, possibly by purposely promoting a direct relation with the (constructed) past, and maybe even by transforming it into a form of Archaeotainment. This practice is far removed



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from a critical historical approach and feeds into the public longing for a tangible past, an attachment to place, as well as entertainment.

Archaeology, Education and Public Archaeology Archaeology as a profession goes back to antiquities being systematically collected in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by wealthy individuals out of a fascination with the past and the material culture itself.3 This was long before archaeology became an academic discipline or even a profession. Antiquities were thought of as both magical and charming. This public valuation lies at the basis of the profession and has persisted, especially with regard to excavations. Actually discovering, uncovering and touching past remains is exciting: the thrill of touch is experienced as a direct relation with the past, much like Huizinga’s ‘historical sensation’.4 The British Channel 4 TV programme Time Team showed 272 episodes in the period from 1994 to 2013.5 The producers’ formula was to visit places of archaeological importance with a team of experts to discover hidden histories that could be touched and, by doing so, experienced. This series remained popular for about twenty years. The ingredients of discovery, ingenious architecture, beautiful (costly!) objects and adventure have been much romanticized in films (Indiana Jones), video games (Lara Croft) and toys (Playmobil, for instance, on Egypt, Rome and the Vikings). Large audiences have been reached through these media for the purpose of entertainment, a phenomenon that has been called Archaeotainment. The content is largely biased by colonial views and treasure hunting, and its relation to actual archaeological practice or even archaeological heritage education is slight.6 Excavations are action-oriented. In general, people find the performative aspect of excavations attractive, which leads to regular visits by schools and local communities to come and see. Some excavations even have formal  public outreach programmes.7 Research in the U.K., Italy, the U.S.A.  and the Netherlands shows that there is relatively good public support for archaeology.8 Although recent legislation has led to the professionalization of excavations and a decrease in actual public participation in digs, a specialized branch of archaeology has emerged: Public Archaeology.9 Storytelling in the public environment is now current practice in archaeological heritage management, especially in relation to the need for establishing regional identities. This practice raises questions with respect to heritage education, a field that is grouped under ‘Public Archaeology’ and that, despite having grown in importance and recognition recently, hardly

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features strategically in mainstream policy, with its focus on commercial archaeology. Heritage education in archaeology is not particularly well defined. As it stands, it means educating the public about archaeological heritage, so they may learn and value (local) history, historical places and material remains. Heritage education and Public Archaeology are used alternately. Two models are discussed in the literature: the educational model (or deficit model) and the democratic model (or multiple perspective model).10 In the educational model, experts aim to increase support for safekeeping measures and raising public funds. Although archaeology and excavations are thought of as exciting, preserving (covered) archaeological sites is not very popular. In the democratic model, the aim is to meet people’s need for identity, curiosity and entertainment, inviting them to participate and express its preferences, memories and interpretations. Both models are defined from the experts’ perspective. Professional standards relating to historical thinking and other educational skills are not at the forefront of either model,11 as both are lacking the critical reflection and awareness in relation to the past that is inherent in the concept of ‘historical distance’, defined as ‘a dynamic configuration of temporality, engagement and participation’.12 Without much professional consideration, it is ‘historical closeness’ that is sought in archaeology, as illustrated recently by the reconstruction and presentation of a Neolithic man from Mienakker. This prehistoric hunter-gatherer was named Cees by the excavation team, after the farmer who owns the land. Such naming results in feelings of historical closeness, generating opportunities for direct identification between the farmer and the Neolithic man.13 Basically, public archaeology is dependent on the agenda of local and provincial councils, which differ in the degree to which they invest in the dissemination of knowledge and the manner in which knowledge is to be transferred.14 The past is increasingly present, not only through collective memory but also through a shared historical environment, which actively influences habitus and, as a result, relates to the way in which people see themselves and others. People relate to place and if that place radiates (in) tangible heritage, this naturally will effect perception. 15 Images of the past are multi-layered and contextually derived by definition. This is all the more reason to call for a critical analysis of the production, dissemination and consumption of knowledge, as the role of the interpreter is paramount in understanding the structuration of meaning.16 Work has been done already, mostly on the topics of archaeology and politics, ethnicity and gender.17 The latest European heritage treaty, the Faro Convention, which came into force in June 2011, concerns people rather than heritage itself, meaning a shift from objects from the past (the objective) towards their value and



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meaning for us (the subjective) and, in effect, a step away from essentialism. The treaty’s title, The Value of Cultural Heritage for Society, is indicative.18 Both this treaty and the European Landscape Convention differ in character from previous EU treaties on heritage in that they offer abstract formulations of values, aiming to effect attitude change rather than implement rules and regulations.19 In the present-day practice of regional identity creation, it is important to focus more on the meaning of archaeology for society and on archaeologists as mediators. Archaeological practice is no longer safely ensconced in the comfortable surroundings of excavations but has entered the planning arena, searching for the right arguments to influence inter- and trans-disciplinary groups in a quest for preservation.20 At the international level, Archaeological Heritage Management (AHM) aims to protect and manage archaeological sites and monuments.21 In the Netherlands, the origins of this policy date back to 1734, when an exotic shipworm was eroding the wood of the Dutch coastal defences, and entrepreneurs thought the megalithic tombs in Drenthe would be a good source of stone to replace the wood. It was in order to protect these monuments that the government issued the first ordinance.22 The foundation for a structural legal framework was laid in the late nineteenth century by the State Museum of Antiquities (founded in 1818) and societies such as the Dutch Antiquarian Society (Nederlandse Oudheidkundige Bond). In the early twentieth century, the demolition of terps (raised mounds) in Groningen led to the establishment of a monitoring programme to prevent further loss of scientific information,23 a measure that was influential because it led to the foundation of university research institutes. After the Second World War, more systematic attention was paid to heritage management, leading to the first Dutch Monuments Act in 1961. Rescue archaeology was common practice at this time: undertaking a quick excavation without many means before demolition took place. The Monuments Act of 1961 formed the first legal basis for protection.24 Today, in situ preservation is the first option by law. Only after the authorities favour development that will destroy the archaeological site, the developer is bound to finance proper care and excavations.25 Behind these changes lie influential European treaties, such as the Treaty of Valletta (1992)26 and the later European Landscape Convention (Florence 2000),27 which declare that (archaeological) heritage management should be integrated into planning. Protection is achieved by making new environments encompass the old or, in other words, by protection through development: presenting the remnants of the past as an opportunity to enhance the quality of public living environments while working on sustainable development at the same time. The Netherlands had a pioneering position in conceptualizing and implementing this policy in the late 1990s with the Belvedere Approach.28 After a period of rapid urban growth in the 1980s and early

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1990s, newly developed urban areas were perceived by the public as lacking in character, lacking in identity and lacking in opportunities for people to position themselves geographically.29 The Belvedere approach undertook to solve this issue by stimulating the integration of historic landmarks into new environments in an attempt to generate local identity. Archaeology was incorporated into this approach. The protection of archaeological sites, then, is no longer a singular action of listing parcels of land and bringing them under a permit, but rather a matter of integrating large areas of archaeological importance into municipal zoning plans across the entire country. Archaeological heritage has been grouped with historical landscapes and buildings under the broad label of cultural heritage. Whenever possible, monuments should be made visual for the public to experience them in order to learn about and appreciate the history of the place and thus to create quality environments as well as places of memory.30 In this way, heritage education has slipped into everyday public space as the effect of cultural heritage management. General practice has shifted towards planning and identity creation. One might say that the democratic model defined in Public Archaeology has implicitly become mainstream. The needs and interests of the public are more and more important. Is heritage for the people or by the people? Who gets to decide? Archaeological heritage education is not only related to active communication with the public through outreach projects, videos or museum exhibitions; people also negotiate historical meaning in experiencing their everyday living environment, urban as well as rural landscapes. Stories in local communities and expert narratives are all part of the ongoing formation of habitus. It is in this frame that the Faro Convention introduced the concept of heritage communities, which should be open, bottom-up and free of identity creation by the government.

Towards Heritage Communities These policies roughly address three groups: cultural heritage experts, planners and the general public.31 They are interrelated as stakeholders, and their interaction is defined by the way in which people perceive the past and value sustainability and the methods used to achieve this. Communication is central, creating scope for both expert and local knowledge.32 So-called Communities of practice (CoP’s) are explored as an organizational tool to bring heterogeneous stakeholders together; CoP’s are groups of people who share an interest or passion and learn through their interaction, CoP’s are specific forms for social learning and innovation.33 Similar efforts are made with the concept of heritage communities proposed in the Faro Convention.



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It is safe to say that the protection of archaeological sites has been propelled straight into the heritage debate. As they are the result of present-day choices and uses, sites are turned into commodities.34 However, identity creation appears to be a second concern in the practice of professional archaeologists, while preservation is the main aim. The professional community is defined as a closed group, inwardly oriented in spite of the vibrant public interest.35 A great investment has been made by the professional community to develop strategic methods for creating images, telling stories, sharing knowledge and gaining influence in society.36 Democratization of heritage management was proposed as something that would greatly benefit society.37 Not only should the professional community open up to the considerable number of amateur archaeologists and other interested parties, but they should also be aware that the subject of what needs to be preserved might vary: the public, for instance, may choose to protect the colourful tulip fields in the west instead of what may lie underneath.38 In the current debate, archaeologists are expected to participate, share, open up to local and lay knowledge and communicate powerful images. One of the central concepts that has been developed to do so is landscape biography. Landscape biography was taken from the branch of landscape archaeology to serve strategically as a unifying concept partly outside the analytical academic context in which it belonged.39 It became a vehicle for storytelling, bringing the long-term history of landscape to the front, but without giving much thought to methodological aspects regarding narratives.40 The National Agency for Cultural Heritage has posted a best practice for writing landscape biographies on its website,41 which has become a mainstream method of communication from experts to non-experts in the field of heritage management. The website of the national agency for cultural heritage cites: Landscape biography: landscape as a book A landscape biography describes the life history of a landscape. How did it change through time to become what it is today? How was it affected by human use? How did people experience the landscape through time and what meaning did they give it? And what meaning has all this for spatial development today? These questions can arise in a landscape biography. Crucial is the notion that landscapes have social dimensions. Creating landscape biographies offers opportunities for really understanding the landscape. This helps to link new developments to the past, which results in quality, as practice shows.42

Landscape biography has been adopted by academic circles and policymakers as a tool for creating local identity, or identity of place. In public discourse, identity of place has become blurred with identity of people, opening the door to classic discussions of people’s origins and their close relations with

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land.43 In the light of these processes, the aims of the Faro Convention with regard to open heritage communities become immediately relevant.

Storytelling, Marketing and Constructions of the Past Archaeologists implicitly feel that they are the responsible guardians of archaeological heritage. This used to be the case before and basically still remains the case today.44 Furthermore, there is a straightforward call for archaeologists to influence the public and the planners to get what they want, which is preservation and education for future generations. Already in 1995, archaeologist Min Bower introduced the idea of creating a public need that went deeper than mere leisure or education, linking to people’s feelings of belonging and tapping into emotions of nostalgia.45 She observed: As archaeology deals primarily with the preservation or control of a material base, part of it is heritage as we know it, it is paramount that archaeologists consider the manipulation of public opinion to further the cause of preservation of the record for the use and education of future generations. If, for whatever reason, people do not believe that the past is significant, preservation of the visible part of that past will not be an issue and public funding will evaporate.46

There appears to be a fine line between raising awareness and straightforward manipulation. The sliding Martini tower may be an example of such ­manipulation, in this case implemented by political parties (the Dutch green party) and lobbyists, in which cultural history was used by non-experts as ammunition to strengthen an already existing political standpoint.47 In the area of knowledge production, experts in strategic (action) research and interpretive heritage research must act within the boundaries of professional ethics and integrity.48 But what are these boundaries? Ethics is a highly implicit affair. Archaeological heritage is not yet widely perceived as a commodity, and archaeological experts see themselves as safe-keepers, not as mediators producing meaning and identity. They seem hardly aware of these interventions and constructions.49 After a lengthy period of debate on history education for schools in the Netherlands, a new tool for history teaching was presented in 2006: the national canon of Dutch History, which would solve a perceived problem of fragmentation of national history in the curriculum and enhance social cohesion.50 The national canon represents fifty chronologically ordered windows on the past that teachers should use as a frame. It not only resulted in controversy but also set an example for many regional and local canons to express their local identities.51 An increased need for regional identity is emerging in European countries in response to globalization.52 This need has been analysed from different



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standpoints and disciplines,53 and its relationship to heritage has been targeted.54 There is obviously a demand for and supply of historical images that strengthen regional identity. Landscape biography, the tool used by archaeologists to deliver landscape characterizations, plays a role in these contexts. A growing number of archaeological canons are emerging in reference to the historical canon,55 and more than a few towns, such as Cuijk56 or Oss,57 have developed local archaeological canons. A complete map of regional canons in the Netherlands is also available,58 all of which contain some archaeology. Regional identity has become a communication medium for the public.59 Archaeologists are often keen to define regional identity as relating to landscape and towns, but the topic of ethnic identities, which has had a bad reputation since the Second World War, is now also returning to research agendas.

The Interpreter’s Role Interpretation is the central issue in archaeological theory, as in the humanities generally.60 From the 1980s onwards, in particular, much attention has been paid to the interpretation of meaning.61 A telling case of the vulnerability of archaeological interpretation is the two famous peat-bodies found in the small village of Weerdinge.62 In the village of Weerdinge in the Dutch province of Drenthe, in 1904, workers found two bog bodies dating to the Iron Age during the peat extractions in the early twentieth century. The bog bodies were referred to as the couple of Weerdinge, as they were found together in an embracing position. A tax collector with an interest in archaeology, G.J. Landweer, examined the bodies and took photos. The larger one of the bodies was definitely male as his genitals demonstrated beyond doubt, and the smaller body on top, then, was thought to be a woman. The bog bodies, as well as the photographs, were put on display in the Drenths Museum in Assen, where Landweer had formal ties. The couple attracted many visitors and were locally known as Mr and Mrs Veenstra, veen meaning peat, and the name, therefore, referring to their having been found in the peat. Landweer wrote an article on the find, romantically wondering about the couple’s lives and their tender burial. Only after research done in 1988, some 84 years after their discovery, did it turn out that both bodies were male. DNA research showed they were unrelated. One of the men, moreover, had a chest wound that indicated he had been killed. Other bog bodies of male couples have been found, for instance, in Hunteburg (Germany) and Bokilde (Denmark). The discourse surrounding these bog bodies is of interest. In 1937, Heinrich Himmler gave a speech

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to the Waffen SS referring to these bog bodies, lamenting the ‘pestilence’ of widespread homosexuality in contemporary society.63 Himmler relied on the work of bog body specialist Alfred Dieck, who interpreted Tacitus’ hypothesis on these bog bodies as being corpores infames (transgressors). Dieck suggested these transgressors were cowards, traitors to the nation, who mutilated themselves in order to escape military service or who were homosexuals, punished and deposited in the bog. It was the second interpretation that Himmler found attractive, and he said it had not been punishment but simply an ending of unnatural lives. According to Himmler, this showed how people in the past dealt with unwanted individuals, and, moreover, it served as an endorsement from the past to the present as a way of eliminating degenerates.64 Since the research of 1988, the Weerdinge couple has no longer been referred to as a couple, without much argumentation. In 1996, the archaeologist Van der Sanden discarded the interpretation of the pair as being punished homosexuals, due to their careful positioning.65 He suggested they were human offerings and that we may never know the truth about their relationship. This case study illustrates the influence of interpreters and their social value systems. It is a well-known pitfall in the interpretation of places to link historical sources directly to specific archaeological remains, as shown in the practice of ‘bible fact-finding’66 or attempts to pin down the exact location of the Varus battle, the revolt against the Romans mentioned by Tacitus. In  1994, an Amsterdam archaeologist proclaimed that he had found the castle of the lordly Van Amstel dynasty, located in the city centre, mentioned by the famous Dutch author Joost van den Vondel in his play Gijsbrecht van Amstel (1638).67 The location was important not only for the castle itself but also for dating the origins of Amsterdam well into the twelfth century. Later dendrochronological dating of the beams produced a solid dating much later in time, disputing the archaeologist’s interpretation. Another example of the steering role of the mediator is the practice of framing or finding a local or regional characteristic and turning it into a desired brand, as shown in the case of the town of Nijmegen, which adopted the identity of being the oldest town in the Netherlands for their city marketing.68

Concluding Remarks In the wake of European treaties, tangible heritage is becoming increasingly integrated into spatial planning, not only in the Netherlands, but throughout Europe, and, hence, there will be an increase in historical monuments in public space as buildings are historically (re)constructed as well as highlighted



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and archaeological places are made visible. Dutch spatial policy specifically focuses on using historical monuments to shape spatial identity and landscape character, thus implicitly stimulating heritage education. From the perspective of Public Archaeology, heritage education can be classified as a democratic model aiming to satisfy needs in the spheres of identity, curiosity and entertainment. However, archaeologists themselves are hardly aware of such constructions and social contexts and see themselves mainly as the guardians of archaeological heritage and as safe-keepers of tangible remains. They make use of concepts, such as landscape biography, with an unclear methodology, whereas archaeological interpretation is never clear-cut. In sum, archaeological policies, the practice of storytelling, unclear ethics and demands for regional identity call for a systematic and critical analysis of the role of mediators and their social context. The importance of such an analysis lies in raising awareness and in deconstructing contemporary meanings attached to archaeological heritage and, therefore, in examining heritage education by archaeological experts as producers of historical images. This may very well cause the paradigm to shift from archaeological heritage management (safeguarding) to purposeful heritage education using professional concepts. Such an awareness would benefit heritage communities, as intended by the Faro Convention, because it would involve critical reflection on identity creation and the purposeful use of historical distance in the shaping of public space.

Notes 1. R. During, H. Elerie and H.A. Groenendijk, ‘Denken en Doen: Verpachten van Wijsheid of Delen van Kennis? Pleidooi voor de Verbinding van Cultuurhistorische Kenniseilanden en een Relatie met de Sociale Wetenschappen’, in Bodemarchief in Behoud en Ontwikkeling: De conceptuele grondslagen, eds J.H.F. Bloemers and M.-H. Wijnen, The Hague, 2001, 111–157, 112–113. M.S.M. Kok and H. van Londen, ‘Mentalities and Perspectives in Archaeological Heritage Management’, in E-learning Archaeology: The Heritage Handbook, Themata 5, eds M.S.M. Kok, H. van Londen and A. Marciniak, Amsterdam, 2012, 48. 2. M. Grever, P. de Bruin and C. van Boxtel, ‘Negotiating Historical Distance: Or, How to Deal with the Past as a Foreign Country in Heritage Education’, Paedagogica Historica: International Journal of the History of Education 48, 6 (2012): 884–886. 3. M. van den Dries, ‘Public Archaeology’, in Kok, Van Londen and Marciniak, E-learning Archaeology, 207. 4. J. Huizinga, Geschiedwetenschap|Hedendaagsche Cultuur. Verzameld werk VII, Haarlem, 1950, 166. 5. www.channel4.com/programmes/time-team (accessed 10 February 2015). 6. M.S.M. Kok, ‘Case study Archaeotainment’, in Kok, Van Londen and Marciniak, E-learning Archaeology, 72–75. 7. www.saa.org/publicftp/public/resources/PAsampleprojects.html (accessed 20 Jan­ uary 2015).

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8. J. Bolt, ‘Waar Blijven ze Nou, een Interesse in de Nederlandse Archeologie’ (Master Thesis, University of Amsterdam, 2008); C. Pas, ‘Supporting Archaeology, Defining Public Support for Archaeology’ (Master Thesis, University of Amsterdam, 2014); C. Bonacchi, ‘Understanding the Public Experience of Archaeology in the UK and Italy: A Call for a “Sociological Movement” in Public Archaeology’, in eds G.P. Brogiolo and A. Chavarria, European Journal of Post Classical Archaeologies (PCA), 4 (2014): 377–400. 9. C. Holtorf, From Stonehenge to Las Vegas: Archaeology as Popular Culture, Altamira, 2005; C. Holtorf, Archaeology is a Brand! The Meaning of Archaeology in Contemporary Popular Culture, Oxford, 2006; R. Skeates, C. McDavid and J. Carman, The Oxford Handbook of Public Archaeology, Oxford, 2011. 10. Van den Dries, ‘Public Archaeology’, 207. 11. See for instance P. Seixas, ‘Scaling Up’ the Benchmarks of Historical Thinking: The Vancouver Meetings, Vancouver, BC, 14–15 February 2008; J. van Drie and C. van Boxtel, ‘Historical Reasoning: Towards a Framework for Analysing Students’ Reasoning about the Past’, Educational Psychology Review 20 (2008): 87–110. 12. Grever, de Bruin and Van Boxtel, ‘Negotiating Historical Distance’, 875. See also M. Grever and C. van Boxtel, Verlangen naar Tastbaar Verleden: Erfgoed, Onderwijs en Historisch Besef, Hilversum, 2014, 55–59. 13. De Steentijdman van Mienakker. In 1000 Woorden en 10 Vragen, Brochure Provincie Noord-Holland. Haarlem, 2013. 14. C. Hageraats, ‘Samen Graven: Een Sociale Functie voor Erfgoed en Archeologie’ (Bachelor thesis, University of Amsterdam, 2012). 15. P. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology, Cambridge, 1977; B. Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to ActorNetwork-Theory, Oxford, 2005. 16. A. Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984. 17. See Ph. L Kohl and C. P. Fawcett, Nationalism, Politics, and the Practice of Archaeology, Cambridge, 1995; P. Graves-Brown, S. Jones and C. Gamble, Identity and Archaeology: The Construction of European Communities, London, 1996; S. Jones, The Archaeology of Ethnicity: Constructing Identities in the Past and Present, New York, 1997; R. Gilchrist, Gender and Archaeology. Contesting the Past, London, 1999; M. Eickhof, ‘De Oorsprong van het Eigene’ (PhD dissertation, University of Amsterdam, 2007); M. Shanks, ‘Archaeology and Politics’, in A Companion to Archaeology, ed. J. Bintliff, Oxford, 2004; 490–509. 18. www.coe.int/t/dg4/cultureheritage/heritage/Identities/default_en.asp 19. G. Fairclough and H. van Londen, ‘Changing Landscapes of Archaeology and Heritage’, in The Cultural Landscape and Heritage Paradox: Protection and Development of the Dutch Archaeological-historical Landscape and its European Dimension (Landscape & Heritage Series), eds T. Bloemers, H. Kars, A. Valk and M. Wijnen, Amsterdam, 2010, 653–669. 20. T. Bloemers, H. Kars, A. Valk and M. Wijnen, eds, The Cultural Landscape and Heritage Paradox: Protection and Development of the Dutch Archaeological-historical Landscape and its European Dimension (Landscape & Heritage Series), Amsterdam, 2010. 21. H. Cleere, ed., Archaeological Heritage Management in the Modern World, One World Archaeology 9, London and New York, 1989; M.A. Cooper, A. Firth, J. Carman and D.  Wheatley, eds, Managing Archaeology, London, 1995; W.J.H. Willems, ‘Archaeological Heritage Management in the Netherlands: Past, Present and Future’, in Archaeological Heritage Management in the Netherlands: Fifty Years State Service for Archaeological Investigations, eds W.J.H. Willems, H. Kars and D.P. Hallewas, Amersfoort, 1997, 3–35. 22. Willems, ‘Archaeological Heritage Management in the Netherlands’, 4–9. 23. Ibid.



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24. Ibid, for a detailed overview on the development of Dutch archaeological heritage management. 25. Monuments Act 2007. 26. European Convention on the Protection of the Archaeological Heritage (Revised) at http://conventions.coe.int/Treaty/en/Treaties/Html/143.htm 27. European Landscape Convention at www.coe.int/t/dg4/cultureheritage/heritage/ Landscape/default_en.asp 28. F. Feddes, The Belvedere Memorandum: A Policy Document Examining the Relationship between Cultural History and Spatial Planning, Nieuwegein, 1999; see also www.belvedere.nu/ 29. So-called Vinex locations. 30. Pierre Nora, Les Lieux de Mémoires (7 vol.), Paris, 1984–1992. 31. H. van Londen, Culturele Biografie van het Landschap: Tussen Kennisoverdracht en Belangenbehartiging. Essay over de Definitie en het Toepassingsbereik van het Concept, Het Oer-IJ estuarium, Gebiedsgerichte Studie, at http://dare.uva.nl/document/359366, 2004;  T.  Bloemers,  ‘Cultural Landscape and Heritage Paradox: Protection and Development of the Dutch Archaeological Landscape and its European Dimension’, in Bloemers, Kars, Valk and Wijnen, The Cultural Landscape and Heritage Paradox, 13; Kok and Van Londen, ‘Mentalities and Perspectives’, 38–50. 32. Bloemers, Kars, Valk and Wijnen, The Cultural Landscape and Heritage Paradox. 33. E. Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity, Cambridge, 1998. 34. G. Ashworth, ‘Heritage and the Consumption of Places’, in Bezeten van Vroeger: Erfgoed, Identiteit en Musealisering, ed. R. van der Laarse, Amsterdam, 2005, 193–194; H.  van Londen and J.P. Flamman, ‘Het AHR-project, Archeologische Monumentenzorg en Duurzame Ontwikkeling’, in Het Verleden boven Water: Archeologische Monumentenzorg in het AHR-project, eds J.P. Flamman and E.A. Besselsen, RAM148, Delft/Amersfoort, 2008, ­345–365; Kok and Van Londen, ‘Mentalities and Perspectives’, 38–50. 35. M. Duineveld, ‘Van Oude Dingen, de Mensen, die Voorbij Gaan: Over de Voorwaarden meer Recht te Kunnen Doen aan de door Burgers Gewaardeerde Cultuurhistories’ (PhD dissertation, Wageningen University, 2006), 95–130; Vanden Dries, ‘Public Archaeology’, 207. 36. Bloemers, Kars, Valk and Wijnen, The Cultural Landscape and Heritage Paradox. 37. M. Duineveld, R. Beunen and K. van Assche, ‘Interpretive Heritage Research and the Politics of Democratisation and De-democratisation: As Illustrated by the Plight of Hardworking Amateurs in the Trenches of Revamped Policy Arrangements’, in Bloemers, Kars, Valk and Wijnen, The Cultural Landscape and Heritage Paradox, 291. 38. M. Koedoot, Het Neolithicum van Nu: Over de Alledaagse Betekenis van Archeologisch Erfgoed in de Polder De Gouw en de Groetpolder, Wageningen, 2004. 39. J. Kolen, ‘De Biografie van het Landschap: Drie Essays over Landschap, Geschiedenis en Erfgoed’ (PhD dissertation, Free University Amsterdam, 2005); M. Hidding, J. Kolen and Th. Spek, ‘De Biografie van het Landschap: Ontwerp voor een Inter- en Multidisciplinaire Benadering van de Landschapsgeschiedenis en het Cultuurhistorisch Erfgoed’, in Bodemarchief in Behoud en Ontwikkeling: De Conceptuele Grondslagen, eds J. H. F. Bloemers and M.-H. Wijnen, The Hague, 2001, 7–111; T. Bloemers, ‘Cultural Landscape and Heritage Paradox’, 11–12. 40. Van Londen, ‘Culturele Biografie van het Landschap’; H. van Londen, ‘Cultural Biography and the Power of Image’, in Multiple Landscape: Merging Past and Present, eds W. van der Knaap and A. van der Valk, Wageningen, 2006, 171–182. 41. E. Meijles, Th. Spek, Het Maken van een Landschapsbiografie: Over het Gebruik van Historische Kennis voor het Toekomstige Landschap, Groningen, 2009, www.rug.nl/staff/ e.w.meijles/brochure_2_landschapsbiografie.pdf 42. Translated by the author. Former web text of the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands www.cultureelerfgoed.nl/handreikingerfgoedenruimte/home/ambitie-enbeleidspoor/afwegen-en-integreren/gebiedsgerichte-methode

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43. Van Londen, ‘Cultural Biography and the Power of Image’. See also note 16 on archaeology and politics. 44. Bloemers, Kars, Valk and Wijnen, The Cultural Landscape and Heritage Paradox. 45. M. Bower, ‘Marketing Nostalgia’, in Managing Archaeology, eds M.A. Cooper, A. Firth, J. Carman and D. Wheatley, London, 1995, 37. 46. Ibid., 34. 47. R. Hoppe, ‘Van Flipperkast naar Grensverkeer: Veranderende Visies op de Relatie tussen Wetenschap en Beleid’, in AWT-achtergrondstudie 25, Adviesraad voor het Wetenschapsen Technologiebeleid, Twente, 2002, 22–23. 48. Bloemers, Kars, Valk and Wijnen, The Cultural Landscape and Heritage Paradox, 11–12; Duineveld, Beunen and Van Assche, ‘Interpretive Heritage Research’, 291. 49. Van Londen, ‘Cultural Biography and the Power of Image’, 171–182. 50. Commissie Ontwikkeling Nederlandse Canon, Entoen.nu: De canon van Nederland, The Hague, 2006 (www.entoen.nu) (report of the committee of development of the Dutch canon; Dutch and English versions); M. Grever, E. Jonker, K. Ribbens and S. Stuurman, Controverses rond de Canon, Assen, 2006. 51. Grever and Van Boxtel, Verlangen naar Tastbaar Verleden, 30–37. 52. L. Cornips and I. Stengs, Regionale Identiteit: Lokale Beleving van Wie We Zijn, at http://depot.knaw.nl/8394/1/idee%235nov2010[provincies]-2.pdf, 2010, 10. 53. For instance by J. Leerssen, National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History, Amsterdam, 2010, on history; A. Paasi, ‘The Resurgence of the “Region” and “Regional Identity”: Theoretical Perspectives and Empirical Observations on Regional Dynamics in Europe’, Review of International Studies 35 (2009): 121–146, on geography. 54. D. Lowenthal, ‘Heritage and History, Rivals and Partners in Europe’, in Bezeten van Vroeger, Erfgoed, Identiteit en Musealisering, ed. R. van der Laarse, Amsterdam, 2005, 29–40; M.  Cremer, Y. Gieles, T. de Neef, T. van Straten and A. Weij, Retour Brussel: Erfgoed en Europa, Amsterdam, 2011. 55. See also Grever, De Bruin and Van Boxtel, ‘Negotiating Historical Distance’, ­873–887; http://entoen.nu/ 56. See http://cuijksecanon.nl/ 57. See http://www.ossecanon.nl 58. See http://www.regiocanons.nl/ 59. H. van Londen, ‘Archaeology and Politics’, in Kok, Van Londen and Marciniak, E-Learning Archaeology, 206. 60. For instance I. Hodder, Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology, Cambridge, 1986; A. Jones, Archaeological Theory and Scientific Practice, Topic in Contemporary Archaeology, Cambridge, 2002; C. Tilley, ‘Metaphor, Materiality and Interpretation’, in The Material Culture Reader, ed. V. Büchli, New York, 2002, 23–56; B. Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought, 2nd edn, Cambridge, 2007. 61. See A. Marciniak, ‘Setting a New Agenda: Ian Hodder and His Contribution to Archaeological Theory’, Archaeologia Polona 35, 6 (1998): 409–426, on the work of Hodder. 62. After M.S.M. Kok, ‘Queer Archaeology’, in Kok, Van Londen and Marciniak, E-Learning Archaeology, 113–116. 63. K. Sanders, Bog Bodies and the Archaeological Imagination, Chicago, 2009, 61–62. 64. Ibid. 65. W.A.B van der Sanden, Through Nature to Eternity – The Bog Bodies of Northwest Europe, Amsterdam, 1996. 66. M. Kirchhoff, ‘“This Country is Essentially Ours”: Der Palestine Exploration Fund und die Palästinaforschung des 19. Jahrhunderts’, in Dass Grosse Spiel: Archäologie und Politik (1860–1940), ed. Ch. Trümpler, Dumont, Essen, 2010, 94–103, 94ff; see also www.faithfacts. org/search-for-truth/maps/archaeological-and-external-evidence



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67. Th. Toebosch, De Nieuwezijds Kolk en de Nieuwendijk in Dertiende-eeuws Amsterdam: Een Archeologische Speurtocht, Amsterdam, 2011. 68. B. Verfürden, ‘Uit de Marge in het Brandpunt: Erfgoed, Identiteit en Politiek in ‘s Lands Oudste Stad’, in Neerlands Hoop: Erfgoed en Politiek, eds R. Hermans, T. de Neef, M. Seigali and A. Weij, Erfgoed NU 5, Amsterdam, 2010, 54–67.

References Ashworth, G. ‘Heritage and the Consumption of Places’, in Bezeten van Vroeger: Erfgoed, Identiteit en Musealisering [Obsessed by the Past. Heritage, Identity and Musealization], ed. R. van der Laarse, Amsterdam, 2005, 193–207. Bloemers, T. ‘Cultural Landscape and Heritage Paradox: Protection and Development of the Dutch Archaeological Landscape and its European Dimension’, in The Cultural Landscape & Heritage Paradox: Protection and Development of the Dutch Archaeological-historical Landscape and its European Dimension (Landscape & Heritage Series), eds T. Bloemers, H. Kars, A. Valk and M. Wijnen, Amsterdam, 2010, 3–16. ———, H. Kars, A. Valk and M. Wijnen, eds. The Cultural Landscape & Heritage Paradox: Protection and Development of the Dutch Archaeological-historical Landscape and its European Dimension (Landscape & Heritage Series), Amsterdam, 2010. Bolt, J. ‘Waar Blijven Ze nou, een Interesse in de Nederlandse Archeologie’ [Where are They, Interest in Dutch Archeology] (Unpublished master thesis, University of Amsterdam, 2008). Bonacchi, C. ‘Understanding the Public Experience of Archaeology in the UK and Italy: A Call for a “Sociological Movement” in Public Archaeology’, in eds G.P. Brogiolo and A. Chavarria, European Journal of Post Classical Archaeologies (PCA), 4 (2014): 377–400. Bourdieu, P. Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology, Cambridge, 1977. Bower, M. ‘Marketing Nostalgia’, in Managing Archaeology, eds M.A. Cooper, A. Firth, J. Carman and D. Wheatley, London, 1995. Cleere, H. ed. Archaeological Heritage Management in the Modern World, One World Archaeology 9, London and New York, 1989. Commissie Ontwikkeling Nederlandse Canon, Entoen.nu: De canon van Nederland, The Hague, 2006 (www.entoen.nu) (Report of the committee of development of the Dutch Canon; Dutch and English versions). Cooper, M.A., A. Firth, J. Carman and D. Wheatley, eds, Managing Archaeology, London, 1995. Cornips, L. and I. Stengs. Regionale Identiteit: Lokale Beleving van Wie We zijn [Regional Identity: Local Experiences of Who We are], at http://depot.knaw.nl/8394/1/ idee%235nov2010[provincies]-2.pdf, 2010. Cremer, M., Y. Gieles, T. de Neef, T. van Straten and A. Weij. Retour Brussel: Erfgoed en Europa [Retour Brussels: Heritage and Europe], Amsterdam, 2011. Duineveld, M. ‘Van Oude Dingen, de Mensen, die Voorbij Gaan: Over de Voorwaarden meer Recht te Kunnen Doen aan de door Burgers Gewaardeerde Cultuurhistories’ [Old People and the Things that Pass: About the Conditions for Doing More Justice to Cultural Histories that Civilians Appreciate] (PhD dissertation, Wageningen University, 2006). ———, R. Beunen and K. van Assche. ‘Interpretive Heritage Research and the Politics of Democratisation and De-democratisation: As Illustrated by the Plight of Hard-working Amateurs in the Trenches of Revamped Policy Arrangements’, in The Cultural Landscape

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& Heritage Paradox: Protection and Development of the Dutch Archaeological-historical Landscape and its European Dimension (Landscape & Heritage Series), eds T. Bloemers, H. Kars, A. Valk and M. Wijnen, Amsterdam, 2010, 291–308. During, R., H. Elerie and H.A. Groenendijk. ‘Denken en Doen: Verpachten van Wijsheid of Delen van Kennis? Pleidooi voor de Verbinding van Cultuurhistorische Kenniseilanden en een Relatie met de Sociale Wetenschappen’ [Thinking and Doing: Renting of Wisdom or Knowledge Sharing? A Plea for Connecting Cultural Knowledge Islands and a Link with the Social Sciences], in Bodemarchief in Behoud en Ontwikkeling: De Conceptuele Grondslagen, eds J.H.F. Bloemers and M.-H. Wijnen, The Hague, 2001, 111–157. Eickhof, M. ‘De Oorsprong van het Eigene’ [The Origins of the Personal] (PhD dissertation, University of Amsterdam, 2007). Fairclough, G. and H. van Londen. ‘Changing Landscapes of Archaeology and Heritage’, in The Cultural Landscape & Heritage Paradox: Protection and Development of the Dutch Archaeological-historical Landscape and its European Dimension (Landscape & Heritage Series), eds T. Bloemers, H. Kars, A. Valk and M. Wijnen, Amsterdam, 2010, 653–669. Feddes, F. The Belvedere Memorandum: A Policy Document Examining the Relationship between Cultural History and Spatial Planning, Nieuwegein, 1999. Giddens, A. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration, Berkeley, 1984. Gilchrist, R. Gender and Archaeology. Contesting the Past, London, 1999. Graves-Brown, P., S. Jones and C. Gamble. Identity and Archaeology: The Construction of European Communities, London, 1996. Grever, M., P. de Bruin and C. van Boxtel. ‘Negotiating Historical Distance: Or, How to Deal with the Past as a Foreign Country in Heritage Education’, Paedagogica Historica: International Journal of the History of Education 48, 6 (2012): 873–887. Grever, M., E. Jonker, K. Ribbens and S. Stuurman. Controverses Rond de Canon [Controversies about the Canon], Assen, 2006. Grever, M. and C. van Boxtel. Verlangen naar Tastbaar Verleden: Erfgoed, Onderwijs en Historisch Besef [Longing for a Tangible Past: Heritage, Education and Historical Consciousness], Hilversum, 2014. Hageraats, C. ‘Samen Graven: Een Sociale Functie voor Erfgoed en Archeologie’ [Digging Together: A Social Function for Heritage and Archeology] (Unpublished Bachelor thesis, University of Amsterdam, 2012). Hidding, M., J. Kolen and Th. Spek. ‘De Biografie van het Landschap: Ontwerp voor een Interen Multidisciplinaire Benadering van de Landschapsgeschiedenis en het Cultuurhistorisch Erfgoed’ [The Biography of the Landscape: Design of an Inter- and Multidisciplinary Approach to the History of Landscape and Cultural Heritage], in Bodemarchief in Behoud en Ontwikkeling: De Conceptuele Grondslagen, eds J. H. F. Bloemers and M.-H. Wijnen, The Hague, 2001, 7–111. Hodder, I. Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology, Cambridge, 1986. Holtorf, C. From Stonehenge to Las Vegas: Archaeology as Popular Culture, Altamira, 2005. ———. Archaeology is a Brand! The Meaning of Archaeology in Contemporary Popular Culture, Oxford, 2006. Hoppe, R. ‘Van Flipperkast naar Grensverkeer: Veranderende Visies op de Relatie tussen Wetenschap en Beleid’ [From Pinball to Cross-border Traffic: Changing Perspectives on the Relation between Science and Policy], in AWT-achtergrondstudie 25, Adviesraad voor het Wetenschaps- en Technologiebeleid, Twente, 2002. Huizinga, J. Geschiedwetenschap|Hedendaagsche Cultuur. Verzameld Werk VII, [History; Presentday Culture. Collected Works VII], Haarlem, 1950. Jones, A. Archaeological Theory and Scientific Practice, Topic in Contemporary Archaeology, Cambridge, 2002.



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Jones, S. The Archaeology of Ethnicity: Constructing Identities in the Past and Present, New York, 1997. Kirchhoff, M. ‘“This Country is Essentially Ours”: Der Palestine Exploration Fund und die Palästinaforschung des 19. Jahrhunderts’, in Dass grosse Spiel: Archäologie und Politik (1860–1940), ed. Ch. Trümpler, Dumont, Essen, 2010, 94–103. Koedoot, M. Het Neolithicum van Nu: Over de Alledaagse Betekenis van Archeologisch Erfgoed in de Polder De Gouw en de Groetpolder [The Present-Day Neolithicum: About the Ordinary Meaning of Archeological Heritage in Polders De Gouw and the Groetpolder], Wageningen, 2004. Kohl, P.L. and C.P. Fawcett. Nationalism, Politics, and the Practice of Archaeology, Cambridge,  1995. Kok, M.S.M. ‘Case Study Archaeotainment’, in E-learning Archaeology: The Heritage Handbook, Themata 5, eds M.S.M. Kok, H. van Londen and A. Marciniak, Amsterdam, 2012, 72–75. ———. ‘Queer Archaeology’, in E-Learning Archaeology: The Heritage Handbook 5 (Appendix Case Studies), eds M.S.M. Kok, H. van Londen and A. Marciniak, Amsterdam, 2012, 113–116. ——— and H. van Londen. ‘Mentalities and Perspectives in Archaeological Heritage Management’, in E-learning Archaeology: The Heritage Handbook, Themata 5, eds M.S.M. Kok, H. van Londen and A. Marciniak, Amsterdam, 2012, 38–49. Kolen, J. ‘De Biografie van het Landschap: Drie Essays over Landschap, Geschiedenis en Erfgoed’ [The Biography of the Landscape: Three Essays about Landscape, History and Heritage] (PhD dissertation, Free University Amsterdam, 2005). Latour, B. Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford, 2005. Leerssen, J. National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History, Amsterdam, 2010. Lowenthal, D. ‘Heritage and History, Rivals and Partners in Europe’, in Bezeten van Vroeger, Erfgoed, Identiteit en Musealisering, ed. R. van der Laarse, Amsterdam, 2005, 29–40. Marciniak, A. ‘Setting a New Agenda: Ian Hodder and his Contribution to Archaeological Theory’, Archaeologia Polona 35, 6 (1998): 409–426. Meijles, E. and Th. Spek. Het Maken van een Landschapsbiografie: Over het Gebruik van Historische Kennis voor het Toekomstige Landschap [The Construction of a Landscape Biography: About the Use of Historical Knowledge for the Future Landscape], Groningen, 2009. Nora, P. Les Lieux de Mémoires (7 vol.), Paris, 1984–1992. Paasi, A. ‘The Resurgence of the “Region” and “Regional Identity”: Theoretical Perspectives and Empirical Observations on Regional Dynamics in Europe’, Review of International Studies 35 (2009): 121–146. Pas, C. ‘Supporting Archaeology, Defining Public Support for Archaeology’ (Unpublished Master Thesis, University of Amsterdam, 2014). Sanders, K. Bog Bodies and the Archaeological Imagination, Chicago, 2009. Seixas, P. ‘Scaling Up’ the Benchmarks of Historical Thinking. The Vancouver Meetings, Vancouver, BC, 14–15 February, 2008. Shanks, M. ‘Archaeology and Politics’, in A Companion to Archaeology, ed. J. Bintliff, Oxford, 2004, 490–509. Skeates, R., C. McDavid and J. Carman. The Oxford Handbook of Public Archaeology, Oxford, 2011. Toebosch, T. De Nieuwezijds Kolk en de Nieuwendijk in Dertiende-eeuws Amsterdam: Een Archeologische Speurtocht [The Nieuwezijds Kolk and the Nieuwendijk in Thirteenthcentury Amsterdam: An Archeological Quest], Amsterdam, 2011. Tilley, C. ‘Metaphor, Materiality and Interpretation’, in The Material Culture Reader, ed. V. Büchli, New York, 2002, 23–56. Trigger, B. A History of Archaeological Thought, 2nd edn, Cambridge, 2007. van den Dries, M. ‘Public Archaeology’, in E-learning Archaeology. The Heritage Handbook, Themata 5, eds M. Kok, H. van Londen and A. Marciniak, Amsterdam, 2012, 207–216.

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van der Sanden, W.A.B. Through Nature to Eternity – the Bog Bodies of Northwest Europe, Amsterdam, 1996. van Drie, J. and C. van Boxtel. ‘Historical Reasoning: Towards a Framework for Analysing Students’ Reasoning about the Past’, Educational Psychology Review 20 (2008): 87–110. van Londen, H. Culturele Biografie van het Landschap: Tussen Kennisoverdracht en Belangenbehartiging. Essay over de Definitie en het Toepassingsbereik van het Concept, Het Oer-IJ estuarium, Gebiedsgerichte Studie [Cultural Biography of the Landscape: Between Knowledge Transmission and Representation of Interests. Essays about the Definition and Application of the Concept, The Oer-IJ estuarium, Area-specific Study], at http:// dare.uva.nl/document/359366, 2004. ———. ‘Cultural Biography and the Power of Image’, in Multiple Landscape: Merging Past and Present, eds W. van der Knaap and A. van der Valk, Wageningen, 2006, 171–182. ———. ‘Archaeology and Politics’, in E-Learning Archaeology: The Heritage Handbook 5, eds M.S.M. Kok, H. van Londen and A. Marciniak, Amsterdam, 2012, 204–207. ——— and J.P. Flamman. ‘Het AHR-project, Archeologische Monumentenzorg en Duurzame Ontwikkeling’ [The AHR-project, Preservation of Archeological Monuments and Sustainable Development], in Het Verleden Boven Water: Archeologische Monumentenzorg in het AHR-project, eds J.P. Flamman and E.A. Besselsen, RAM148, Delft/Amersfoort, 2008, 345–269. Verfürden, B. ‘Uit de Marge in het Brandpunt: Erfgoed, Identiteit en Politiek in ‘s Lands Oudste Stad’ [Out of the Periphery into the Focal Point: Heritage, Identity and Politics in the Countries’ Oldest City], in Neerlands Hoop. Erfgoed en Politiek, eds R. Hermans, T. de Neef, M. Seigali and A. Weij, Erfgoed NU 5, Amsterdam, 2010, 54–67. Wenger, E. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity, Cambridge, 1998. Willems, W.J.H. ‘Archaeological Heritage Management in the Netherlands: Past, Present and Future’, in Archaeological Heritage Management in the Netherlands: Fifty Years State Service for Archaeological Investigations, eds W.J.H. Willems, H. Kars and D.P. Hallewas, Amersfoort, 1997, 3–35.

Heleen van Londen is assistant-professor at the Archaeology Department of the University of Amsterdam (UvA, the Netherlands). After her graduation in History (Utrecht University) and Archaeology (UvA) she became director of excavations of a ten year project on the Roman landscape (UvA 1991 researcher position). She did her postdoctoral research on the Cultural Biography of Landscape (UvA, 2002–08) and she participated in European projects on European landscapes (ESF-COST A27) and on developing e-learning solutions in Archaeological Heritage Management. She also did a survey of the archaeological profession (DISCO 14). She is currently involved in the Strategic Partnership Innovative format of education and training of the archaeological and natural heritage (Erasmus+).

EPILOGUE

PART

II

History, Heritage and the Spaces Inbetween Brenda Trofanenko

The title for this review essay is a little ambiguous and sounds firmly situated in vagueness. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘inbetween’ can mean (1) an interval; and (2) placed between. The first meaning, emphasized in this epilogue, highlights the productive potential of what results from the separate and distinct break between history and ­heritage and their associated disciplines. The second meaning suggests an intermediary pause between history and heritage to consider each on their own merit and to reflect on what has occurred and what is yet to come. Both conceptions of ‘inbetween’ push the notion of history and heritage each being an established discipline with a discrete set of practices. This idea is particularly pertinent in the context of heritage education, its trajectory, and the increasing commentary occurring within critical heritage studies discipline on their own purpose and direction. It is also pertinent to the developing field of heritage education and the desire by scholars in education to grasp the relationship between history and heritage in order not only to advance historical understanding but to discover its similarities and differences. At a time when history teachers, educators and researchers are engaging with various objects of meaning and sites of pedagogical engagement to advance their historical understanding, parallel institutions and sites are also developing key positions in the transmission, propagation and consolidation of particular forms of knowledge about and around the past. Questions still remain. What is heritage? What is heritage education? And what is the relationship to history? Notes for this section begin on page 178.

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To answer these questions I suggest that we step back to examine the definitions of each and to consider how we address them in our research and our teaching. Taking as a starting point that history is a ‘process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past’, as historian Edward Hallett Carr wrote years ago, the discipline has moved towards a greater awareness of representation and referential that has created a deeper uncertainty about the nature of knowledge creation.1 Those facts that Carr spoke of remain a significant element, often determining what is learnt of the past. The dependence on dates of events supported by evidentiary facts continues to be advanced by national education associations, state education departments, curricular documents and classroom teachers. The recent move within history education to critically reflect on what knowledge is positioned as necessary and how this is gained has opened the door to the complexity evident in understanding the past. Just as history cannot easily be defined, so heritage is also interpreted in different ways. The different meanings attributed to ‘heritage’ depend on the contextually situated uses and definitions about it that prompt questions about disciplinary boundaries, interdisciplinary associations and multidisciplinary transgressions. In examining the relationship between heritage and history, a universalism holds that history and heritage are one and the same. Yet, as Smith suggests, heritage can be described as something which is ‘old grand, monumental and aesthetically pleasing sites, building, places and artifacts’.2 She argues through case studies that people create their own perceptions of heritage that do not concur with the authorized historical or heritage discourses. Further, heritage is not about abstract cultural values and material monuments and sites, but about how people remember, forget, communicate, negotiate and express identity. In short, ‘heritage is constituted by social and cultural processes’.3 These processes stand in direct conflict with what has traditionally distinguished heritage from history. Heritage is not history and does not seek, as David Lowenthal argues, to ‘convince by truth’ through objective and quantifiable means.4 Instead, he suggests, heritage is ‘a declaration of faith in the past’. These two definitions place educators in between the educational purpose of each and depend on the assumptions that inform such definitions and interpretations. At this point, concerning the current use of the terms and the public pedagogical expectations held by each, there remains both a distinct separation as well as a close relationship between the two. On the one hand, history and heritage form a close association and together can reasonably refer to knowledge that has a dimension of significance produced and articulated through material and immaterial objects. On the other hand, though, the knowledge produced is not as distinct and



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produces an overlap with geographic, anthropological or cultural knowledge, such as that concerned with place, ethnicity and identity, and nation. In this sense, knowledge is constructed and produced in relation to the disciplinary methodologies, tangible and intangible objects, to foster or frame a critical response, practice and sensitivity. As is evident in the chapters that inform this epilogue, as well as those presented at the Tangible Pasts? Questioning Heritage Education conference, history education has embarked on a critical turn. Beyond the burgeoning scholarship focusing on examining historical understanding, the increasing interest in heritage, heritage education and their relationship with  history education is more evident in the education discipline than previously.  Underpinning this change, perhaps, is the belief that heritage has much to offer for making sense of the complex issues which enmesh history education in the twenty-first century. Or, it could also mean that academics in history education are more aware of how a with local, national and global issues associated identity is no longer tied to the history gleaned from examining primary and secondary sources but, rather, intertwined with heritage. Why has it taken scholars in history education thirty plus years to consider heritage? The theoretical debates facing heritage studies, those concerning concepts such as identity, authenticity or dissonance, are similar to the debates occurring among historians. Perhaps it is because of the increased realization that the development of historical knowledge and understanding arises beyond the sole examination of primary and secondary sources to include those sites considered as ‘heritage’ that can, as others suggest, occur at places other than school classrooms and disciplinary restrictions. This collection of chapters by Sheila Watson, Alex van Stipriaan, Susan Legêne, Siȃn Jones and Heleen van Londen collectively speak to the possibilities of extending historical understanding through themes not rigorously engaged by history education scholars. The relationship between emotions and learning, dealing with a country’s colonial past, and how public archaeology (once considered solely an academic pursuit) defines a country’s identity, are topics few scholars in history education have addressed in any depth. The chapters serve to advance discussions about heritage education, highlighting how such research can work to resolve (or at least understand) the tensions facing heritage to then advance historical understanding. Smith talks about the struggle with, for and against the ambiguity and positionality of heritage under national, social, cultural, historical and disciplinary conditions. For her, at the heart of the struggle is the desire to understand the processes through which heritage is defined and to examine the processes themselves to determine the concepts, tools, or pedagogical strategies that are utilized to then define the term.

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In her chapter ‘Why do Emotions Matter in Museums and Heritage Sites?’, Sheila Watson asks why so little attention has been focused on emotions and how they are generated in museums. She argues that history museums are particular sites of emotional expression and regulation; by producing effective responses to the displayed past, they direct us both intentionally and unintentionally towards what we may come to ‘think’ when attending an exhibition as well as what we may come to ‘feel’ through the same exhibition. In presenting case studies from the U.K. and Germany, Watson argues that emotions are evoked for various reasons, including political, moral and ethical ones, to advance patriotism and national identity, to question the purposes of past historical acts, and to understand the codes of behavior of one’s society. Yet there remains little examination within museum studies of the emotional elements that allow individuals to selfreflexively realize what emotions have been evoked, for what purposes, and for what results. This should be a call to education and museum scholars to engage further in understanding the relationship between learning and emotions. History museums are tasked not only with representing the past but also in dealing with the past in the present. In offering a case study of the legacies of the Dutch slave trade as displayed in an exhibition at the Amsterdam Tropenmuseum, Alex van Stipriaan examined the Black & White exhibition  and the articulation of race, identity, and the way in which these are determined and by whom. Asking who is black, who is white and how a racial identity is determined framed the exhibition which marked the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the Netherlands. The exhibition invited visitors to engage in discussions through personal stories,  photos, videos, contemporary art and historical documents about a past event that continues to hold importance in Dutch society. By highlighting how what he refers to as ‘dimensions’ or ‘spheres’ of Dutch society remain challenged about such a past and how best to address the response each evokes in the public presentation of such an event, Van Stipriaan argues that the transition that occurred within the museum is self-reflexive. The exhibition does not ask the visitor to learn of a past, but instead transforms the museum into a forum to engage in such discussions. Certainly, historical documents, texts and objects traditionally included in any exhibition offer a ‘static narrative’. Instead, Van Stipriaan notes, the interactive goal in asking a question is to direct the engagement of those attending the  exhibition. The exhibition’s purpose is more than merely looking at the paintings, objects and text panels; rather, its mission is to ensure a dialogue or, at the very least, a reflexive consideration of what the exhibition means to the curators and institution and what it means to the individual attending.



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In her contribution, ‘Tagging Borobudur: Heritage Education and the Colonial Past in Onsite and Online Museum Collections’, Susan Legêne engages the two concepts of heritage education and history and suggests that colonial heritage emerges as a part of history (my emphasis). She acknowledges both the tangible and intangible aspects of heritage and suggests that the association between heritage, history and the objects displayed by museums or owned by individuals are evidence of a colonial past. She reiterates two significant claims about the objects: first, that the majority of objects in museums were obtained through colonization; and second, that the majority of objects that highlight a colonial past are not necessarily in the museum but also found in private collections. Basing her argument on case studies of several Dutch museums (including Amsterdam’s Tropenmuseum and Rijksmuseum), she suggests that the valued objects possess a reverence or significance that forces a tension between the colonial past and our ­present-day understanding of colonial practices and their relationship with historical understanding. In focusing on a community history and archaeology project in ‘Unlocking Essences and Exploring Networks: Experiencing Authenticity in Heritage Education Settings’, Siȃn Jones offers a cogent call to history educators to consider how the tangible and the intangible intersect to provide a particular opportunity for engagement with heritage often absent when considering material objects alone. In drawing on a case study, Jones highlights how the intersection of the physical object with the social, political and economic contexts in which it was created may serve as the normative basis for deeply meaningful and personal experiences. More particular, she suggests that in the continued concern for authenticity – of objects and experiences – we need to cautiously consider how the past, as evidenced by the object, remains distinct from the present. Jones suggests that this historical distance reveals both a temporality as well as a perspective for historical interpretation. Historical distance is no longer detached: rather, what has emerged – key for heritage education – is an acknowledgement of the emotional uses the past provides that makes space for empathy, moral commitment and identity. This makes heritage education more robust than history education as it understands the biographies of object, the networks of relationship that have been embedded in such objects, and how both contribute to personal experience. In the final chapter in this section, ‘Archaeological Heritage Education and the Making of Regional Identities’, Heleen van Londen asks how archaeology can be better utilized to define regional identity through increasing use of narratives and storytelling in archaeology. The interpretive narratives and storytelling offer that which is absent solely through the preservation process. This shift seeks to support the social and cultural value that archaeology has

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for regional identity and may serve as a move to include heritage education as its disciplinary mandate. Heritage education in this instance seeks to support critically understanding how archaeology defines local, regional and national identities through a robust archaeological disciplinary knowledge in order to provide information that may be taken beyond the emotional elements of heritage and history. The pedagogical aim is to gain knowledge about the past through the social and cultural value that archaeology possesses for the general public. The use of the city and the monuments to claim archaeology as legitimate physical evidence to argue for the social and cultural value it has for the general public. Taken together, these five chapters highlight the tension present in understanding heritage education and how it ought to be supported. It is without question, to follow Grever and van Boxtel’s assertion, that heritage education is useful in understanding history and culture.5 Scholars have examined how consensus history has been developed, simplified, commodified and consumed at heritage sites for easy and uncritical consumption. We can easily see this in action. The issue facing scholars as they consider heritage education and its relationship with history, historical understanding and historical consciousness is knowing the ideas, constructs, concepts and levels of abstraction that inform heritage studies and how heritage studies considers itself a critical element to history. If we return to Smith’s commentary on the necessity of critical heritage studies as a way to move heritage studies forward, education scholars need to consider the demands that greater attention be paid to the use of heritage by various users (including both popular and non-expert heritage users) and what it tells us about the phenomenon of heritage.6 As discussed at the inaugural Critical Heritage Studies conference in Gothenburg in 2012, a call was extended to ask scholars to draw on ‘wider intellectual sources’ to examine the study of heritage, which has historically been dominated by ‘Western, predominantly European, experts in archeology, history, architecture, and art history’, and how the canon of heritage privileges ‘old, grand, prestigious, expert approved sites, buildings, and artefacts that sustain Western narratives of nation, class, and science’.7 This call invites scholars committed to extending their research on heritage education to question the heritage canon in order to offer research that examines the increasing public, national and international interest in ‘saving’ what initially were perceived as ‘fragile’ and ‘finite resources’ of human creation for the betterment of ‘future generations’. Making a commitment to heritage education by considering various theoretical frameworks allows for one to be critical of the economic exploitation of heritage as not only providing necessary knowledge but also in advancing a collective identity through nationalism and patriotism. In addition, drawing



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forward an understanding of heritage education as being a multidisciplinary body of scholarship that collectively examines the political, social and cultural policies supported by government funding agencies highlights the ongoing debates somewhat mired only in defining history as being distinct from heritage. Between these two understandings of the terms – history and heritage formed through the relationship between the two – a critical space of inquiry opens for conceiving history and heritage education as instruments for knowledge creation and also the result of knowledge, discourse and culture. Here, not only are history and heritage considered strategic components of identity (particular national identity), capable of articulating and distinguishing one nation from another by impressing on them a common identity across diverse communities through museums, cultural heritage sites and cultural icons, but both are also upheld as ways to forge a presence in the world and a relationship to it. In this way, history and heritage education represent a double-edged sword – both a problem and a solution – with the ability to foster learning while advancing a particular and specific past. It would be shortsighted in both instances to consider history solely as what can be gleaned from primary and secondary source documents learnt in school classrooms, and heritage as the tangible and intangible elements established for remembrance, celebratory and retributive purposes. Instead, we need to consider the relationship between the two disciplines and to consider the intersection of the two elements as presenting a constructive tension that aids in understanding what role each discipline plays in the construction of historical, geographic, anthropological and archaeological understanding. There is little doubt that heritage feeds on a nation’s past by ensuring that it remains a concern of its future. This moves heritage away solely from being situated in history museums, complete with their collections of objects, towards the social and cultural context and significance of the past, of politics, and of the social and economic contexts in which heritage is created and advanced. There is no better time for scholars concerned about history education to embrace the broad umbrella of heritage to ensure that heritage education does matter. The legitimacy of heritage education lies in the recognition that it, like history education, has high political stakes, which rest not only on how the past is represented but also on how current expressions of culture, social identity, place, memory and emotions are utilized within the struggle for recognition and agency. Heritage education does matter because it has emotional, political and intellectual consequences, as these scholars have aptly shown. As such it is not only worthy of, but requires, critical analysis of topics to advance its scholarly place. These c­ hapters and this volume are a good start.

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Notes 1. E.H. Carr, What is History? London, 1960. 2. L. Smith, Uses of Heritage, London, 2006, 11. 3. Smith, Uses of Heritage, 83. 4. D. Lowenthal, ‘Fabricating Heritage’, History and Memory 10, 1 (1998): 7. 5. M. Grever and C. van Boxtel, ‘Introduction: Reflections on Heritage as an Educational Resource’, in Heritage Education: Challenges in Dealing with the Past, eds C. van Boxtel, S. Klein and E. Snoep, Amsterdam, 2011, 9–13. 6. L. Smith, ‘Editorial’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 19, 4 (2013): 325–326. 7. L. Smith, ‘Editorial’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 18, 6 (2012): 535.

References Carr, E.H. What is History?, London, 1960. Grever, M. and C. van Boxtel. ‘Introduction: Reflections on Heritage as an Educational Resource’, in Heritage Education: Challenges in Dealing with the Past, eds C. van Boxtel, S. Klein and E. Snoep, Amsterdam, 2011, 9–13. Lowenthal, D. ‘Fabricating Heritage’, History and Memory 10, 1 (1998): 5–24. Smith, L. Uses of Heritage, London, 2006. ———. ‘Editorial’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 18, 6 (2012): 533–540. ———. ‘Editorial’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 19, 4 (2013): 325–326.

Brenda Trofanenko is an associate professor at the Canada Research Chair in Education, Culture, and Community at Acadia University, Wolfville, NS Canada. Her research focuses on public pedagogy particular to cultural heritage institutions, specifically museums and memorials. She is currently involved in a research project examining how memory is geographically situated and defined through memory projects and exhibitions. She has widely published in peer-reviewed journals and books in addition to various public presentations.

Part III

Teaching and Learning about Sensitive Heritage

CHAPTER

9

Holocaust Heritage Nearby How to Analyse Historical Distance in Education Stephan Klein

To what kinds of dealing with the past does ‘heritage education’ refer when compared to ‘history teaching’? As a pair, these terms suggest institutional differences in organizing learning. History is a school subject, regulated by government curricula, using history textbooks, atlases, films and websites as key tools in the classroom. Those who give instruction and mediate between learning materials and learners are usually professionals with a qualification in history and teacher training in history education, which includes some knowledge of history curricula and assessment criteria. The term heritage education is more associated with learning activities in out-of-school contexts, for example, in museums, centres of remembrance and at historical sites. Usually, there are no curricula regulations or assessment procedures for this type of education. These institutions or sites develop their own programmes and educational materials, relating to specific collections or to the places and events they aim to commemorate. Educators and guides may have different educational backgrounds but are often not academically trained historians. Learning about the past takes place in highly different contexts and is supported by various mediators. Both in-class and out-of-school contexts reach out to many students and thus contribute to the development of historical consciousness of new generations. What kind of historical narratives are taught in these contexts? Both history teaching and education by heritage institutions have come under scrutiny and have been criticized.1 School history may result in collective memory training or in teaching critical Notes for this section begin on page 194.

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historical approaches without making the past significant for students today. The popular heritage industry, on the other hand, has been accused of producing history as experience-driven entertainment and, again, as collective memory. It is important to understand better what both fields do for certain topics in specific learning situations and how they interact. This begs the question of how we can analyse such approaches and interactions. In this chapter, I will first discuss some differences between history teaching and heritage education, in particular as these manifest themselves in the Netherlands. Then I will propose a five-dimensional framework for an analysis of historical approaches in education, using the concept of historical distance as metaphor.2 Finally, I will apply this framework by analysing an educational assignment developed by a Dutch heritage institution dedicated to the memory of the Holocaust. To support my analysis, I interviewed the responsible educator and four history teachers who were the prospective end users of the learning materials in a local context, and I used their insights to reflect on the relation between history as a school subject and education by heritage institutions.

History, Heritage and Education Historians have been forced to rethink their positions during the past decades.3 Public interest in the past and the need for meaningful heritage have grown enormously in our rapidly changing world.4 In the Netherlands, historians have argued that the historical discipline should become more responsive to public needs, for example, by practising a kind of ‘reflexive presentism’.5 If the call for ‘heritage’ cannot be ignored, it should at least be approached dynamically, with historians guarding against the invention of traditions and exclusivist interpretations.6 What does this mean for education? Debates in several Western countries about history curriculum standards and history teaching and learning exemplify the social and political tensions surrounding the question of what historical topics should be taught in what manner.7 In the Netherlands, students are required to ‘think historically’, which means that learning about history involves more than memorizing facts and uncritically appropriating values embedded in a textbook narrative. Students face difficult concepts such as continuity and change, authorial subjectivity, source reliability, multiperspectivity, and historical and contemporary significance.8 History in the Dutch classroom should be presented as a construction that is grounded in subjective experience and bound by place and time. At the same time, the curriculum incorporates a heritage purpose when teachers are asked to make history significant for the present.9 This is a demanding aim as teaching practice shows that culturally divergent student



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audiences produce highly different ways of understanding history’s impact upon the present.10 The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and the Second World War, for example, are topics that easily trigger conflicting student perspectives in the classroom. Teachers often experience great difficulty mediating such situations, and many of them opt for avoidance strategies, leaving the impact of the past upon the present untouched.11 In the Netherlands, the supposed lack of contemporary significance of history teaching may explain the support for a new type of history learning, called heritage education. The debate on heritage and education is not specifically Dutch and does not focus exclusively on history education. Some have defined heritage education as presentist by nature and geared towards identity issues such as responsible democratic citizenship, with a future-­ oriented, intercultural social agenda.12 It is taken to be a participatory and cross-curricular approach rather than a passive form of learning tied to a specific subject.13 In the Netherlands, the debate on heritage education surfaced after a government initiative in 2005 established a national history canon as an instrument to promote social cohesion. In 2006 and 2007, a special committee published a Dutch history canon, consisting of fifty themes or windows on the past that every Dutch citizen should learn. An important feature of the canon website is that it systematically links the fifty themes to museums and other heritage institutions, while not prescribing a critical historical approach. This, in turn, explains the call from education specialists for applying historical concepts from school history to Dutch heritage education in the future, in line with similar trends in other countries.14 Because both fields have been drawn more closely to each other, the question is now a more positive one: how can we assess different approaches to the past within and between both fields and how can these strengthen one another in such a way that students, as John Tosh wrote, can ‘draw on the past for a richer sense of possibilities in the future’?15

Historical Distance in Education: An Analytical Framework If history teaching and heritage education both aim to teach students something about the significance of the past for their world and about the construction of historical identities (including their own), then what we need is at least a rudimentary analytical framework that can help to explain how past-present relations are composed in education. For such a framework, the concept of ‘historical distance’ will be helpful. In the theory of history, ‘historical distance’ is used when past-present interpretations emphasize discontinuity,16 meaning that the past is interpreted as being different from the present. Knowledge of the past is acquired by

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evaluating past behaviour in a proper historical context. To accept historical distance presumes that we master our emotions and examine our own convictions rather than engage in reasoning based on present values and instant feelings; such reflection on historical change enables us to acknowledge the existence ‒ perhaps even the value ‒ of different perspectives on the past. The less distant it is, however, the more the past tends to become a familiar and continuous thing. This ‘shorter distancing’ is also called proximity. Shorter distancing refers to two phenomena that are sometimes ‒ though not necessarily ‒ interconnected. First, it refers to the idea of experiencing the past. Sometimes people feel they have direct access to the past when they touch historical objects, walk in historical places, witness historical re-­enactments or watch audiovisual recreations. The human need to make connections with the past through such means can be interpreted positively as new ways of creating ‘authentic’ cultural identities.17 Whether such experiences have much to do with ‘history’ may be doubted, however, as replicas, redecorations, recreations and (re-)inventions often blur the time dimension.18 In addition, then, and this is the second phenomenon, shorter ­distancing refers to certain types of historical narratives, i.e. those involving values and moral judgments that sustain the memory of communities. Such narratives appropriate objects, relics, places and other ‘time travellers’ as their ‘heritage’. They often conflate the past with the present in order to celebrate continuity through time rather than change.19 Much scholarly reflection today focuses on the complex intertwining of longer and shorter distancing in representations of the past and on dynamic interactions in historical culture at large.20 A framework of analysis, therefore, should be imagined as a continuum, where many intermediate positions and complicated combinations are possible, creating unique varieties of distance. Such a framework could consist of five interrelated dimensions: 1. time: to what extent are historical phenomena constructed as time ruptures or as part of continuous historical processes (discontinuity– continuity)? This involves studying language and emplotment in historical narrative. Periodizations, for example, demarcate one period from another, suggesting that something important has changed in between. A template like ‘triangular trade’ also works towards ordering time as discontinuous because it configures slave trade and slavery as an essentially economic phenomenon, tied to the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Very different are schematic narrative templates such as the American notion of freedom and progress, suggesting a plot that has unfolded continuously over the centuries up until the present. Such effects of shorter distance are also produced by narrative bridging and pasting techniques, which connect or juxtapose different points in time,



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for example, through the power of analogy, to suggest sameness or even continuity.21 2. person: to what extent do learning materials present historical actors as ahistorical moral examples or as contextualized human beings (identity– difference)? Historical actors are important in historical narrative as they represent the point of perspective in the historical process. Historical actors can be abstract entities, such as ‘the nation’, but they can also be human or both. In the case of human actors, it is important to note how they are represented: as heroes, perpetrators, rebels, victims or just as ‘normal’ people dealing with the regular rhythm of the day or with the totally unexpected way in which lives can be changed. 3. imagination: to what extent do learning materials explain the past through abstract concepts, symbols and metaphors or through concrete stories and images (theoretical–specific)? This refers to how a mediator or an educational text tells a story, commonly amounting to a complex dynamics of language and visuals. Analysis of narration will focus on the question of who does the telling and through whose eyes we look. Written educational texts often use an unknown omniscient narrator, but various ways of focalization may occur by inserting historical eyewitness accounts. Audiovisual educational texts may have different or additional narrative rules. The ways in which (written and spoken) language and images interact in education will influence learning outcomes that are specific to history teaching, such as the students’ ability to recognize certain historical perspectives or their willingness to apply historical empathy / contextualization skills.22 4. place: to what extent are the locations of history presented as geographically distant or nearby (far away–close)? The experience of place, as it remains constant through time, can bring a sensual experience of history. Educational assignments can use the power of place in multiple ways, from using a photo, showing a video, creating a live connection to actually visiting a location and physically experiencing its environment. How place is perceived by students will also be influenced by the local, national or global geographical framework adopted by learning materials to create present meaning. 5. engagement: to what extent are students treated as passive receivers of historical knowledge or as active performers who produce meanings (for) themselves (passive–active)? This refers to two aspects. First, this dimension should be seen at the level of the general learning process, particularly the extent to which students are challenged to use their prior knowledge and convictions to actively create new understandings. Secondly, engagement takes place at the level of past-present ­relationships and refers to the way in which the construction of historical

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identities is forced upon students as given or facilitated as a personal process of becoming. These dimensions will often cross or overlap each other. Nevertheless, as a framework it will be helpful for analysing how narratives about the past are organized in education for both in-class and out-of-school contexts.23 I will use the framework here to analyse an assignment from an educational Dutch heritage project on the Second World War, called The War Nearby.

Imagining the Holocaust in your Own Environment: Analysing The War Nearby Teaching the Holocaust has been described as one of the most important things one can do as a teacher.24 There is less consensus, however, about the selection of the exact learning objectives that are to be achieved, and teachers, therefore, will favour different approaches. Today, this topic easily flows from the past into the present as a history we should learn from,25 but the current emphasis on learning and remembering in the service of developing democratic citizenship is not adopted by every teacher and is also subject to historical change.26 Even when learning objectives are similar, teaching materials may vary widely in their chosen teaching methodologies and particular choices made to accomplish particular objectives. The War Nearby is an educational project of the Dutch Remembrance Centre  Kamp Westerbork,27 located in the north-eastern part of the Netherlands. In the Second World War, it was a transition camp where Jewish people from all Dutch destinations were gathered before being transported to one of the concentration camps in Poland. This educational project was designed to connect this tragic episode in national and international history to local heritage. The project consists of a number of educational assignments developed specifically for several Dutch cities and towns, based on their local stories, places and archival records. For this chapter, I analysed an assignment for the town of Alphen aan den Rijn in the west of the Netherlands. The assignment provides materials and ­questions to guide students on a biking or walking tour of the town, visit at least five particular places, take photographs and finally present their impressions in the classroom. I used this material also as input for my interviews with the responsible heritage educator at Remembrance Centre Kamp Westerbork and four history teachers in Alphen aan den Rijn (henceforth: Alphen).28 Time The practical assignment of The War Nearby uses 1940 to 1945, the standard periodization in Dutch historiography, as an enclosed time unit for reflection



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but explains anti-Semitism as a phenomenon that is continuous throughout the ages. Time is dealt with in a comparative manner, so the question of why synagogues were molested during the war period, for example, is followed by the question of whether this also happens with other places of worship today. It resembles ‒ what Eviatar Zerubavel calls ‒ a ‘mnemonic pasting’ technique that facilitates thinking about continuities, but it is not presented without reflection.29 Several questions invite students to identify differences between the past and the present, and sometimes students are asked to present their opinion on whether these differences are good or bad. Still, the learning objective focuses more on developing knowledge and values for contemporary society than on explaining the strangeness of the past. This was affirmed by the heritage educator, as she acknowledged her main goal to be to make sure that children would not doubt that the Holocaust had really happened and that they would speak respectfully about the victims.30 According to her, this type of education should always be linked to the present and contribute to a shared understanding. Despite the often supposed difference between history teaching and heritage education, the four history teachers, who were none of them Jewish, strongly approved of this approach to this topic.31 In fact, they felt the link with the present was self-evident, and two of them said their preference in handling this topic was strongly influenced by their own personal experience. Teacher 1 had visited Auschwitz himself and taken his own photographs, which he used in the classroom. Teacher 2 not only recalled family stories of the Second World War, but also explained the very deep emotional experience he had had when studying Jewish war diaries for his history degree: ‘If you talk [as a teacher to students] from that experience, then it makes a real impression. Then it is something that almost becomes part of yourself, it goes that deep’. Having gone through such experiences, these teachers felt that they had come close to the emotions of the topic, and the second teacher in particular felt he taught about the Holocaust in a more ‘authentic’ way. Both the teachers and the educator felt that the Holocaust was a topic that needed short distancing as it was a narrative tool for learning about important democratic values in the present. Person The focus of attention in The War Nearby is on the Jewish victims from Alphen. Usually such a perspective helps students to see human suffering in a particular historical context, but the assignment only partially realizes (or aims to realize) this potential as it is mainly concerned with the material heritage of the Alphen area to which the historical people are connected. Most individuals are mentioned by name, but, except for some general biographical data, little further information is or could be provided. The educator acknowledged that this was a problem as students now get to see rather

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flat characters such as a teacher and a pupil at a Jewish school; parents and their children at a place of hiding; anonymous men, women and children at a Jewish monument; no people at a synagogue; and a family at a Jewish shop. The texts mention both survival and tragic destinies without making a central issue of man’s agency. For the teachers, however, this lack of biographical detail did not appear problematic as they were all attracted to this material by the fact that students would indeed be able to experience something of the Holocaust at all in their own local area. Imagination and place The story in the written assignment accompanying the walk or bike tour in Alphen is told by an unknown omniscient narrator in a sober style, with only a few details. There are no points where focalization occurs. The images in the assignment, mostly black and white photographs showing buildings from around the 1940s, prepare students for using the environment as an imaginative tool. The possible dynamics of the dimensions of imagination and place in the learning materials become apparent when we focus on one photo in particular. In this picture, taken around 1940, we actually see two Jewish people in front of the shop where they sold linen. Students are told that this is the shop of Nathan van Dien and his parents. Then they learn that Nathan was married to Roosje and that they had two children: Sara (4) and Isaac (2). Their fates are also mentioned: Roosje, Sara and Isaac died at Auschwitz on 5 October 1942, and Nathan died at Schoppinitz one year later. Sara and Isaac were the youngest victims from Alphen. These details help to make this horrible past concrete in the dimension of person and place, but from the dimension of imagination the material is confusing. The people we actually see in the photograph are Nathan’s parents or little Sara and little Isaac’s grandparents: Louis and Sarah van Dien. They are not mentioned. Both of them also died at Auschwitz and were probably on the same train. In fact, grandmother Sarah died on the same day as her daughter and her two grandchildren. If students know the whole family story, the image will be more powerful for them when they go outside the classroom and stand before the very same building in exactly the same spot as the photographer did around 1940. The learning materials ‒ both on paper and in the local environment ‒ would then work towards both bridging and separating past and present at the same instant. The old black and white picture with Louis and Sarah contrasts sharply with the modern building (which is to let), with graffiti on its walls and an expressive advert in the window. Visiting this place more than seventy years later may create effects of both shorter and longer historical distance, but only if learning materials provide tailor-made information.



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Figure 9.1  A linen shop in Alphen aan den Rijn, with Sarah and Louis van Dien (around 1940).

The dimension of place is the actual target of this assignment. Students will actively discover heritage and the topography of memory in their own  local area. Some of the places in Alphen have changed completely, while others are still recognizable as ‘time travellers’. It is in the dimension of place that larger historical developments are made concrete and part of learning through experience. As the heritage educator explains: ‘What all those children with all those different backgrounds have in common is that they live there right now and that they pass places that still remind us of what happened’. All four history teachers fully agreed on this point. What students need, according to one, is not just the facts, the dates and the concepts but ‘very specific examples’. Teacher 4 observed that local heritage provides something of a ‘historical sensation’ and that specific stories are a valuable addition to the more textual way of learning history in the classroom.

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Figure 9.2  The same building, February 2012.

Engagement With regard to the dimension of engagement, it is important to know something about the origin of this project. Remembrance Centre Kamp Westerbork had been asked to develop educational materials by Alphen’s Foundation for the Remembrance of Jewish Victims of Persecution. Some of the Foundation’s members were also on the municipal council and felt



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morally outraged by the actions of their predecessors in the 1940s, who had collaborated in the transportation of Jewish citizens from Alphen. The Foundation’s initiative to set up a special educational project was born out of a row over Remembrance Day (4 May). The Alphen remembrance ceremony is habitually held at the resistance monument, which was established in 1949 and has grown into a memorial symbol for the whole community, the commemoration of the Second World War having widened to include other victims, such as Jewish citizens. In 2008, however, the mayor was invited also to appear at the separate Jewish monument, which had been established in 1990, on the same day, but declined the invitation on the grounds that this was a private matter. The Foundation’s concern was then translated into educational material by the educator at Remembrance Centre Kamp Westerbork, aiming to improve children’s understanding of why there was a separate Jewish monument in Alphen. In The War Nearby, children are asked to read what a local newspaper from 2008 reported about the issue. There is, however, room for reflection and no prescribed significance. In fact, the heritage educator (a historian herself  ) said she explicitly abstained from taking a moral perspective on the issue and making Alphen’s town council of the 1940s into a unique example of collaboration. She refused to take a morally judging approach, she said, because every town in the Netherlands reacted in the same way. Nor did she take the approach suggested by members of the Foundation, i.e. to ask students what they would have done: ‘We found that question a very difficult one because you don’t know what you would have done; you can’t step into the shoes of people living seventy years ago and say: “I would have done it completely differently”’. Instead, through her influence, the educational material took a heritage angle, paying attention to the local remains of the past. One of the issues now raised in the assignments is whether students agree with the mayor or not. It also asks students to find other war monuments in Alphen and identify for whom they are there. The educational material thus sets the agenda for researching Alphen’s memorial landscape and for trying to understand some underlying tensions but leaves it up to the students and their teachers how to engage with them. This approach of combining past-present connections with critical reflection fitted well with the four history teachers’ expectations of good practice. They wanted history teaching to be critical and emotional, with stories full of details, but they made a distinction between what was suitable within and without the classroom environment. Teacher 3 criticized the critical assignment on the 2008 incident, which, he thought, was a rather textual exercise which required even more background information to make it work. This teacher recognized the cognitive demand of thinking about ‘heritage’, where he expected less textual demands from heritage education.

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For him, the 2008 issue was not an easily digestible story and, therefore, more of a textbook assignment. The assignment involving the 2008 incident was composed to take a more distant approach and to stimulate students to think about personal identity and different perspectives on commemoration. Sadly, at the time some of the interviews took place, the teachers’ presentist commemoration concerns had grown unexpectedly. On Saturday 9 April 2011, the Alphen community had been shocked by a shooting incident in which six people were killed in ‘De Ridderhof’ shopping centre. After the killings, the lone gunman took his own life. Two schools had close connections with the incident: some students and parents had witnessed it or knew victims, and one school was located next to the shopping centre. The memorial service for the incident the day after (10 April) took place less than a month before the ceremony to commemorate the victims of the Second World War. This coincidence provided a strong incentive to merge past and present and engage with general issues such as ‘vulnerability’ and ‘freedom’. The incident seemed to foster understanding of historical positions more strongly than an educational assignment. As teacher 2 explained: It’s the personal aspect, being touched by the fact that people are suddenly very vulnerable and that your life can suddenly end, by such an odd, bizarre event. You think you’ve got everything under control when you ‘re young and strong, in the strength of your life. And then suddenly, this ‘Ridderhof’ story comes along and suddenly you’re very vulnerable. Our students were also involved, or their parents, people they knew. Yes, you can suddenly be hit. You can be Jewish during World War II and think ‘I’ll go underground, or I’ll go somewhere, or I’ll run away from them’. Because of this ‘Ridderhof’ story, all this becomes very concrete and clear and it’s not that simple.

Although one cannot deny the value of such a comparison on a general level, the idea of ‘vulnerability’ during the 1940s and 2011 was without doubt very different. However, the impact of the present, or the proximity of violence, easily erased such historical nuances and made the present into a tool to engage with the past on one’s own terms, both for the teachers and the students.

Conclusion and Final Remarks In this chapter, I proposed a framework for analysing historical distance in education from five dimensions: time, person, imagination, place and engagement. I applied the framework to an educational assignment developed for a specific Dutch town by national Remembrance Centre Kamp Westerbork, a former transition camp used by the German occupiers to organize the Holocaust from the Netherlands. Students from schools in



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Alphen aan den Rijn were invited to take a walking or biking tour and visit locations connected with Jewish life in this town, aided by an assignment consisting of explanatory texts, images and questions. If we interpret the assignment from the dimension of time, it appears that it is meant mainly as a tool for developing knowledge and values for the present. It uses a mnemonic pasting technique to bring the war period close to the present. From the dimension of person, the approach is less clear. Historical actors are introduced in the materials, but, due to a lack of contextual information, they remain flat characters. From the dimensions of imagination and place, it is important to look at the dynamics between the visual information in the assignment and the actual places to be visited. Students can see both change and continuity in historical places by comparing photographs of the 1940s with the same locations in the present. Experiencing shorter and longer distance may occur simultaneously here and create an experience that is more historical than presentist. This only works, however, if students are provided with the correct contextual information about the historical actors in the old photographs, which was absent from the assignment. In the engagement dimension, I looked at how some mediators would distance historically when teaching with these materials. The educator responsible for The War Nearby explained that she had resisted the project initiators’ call for a straightforward moral perspective. Bringing the past closer to the present, according to her, was useful for educational purposes only as an encounter with material remains, but not as a closed narrative with a particular moral stance. The teachers valued this approach positively. They said that they saw this material as a valuable addition to their teaching practice and thought they could add enough contextual ­information, if necessary, to balance longer and shorter distancing. These interviews show why we cannot evaluate the construction of historical distance solely by interpreting a written assignment. Mediators add their own materials and insights, as do the students themselves. Therefore, we need to understand historical distance within the overall learning process on a certain curriculum topic. There are classroom activities, and there is learning in and around heritage institutions, but there are also collaborative projects which may have a unique impact on how past and present are connected. The assignment involving active learning in the school environment about the heritage of the Jewish victims was barely used in the Alphen schools. This was very much due to practical concerns. The assignment was part of the much larger project The War Nearby, and it was difficult to incorporate this whole package into the daily routines of the school programmes and, hence, the smaller assignment was overlooked. This is a well-known problem showing that both epistemological and practical concerns need to

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be considered before teaching in heritage institutions and classroom practice can be mutually beneficial. In the educational context of the Netherlands, heritage institutions can contribute to the need to humanize and emotionalize the past in history education, if they do not present the past uncritically or as static in meaning. If such teaching is developed for classroom use, it also needs to be flexible enough to accommodate timetables, student diversity and teacher needs. This is easier said than done. One of the major dilemmas, which also surfaced in the teacher interviews, is that critical historical thinking about heritage should be supported by providing students with enough contextual information. Teachers, however, do not always seem to expect a contextualized and analytical approach to be part of a heritage project. They themselves are not consistent in their approaches either and may accommodate emotional needs when everyday life enters the classroom. This became evident from the interviews, which took place in Alphen shortly after dramatic events had shocked the community. Therefore, the most promising results will appear where schools, heritage institutions and educational specialists find ways to cooperate on a more permanent basis and to analyse goals and practices, both in terms of historical distance and in terms of their use in different learning contexts.

Notes 1.  J. Hamer, ‘History Teaching and Heritage Education: Two Sides of the Same Coin, or Different Currencies?’, in The Politics of Heritage: The Legacies of Race, eds J. Littler and R. Naidoo, New York, 2005, 159–169. 2.  The framework of analysis in this article has also been described for a Dutch audience in S. Klein, M. Grever and C. van Boxtel, ‘“Zie, Denk, Voel, Vraag, Spreek, Hoor en Verwonder”. Afstand en Nabijheid in Geschiedenisonderwijs en Erfgoededucatie in Nederland’, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 124, 3 (2011): 381–395. 3.  A. Rigney, ‘Introduction: Values, Responsibilities, History’, in Historians and Social Values, eds A. Rigney and J. Leerssen, Amsterdam, 2000, 8; J. Black, Using History, London, 2005, 175–178. 4.  J. de Groot, Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture, London and New York, 2009; K. Ribbens, Strijdtonelen: De Tweede Wereldoorlog in de Populaire Historische Cultuur, inaugural lecture Erasmus University Rotterdam, 25 October 2013. 5.  The term used in E. Jonker, ‘Reflection on History Education: Easy and Difficult Histories’, Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society 4, 1 (2012): 107. See also C. Lorenz, ‘Unstuck in Time: Or, The Sudden Presence of the Past’, in Performing the Past: Memory, History, and Identity in Modern Europe, eds K. Tilmans, F. van Vree and J. Winter, Amsterdam, 2010, 67–102; H. Jansen, Triptiek van de Tijd: Geschiedenis in Drievoud, Nijmegen, 2010, 50–55; R. Aerts, ‘De Lege Kathedraal: Over Geschiedwetenschap, Vaderlandse Geschiedenis en het Publiek’, in Het Vaderlandse Verleden: Robert Fruin en de Nederlandse Geschiedenis, eds H. Paul and H. te Velde, Amsterdam, 2010, 195–220. 6.  W. Frijhoff, Dynamisch Erfgoed, Amsterdam, 2007, 13–40.



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7.  P. Seixas, ed., Theorizing Historical Consciousness, Toronto, ON, 2004; M. Grever and S. Stuurman, eds, Beyond the Canon: History for the Twenty-First Century, Basingstoke, UK, 2007; K. Barton and L. Levstik, Teaching History for the Common Good, Mahwah, NJ and London, 2004; L. Symcox and A. Wilschut, eds, National History Standards: The Problem of the Canon and the Future of Teaching History, Charlotte, NC, 2009; M. Carretero, M. Asensio and M. RodríguezMoneo, eds, History Education and the Construction of National Identities, Charlotte, NC, 2012. 8.  See, for example, J. van Drie and C. van Boxtel, ‘Historical Reasoning: Towards a Framework for Analyzing Students’ Reasoning about the Past’, Educational Psychology Review 20 (2008): 87–110; S. Lévesque, Thinking Historically: Educating Students for the Twenty-First Century, Toronto, Buffalo and London, 2008. Although the Dutch history curriculum was revised substantially in 2007, with more emphasis on chronology, the combination of critically examining historical representations and thinking about their present value is still a key characteristic. 9. The concept of historical significance is the subject of much debate in the theory of history didactics. For example, L. Cercadillo, ‘“Maybe They Haven’t Decided Yet What is Right”: English and Spanish Perspectives on Teaching Historical Significance’, Teaching History 125 (2006): 6–9; Lévesque, Thinking Historically, 39–61; L.C. Peck, ‘“It’s Not Like [I’m] Chinese and Canadian. I am In Between”: Ethnicity and Students’ Conceptions of Historical Significance’, Theory and Research in Social Education 38, 4 (2010): 574–617. 10.  M. Grever and K. Ribbens, Nationale Identiteit en Meervoudig Verleden, Amsterdam, 2007. 11.  Barton and Levstik, Teaching History for the Common Good, 253; S. Klein, ‘Teaching History in The Netherlands: Teachers’ Experiences of a Plurality of Perspectives’, Curriculum Inquiry 40, 5 (2010): 614–634. 12.  J.J. Patrick, ‘Heritage Education in the School Curriculum: Defining and Avoiding the Pitfalls’, Heritage Education Monograph Series, Washington, 1992, 6–14; T. Copeland, ‘Citizenship Education and Heritage’, Internet Archeology 10 (2002); G. Aplin, ‘Heritage as Exemplar: A Pedagogical Role for Heritage Studies in Values Education’, Environmentalist 27 (2007): 375–383. 13.  T. Copeland, European Democratic Citizenship, Heritage Education and Identity, Council of Europe, 2005, 20. 14.  C. van Boxtel, Geschiedenis, Erfgoed en Didactiek, inaugural lecture Erasmus University Rotterdam, 20 February 2009; C. van Boxtel, S. Klein and E. Snoep, eds, Heritage Education: Challenges in Dealing with the Past, Amsterdam, 2011. See also P. Seixas and T. Morton, The Big Six Historical Thinking Concepts, Toronto, 2012; M. Stoddard and W. Woodward, Teaching History with Museums: Strategies for K-12 Social Studies, New York and London, 2012, 20–29. 15.  J. Tosh, Why History Matters, Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York, 2008, 127. 16.  J. den Hollander, H. Paul and R. Peters, ‘Introduction: The Metaphor of Historical Distance’, History and Theory 50 (December 2011): 1–10. 17. S. Jones, ‘Negotiating Authentic Objects and Authentic Selves: Beyond the Deconstruction of Authenticity’, Journal of Material Culture 15 (2010): 181–203. 18.  D. Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country, Cambridge, 1985, 248. 19.  D. Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History, Cambridge, 1998, 127– 147; D. Lowenthal, ‘Fabricating Heritage’, History and Memory 10 (1998): 5–24. 20.  M. Phillips, ‘Distance and Historical Representation’, History Workshop Journal 57 (2004): 123–141; M. Phillips, ‘Rethinking Historical Distance: From Doctrine to Heuristic’, History and Theory 50 (2011): 11–23; F. Hartog, ‘Time and Heritage’, Museum International 227, 3 (2005): 7–18; A. Erll and A. Rigney, Mediation, Remediation and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory, Berlin, 2009. 21.  C. Husbands, What is History Teaching? Language, Ideas and Meaning in Learning about the Past, Buckingham and Philadelphia, 1996, 30–53; J. Wertsch, ‘Specific Narratives and Schematic Narrative Templates’, in Theorizing Historical Consciousness, ed. P. Seixas, Toronto,

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ON, 2004, 49–62; E. Zerubavel, Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past, Chicago and London, 2003. 22.  M. Bal, Narratology: Introduction in the Theory of Narrative, 3rd edn, Toronto, 2009. 23.  M. Grever, P. de Bruijn and C. van Boxtel, ‘Negotiating Historical Distance: Or, How to Deal with the Past as a Foreign Country in Heritage Education’, Paedagogica Historica 48, 4 (2011): 1–15; P. de Bruijn, ‘The Holocaust and Historical Distance: An Analysis of Heritage Educational Resources’, in Forschungswerkstatt Geschichtsdidaktik 12: Beitrage zur Tagung ‘Geschichtsdidaktik Empirisch 12’, eds J. Hodel, M. Waldis and B. Ziegler, Bern, 2013, 204–213. 24. I. Davies, Teaching the Holocaust: Educational Dimensions, Principles and Practice, London, 2000. 25.  See for example the cross-national comparative results in P. Bromley and S. Russell, ‘The Holocaust as History and Human Rights: A Cross-national Analysis of Holocaust Education in Social Science Textbooks, 1970-2008’, Prospects 40 (2010): 153–173. See also the guidelines at http://www.holocaustremembrance.com/educate/teaching-guidelines (accessed 16 December 2015). 26.  For the Netherlands, see D. Hondius, Oorlogslessen: Onderwijs over de Oorlog Sinds 1945, Amsterdam, 2010. 27.  De Oorlog Dichtbij Huis: Alphen aan den Rijn, geproduceerd door Herinneringscentrum Kamp Westerbork (2009), op initiatief van de Stichting Herdenking Joodse Vervolgings­ slachtoffers (The War Nearby: Alphen aan den Rijn, produced by the Remembrance Centre Kamp Westerbork, on the initiative of the Foundation for the Remembrance of Jewish Victims of Persecution). 28.  The four history teachers (all male) worked at four different secondary schools in Alphen aan den Rijn. Two of them had an academic history degree at master’s level, the other two a history degree at bachelor level. All four had at least ten years of teaching experience. The heritage educator (female) had an academic master degree in history and had worked for more than ten years as an educator, combined over two heritage institutions. 29. Zerubavel, Time Maps, 40–41. 30.  Interview with heritage educator (11 July 2011). 31.  Interviews with teacher 1 (9 June 2011), teacher 2 (17 June 2011), teacher 3 (23 September 2011) and teacher 4 (27 September 2011).

References Aerts, R. ‘De Lege Kathedraal: Over Geschiedwetenschap, Vaderlandse Geschiedenis en het Publiek’ [The Empty Cathedral: About History, National History and the Public], in Het Vaderlandse Verleden: Robert Fruin en de Nederlandse Geschiedenis, eds H. Paul and H. te Velde, Amsterdam, 2010, 195–220. Aplin, G. ‘Heritage as Exemplar: A Pedagogical Role for Heritage Studies in Values Education’, Environmentalist 27 (2007): 375–383. Bal, M. Narratology: Introduction in the Theory of Narrative, 3rd edn, Toronto, 2009. Barton, K. and L. Levstik.Teaching History for the Common Good, Mahwah, NJ and London, 2004. Black, J. Using History, London, 2005. Bromley, P. and S. Russell. ‘The Holocaust as History and Human Rights: A Cross-national Analysis of Holocaust Education in Social Science Textbooks, 1970-2008’, Prospects 40 (2010): 153–173. Carretero, M., M. Asensio and M. Rodríguez-Moneo, eds. History Education and the Construction of National Identities, Charlotte, NC, 2012.



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Cercadillo, L. ‘“Maybe They Haven’t Decided Yet What is Right”: English and Spanish Perspectives on Teaching Historical Significance’, Teaching History 125 (2006): 6–9. Copeland, T. ‘Citizenship Education and Heritage’, Internet Archeology 10 (2002). ———. European Democratic Citizenship, Heritage Education and Identity, Council of Europe, 2005. Davies, I. Teaching the Holocaust: Educational Dimensions, Principles and Practice, London, 2000. de Bruijn, P. ‘The Holocaust and Historical Distance: An Analysis of Heritage Educational Resources’, in Forschungswerkstatt Geschichtsdidaktik 12: Beitrage zur Tagung ‘Geschichtsdidaktik Empirisch 12, eds J. Hodel, M. Waldis and B. Ziegler, Bern, 2013, 204–213. de Groot, J. Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture, London and New York, 2009. den Hollander, J., H. Paul and R. Peters. ‘Introduction: The Metaphor of Historical Distance’, History and Theory 50 (December 2011): 1–10. Erll, A. and A. Rigney. Mediation, Remediation and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory, Berlin, 2009. Frijhoff, W. Dynamisch Erfgoed, Amsterdam, 2007. Grever, M., P. de Bruijn and C. van Boxtel. ‘Negotiating Historical Distance: Or, How to Deal with the Past as a Foreign Country in Heritage Education’, Paedagogica Historica 48, 4 (2011): 1–15. Grever, M. and K. Ribbens. Nationale Identiteit en Meervoudig Verleden [National Identity and Plural Pasts], Amsterdam, 2007. Grever, M. and S. Stuurman, eds. Beyond the Canon: History for the Twenty-First Century, Basingstoke, UK, 2007. Hamer, J. ‘History Teaching and Heritage Education. Two Sides of the Same Coin, or Different Currencies?’, in The Politics of Heritage: The Legacies of Race, eds J. Littler and R. Naidoo, New York, 2005, 159–169. Hartog, F. ‘Time and Heritage’, Museum International 227, 3 (2005): 7–18. Hondius, D. Oorlogslessen: Onderwijs over de Oorlog Sinds 1945 [Lessons of War: Education about the War since 1945], Amsterdam, 2010. Husbands, C. What is History Teaching? Language, Ideas and Meaning in Learning about the Past, Buckingham and Philadelphia, 1996. Jansen, H. Triptiek van de Tijd: Geschiedenis in Drievoud [Triptych of Time: History in Triplicate], Nijmegen, 2010. Jones, S. ‘Negotiating Authentic Objects and Authentic Selves. Beyond the Deconstruction of Authenticity’, Journal of Material Culture 15 (2010): 181–203. Jonker, E. ‘Reflection on History Education: Easy and Difficult Histories’, Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society 4, 1 (2012): 95–110. Klein, S. ‘Teaching History in The Netherlands: Teachers’ Experiences of a Plurality of Perspectives’, Curriculum Inquiry 40, 5 (2010): 614–634. ———, M. Grever and C. van Boxtel. ‘“Zie, Denk, Voel, Vraag, Spreek, Hoor en Verwonder”: Afstand en Nabijheid in Geschiedenisonderwijs en Erfgoededucatie in Nederland’ [‘See, Think, Feel, Question, Speak, Hear and Wonder’: Distance and Proximity in History and Heritage Education in the Netherlands], Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 124, 3 (2011): 381–395. Lévesque, S. Thinking Historically: Educating Students for the Twenty-First Century, Toronto, Buffalo and London, 2008. Lorenz, C. ‘Unstuck in Time: Or, the Sudden Presence of the Past’, in Performing the Past: Memory, History, and Identity in Modern Europe, eds K. Tilmans, F. van Vree and J. Winter, Amsterdam, 2010, 67–102. Lowenthal, D. The Past is a Foreign Country, Cambridge, 1985. ———. The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History, Cambridge, 1998.

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———. ‘Fabricating Heritage’, History and Memory 10 (1998): 5–24. Patrick, J.J. ‘Heritage Education in the School Curriculum: Defining and Avoiding the Pitfalls’, Heritage Education Monograph Series, Washington, 1992, 6–14. Peck, L.C. ‘“It’s Not Like [I’m] Chinese and Canadian. I am In Between”: Ethnicity and Students’ Conceptions of Historical Significance’, Theory and Research in Social Education 38, 4 (2010): 574–617. Phillips, M. ‘Distance and Historical Representation’, History Workshop Journal 57 (2004): 123–141. ———. ‘Rethinking Historical Distance: From Doctrine to Heuristic’, History and Theory 50 (2011): 11–23. Ribbens, K. Strijdtonelen: De Tweede Wereldoorlog in de Populaire Historische Cultuur [Battlegrounds: The Second World War in Popular Historical Culture], inaugural lecture Erasmus University Rotterdam, 25 October 2013. Rigney, A. ‘Introduction: Values, Responsibilities, History’, in Historians and Social Values, eds A. Rigney and J. Leerssen, Amsterdam, 2000, 7–15. Seixas, P. ed. Theorizing Historical Consciousness, Toronto, ON, 2004. ——— and T. Morton. The Big Six Historical Thinking Concepts, Toronto, 2012. Stoddard, M. and W. Woodward. Teaching History with Museums: Strategies for K-12 Social Studies, New York and London, 2012. Symcox, L. and A. Wilschut, eds. National History Standards: The Problem of the Canon and the Future of Teaching History, Charlotte, NC, 2009. Tosh, J. Why History Matters, Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York, 2008. van Boxtel, C. Geschiedenis, Erfgoed en Didactiek [History, Heritage and Pedagogy], inaugural lecture Erasmus University Rotterdam, 20 February 2009. ———, S. Klein and E. Snoep, eds. Heritage Education: Challenges in Dealing with the Past, Amsterdam, 2011. van Drie, J. and C. van Boxtel. ‘Historical Reasoning: Towards a Framework for Analyzing Students’ Reasoning about the Past’, Educational Psychology Review 20 (2008): 87–110. Wertsch, J. ‘Specific Narratives and Schematic Narrative Templates’, in Theorizing Historical Consciousness, ed. P. Seixas, Toronto, ON, 2004, 49–62. Zerubavel, E. Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past, Chicago and London, 2003.

Stephan Klein is a lecturer of history teaching and historical culture at ICLON – Leiden University Graduate School of Teaching (the Netherlands). He was a postdoctoral researcher in the programme Heritage Education, Plurality of Narratives and Shared Historical Knowledge (2009–14) at Erasmus University Rotterdam and project leader of the valorisation project Slave Trade in the Atlantic world (www.atlanticslavetrade.eu). He is advisor and editor of history textbooks for upper secondary education and has published on history teaching, historical thinking, and early modern Dutch republicanism in a.o. Curriculum Inquiry, Teaching History and the (Dutch) Journal of History. His current research interests include colonialism, slavery and ­maritime travelling.

CHAPTER

10

Engaging Experiences of the Second World War Historical Distance in Exhibitions and Educational Resources Pieter de Bruijn

In 1990 the Imperial War Museum in London opened an interactive exhibition called the ‘Blitz experience’ about the bombing of Britain’s capital city by the German Air Force in the Second World War. The exhibition was one of the first of its kind and consisted of a reconstructed air raid shelter and a bombed London street brought to live with audio-visual effects and a character actor, all in order to recreate what it must have been like to live through this historical event.1 This type of museum display, that aims to bring the past nearby and stimulate emotional engagement through an immersive experience, is an important feature of today’s museums: a trend that relates to the growing presence of digital media in today’s society, which calls for the authentic aura of original artefacts to be supplemented by reconstructed and simulated environments.2 These strategies are also often used in the educational activities and resources of museums in which they are thought to render the past more tangible and comprehensible to school students.3 Cultural heritage may very well help students in achieving a better historical understanding. The embodied learning experiences that cultural heritage practices provide would trigger affective responses and help people to ‘enter another world’.4 Some studies have indicated that immersive types of display stimulate visitors’ imagination and can leave them with in-depth knowledge of the history presented.5 Although some influential works in heritage studies literature have framed the terrain of emotion as a Notes for this section begin on page 213.

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problematic aspect of cultural heritage, focusing on nostalgic, nationalistic and ­commercial tendencies in some heritage practices, recent studies have suggested the analysis of emotional issues as an important field of research, as it is a key element of how visitors approach cultural heritage.6 Due to the relationship of cultural heritage with processes of identity-making, scholars have, however, also pointed to the exclusionary nature of cultural heritage, and the existence of a dominant discourse that would govern the construction of the meaning and practices of heritage.7 In history teaching methodology theories it has been argued that maintaining a balance between engaging students into learning about history and allowing enough room for reflection and learning is important to achieve historical understanding. For instance, narratives that emphasize individuals have often been regarded as useful tools to trigger students’ interest and prior experience, but these should not draw attention away from larger historical structures and processes.8 Theorists have also stressed the importance of providing multiple perspectives in order to offer students a richer account of historical events and to teach them how to adequately assess (historical) information.9 This chapter seeks to examine how museums actually create distance, proximity, engagement and detachment in their exhibitions and related educational resources, and how the strategies they use may impact the opportunities for exploring multiple points of view.10 The chapter focuses on the exhibitions and educational resources for secondary school groups of the Airbornemuseum ‘Hartenstein’ in Oosterbeek in the eastern region of the Netherlands, and the D-Day Museum and Overlord Embroidery in Portsmouth, U.K. First, I will define the concepts of historical distance and multiperspectivity, and describe the theoretical framework I have developed based on these concepts to analyse the exhibitions and educational resources. Next, I will explain the method underpinning this study, after which I will present the analysis of the two museums’ exhibitions and resources, showing the strategies they use to stimulate proximity or distance, and engagement or detachment. I will also examine how the specific strategies of museum display used in the exhibitions are mediated in the educational resources, and will reflect on the implications of using these strategies for the opportunities of taking multiple perspectives.

Historical Distance and Multiperspectivity Since the emergence of history as a discipline in the nineteenth century, many historians and philosophers of history have reflected on the question of



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how they themselves relate or should relate towards their objects of study.11 In recent years such problems have been theorized through the notion of historical distance as a metaphor, referring to the time span between the present in which historians are writing and the past they are studying.12 Some theorists have primarily emphasized that historians should maintain or create distance when studying the past in order to be able to re-enact the past ‘objectively’. Others have focused on the problem of how historians who are working in the present make sense of the past with present-day values and concepts.13 Historian Mark Phillips has used the concept of historical distance to refer to the closeness or distance in which historical representations position their audience from the historical events and processes they describe.14 Historical distance, according to Phillips, is constructed on a gradient ranging from proximity or immediacy to remoteness or detachment.15 In this chapter, historical distance is hence defined as the configuration of temporality and engagement in historical representations, with temporality referring to the distance or nearness of the past, and engagement pointing to the level of affective, moral or ideological commitment that is stimulated.16 This definition creates a clear analytical distinction between temporality and engagement. Although temporality and engagement often go hand in hand, sometimes museum strategies only paint a vivid picture of the past without eliciting any form of engagement, while strategies that construct the past as temporally distant, on the other hand, may still evoke engagement. The relationship between the past and the present has also been an important issue underlying theories of history learning, as authors have emphasized that it is important for students to learn that the past is not something found by historians in the present, but that historians create historical accounts based on evidence.17 One of the concepts that has been stressed in these theories is the taking of the perspective of historical actors or historical empathy, which involves reconstructing how people in the past felt and thought based on evidence, in order to understand the past as a foreign country.18 Some degree of distance towards the past is needed as it involves analysing the actions, motives and thoughts of historical actors, and not ­identifying with them.19 Several scholars have specifically pointed to the importance of multiperspectivity in historical perspective taking in order to acquire a ‘richer and more complex’ account of historical events and understand history better.20 As a concept, multiperspectivity refers to: the different viewpoints of creators of historical accounts (e.g. historians); the various perspectives of people who witnessed historical events or developments and produced evidence which reflect their personal points of view; and different geographical scales, varying from local to global.21 Some scholars have also noted

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constraints regarding the implementation of multiperspectivity. Actually understanding the underlying values of people’s points of view is a complex activity and presenting different perspectives could also cause students to be confused and suspicious of history. Moreover, the fact that inevitably a selection needs to be made could lead to the marginalization of certain perspectives.22

Strategies of Historical Distance Based on insights from history theory, narrative analysis and the work of sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel on the mental strategies of organizing the past, I have developed a theoretical framework on the configuration of temporality and engagement in historical representations with a specific emphasis on museum display in which I have distinguished two categories: narrative emplotment and mnemonic bridging.23 The first category covers the various narrative structures, plotlines and perspectives that creators of historical representations can use. Historical representations can, for instance, provide a synthetic view on the past (synchronic) or emphasize developments through time (diachronic).24 Although it depends on the other narrative strategies that are used, synchronic approaches normally create more temporal distance than diachronic accounts, as they present the past as a separate, closed-off period in time, free from any connections with the present. Furthermore, historical representations can contain different narrative plotlines, such as progressive, declining, zigzag and rhyming plotlines. Progressive plotlines, which provide a ‘later is better’ scenario, and declining plotlines, in which the past is depicted as superior to the present, create a linear connection between the past and the present and highlight their relation, in effect stimulating temporal proximity. Zigzag plotlines, on the other hand, which offer a combination of decline and progress plots, construct greater temporal distance through their emphasis on the multifaceted nature of the past. In rhyming plots, historical events are presented as fundamentally similar to present occurrences, fusing the past and the present, which ­generates temporal proximity.25 Narratives can, moreover, be told from the point of view of an anonymous agent who is not part of what is being narrated (external focalization) or from the perspective of characters who are participants in the events narrated (character focalization).26 According to narrative theorist Mieke Bal, narratives using external focalization can appear to be more objective, as the subjectivity of the focalizor remains implicit.27 The seemingly objective feel of external focalization generates greater temporal distance and emphasizes



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a detached approach, whereas using character focalization can bring the past closer and can elicit emotional engagement more easily through its direct account of the experiences of historical actors. The second category of strategies to configure temporality and engagement involves the use of mnemonic bridging techniques to create a connection between the past and the present. This concept refers to devices and strategies that are meant to preserve continuity between the past and the present, including people’s physical surroundings (‘same place’), ‘relics and memorabilia’, ‘imitation and replication’ (e.g. reconstructions, r­ e-enactments and invented traditions), calendric fusion through anniversaries and commemorations (‘same time’), ‘historical analogies’, and ‘discursive tokens of sameness’ (e.g. consecutive ordinal numbers and timelines).28 Most history museums focus on the second category of bridging techniques, using material relics to construct a physical connection between the past and the present. It has often been argued that such artefacts could make the past more tangible and even cause what Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga has called a ‘historical sensation’: a feeling of ‘immediate contact with the past’.29 Dutch historian Frank Ankersmit, providing Huizinga’s notion with a stronger philosophical basis, has, however, argued that in order to undergo such an experience one would need to know a lot of historical context, as these ‘clouds of context’ conceal the ‘real’ past and must be broken through: an experience that direct contact with an historical artefact could provide.30 Most people would probably not possess the necessary amount of knowledge to experience such a ‘historical sensation’. Museums often choose to present their material relics in display cases with individual labels providing information about them, a strategy that establishes more temporal distance than proximity as it draws attention to the interpretative nature of the exhibit and emphasizes the artificiality of collecting and exhibiting.31 Drawing from an ethnographic study, archaeologist Siân Jones has pointed to the importance of addressing the interplay between the materiality of the artefacts and the past relationships they embody in order for people to be able to experience their authenticity.32 In their exhibitions and educational activities, museums also often draw from the other categories of bridging techniques. They use historical analogies to draw parallels between the past and the present and ask students to imitate historical actors through empathy activities. The past is also frequently replicated through in situ types of display that aim to include the larger reality that surrounds the object through reconstructions, replicas or re-enactments. Henrietta Lidchi has distinguished between simulacra, which solely rely on imitations of real objects, and reconstructions, featuring artefacts that are

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authentic in origin or design; both types of display require little interpretation and communicate a sense of ‘realness’.33

Method Based on the theoretical framework of historical distance and ­multiperspectivity, a qualitative scheme of analysis was developed to study the narrative structures, plotlines, perspectives and mnemonic bridging techniques included in the museums’ exhibitions and related educational activities. In the analysis a distinction was made between the narrative plot structures present in the exhibitions, specific educational activities and the educational programme as a whole. This chapter focuses on two museums in locations that have gained significance since the Second World War as places where important historical events took place. The D-Day Museum & Overlord Embroidery is located near Portsmouth, which served as an embarkation point for the Normandy landings on 6 June 1944 (termed D-Day) that marked the start of Operation Overlord, which heralded the liberation of Western Europe. The museum offers an exhibition that deals with the preparations and execution of Operation Overlord in chronological order, including a section on the experiences at the home front, and the so-called Overlord Embroidery that provides a similar narrative in thirty-four panels.34 The museum is planning a full redevelopment that is scheduled to be finished in 2019.35 For secondary schools, the museum offered activity sheets that students could use to guide themselves through the museum.36 The Airborne Museum ‘Hartenstein’ is located in the eastern region of the Netherlands, which formed the backdrop to the Allied military Operation Market Garden. This operation was meant to liberate this region in order to create an entry point into Germany, but the operation failed, as the resistance of the German forces proved too strong. The museum offers a formal exhibition with objects presented in display cases, several reconstructions and an elaborate simulacrum called the ‘Airborne Experience’.37 For secondary school groups, the museum offered the programme ‘De Vrienschapsarmband’, consisting of a self-guided exploratory tour through the museum and a pre- and post-plenary session in which this activity is introduced and reflected upon.38 The exhibitions were photographed and the analysis of the educational resources was based on printed materials. As the educational programme of the Airborne Museum also contained a pre- and post-plenary session that were delivered orally, a semi-structured interview with the educator was conducted as a member check.



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D-Day Museum (Portsmouth), ‘Discovering D-Day’ Walking along the beach of Southsea, the seaside resort connected to Portsmouth, with a strong breeze coming from the English Channel and waves crashing over the path, one could almost imagine how a huge fleet of landing craft crossed that very same sea almost seventy years ago as part of the Normandy Landings on D-Day. This is where the D-Day Museum is located, only a few hundred metres off the coast. Although this setting provides an opportunity for proximity and engagement by stimulating a constancy of place, the museum has opted not to use the historical significance of its location. The museum opened in 1984 and was primarily built to provide a home to the Overlord Embroidery, which was commissioned in the 1960s as a ‘permanent memorial and tribute to the efforts and sacrifices of the Allies, but above all to the “national teamwork” here in this country which made D-Day possible’.39 It was meant as a sort of ‘reverse Bayeux Tapestry’, which commemorates the Norman conquest of England in the eleventh century.40 Historians of the Ministry of Defence Library wrote the script in 1968, while designer and painter Sandra Lawrence created the cartoons, which were then embroidered at the Royal School of Needlework.41 The finished embroidery was originally to be put on display at the Imperial War Museum in London, but, after a tour through the U.S.A., Canada and Britain, was relocated to Portsmouth, due to its size and problems over getting planning permission for a new museum building.42 Overlord Embroidery: National Identification The narrative of the embroidery stimulates a sense of national identification through its plotline and the perspectives that have been integrated. In thirty-four panels the embroidery narrates how the British prepared for the Second World War, how they suffered massive damage from German air raids during the Blitz and how the military campaign was planned and executed. As the Operation was a success and the Allied forces emerged victorious, the plotline of this exhibit can be characterized as being progressive. Together with the perspectives that have been included, this plotline contributes to its national sense of ideological engagement, as it shows how the entire nation – including women – collectively supported the war effort and fought back against the Germans. While the narrative does also include the Americans and Canadians by referring to the Allied Forces, the Germans primarily act as antagonists. The sense of national identification as stimulated by the narrative is reinforced by its context as a ‘reverse Bayeux Tapestry’. The idea of having two tapestries on display on exactly the opposite sides of the English Channel

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emphasizes Britain’s status as an island nation that was conquered by the Normans but that liberated Europe centuries later. This pattern reflects the overall memory of British military experiences in the Second World War, often drawing attention to events in which Britain stood alone, fought against the odds and got caught in a lot of trouble at the beginning.43 In one text panel, the invasion is called an ‘armada’, referring to the maritime conflicts between England and Spain in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. This phrasing stresses the importance of maritime events in Britain’s national memory. These kinds of templates reinforce the national sense of ideological engagement elicited by the embroidery. The questions in the educational activity sheets mediate the experience of temporal proximity this visual representation may provide by stimulating students to look closely at the panels of the Overlord Embroidery, and reinforce the ideological engagement by referring to some of the elements in the embroidery that emphasize that the British people and Allied Forces were all involved in this history. For example: In Panels 1–4 write down ways in which civilians are shown helping the war effort on the Home Front in Britain. In Panels 21–25 which nationalities are shown taking part in the fighting on D- Day?44

The Germans are not referred to, except for a question that asks for the name of commander Field Marshal Rommel. Some questions aim to bring the past even closer and trigger emotional engagement through empathy-based activities that stimulate students to imagine what it must have been like in the past, which relates to the ­mnemonic bridging technique of imitation and replication. Students are encouraged, for example, to take the perspective of a French woman or man seen looking out of a window in one of the panels and are asked to describe what they would feel: In Panel 17 imagine you are the French woman or her husband looking out of the window. Describe what you can see and how you are feeling.45

This first-person perspective not only encourages students to experience through imagination but also stimulates their affective engagement by having them think of emotions. A similar approach is taken by the question that asks students to find out more about the weather conditions on D-Day from the embroidery panels. It tells students more about the experiences of the soldiers and the severe circumstances in which they operated. Material Relics, Reconstructions and Facts The main exhibition of the D-Day Museum carries a similar focus on the Allied military perspective as the Overlord Embroidery, and also speaks of



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an ‘armada’, reflecting Britain’s national framing of the history of the Second World War, fostering a similar sense of national identification. This exhibition, however, primarily relies on a combination of bridging techniques to configure temporality and engagement. Firstly, it uses the bridging technique of material relics by presenting artefacts ‘in context’ behind glass panels and encapsulated in interpretative texts, which emphasizes that they have been ripped from their original context, generating temporal distance. The analysis shows that instead of focusing on particular characteristics of the objects, the object labels and text panels primarily recount the historical events and processes the objects ­represent, treating the artefacts as illustrations. Sometimes the exhibition aims to bring the past closer by interpreting objects through first-person narration. For instance, one label, referring to packets of Durex on display, offers an impersonal description of how they were used, while another recounts a soldier as saying that he was expecting to meet girls on the beach but eventually found that the condom was only to be used ‘to put your compass and your watches in … and put it in your helmet, so when you went ashore … we wasn’t going to get these things wet’.46 Interpretations of the more descriptive first type, however, dominate the exhibition. Secondly, in addition to this ‘in context’ type of display, the D-Day Museum also combines material relics with the bridging technique of imitation and replication, as several reconstructions have been incorporated into the exhibition using mannequins, props and original artefacts in recreated environments. For example, the exhibition features a reconstruction  of a woman working in a factory, representing the fact that women were employed during the war in order to facilitate the war industry. Although these displays are intended to provide a more vivid depiction of wartime events or situations and thus stimulate temporal proximity, visitors are still kept at a spatial distance and are only invited to peek at these scenes. These exhibits are based on modes of display that originated in the nineteenth century at World Fairs and folklore museums that presented episodes of people’s daily life in the past.47 From the section narrating the start of the invasion of France, however, the museum also begins to allow visitors to walk through these reconstructions. They pass through a recreated section of an aircraft carrier and encounter a jeep in ‘a field north of Ranville in Normandy, just before dawn on D-Day’.48 These reconstructions should be more immersive but are probably not elaborate enough to be convincing by today’s standards. The educational activity sheets primarily use the reconstructions and the large pieces of military equipment on display in a vehicle shed to teach

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students more about the history of D-Day. Contrary to what the presentation technique sets out to do, these questions do not mediate an experience but approach the exhibits as evidence for retrieving historical information. From a reconstruction of the Map Room at Southwick House, the building in Portsmouth from where Operation Overlord was coordinated, for instance students only need to derive the date on which D-Day took place and from which three ports the invasion ships sailed: Look at the replica of the wall map of the Channel at Southwick House near Portsmouth. What was the date of D-Day? Name three English ports from which invasion ships set sail?49

Although such questions implicitly attribute a sense of ‘realness’ to the reconstructions, they do not really mediate the temporal proximity they convey. Moreover, while the activity sheets mention the ‘authentic wartime landing craft’ that is on display in the vehicle shed, they do not touch upon the experience it can provide by walking into it and looking at video footage of soldiers sailing to France in a similar vessel. Instead, attention is drawn to other vehicles on display, and students are asked to describe what function they had. To summarize, the D-Day Museum fosters a national sense of identification through the progressive narratives of the main exhibition and the Overlord Embroidery, and a notable absence of multiple perspectives. The museum mediates this engagement by highlighting the Allied and British civilian point of view and encouraging students to take a first-person perspective. The displays in the main exhibition create a bridge between the past and the present by using material relics, but these displays generate more temporal distance with the objects being presented in display cases and encapsulated in descriptive interpretations. Reconstructions provide a more vivid depiction of the past, but the educational activity sheets do not mediate  this temporal proximity, nor do they add perspectives or provide room for reflection, as they focus on historical fact-finding.

Airborne Museum ‘Hartenstein’ (Oosterbeek), ‘De Vriendschapsarmband’ At the edge of a park in the village of Oosterbeek in the eastern region of the Netherlands stands a nineteenth-century mansion that has been home to the Airborne Museum ‘Hartenstein’ since 1978. The mansion, formerly a hotel, served as the main headquarters of the British Airborne Division during the Allied military Operation Market Garden that took place in the



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wider surrounding area.50 Contrary to the D-Day Museum, the Airborne Museum does emphasize the historical significance of its surroundings in its exhibitions and educational resources. Personal Narrative and Material Relics One of the museum’s educational programmes called ‘The Friendship Armband’ stimulates temporal proximity and emotional engagement through the narrative strategy of personalizing a particular perspective, by focusing on the personal story of two young Staff Sergeants, Richard William West and P.J. Allen, who both fought in the Battle of Arnhem. The programme combines this strategy with the mnemonic bridging technique of material relics, as it revolves around one object that is related to this story: an armband made of cotton with the Dutch flag and the word ‘Orange’ stitched on it, which Allen and West tore in half as a token of their friendship, meaning to reconnect them after the battle. Unfortunately, this never happened as West fell in battle. The attribution of a personal story to the object highlights some of the past relationships embodied by the artefact, which may contribute to people’s ability to experience their authenticity.51 The object serves as a ‘guide’ for students to work on a historical enquiry in the exhibition. The main exhibition on the top floor of the Airborne Museum features material relics that have been presented in glass display cases, suggesting temporal distance, but the museum has interwoven them with many blown-up pictures of events that took place in the region, video footage of the events that is projected on some of the display cases, and quotes from German and Allied soldiers and eyewitnesses who give their take on the battles. Furthermore, the exhibition uses the mnemonic bridging technique of ‘same place’ by emphasizing in the introductory video that traces of the battles and fights that took place in the surrounding area are still present and that the events are commemorated and remembered on a regular basis. The questions in the activity sheets that students use to guide themselves through the exhibition encourage them to investigate the objects, texts, quotes, photos, maps and video interviews in the exhibition to find out historical information, which should be used to decide whether a recreated scene in Allen and West’s story actually took place or not. This evidencebased activity of historical enquiry stresses the act of ‘historical craftsmanship’, emphasizing a detached, reflective approach, which is reinforced through some of the questions that draw more attention to the interpretative texts in which the objects have been wrapped than to the artefacts and photos themselves. Despite the evidence-based approach, most questions however stimulate temporal proximity by highlighting the authenticity of the objects and

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the ability of quotes and photos to provide an insight into the past. Some questions encourage students to look closely at the objects and use them to acquire information about the past and get a better image of it: Look at the display case with the lab coat. What information can you find about the armband that is visible here? Make a drawing of the armband and describe it. Look at the wall directly on the left with pictures and quotes from private Sidney Elliot at the top. How were the allied forces received in Oosterbeek?52

Another assignment asks students to compare the significance of the ‘friendship armband’ with another armband on display, pointing to the specific history of this artefact and the past relationships it embodies. The emotional engagement that is fostered by connecting the enquiry to the personal story of Allen and West is reinforced by some questions that encourage students to cognitively re-enact the thoughts of historical actors, hinting at the bridging technique of ‘imitation and replication’: Look at the quotes on the grey bar. What would the soldiers have thought when they left Great Britain?53

Immersive Experiences In addition to the objects-centred main exhibition, which provides the necessary historical context, the museum offers several experience-based exhibits that heavily feature the bridging technique of ‘imitation and replication’. On the sub-basement level, the museum has installed reconstructions that show how the Hartenstein Hotel was used as headquarters by the Allied troops, hence combining the bridging technique with an experience of ‘same place’. It shows how, on the very spot where visitors are standing, wounded were treated in the emergency hospital at Hartenstein and how Major-General Roy Urquhart devised a strategy in a meeting with some of his officers. Similar to the ones at the D-Day Museum, these reconstructions still keep visitors at a spatial distance, reducing their level of immersion. The basement level aims for a more immersive experience, inviting ­visitors to step into the footsteps of a British parachutist. After a video ­briefing of ‘their mission’, visitors enter a reconstruction of a plane, which they exit through the side door as if they are making a parachute jump. They then reach an elaborate simulacrum of the Battle of Arnhem, recreated by footage shown on giant projection screens, blown-up pictures, mannequins, reconstructions of houses, military vehicles and sounds. Although some of the vehicles included in the experience may be authentic, the museum has not labelled them as such and uses them to support the immersion.



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Regarding this immersive ‘Airborne Experience’ the educational resource uses the same detached approach of historical enquiry as it does for the exhibition on the upper floors. Students have to analyse the experience as a film and write down whether they recognize scenes from Allen and West’s story. This activity appears to defuse the experience of temporal proximity that the exhibit aims for, but also attributes a sense of authenticity to the simulacrum, without discussing it as a representation. According to the museum’s educator at the time, reflecting on the constructed nature of the experience would be too complex for students, while the design of the experience is also based on thorough historical research so the information that students can derive from it would be similar to that on text panels in the exhibition. Deconstructing Narratives and Multiple Perspectives Although the resource revolves around the personal story of the two Allied soldiers, it also draws attention to other perspectives. The activity sheets encourage students to explore the experiences of civilians who got caught up in the conflict, and one question asks them to compare a German and Allied account of what happened during the battle. They can find this information in the exhibition that also contains various references to the point of view of civilians who got caught in the battles and to the German side of the story, most obviously so in the museum’s collection of weapons, uniforms and equipment, where the German and Allied objects each take up one half of the room. Germans are also frequently quoted and a video screen shows interviews with German veterans in which they talk about their motivations and their ‒ sometimes emotional ‒ experiences. These interviews give a human voice to the enemy forces, generating temporal proximity and ­emotional engagement. In contrast with this approach of multiperspectivity, the experiencebased displays on the basement levels, however, mainly focus on the perspective of the Allied forces, and it would be difficult to explore others. This is particularly the case in the ‘Airborne Experience’. Due to its first-person perspective, visitors are less likely to detach themselves from the history that is presented to them. Regarding the ‘Airborne Experience’ the educational resource does not attempt to search for multiple perspectives but to create a potential reconstruction of what Sergeants Allan and West might have encountered. To sum up, the Airborne Museum uses the bridging techniques of constancy of place, material relics, and imitation and replication to stimulate temporal proximity. The museum’s exhibition explores multiple points of view, including those of the Allied forces, German forces and civilians, but these perspectives are not present in the Allied-centred reconstructions and

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simulacra, which aim to create an immersive experience of the past. The museum’s educational programme reinforces temporal proximity by introducing a personal story related to a single object that may also stimulate emotional engagement, while opting for an educational activity that is based on historical enquiry, which encourages a more detached stance and defuses the immersive nature of the ‘Airborne Experience’.

Conclusion Just like the Imperial War Museum with its Blitz Experience, museums in general increasingly draw on modes of display that provide a sensory experience and create a more tangible version of the past in order to make it better accessible and trigger the imagination. While this may be a good vehicle to engage young people into history learning, theories from history teaching methodology have also stressed the importance of multiperspectivity, which would require a certain degree of distance and detachment to allow for proper reflection. The analysis shows that there are many different strategies to construct distance or proximity and engagement or detachment in various degrees. The exhibitions analysed in this chapter heavily rely on the bridging strategies of relics and memorabilia and imitation and replication to construct historical distance. Regarding the display of material relics, the exhibitions show different approaches, with descriptive interpretations generating more temporal distance, while interpretations which highlight specific aspects of objects or relate them to a personal story foster temporal proximity and engagement. The analysis also shows different takes on in situ types of display that vary in their degree of immersion, due to the use of, for instance, a firstperson perspective or modern technologies. How these strategies are mediated to school students depends on the educational resources and activities. The educational activity sheets of both museums studied in this chapter rarely stimulate the experience that is provided by their exhibitions. The D-Day Museum primarily encourages students to learn about facts from the exhibits on display. It seldom touches upon the authentic aura of objects and students are not encouraged to immerse themselves in the themed reconstructions. The Airborne Museum focuses on historical enquiry, which encourages students to take the detached stance of a historian. Even for the immersive ‘Airborne Experience’, the activity sheets focus on analysis and investigation. Both museums show different ways of configuring temporality and engagement through the narrative pattern of their exhibitions. The D-Day Museum’s progressive narrative and focus on the British and Allied



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perspective stimulates a national sense of identification, which is mediated in the educational resource through specific assignments. The Airborne Museum’s exhibition presents multiple points of view, but the accompanying educational programme primarily emphasizes a personal story, which fosters emotional engagement. The narrative strategies show that the concepts of historical distance and multiperspectivity are closely related to each other. Depending on its presentation, a historical narrative that looks at the past through the perspective of a single (group of  ) historical actor(s) can stimulate a more intimate relation with the past than a narrative that looks at it from various angles. Constructing the past as nearby or in an engaging fashion may also influence the opportunities for exploring multiple perspectives. The Airborne Museum’s reconstructions and simulacra that aim for immersion and engagement strongly rely on a singular, first-person perspective, which makes the exploration of other points of view difficult. In such cases, it might be better to fully exploit the engagement strategy in educational resources, as it is a unique characteristic of these exhibitions, and introduce other perspectives later in an environment with fewer stimuli. Cultural heritage offers unique opportunities for experience and engagement that may help people in learning about the past. Strategies of stimulating temporality and engagement, however, need to be balanced out with distanced and detached approaches in order for the educational use of heritage to reach its full potential. The museums analysed in this chapter could create this balance by better supporting the experience provided in some of the exhibits, while adding perspectives and reflective activities for others, in order to help students understand the interpretative nature of these active expressions in today’s historical culture. This way, cultural heritage can become an asset of history learning.

Notes 1. J. Winter, ‘Museums and the Representation of War’, Museum and Society 10, 3 (2012): 154. 2.  B. Dicks, Culture on Display: The Production of Contemporary Visitability, Maidenhead, 2003, 20–21. 3. S. Klein, M. Grever and C. van Boxtel, ‘“Zie, Denk, Voel, Vraag, Spreek, Hoor en Verwonder”. Afstand en Nabijheid bij Geschiedenisonderwijs en Erfgoededucatie in Nederland’, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 124, 3 (2011): 381. 4.  K. Gregory and A. Witcomb, ‘Beyond Nostalgia: The Role of Affect in Generating Historical Understanding at Heritage Sites’, in Museum Revolutions: How Museums Change and Are Changed, eds S.J. Knell, S. MacLeod and S. Watson, New York, 2007, Chapter 20 [Apple iBooks version]: section 3.

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5. E.g. G. Bagnall, ‘Consuming the Past’, in Consumption Matters: The Production and Experience of Consumption, eds S.R. Edgell, K. Hetherington and A. Warde, Oxford, 1996, 244–245; Dicks, Culture on Display, 166. 6. L. Smith and G. Campbell, ‘The Elephant in the Room: Heritage, Affect, and Emotion’, in A Companion to Heritage Studies, eds W. Logan, M. Nic Craith and U. Kockel, Chichester, 2015, 446–449. 7.  B. Graham, G.J. Ashworth and J.E. Tunbridge, A Geography of Heritage: Power, Culture and Economy, London, 2000, 23–25; L. Smith, Uses of Heritage, Oxford and New York, 2006, 28. 8.  K. Barton and L. Levstik, Teaching History for the Common Good, Mahwah, New York and London, 2004, 150–151. 9.  P. Seixas, ‘Who Needs a Canon?’, in Beyond the Canon: History for the Twenty-First Century, eds M. Grever and S. Stuurman, Basingstoke and New York, 2007, 20–22; J. van Drie and C. van Boxtel, ‘Historical Reasoning: Towards a Framework for Analyzing Students’ Reasoning about the Past’, Educational Psychology Review 20, 2 (2008): 94. 10.  This study is based on the results of a PhD Research Project, which was conducted at Erasmus University Rotterdam as part of the Heritage Education, Plurality of Narratives, and Shared Historical Knowledge programme, which was funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). 11.  M. Grever, P. de Bruijn and C. van Boxtel, ‘Negotiating Historical Distance: Or, How to Deal with the Past as a Foreign Country in Heritage Education’, Paedagogica Historica 48, 6 (2012): 880. 12.  J. den Hollander, H. Paul and R. Peters, ‘Introduction: The Metaphor of Historical Distance’, History and Theory 50, 4 (2011): 1–10. 13.  Ibid., 5–7. 14. M. Phillips, ‘History, Memory and Historical Distance’, in Theorizing Historical Consciousness, ed. P. Seixas, Toronto, Buffalo and London, 2004, 95. 15.  Ibid., 89. 16.  Grever, De Bruijn and Van Boxtel, ‘Negotiating Historical Distance’, 875. 17.  P. Seixas and T. Morton, The Big Six Historical Thinking Concepts, Toronto, 2013, 2–3; S. Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past, Philadelphia, 2001, 5–17. 18.  Seixas and Morton, The Big Six, 136–167; O.L. Davis Jr., A. Yeager and S.J. Foster, eds, Historical Empathy and Perspective Taking in the Social Studies, Lanham, 2001. 19.  Seixas and Morton, The Big Six, 6. 20.  Stradling, R., Multiperspectivity in History Teaching: A Guide for Teachers, Strasbourg, 2003, 19–20; Seixas and Morton, The Big Six, 6. 21. Stradling, Multiperspectivity in History Teaching, 10–18; C. Lorenz, ‘Towards a Theoretical Framework for Comparing Historiographies: Some Preliminary Considerations’, in Theorizing Historical Consciousness, ed. P. Seixas, Toronto, Buffalo and London, 2004, 36–39. 22. S. Lévesque, ‘Teaching Second-Order Concepts in Canadian History: The Importance of “Historical Significance”’, Canadian Social Studies 39, 2 (2005); Stradling, Multiperspectivity in History Teaching, 10, 23. http://www.educ.ualberta.ca/css/Css_39_2/ ARLevesque_second-order_concepts.htm 23. P. de Bruijn, ‘Bridges to the Past: Historical Distance and Multiperspectivity in English and Dutch Heritage Educational Resources’ (PhD dissertation, Erasmus University Rotterdam, 2014), 34–37. 24. H. Jansen and M. Grever, ‘Inleiding’, in De Ongrijpbare Tijd: Temporaliteit en de Constructie van het Verleden, eds M. Grever and H. Jansen, Hilversum, 2001, 11. 25.  E. Zerubavel, Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past, Chicago and London, 2003, 11–36.



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26. M. Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, Toronto, Buffalo and London, 2009, 147–153. 27. Ibid. 28. Zerubavel, Time Maps, 37–54. 29.  J. Huizinga, ‘Het Historisch Museum’, De Gids 84, 2 (1920): 259. 30.  F. Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, Stanford, 2005, 276–277. 31. B. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage, Berkeley, 1998, 19–23; H. Lidchi, ‘The Poetics and the Politics of Exhibiting Other Cultures’, in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. S. Hall, London, 1997, 173. 32. S. Jones, ‘Negotiating Authentic Objects and Authentic Selves: Beyond the Deconstruction of Authenticity’, Journal of Material Culture 15, 2 (2010): 199–200. 33.  Lidchi, ‘The Poetics and the Politics of Exhibiting Other Cultures’, 173–174. 34.  D-Day Museums and Overlord Embroidery, ‘Permanent Exhibition’, Portsmouth, photographed on 11 April 2012. 35. http://www.ddaymuseum.co.uk/d-day/transforming-the-d-day-museum (accessed 17 December 2015). 36. D-Day Museums and Overlord Embroidery, D-Day Worksheet: Secondary Schools, Portsmouth, n.d. 37.  Airborne Museum ‘Hartenstein’, ‘Main Exhibition’, Oosterbeek, photographed on 22 March 2012. 38.  Airborne Museum ‘Hartenstein’, De vriendschapsarmband, Oosterbeek, 2012. 39.  S. Brooks and E. Eckstein, Operation Overlord: The History of D-Day and the Overlord Embroidery, Shedfield, 1989, V. 40.  Ibid., 2. 41.  Ibid., 4–9. 42.  Ibid., 140–142. 43. M. Connelly, We Can Take It! Britain and the Memory of the Second World War, Harlow, 2004, 8–15. 44.  D-Day Museums, D-Day Worksheet, 1–2. 45. Ibid. 46.  D-Day Museums, ‘Permanent Exhibition’. 47.  T. Mitchell, ‘The World as Exhibition’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 31, 2 (1989): 222–223; A. de Jong, De Dirigenten van de Herinnering: Musealisering en Nationalisering van de Volkscultuur in Nederland, 1815-1940, Nijmegen, 2001, 111–113; H. Henrichs, ‘Een Zichtbaar Verleden? Historische Musea in een Visuele Cultuur’, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 117, 2 (2004): 247. 48.  D-Day Museums, ‘Permanent Exhibition’. 49.  D-Day Museums, D-Day Worksheet, 3. 50.  J. Kolen, R. van Krieken and M. Wijdeveld, ‘Topografie van de Herinnering: De Performance van de Oorlog in het Landschap en de Stedelijke Ruimte’, De Dynamiek van de Herinnering, eds F. van Vree and R. van der Laarse, Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2009, 205–206. 51.  Jones, ‘Negotiating Authentic Objects and Authentic Selves’, 199–200. 52.  Airborne Museum ‘Hartenstein’, De Vriendschapsarmband: Opdrachtenkaart. 53. Ibid.

References Ankersmit, F. Sublime Historical Experience, Stanford, 2005. Bagnall, G. ‘Consuming the Past’, in Consumption Matters: The Production and Experience of Consumption, eds S.R. Edgell, K. Hetherington and A. Warde, Oxford, 1996, 227–247.

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Bal, M. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, Toronto, Buffalo and London, 2009. Barton, K. and L. Levstik. Teaching History for the Common Good, Mahwah, New York and London, 2004. Brooks, S. and E. Eckstein. Operation Overlord: The History of D-Day and the Overlord Embroidery, Shedfield, 1989. Connelly, M. We Can Take It! Britain and the Memory of the Second World War, Harlow, 2004. Davis Jr., O.L., A. Yeager and S.J. Foster, eds. Historical Empathy and Perspective Taking in the Social Studies, Lanham, 2001. de Bruijn, P. ‘Bridges to the Past: Historical Distance and Multiperspectivity in English and Dutch Heritage Educational Resources’ (PhD dissertation, Erasmus University Rotterdam, 2014). de Jong, A. De Dirigenten van de Herinnering: Musealisering en Nationalisering van de Volkscultuur in Nederland, 1815-1940 [The Conductors of Memory: Musealization and Nationalization of Folk Culture in the Netherlands, 1815-1940], Nijmegen, 2001. den Hollander, J., H. Paul and R. Peters. ‘Introduction: The Metaphor of Historical Distance’, History and Theory 50, 4 (2011): 1–10. Dicks, B. Culture on Display: The Production of Contemporary Visitability, Maidenhead, 2003. Graham, B., G.J. Ashworth and J.E. Tunbridge. A Geography of Heritage: Power, Culture and Economy, London, 2000. Gregory, K. and A. Witcomb. ‘Beyond Nostalgia: The Role of Affect in Generating Historical Understanding at Heritage Sites’, in Museum Revolutions: How Museums Change and Are Changed, eds S.J. Knell, S. MacLeod and S. Watson, New York, 2007. Grever, M., P. de Bruijn and C. van Boxtel. ‘Negotiating Historical Distance: Or, How to Deal with the Past as a Foreign Country in Heritage Education’, Paedagogica Historica 48, 6 (2012): 873–887. Henrichs, H. ‘Een Zichtbaar Verleden? Historische Musea in een Visuele cultuur’ [A Visible Past? Historical Museums in a Visual Culture], Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 117, 2 (2004): 230–248. Huizinga, J. ‘Het Historisch Museum’ [The Historical Museum], De Gids 84, 2 (1920): 251–262. Jansen, H. and M. Grever. ‘Inleiding’, in De Ongrijpbare Tijd: Temporaliteit en de Constructie van het Verleden [Intangible Time: Temporality and the Construction of the Past], eds M. Grever and H. Jansen, Hilversum, 2001, 7–16. Jones, S. ‘Negotiating Authentic Objects and Authentic Selves: Beyond the Deconstruction of Authenticity’, Journal of Material Culture 15, 2 (2010): 181–203. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage, Berkeley, 1998. Klein, S., M. Grever and C. van Boxtel. ‘“Zie, Denk, Voel, Vraag, Spreek, Hoor en Verwonder”: Afstand en Nabijheid bij Geschiedenisonderwijs en Erfgoededucatie in Nederland’ [‘See, Think, Feel, Question, Speak, Hear and Wonder’: Distance and Proximity in History and Heritage Education in the Netherlands], Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 124, 3 (2011): 380–395. Kolen, J., R. van Krieken and M. Wijdeveld. ‘Topografie van de Herinnering: De Performance van de Oorlog in het Landschap en de Stedelijke Ruimte’ [Topography of Memory: The Performance of War in Landscape and Urban Space], De Dynamiek van de Herinnering, eds F. van Vree and R. van der Laarse, Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2009, 196–220. Lévesque, S. ‘Teaching Second-Order Concepts in Canadian History: The Importance of “Historical Significance”’, Canadian Social Studies 39, (2005), www.quasar.ualberta.ca/ css/Css_39_2/ARLevesque_second-order_concepts.htm Lidchi, H. ‘The Poetics and the Politics of Exhibiting Other Cultures’, in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. S. Hall, London, 1997, 151–221.



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Lorenz, C. ‘Towards a Theoretical Framework for Comparing Historiographies: Some Preliminary Considerations’, in Theorizing Historical Consciousness, ed. P. Seixas, Toronto, Buffalo and London, 2004, 25–48. Mitchell, M. ‘The World as Exhibition’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 31, 2 (1989): 217–236. Phillips, M. ‘History, Memory and Historical Distance’, in Theorizing Historical Consciousness, ed. P. Seixas, Toronto, Buffalo and London, 2004, 86–109. Seixas, P. ‘Who Needs a Canon?’, in Beyond the Canon: History for the Twenty-First Century, eds M. Grever and S. Stuurman, Basingstoke and New York, 2007, 19–30. ———, T. Morton. The Big Six Historical Thinking Concepts, Toronto, 2013. Smith, L. Uses of Heritage, Oxford and New York, 2006. ——— and G. Campbell. ‘The Elephant in the Room: Heritage, Affect, and Emotion’, in A Companion to Heritage Studies, eds W. Logan, M. Nic Craith and U. Kockel, Chichester, 2015, 444–460. Stradling, R. Multiperspectivity in History Teaching: A Guide for Teachers, Strasbourg, 2003. van Drie, J. and C. van Boxtel. ‘Historical Reasoning: Towards a Framework for Analyzing Students’ Reasoning about the Past’, Educational Psychology Review 20, 2 (2008): 87–110. Wineburg, S. Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past, Philadelphia, 2001. Winter, J. ‘Museums and the Representation of War’, Museum and Society 10, 3 (2012): 150–163. Zerubavel, E. Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past, Chicago and London, 2003.

Pieter de Bruijn is an assistant professor in cultural heritage and cultural education at the Open University (the Netherlands). In 2014, he completed his doctoral dissertation Bridges to the Past. Historical Distance and Multiperspectivity in English and Dutch Heritage Educational Resources at Erasmus University Rotterdam. He also carried out a small-scale study at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies on teaching the history of World War II from a citizenship education perspective. His research interests meet at the intersection of cultural heritage, history education and historical culture.

CHAPTER

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An Intriguing Historical Trace or Heritage? Learning about Another Person’s Heritage in an Exhibition Addressing the Second World War Geerte M. Savenije

Many students visit historical museums, archives or sites during their secondary history education. Often, students remember these types of visit years later. Because of expanding research and improved evaluation techniques, this area of extracurricular learning has increasingly gained recognition as a complement to history education.1 There are various reasons for visiting such out-of-school learning environments and teaching with historical traces (such as historic sites, museum artefacts, customs and ritual).2 The use of historical traces during an educational visit to a museum, archive or site can be motivational and stimulate historical inquiry and historical imagination.3 Particularly with regard to sensitive topics such as the Second World War, the topic of the case study presented in this chapter, students may encounter difficulty understanding a historical reality that is unjust, cruel or horrible in their eyes.4 Historical traces may help students adopt a historical perspective to understand how people in the past thought and how their values and feelings differed from the students’ ideas. As in numerous other European countries, the Netherlands provide various opportunities to include historical traces in history education about the Second World War. Students can visit historical sites, such as the former concentration camps in Vught, Westerbork and Amersfoort, meet concentration camp survivors in the classroom or visit the various war museums and war memorials throughout the country. However, what is often overlooked in teaching with such historical traces is that in many cases, these traces are also presented as Dutch Notes for this section begin on page 236.



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heritage. Particularly in diverse, urban classrooms, this perspective may not necessarily be shared by all students. This raises the question of how these students learn in such educational settings. By heritage I mean traces of the past that are considered valuable in the present and for the future by a particular group of people.5 The distinction between traces and heritage emphasizes the dynamic character of heritage. Within the context of museums, heritage institutions, tourism and education, heritage is often used as a governmental strategy for social inclusion that may not necessarily lead to the acknowledgement of diversity.6 However, considered from a dynamic approach to heritage, material and immaterial traces of the past are not self-evident and do not have an eternal essence but instead answer to the specific needs and aims of communities that use these traces as a source for creating identities.7 The issue of which story is selected as the ‘official’ one is particularly urgent and apparent in the way in which a topic is taught at school as part of the history curriculum or presented in museums.8 Although there are diversity and dynamics in Second World War narratives in museums and schools, the Second World War narrative that is currently presented in many Dutch schools and European museums and heritage institutions focuses on the various victim groups of the war, often stimulating empathy and identification through personal stories and emotional experiences.9 Education about the Second World War is usually accompanied by a strong moral message that people should seek to prevent a war of such catastrophic, horrifying and global dimensions in the future. However, this narrative has been called into question in recent years. For example, some students consider the Holocaust to be Jewish history and equate ‘Jews’ with ‘Israel’.10 Theories regarding the instrumental use of the Holocaust by Israel, the denial of the Holocaust and the equation between the Holocaust and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have circulated in the countries of origin of many European immigrants, reaching Europe through the media and presenting a challenge in European urban classrooms.11 The challenges described above to the dominant narrative about the Second World War may lead to difficulties in teaching about the war, particularly in urban classrooms. Such tensions may be intensified by an encounter with the historical traces related to this history, particularly when these traces are considered heritage and are assigned significance by a majority, a minority or both, but in different ways. Students’ historical understanding is influenced by their cultural and ethnic background.12 Students from various backgrounds may connect with Second World War history in different ways, and these connections can emerge in the forefront when students are confronted with ‘the Dutch heritage’ of the war. This situation may create tension among students or between students and their teacher.13 However,

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the idea that students are studying things that are considered valuable in the society in which they live can motivate students.14 Further, studying heritage may stimulate students’ awareness that history is built on stories that are significant to particular groups of people. This awareness can help students reflect on their own criteria for historical significance.15 One of the aims of history education is to understand the ways in which history is constructed and is subject to the changing viewpoints of its present creators.16 However, the ways in which the often multi-layered or disputed heritage status of particular traces of the past influences the learning of history remain understudied. Concerns regarding teaching the Holocaust to students of Arabic backgrounds because of references to the Middle East conflict, as described above, and their assumed anti-Semitic attitude have produced numerous initiatives in schools, museums and historical sites related to the topic.17 This case study explores the attribution of significance by Dutch students of immigrant descent engaged in a project that presents Second World War historical traces as Dutch heritage. Students were queried using questionnaires and interviews and were videotaped during three lessons, including a museum visit. In the following sections, I present the methods and the results of this case study.

Method This case study was conducted in 2011 in The Hague.18 I followed secondary education students who participated in a project addressing the topic of the Second World War within the context of history education. The project included an introductory lesson at school, a visit to Museon and a closing lesson at school. At Museon, the students visited the permanent exhibition about the Second World War ‘Child in War’. Museon Exhibition ‘Child in War’ The Museon exhibition includes the personal belongings and stories of 35 persons with different backgrounds and experiences, all of whom were children when the Second World War began. Several stories refer to the countries of origin of some of the largest immigrant groups in the Netherlands. The exhibition’s donated objects (documents, objects, and audio and film fragments) are stored in a ‘filing cabinet’ in the back of the exhibition room, simulating the idea of stepping into an archive (see figure  11.1). In addition to the personal drawers, the cabinet also contains drawers with background information about key concepts, developments and figures in the Second World War. Some of the personal stories are exhibited in large crooked  pillars with show cases (see figure 11.2). At the entrance of the



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Figure 11.1  The ‘Filing Cabinet’. (Photo: Ebbert Olierook / Museon)

Figure 11.2  The theme pillars. (Photo: Ebbert Olierook / Museon)

room, one pillar shows videotaped interviews with refugee children who recently moved to the Netherlands to escape war situations in their home countries. The short introductory text of the exhibition explains its theme: to discover the ways in which war radically changes children’s lives. The

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video segments of refugees in the Netherlands are meant to emphasize that some children still grow up in wartime. The exhibition’s concept of featuring 35 real people who donated their own real objects provides an interesting case for my research question addressing teaching with historical traces that are presented as Dutch heritage. These objects are considered to be heritage not only by a majority of Dutch citizens as part of Second World War history and by Museon as part of its collection but also by the 35 persons themselves. The knowledge that these persons provided their personal belongings to Museon for preservation and exhibition adds depth to the concept of heritage and makes the abstract concept more penetrable. Further, the presentation of different experiences of the war relates to the idea of multiperspectivity in history and heritage. Project Procedure In the introductory lesson at school, the teacher briefly introduced the topic of the Second World War by showing the students some recent examples of societal debate about the history of the war. The students then discussed a few statements formulated by the teacher. At Museon, the students participated in a workshop titled ‘War Children in Dialogue’, which was designed to align with the exhibition. The students gathered information about the lives of the 35 persons by investigating the donated objects and stories. Each triad investigated two different persons. The groups then wrote an imaginary dialogue between these two persons that could have occurred at the exhibition’s opening in 2004 when the exhibition donors met for the first time and exchanged stories about their war experiences. The students presented their dialogues to the group at the end of the workshop. In the closing lesson at school, the triads of students created scripts for a documentary about the Second World War. The students were required to address several topics in their film. For each topic, the groups could choose from three different perspectives or approaches (e.g., different historical actors; a local, national or global perspective; different present-day representations). They had to choose, first for themselves and then as a group, which approach was the most important for their film. Participants The participants included 22 fourth- and fifth-year pre-university education students aged 15 to 19 years (the majority of students were 16 to 17 years old) from two classes at a secondary school. Because of the small groups, the two classes were merged for their history course. The classes were culturally and ethnically diverse (e.g., the students’ backgrounds included Moroccan, 35 per cent; Surinamese, 30 per cent; and Turkish, 15 per cent). Although



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Table 11.1  Students in the selected triad. Student Gender Age Birth country Parents’ birth country (F – M) Religion Ravi Sofia Salima

M F F

17 16 15

Netherlands Netherlands Netherlands

Suriname – Suriname Morocco - Morocco Morocco - Morocco

Muslim Muslim Muslim

80 per cent of the students were born in the Netherlands, none of their parents were. A total of 60 per cent of the participating students were female, and 74 per cent were Muslim (the remaining students were Christian or Hindu).19 History was a compulsory subject consisting of three hours per week. The class had already studied the Second World War when I began my research. The project was scheduled as an extracurricular activity for which the teacher accompanied the classes. Of the 22 participants in the study, 12 students were selected to be interviewed individually and videotaped in triads during the lessons. Of the four triads, one triad was selected to be discussed in depth in this chapter. The triad included three fourth-year students, denoted as Ravi, Sofia and Salima (see table 11.1). In two triads, one of the students was absent during one of the lessons. Of the remaining two triads, one triad had more verbal interactions among the students during the lessons, particularly during the museum lesson. Because verbalization is essential to my understanding and analysis of the students’ perspectives and of the interaction in the triad, the triad with more verbal interactions was selected to be presented in this chapter. The results of this triad are not meant to be representative of the other students of my study; rather, the results provide insight into the variety of perspectives that students of immigrant descent may possess about the Second World War and into the possible results of students’ encounters with Second World War heritage during a museum visit. Data Collection and Analysis To investigate my research question regarding how students in Dutch urban classrooms attribute significance to Second World War history while engaged in a project that presents historical traces as Dutch heritage, I used the following sub-questions: 1. In what ways do students attribute significance to the history and heritage of the Second World War, and how is this related to their selfreported ethnic identity? 2. To what extent do students encounter and acknowledge multiple perspectives on the Second World War history and heritage and their significance?

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I conducted questionnaires with the entire class at the beginning of the project and after the closing lesson. Short free recall questionnaires after each lesson informed me about the students’ initial thoughts about the lessons. Twelve students were interviewed individually before and after the project and observed in four triads during the lessons. (1) To investigate the students’ understandings of the significance of Second World War history and heritage at the beginning of the project, the first questionnaire examined their opinions regarding the preservation of Second World War objects and stories. The questionnaire also included a closed question regarding the students’ interest in learning about Second World War history and heritage. In the interview, I asked the students to explain their responses. For example, I said, ‘The next two questions concern the preservation of objects and stories of the Second World War. You indicated you find it important to preserve these. Could you explain your answer to me?’ I also asked them to describe their ethnic identity and to reflect on its influence on their responses to the questionnaire and in the interview. These questions were based on literature concerning students’ understandings of historical significance in relation to their self-reported ethnic identity.20 The transcribed interviews were examined thoroughly, analysing the students’ understandings of the significance of Second World War history and h ­ eritage and the interrelationships between their u ­ nderstandings and their self-reported ethnic identity. The questionnaire after the closing lesson repeated the question about the importance of the preservation of Second World War objects and stories in the first questionnaire. In the interview after the closing lesson, we compared the responses to both questionnaires. I asked, for example, ‘In the previous interview, you explained to me that you thought this was not important. Can you describe what made you change your mind?’ I analysed the interviews and the video recordings of the group work for the students’ attribution of significance during the project and their reflections on the ‘heritage status’ of the historical traces. The questionnaire after the closing lesson also repeated the interest question and it asked for written argumentation addressing whether the students would regret it if their school could not visit the Museon exhibition as a way to examine their opinions regarding learning history in that exhibition. (2) To examine the students’ prior knowledge of multiple perspectives on Second World War history and heritage, the first questionnaire included a mind map and a closed question regarding the students’ familiarity with various historical actors or groups that were involved in the war. In the interview, I asked whether the students thought others would agree with them on their opinions about the significance of Second World War history and heritage, and if not, who would not and why. These questions allowed



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me to gain additional insight into their adoption of multiple perspectives and their ideas regarding what determines one’s opinion. The extent to which the students acknowledged different perspectives on Second World War history and heritage and their significance (encountered within the triad or in the exhibition) was examined with the free recall, the video recordings and the interviews. In the interview, I raised specific issues in their discussion and sought their opinions on the differences in perspective. I also asked whether they understood others’ opinions and whether they were satisfied with the solution that was reached during the lesson. I analysed the free recall responses, the video recordings and the interviews to study the students’ remarks about new or different perspectives in the exhibition and the triad and to examine how the students discussed these issues. Previous literature on students’ discussion of different perspectives provided a sensitizing framework.21 I present my results in detail by closely examining one triad throughout the project to explore and describe the experiences of these three students in depth. For the closed questions in the questionnaires, I also provide the results of the entire class to show the extent to which these three students were extraordinary within their own class. First, I discuss the understanding of Second World War history and heritage of the three students prior to the project. Then, I elaborate on the students’ learning while engaged in the project, specifically their encounter with multiple perspectives on the Second World War and their attribution of significance to its history and heritage.

Results The Second World War: Interesting and Important, but not Their Heritage The analysis of the students’ understandings of Second World War history and heritage and their significance at the beginning of the project showed both the variety and the similarities in the understandings with which these students entered the learning process about this topic. All three students already possessed some knowledge about the history of the Second World War, particularly regarding the persecution of Jews and the concentration camps. These narratives were also known by the rest of the class. Both girls of Moroccan background knew about the history of Morocco during the Second World War. Salima was the only student in the class who said she knew this narrative well. Ravi, of Surinamese background, did not know about the history of Suriname during the war. Although all of the students were interested in learning more about the Second World War, Ravi and Sofia were more interested than Salima. Ravi and Sofia found it very

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important to preserve the objects and stories of the Second World War, whereas Salima did not. However, all three attributed significance to these objects and stories for persons involved in the war or their children. Sofia and Ravi also attributed significance for themselves: for Sofia, to obtain a better image and understanding of the past; and for Ravi, to connect his learning on an emotion level. Conversely, it was the emotions that objects and stories of the Second World War could evoke that made Salima believe that it was better not to preserve them. Regarding the relationship between identity and understandings, all three students believed that the fact that their non-native Dutch family had not been involved in the Second World War determined their emotionally distanced stance towards the war. Further, both Sofia and Salima felt that they were too young to really care about the war and believed that this way of thinking was typical of adolescents. However, they said that they found the war to be an important topic in history education, a perspective that they related to their Dutch identity and their education at a Dutch school. For Ravi, his interest in history was the most important determinant  regarding his understandings. All three students were Muslim, but they felt differently regarding the interrelationship between their religious ­identity and their understandings. For Ravi, this relationship was certain because he empathized with Jews during the Second World War because of his Muslim identity. He seemed to conceive of Jews and Muslims as victims of religious discrimination and regarded himself as part of this group because of his religious beliefs. For Salima, it was quite the opposite; she felt that the war concerned people from a different religious group and therefore did not affect her. Sofia believed that her religion played a role on a meta-level of general values and norms. The students thus differed in which sides of their identity they emphasized and in the roles they believed these factors played. Encountering Multiple Perspectives on the History and Heritage of the Second World War During the introductory lesson, Ravi, Sofia and Salima discussed different perspectives within the group. For example, Salima agreed with the statement ‘the current attention to the Second World War is exaggerated because it was 70 years ago’. Ravi and Sofia tried to convince her that the war should never be forgotten because of its impact on people and in order to prevent such a war from occurring again. In the interview afterwards, they all said that they enjoyed listening to each other and weighing the others’ opinions. Ravi said that although he found Salima’s opinion to be strange, he could understand her line of reasoning that the war did not affect her family and therefore does not affect her now.



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During the museum visit, the students noticed the multiperspectivity of the exhibition. Sofia, for example, was interested in how the exhibition was designed to bring many different stories from around the globe into one small room and found this approach to be effective. As an example, she mentioned the story of the Moroccan soldiers in the French army. She found that story to be impressive because these men set aside their own interests to fight for people they did not even know. She found the stories that her triad had investigated to be less interesting than other stories she had heard because the two girls ‘just ran away from danger and had not really faced it’. She would have preferred to investigate all the stories by herself to determine which stories were interesting. When describing the museum, Ravi found it interesting to learn how the different experiences from around the world were all related somehow. In the closing lesson, the issue of multiperspectivity was raised in the students’ discussion as they worked on their documentary script. Within the first theme of ‘stories told by Dutch families about the Second World War’, Salima chose picture 3 (see figure 11.3). The others chose picture 2 (see figure 11.4).

Figure 11.3  Picture 3 within the Theme ‘Stories told by Dutch Families about the Second World War’ (drawing by Wim Euverman). Caption provided to the students: In 1943, several hundred Moroccan war prisoners worked as forced labourers for the Germans in Zeeland (Dutch province). Some of them made friends among the people of Zeeland.

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Figure 11.4  Picture 2 within the Theme ‘Stories told by Dutch Families about the Second World War’ (drawing by Wim Euverman). Caption provided to the students: Various people in the Netherlands allowed persons to hide in their homes during the Second World War.

The students discussed these differences as follows: Sofia: Ok, why do you have picture 3? Salima: It appeals to me. Sofia: Why does it appeal to you? Because she is wearing a kerchief? Salima: No, because Moroccan, she is Moroccan [talks in Arabic, Sofia laughs], she is just Moroccan, [talks in Moroccan] little grandma. Sofia: No, you need to take picture 2; you know why? Salima: No, I just want to do this. Sofia: Look, because different people. Salima: Why does that appeal to you? Sofia: Because this, what did I write down? Um, this is how different people encountered different stories because of those people in hiding they took in their homes, is just much better than, um, is just, this is diverse [points to picture 2] and this is not. [points to picture 3] Salima: If you think so. Ravi: Ok, so you have 3, just because there is a Moroccan in it. Salima: Yes, I feel related to that. Ravi: I have 2 as well. Salima: Because? Ravi: Because there you can see that different cultures are involved, like you said already in fact [to Sofia], that is more important. Salima: Ok then we will do picture 2. Ravi: Not just the Moroccans! Salima: Ok then we will do picture 2.



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This example reveals the way in which Salima’s self-reported Moroccan identity influenced her opinion regarding which Second World War story was important to tell. Interestingly, she spoke in Arabic during this specific instance, which she did not do at any other moment during the project. Whether she intended to use a language unknown to Ravi or me or to emphasize her shared identity with Sofia or whether this language was evoked by the picture remains unclear. The students had a similar conversation regarding the theme ‘commemoration of the Second World War’, for which they could choose from the Liberation monument in The Hague, the National Monument in Amsterdam and the Holocaust monument in Berlin (the students were given pictures of the three monuments with short descriptions regarding what they were and what they represented). Ravi and Sofia chose the National Monument, whereas Salima chose the one in The Hague. She explained that it appealed to her because she lived in The Hague herself. Again, Ravi and Sofia argued she should think more broadly and select the National Monument, which is in the news every year when the war is commemorated with a moment of silence. In the interviews after the closing lesson, Ravi and Sofia again stressed the importance of including multiple perspectives by including persons and stories from different cultures and focusing on their encounters. They seemed to equate multiperspectivity with multiculturality. Conversely, Salima sought to focus on the history of her parents’ country of origin and the city in which she lived. Salima’s preferences aligned with an earlier study on the perspectives on history of Dutch students of immigrant descent.22 Compared with the results of that study, Ravi’s and Sofia’s emphasis on national history was atypical. Salima explained that she found Moroccan history to be more interesting and the monument in The Hague to be more important. However, when asked if she related more closely to the monument in The Hague than the other monuments, she said she did not feel related to any of them, but that if she had to choose, she would select The Hague because she found it to be the prettiest. The students’ discussions during the lessons at school revealed differences in their understandings of Second World War history and heritage and their significance. The lessons enabled the students to explore and compare their perspectives, for example, regarding their criteria for attributing historical significance to the war and the ways in which one’s identity shapes these understandings. The multiperspectivity of the Museon exhibition was noticed and appreciated by Ravi and Sofia. Sofia also explicitly mentioned the story of the Moroccan soldiers about whom she had learned. Although Salima did not express her opinion in this area, in the closing lesson she made a case for the inclusion of specific perspectives on Second World War history that particularly appealed to her in the documentary about the war.

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Figure 11.5  The drawer of Connie Suverkropp with the Chamber Pot. (Photo: Pieter de Bruijn)

From Historical Traces to Heritage? One of the objects this triad discovered in the cabinet was a chamber pot (see figure 11.5). The object belonged to Connie Suverkropp, a Dutch girl in the Dutch East Indies who was arrested when she put her little sister on the pot. She took the object with her to prison and during their transport, where it enabled them to retain some of their dignity and possibly protected them against diseases. When I discussed the chamber pot with the students in the interview after the closing lesson, it was apparent that this object had stimulated their thinking about its significance and about the historical traces of the Second World War in general. Intrigued by the chamber pot, Ravi found it to be special that such a simple object was considered to be a luxury by people at that time. To him, the chamber pot showed that one should be happy with the smallest things and that one does not need luxury. He also realized how much significance something like a chamber pot could have for people because in the end it helped to save them. When I asked Ravi what he thought of a chamber pot being exhibited in a museum showcase, he asked whether the objects had belonged to real people. When I confirmed this fact, he said that he found it strange that these persons had given the things away that meant so much to them, explaining that he could not have done the same. He then explained what he learned from this realization: That they give it away to pass on knowledge to others shows how important these objects are to them, and that means a lot. That is what I learned. So that



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gave me the picture of, um, it shows how important objects and stories are, also how important it is that just, that it is passed on from generation to generation so they will all become aware. That is what I realized that it is really important.

Although Ravi had already stressed the significance of the history of the Second World War and the importance of the preservation of historical traces of the war in the first interview, he learned more about these topics through the encounter with the heritage objects. His remark shows his awareness that traces can be heritage. For Sofia, the chamber pot helped her to realize that value exists in even the smallest things and that people differ in how they attribute significance to things. Sofia reflected that significance is not about the object itself but about the story behind it. Further, she said that she realized that these traces were foremost of emotional value for their owners. To her, the traces showed the personal side of the war. For example, she thought that for the persons whom they studied in Museon, the founding of NATO was not really the point; for them, it was about their grief over the loss of their mother and the retelling of this type of story that eventually became ‘history’. These insights persuaded Sofia to change her perspective on the significance of historical traces of the war. She no longer believed that the traces could help to better understand the war because they did not tell the broad, summarizing story that she learned at school. Instead, the traces showed the small details and the way that people had experienced the war. Therefore, she said, they would remain in her memory forever; compared with her feelings before the visit, she felt more personally that it would be a shame if the traces were not preserved. With these remarks, Sofia contrasts history and heritage, with the first viewed being as distanced and summarizing. The latter was viewed as more personal and detailed; although it serves as the basis of history, it is somehow also separated from it. Another change in Sofia’s perspectives concerned the significance for the Netherlands. After the project, she regarded the significance of the traces for the Netherlands to be less important. She explained that historical traces of the Second World War not only belong to the Netherlands but also are significant for the world. These changes suggest an awareness that heritage is inherently related to individual persons or groups, possibly transcending national borders, and therefore can never tell ‘the’ (hi)story. Conversely, Salima believed that Museon had displayed the chamber pot in the cabinet because the museum did not have anything better or more valuable available, such as letters, photographs or a Star of David. However, she did change her mind regarding the importance of preserving the objects and stories of the Second World War and became more interested in its history and heritage; in this manner, she contrasted with her entire class, although the difference was very small (see table 11.2). In her written

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Table 11.2  Results of the triad and the entire class regarding the interest and preservation questions in the questionnaires at the beginning of the project and after the closing lesson. Note. aMean interest scale (8 items; 4-point scale: I want to: know nothing at all, know nothing, know something, know a lot). bScore single question regarding preservation (4-point scale: completely disagree, disagree, agree, completely agree). Student

Ravi Sofia Salima Mean whole class

Interest in learning about Second World War history and heritagea

Opinion about the preservation of Second World War objects and storiesb

Beginning of the Project

After the Beginning of Closing Lesson the Project

After the Closing Lesson

3.57 3.57 2.71 2.91 (sd = .52)

3.14 2.86 3.14 2.78 (sd = .30)

4 4 3 3.15 (sd = .67)

4 4 2 3.45 (sd = .69)

argument about the usefulness of a visit to the Museon exhibition, she wrote that because of the visit, she better understood the people of the Second World War. In the interview, she said that she now thought the traces would help people like her and her classmates to understand the war. Contrary to her expectations, she also enjoyed learning about the commemoration of the war. She explained as follows: Because at first I maybe did not know much about it and stuff, and, um, at the museum we saw those documents and, um, just the things people had preserved and stuff, and so, um, it is quite important how people commemorate the war.

Before the museum visit, Salima already knew that people consider it important to commemorate the war and preserve the related objects and stories, but for her, it seemed too long ago to share this idea. The encounter with historical traces that had been preserved by real people somehow gave her the feeling that commemorating the Second World War is important. Although she did not say commemoration was important for her personally, she appeared to be more engaged in thinking about it. She appeared to have experienced that historical traces can bring the history of the war closer and make it more understandable for people like her, who do not initially feel engaged with this past. The students in this triad did not consider the history and historical traces of the Second World War as their heritage at the beginning of the project, but they knew that a majority of Dutch citizens did. During the



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encounter with the traces, their ‘heritage status’ did not seem to be sensitive or create tension among these students. Instead, they found heritage intriguing and appeared to realize more concretely what heritage entails. This realization sparked their thinking processes about what it means to consider this particular history and traces to be heritage. The encounter with heritage and the reflections evoked by it enabled these students to value the historical traces themselves.

Conclusion In this study, I investigated how students in Dutch urban classrooms attribute significance to Second World War history while engaged in a project that presents historical traces as Dutch heritage. First, I examined the students’ understandings of the history and heritage of the war and their significance and the ways in which these perspectives were related to the students’ selfreported ethnic identity. The students in the triad had prior knowledge about the history of the war and considered its history to be interesting and important. Ravi and Sofia also found the preservation of historical traces of the war important, whereas Salima did not. However, none of the students regarded the history and historical traces of the war as their heritage because of their immigrant backgrounds and lack of family memories of the war. The students were aware of the significance that is attributed to Second World War history and heritage by a majority of Dutch citizens. My analysis showed that the students’ self-reported Muslim identity played a role in their perspectives, as also described in the study by Jikeli, but in very different ways.23 All students, particularly Ravi and Sofia, spoke in a rather sophisticated way about how one’s identity – formed by cultural background, education, upbringing, religious beliefs and personal interests – influences one’s understandings of history and heritage, and they applied these reflections to themselves. Although the analysis clearly showed the interplay between the students’ Surinamese and Moroccan backgrounds and their somewhat distanced stance towards the Second World War heritage, there were no signs of real challenges to the dominant narrative of the war, as found in other studies.24 The encounter with Second World War heritage during the project did not seem to create tension or discomfort. On the contrary, the exploration of the heritage objects and stories, of which the significance that was attributed to them was made explicit and personal in the exhibition, was motivational. It stimulated reflection on the nature of heritage, and it enriched and sometimes even changed the students’ understandings of its significance. My analysis showed that although the heritage objects were presented in an

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archive, suggesting a disciplinary sphere of investigating the past, the students discerned the message of the significance of the personal belongings of persons who were involved in the war. These objects and stories were preserved for a reason. Keeping in mind Sofia’s and Ravi’s remarks about the difference between school history and historical traces (that traces are of emotional value but cannot tell the larger story), my study also showed the overly simple distinction between history and heritage that an encounter with heritage may elicit. The students noticed the pluralistic and daily life perspectives that traces can add, as described by Nakou.25 However, they had difficulty including this perspective in their existing narrative about the war. It is important that teachers and educators are aware that an engagement with heritage may encourage such processes, and they must ensure that, as teachers, they can add nuance to students’ thinking. Educators may seek to stimulate critical reflection on the construction of both history and heritage, and on the unquestioned ‘heritage status’ of the traces at hand, to enable students to express alternative perspectives. Based on existing literature, one would expect this task to be difficult with regard to Second World War traces and students of immigrant descent. My case study, however, suggests that this may not necessarily be the case. One could even argue that to discuss multiple perspectives on Second World War heritage may sometimes be more challenging in a classroom of students who do not question the ‘heritage status’ ascribed to it in society. Second, I discussed the extent to which the students acknowledged different perspectives on the war when encountered within the triad or in the exhibition. The students discovered that they differed in their attribution of significance to the history of the war and in the extent to which they considered it their history or even heritage. Ravi related Salima’s perspectives to her Moroccan background, and although all the students were of immigrant descent, this discussion demonstrated some of the tension between ‘native’ and ‘immigrant’ perspectives. It showed how students can experience this tension internally. All three said that their immigrant descent made them feel somewhat distanced from the history of the war; notably, however, they explained that the Dutch side of their identity ‘made’ them attribute significance to that history. Ravi and Sofia felt much more strongly about this phenomenon than Salima did, at least at the beginning of the project. Thus, both ‘native’ and ‘immigrant’ perspectives were present in the individual students, who differed in the weight that they gave to each perspective. The students’ discussions brought these differences to the surface. Instead of obstructing learning, these differences provided an opportunity to reflect on which criteria can be used for the attribution of significance and whether and in what ways these criteria are related to ethnic background. For example, these discussions made the students consider whether



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choosing a Moroccan image because one identifies as a Moroccan is simple and narrow-minded or is a legitimate argument. However, the sometimes blunt and otherwise subtle differences in the students’ understandings of significance and the complexity of the interplay with different parts of their identity demand a nuanced approach by teachers and museum educators when discussing these issues. The idea of multiperspectivity clearly appealed to the students in this triad. Salima and Sofia seemed to appreciate the inclusion of a Moroccan ­perspective on the Second World War in the Museon exhibition. Further, Ravi and Sofia explicitly stressed the importance of including people from  different cultures in the narrative of the war and found the various ­perspectives gathered in the exhibition room interesting. Gryglewski also found that students of immigrant descent emphasized the inclusion of different cultures and related this finding to the students’ socioeconomic ­position  in society.26 Interestingly, Ravi and Sofia outvoted an explicitly different perspective on the war from their documentary because the perspective was not diverse enough. From this perspective, one could also argue that it was Salima who attempted to include multiple perspectives in their product by selecting stories and pictures that normally were not included in the Dutch national narrative about the war. The question here is whether a gathering of perspectives as in the Museon exhibition encourages students  to combine multiple perspectives or whether students will merely choose what they like. The task in Museon, including the dialogue between different perspectives and the plenary presentation of all perspectives, together with the making of a documentary in the closing lesson in school, played an important role in bringing the different threads together and stimulating the students to comprehend how all the perspectives together formed history. Despite the limitations of this small case study, my in-depth ­analysis of one triad provides a rich understanding of the students’ attribution of significance and acknowledgement of multiple perspectives during the project. It shows the complexities and nuances of these learning processes in educational settings in which historical traces that are presented as national heritage are used to teach history. The students gained an understanding of the various ways in which people attribute significance to the Second World War traces and learned that they can be a shared heritage for different countries. Viewing the traces that people had donated to Museon to educate youngsters also had an impact on the students in this triad and added to their understandings of their significance. However, the study also revealed the importance of critical reflection on the ways in which significance is attributed to history and heritage and the need to discuss with students their constructed nature and interrelatedness.

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Notes 1. J. Falk and L. Dierking, The Museum Experience Revisited, Walnut Creek, 2013; V. Gosselin, ‘Open to Interpretation: Mobilizing Historical Thinking in the Museum’ (PhD dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2011). 2.  J. Hamer, ‘History Teaching and Heritage Education: Two Sides of the Same Coin, or Different Currencies?’, in The Politics of Heritage, eds J. Littler and R. Naidoo, New York, 2005, 159. 3. B. Von Borries, ‘Lernende in Historischen Museen und Ausstellungen: Erhoffter Kompetenzerwerb und Kritische Ruckfragen’, in Historische Kompetenzen und Museen, eds S.  Popp and B. Schonemann, Idstein, 2009, 116–117; A.S. Marcus, J.D. Stoddard and W.W.  Woodward, Teaching History with Museums: Strategies for K-12 Social Studies, New York, 2012, 192; I. Nakou, ‘Children’s Historical Thinking within a Museum Environment: An Overall Picture of a Longitudinal Study’, in Raising Standards in History Education, eds A. Dickinson, P. Gordon and P. Lee, London, 2001, 73–96. 4.  A. Pettigrew, P. Salmons and S. Foster, Teaching about the Holocaust in English Secondary Schools: An Empirical Study of National Trends, Perspectives and Practice. HEDP-report, London, 2009, 11; G.M. Savenije, C. van Boxtel and M. Grever, ‘Learning about Sensitive History: “Heritage” of Slavery as a Resource’, Theory and Research in Social Education 42, 4 (2014): 516–547. 5.  Savenije et al., ‘Learning about Sensitive History’. 6. J. Littler and R. Naidoo, eds, The Politics of Heritage: The Legacies of ‘Race’, New York, 2005; E. Waterton and L. Smith, ‘The Recognition and Misrecognition of Community Heritage’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 16, 1 (2010): 4–15. 7.  L. Smith, Uses of Heritage, New York, 2006; C. van Boxtel, ‘Something to Talk about: The Potential of a Dynamic Approach of Heritage in Heritage Education’, Euroclio Bulletin 30 (2010): 53–63. 8. J. Wertsch, Voices of Collective Remembering, Cambridge, 2002, 202; T. Goldberg, D. Porat and B. Schwarz, ‘“Here Started the Rift we See Today”: Student and Textbook Narratives Between Official and Counter Memory’, Narrative Inquiry 16, 2 (2006): 319–347; B. VanSledright, ‘Narratives of Nation-state, Historical Knowledge and School History Education’, Review of Research Education 32 (2008): 109–146. 9. D. Hondius, Oorlogslessen, Amsterdam, 2010; E. Somers, De oorlog in het museum: Herinnering en verbeelding, Zwolle, 2014. 10.  B. van Driel and L. van Dijk, ‘Diverse Classrooms – Opportunities and Challenges’, Intercultural Education 21, Supplement 1 (2010): 4. 11.  J. Allouche-Benayoun and G. Jikeli, ‘Introduction’, in Perceptions of the Holocaust in Europe and Muslim Communities, eds J. Allouchi-Benayoun and G. Jikeli, Dordrecht, 2013, 5–6. 12.  G.M. Savenije, C. van Boxtel and M. Grever, ‘Sensitive “Heritage” of Slavery in a Multicultural Classroom: Pupils’ Ideas Regarding Significance’, British Journal of Educational Studies 62, 2 (2014): 127–148; P. Seixas, ‘Historical Understanding among Adolescents in a Multicultural Setting’, Curriculum Inquiry 23, 3 (1993): 301–327; T. Epstein, ‘Deconstructing Differences in African-American and European-American Adolescents’ Perspectives on U.S. History’, Curriculum Inquiry 28, 4 (1998): 397–423. 13.  R. Ensel and H. Stremmelaar, ‘Speech Acts: Observing Antisemitism and Holocaust Education in the Netherlands’, in Perceptions of the Holocaust in Europe and Muslim Communities, eds J. Jikeli and G. Allouche-Benayoun, Dordrecht, 2013, 153–171. 14.  Hamer, ‘History Teaching and Heritage Education’. 15.  P. Seixas and P. Clark, ‘Murals as Monuments: Students’ Ideas about Depictions of Civilization in British Columbia’, American Journal of Education 110, 2 (2004): 146–171; J. van



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Drie, C. van Boxtel and B. Stam, ‘“But Why is this so Important?” Discussing Historical Significance in the Classroom’, International Journal of Historical Learning, Teaching and Research 12, 1 (2014): 146–168. 16.  P. Seixas and T. Morton, The Big Six Historical Thinking Concepts, Toronto, 2013. 17.  Ensel and Stremmelaar, ‘Speech Acts’; E. Gryglewski, ‘Teaching about the Holocaust in Multicultural Societies: Appreciating the Learner’, Intercultural Education 21, Supplement 1 (2010): 41–49. 18.  See also G.M. Savenije, ‘Sensitive History under Negotiation: Students’ Historical Imagination and Attribution of Significance while Engaged in Heritage Projects’ (PhD dissertation, Erasmus University Rotterdam, 2014). 19.  According to the last estimations (in 2010) 5 per cent of the Dutch population is Muslim. The majority of the Dutch Muslims have a Turkish or Moroccan background and live in one of the four major cities of the country, one of which is The Hague. Central Statistical Office, Religie aan het begin van de 21e eeuw, The Hague, 2009. 20. L. Levstik, ‘Articulating the Silences: Teachers’ and Adolescents’ Conceptions of Historical Significance’, in Researching History Education, eds L. Levstik and K.C. Barton, New York, 2008, 273–291; C. Peck, ‘“It’s Not Like I’m Chinese and Canadian. I’m in Between”: Ethnicity and Students’ Conceptions of Historical Significance’, Theory and Research in Social Education 38, 4 (2010): 574–618. 21. T. Goldberg, ‘“It’s in my Veins”: Identity and Disciplinary Practice in Students’ Discussions of a Historical Issue’, Theory and Research in Social Education 41, 1 (2013): 33–64; K.C. Barton and A. McCully, ‘Trying to “See things Differently”: Northern Ireland Students’ Struggle to Understand Alternative Historical Perspectives’, Theory and Research in Social Education 40, 4 (2012): 371–408. 22.  M. Grever, T. Haydn and K. Ribbens, ‘Identity and School History: The Perspective of Young People from the Netherlands and England’, British Journal of Educational Studies 56, 1 (2008): 86–87. 23.  G. Jikeli, ‘Perceptions of the Holocaust among Young Muslims in Berlin, Paris and London’, in Perceptions of the Holocaust in Europe and Muslim Communities, eds J. AlloucheBenayoun and G. Jikeli, Dordrecht, 2013, 105–132. 24. Ibid. 25.  Nakou, ‘Children’s Historical Thinking within a Museum Environment’. 26.  Gryglewski, ‘Teaching about the Holocaust in Multicultural Societies’, 46–47.

References Allouche-Benayoun, J. and G. Jikeli. ‘Introduction’, in Perceptions of the Holocaust in Europe and Muslim Communities, eds J. Allouchi-Benayoun and G. Jikeli, Dordrecht, 2013, 1–12. Barton, K.C. and A. McCully. ‘Trying to “See Things Differently”: Northern Ireland Students’ Struggle to Understand Alternative Historical Perspectives’, Theory and Research in Social Education 40, 4 (2012): 371–408. Central Statistical Office (Netherlands). Religie aan het Begin van de 21e Eeuw [Religion at the Start of the Twenty-first Century], The Hague, 2009. Ensel, R. and H. Stremmelaar. ‘Speech Acts: Observing Antisemitism and Holocaust Education in the Netherlands’, in Perceptions of the Holocaust in Europe and Muslim Communities, eds J. Jikeli and G. Allouche-Benayoun, Dordrecht, 2013, 153–171. Epstein, T. ‘Deconstructing Differences in African-American and European-American Adolescents’ Perspectives on U.S. History’, Curriculum Inquiry 28, 4 (1998): 397–423. Falk, J. and L. Dierking. The Museum Experience Revisited, Walnut Creek, 2013.

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Goldberg, T. ‘“It’s in my Veins”: Identity and Disciplinary Practice in Students’ Discussions of a Historical Issue’, Theory and Research in Social Education 41, 1 (2013): 33–64. ———, D. Porat and B. Schwarz. ‘“Here Started the Rift we See Today”: Student and Textbook Narratives Between Official and Counter Memory’, Narrative Inquiry 16, 2 (2006): 319–347. Gosselin, V. ‘Open to Interpretation: Mobilizing Historical Thinking in the Museum’ (PhD dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2011). Grever, M., T. Haydn and K. Ribbens. ‘Identity and School History: The Perspective of Young People from the Netherlands and England’, British Journal of Educational Studies 56, 1 (2008): 76–94. Gryglewski, E. ‘Teaching about the Holocaust in Multicultural Societies: Appreciating the Learner’, Intercultural Education 21, Supplement 1 (2010): S41–S49. Hamer, J. ‘History Teaching and Heritage Education: Two Sides of the Same Coin, or Different Currencies?’, in The Politics of Heritage, eds J. Littler and R. Naidoo, New York, 2005, 159–168. Hondius, D. Oorlogslessen, Amsterdam, 2010. Jikeli, G. ‘Perceptions of the Holocaust among Young Muslims in Berlin, Paris and London’, in Perceptions of the Holocaust in Europe and Muslim Communities, eds J. Allouche-Benayoun and G. Jikeli, Dordrecht, 2013, 105–132. Levstik, L. ‘Articulating the Silences: Teachers’ and Adolescents’ Conceptions of Historical Significance’, in Researching History Education, eds L. Levstik and K.C. Barton, New York, 2008, 273–291. Littler, J. and R. Naidoo, eds. The Politics of Heritage: The Legacies of ‘Race’, New York, 2005. Marcus, A.S., J.D. Stoddard and W.W. Woodward. Teaching History with Museums: Strategies for K-12 Social Studies, New York, 2012. Nakou, I. ‘Children’s Historical Thinking within a Museum Environment: An Overall Picture of a Longitudinal Study’, in Raising Standards in History Education, eds A. Dickinson, P. Gordon and P. Lee, London, 2001, 73–96. Peck, C. ‘“It’s Not Like I’m Chinese and Canadian. I’m in Between”: Ethnicity and Students’ Conceptions of Historical Significance’, Theory and Research in Social Education 38, 4 (2010): 574–618. Pettigrew, A., P. Salmons and S. Foster. Teaching about the Holocaust in English Secondary Schools: An Empirical Study of National Trends, Perspectives and Practice. HEDP-report, London, 2009. Savenije, G.M. ‘Sensitive History under Negotiation: Students’ Historical Imagination and Attribution of Significance while Engaged in Heritage Projects’ (PhD dissertation, Erasmus University Rotterdam, 2014). ———, C. van Boxtel and M. Grever. ‘Learning about Sensitive History: “Heritage” of Slavery as a Resource’, Theory and Research in Social Education 42, 4 (2014): 516–547. ———, G.M., C. van Boxtel and M. Grever. ‘Sensitive “Heritage” of Slavery in a Multicultural Classroom: Pupils’ Ideas Regarding Significance’, British Journal of Educational Studies 62, 2 (2014): 127–148. Seixas, P. ‘Historical Understanding among Adolescents in a Multicultural Setting’, Curriculum Inquiry 23, 3 (1993): 301–327. ——— and P. Clark. ‘Murals as Monuments: Students’ Ideas about Depictions of Civilization in British Columbia’, American Journal of Education 110, 2 (2004): 146–171. ——— and T. Morton. The Big Six Historical Thinking Concepts, Toronto, 2013. Smith, L. Uses of Heritage, New York, 2006. Somers, E. De Oorlog in het Museum: Herinnering en Verbeelding [The War in the Museum: Memory and Imagination], Zwolle, 2014.



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van Boxtel, C. ‘Something to Talk about: The Potential of a Dynamic Approach of Heritage in Heritage Education’, Euroclio Bulletin 30 (2010): 53–63. van Drie, J., C. van Boxtel and B. Stam. ‘But Why is this so Important?’ Discussing Historical Significance in the Classroom’, International Journal of Historical Learning, Teaching and Research 12, 1 (2014): 146–168. van Driel, B. and L. van Dijk. ‘Diverse Classrooms – Opportunities and Challenges’, Intercultural Education 21, Supplement 1 (2010): 1–5. VanSledright, B. ‘Narratives of Nation-state, Historical Knowledge and School History Education’, Review of Research Education 32 (2008): 109–146. Von Borries, B. ‘Lernende in Historischen Museen und Ausstellungen: Erhoffter Kompetenz­ er­werb und kritische Ruckfragen’, in Historische Kompetenzen und Museen, eds S. Popp and B. Schonemann, Idstein, 2009, 100–120. Waterton, E. and L. Smith. ‘The Recognition and Misrecognition of Community Heritage’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 16, 1 (2010): 4–15. Wertsch, J. Voices of Collective Remembering, Cambridge, 2002.

Geerte Savenije is a postdoctoral researcher at the Research Institute of Child Development and Education of the University of Amsterdam (UvA, the Netherlands). In 2014, Savenije completed her doctoral dissertation Sensitive History under Negotiation: Pupils’ Historical Imagination and Attribution of Significance while Engaged in Heritage Projects at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her research focuses on the ways in which pupils adopt a historical perspective when learning about sensitive topics in history. She is particularly interested in the interplay of cognitive reasoning and emotional engagement with the past.

CHAPTER

12

Increasing Understanding or Undermining National Heritage Studying Single and Multiple Perspectives of a Formative Historical Conf lict Tsafrir Goldberg

Identity, Multiple Perspectives and Critical Inquiry in History Teaching Fostering identification with the nation, understanding the other’s perspective, and critical analysis of information are all goals of the Israeli history curriculum.1 However, these goals may conflict when teaching controversial aspects of topics which are central to national heritage. Teaching episodes from national history in which the nation played a questionable or ­contested role is a great opportunity for practicing critical skills2 and encountering conf licting perspectives.3 When studying controversies dealing with intergroup conflict, students can encounter the out-group perspective and attempt to understand it.4 Still, it is feared that focusing a critical lens on one’s collective may reduce identification with the nation5 or in-group.6 The teaching of controversial aspects of national history may therefore pose an obstacle to identity goals of history teaching or raise charged emotional reactions, causing many educators to evade it.7 National identification is conceptualized in social identity theory as consisting both of feeling attached to the national group and of glorifying it as better than others.8 National heritage usually attempts to foster both facets of identification and challenging it may be assumed to reduce glorification or attachment. Conservatives would claim therefore that topics which are at the heart of national heritage, such as the birth Notes for this section begin on page 257.



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of the nation, should only be approached through the official authorized perspective.9 A pessimistic outlook on the feasibility of teaching national heritage in a multiple-perspective approach may also come from an opposite line of thought, which points to identification with the nation as a possible obstacle to learning rather than its goal. Social cognition research points to identification with one’s group as a biasing influence on individuals’ processing of in-group threatening perspectives.10 Minorities and groups in conflict situations may be especially threatened by a derogative out-group perspective and employ various defence mechanism against their impact.11 This outlook is also borne out by analysis of collective narratives and history teaching in the context of the Jewish-Arab conflict. Analyses of history textbooks and official narratives of the conflict shows that each party to the conflict fosters one-sided, self-justifying accounts of the conflict while delegitimizing and dehumanizing the out-group.12 Multiple-Perspective History and Intergroup Relations Exposure to one-sided collective narratives is assumed to harm intergroup relations and hinder conflict resolution.13 In similar vein, proponents of multiple-perspective history teaching claim that an affirmative encounter with the out-group’s historical narrative would promote intergroup empathy.14 Intergroup empathy and even just motivation for perspective taking are considered to be predictors of improved relations and conflict resolution.15 Critical disciplinary inquiry into the competing historical perspectives of groups in conflict should furnish students of both groups with the necessary dispositions and capacities to resolve it.16 However, these assumptions have only rarely been empirically examined and some of the attempts to test them produced findings to the contrary.17 Furthermore, since in many cases (as is definitely the case in Israel) historical conflicts are formative of national identity, they constitute focal points of national heritage.18 Wouldn’t competing collective narratives challenge cherished national heritage, serving as ‘dangerous memories’ raising antagonism toward the out-group members’ perspective?19 In Israel, two attempts were made to teach multiple-perspective history of the JewishArab conflict, one through a critical inquiry approach,20 the other in an empathetic-narrative approach.21 The presentation of the Palestinian perspective in Israeli history teaching indeed raised considerable antagonism (among publicists and policy makers), to the degree that they were banned or censored.22 Public debate and the banning of Palestinian perspectives by Jewish policy makers could be seen as a reaction to encounter with out-group challenges to the cherished in-group heritage and collective memory. Thus, the

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answer to the above question could be that out-group perspective which challenges heritage to raise intergroup antagonism. However, it would be more instructive to monitor the impact through reports of learners on their attitudes towards in-group out-group perspectives.23 Another informative way to gauge the impact of an encounter with a perspective challenging your heritage is to track learners’ actual discourse when discussing a historical controversy with an out-group member.24 To explore the impact of single- and multiple-perspective teaching of a historical conflict on students’ identity and on intergroup relations, we have formulated the following study.

Description of Research Design and Method Individual Learning Study One hundred Jewish-Israeli and seventy-eight Arab-Israeli high school students studied the controversial historical topic of the Israeli war of independence and the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem. This topic is part of the mandatory Israeli high school history curriculum. As in other nation states, the War of Independence is a focal point of national heritage, commemorated as the heroic and righteous ‘birth of the nation’. Israeli Arabs are members of an ethnic minority, most of whom identify with the Palestinian people.25 For the Palestinians the same events are the symbol of defeat, deportation and exile, the ‘Naqba’, which is a cornerstone of Palestinian heritage. The Palestinian refugee problem is a contested issue which is conventionally taught in Israel from a self-legitimizing Israeli perspective,26 which rejects the Palestinian narrative of Naqba. The Palestinian perspective may shed an unfavourable light on the Jewish national heritage of the War of Independence. Students were randomly placed in one of three history learning activities based on different teaching approaches. The first was a conventional teaching approach: a teacher’s presentation based on an authorized textbook, oriented to success in exams, the common approach in the world and in the Israeli state school system. The second was a critical-disciplinary approach, in which the teacher coached students in evaluating contrasting Jewish and Palestinian sources,27 an activity explicitly oriented at acquiring the historian’s practices and developing critical thinking. The third was an empathetic-­ narrative approach, wherein the teacher coached students in non-judgmental empathetic reading of narratives, which they later applied to excerpts from a dual (Israeli-Palestinian) narrative textbook,28 oriented to conflict resolution. Both the critical-disciplinary and the empathetic-narrative approaches were adapted from curricula initiated in the Israeli educational system, and



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banned on account of their supposed subversive stance to national heritage and identity. Texts in all three approaches were of the same length and presented essentially the same basic items of information, although with very different emphases and nuances. All materials were translated and participants received texts in their mother tongue. Teaching duration was also the same for all approaches and was equivalent to a full school lesson, with about twenty-five minutes devoted to instruction and twenty minutes to individual engagement with reading and writing tasks. It should be noted these experimental conditions did not pose fully identical situations for Jewish and Arab students. While the two multipleperspective approaches exposed students from both groups to a threatening out-group perspective, the conventional approach stressing the Jewish narrative posed more challenge for the Arab students (who commonly identify with the Palestinian people). This imbalance is representative of the wider Israeli educational scene where the concerns of the Jewish majority overrule those of the Arab minority. Two weeks prior to the learning activity and immediately following it, all students filled a closed questionnaire tapping national identification in its two facets or modes, attachment and glorification (see endnote 8) with the Jewish and Palestinian people serving as the nation for Jewish and Arab students respectively. Interest in learning about the other side’s historical perspective on the Jewish-Arab conflict (see endnote 12) was also measured. Participants also answered open questions tapping their knowledge and opinions as to the causes of the 1948 (Israeli independence) war and the Palestinian refugee problem. These supplied the basis for tracking change in participants’ identification with the nation, and change in participants’ understanding of the controversial historical issue.

Findings Impact on National Identification What can we say about the impact of the encounter with an out-group perspective on participants’ national identification? Repeated measures ANOVAS (Analysis of variance) were performed over the attachment mode of national identification and over the glorification mode of national identification with the national group and teaching approach as between subjects’ factors and time (pre- and post-intervention) as within subjects’ factor. That is, we tested whether a significant change occurred in national identification, and whether teaching approach or membership in a national group affected this change. No significant main or interaction effects were found. We may

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Table 12.1  Main and interaction effects for national group, condition and time over interest in the other’s perspective. Dependent variable

Factor

Interest in the Other’s perspective

National group Experimental condition X time National group X experimental   condition X time Error

 df 1 2 2

 F

  η2

 p

10.07 6.33 4.79

.06 .072 .055