Abstract
Educating with, from, towards, and for heritage involves a revision of the teaching contents and the dominant traditional teaching methodology. The search for new strategies to work on heritage on the basis of relevant socio-environmental issues has led us to consider the convenience of a selection of heritage content not in terms of aesthetic or environmental values, but to arouse conflict or controversy in relation to heritage, either ideological, political, economic, environmental or by interaction among them. The aim of this selection is to equip the students with skills and abilities characteristic of critical thinking and contribute to the education of citizens committed to social participation and planetary sustainability. To this end, in the present work we intend to ground, categorise and exemplify the controversies that arise around heritage, its management and conservation or safeguard as a reference for social science teachers intending to work on heritage education from this perspective.
TopAntecedents: Beyond A Question Of Names
If we review the scientific literature combining the concepts of heritage and conflict, a third concept can be appreciated, namely tourism. This is due, in most cases, to conflicts that arise around heritage when it becomes a tourist consumer item beyond, or above, any intrinsic historical or natural value it may have (Porter & Salazar, 2005), or the problems that arise when mass tourism jeopardises its conservation. Also associated with tourism, we find heritage as an element of political legitimacy to establish an ‘us’ and ‘them’ and tourism implemented to consolidate these differences. To do so, in many cases, the patrimonial elements may even be falsified, so that the conflict is generated from a certain intention to manipulate the heritage in favour of tourist well-being (Poria & Ashworth, 2009). The principal forerunner in this sense can be found in Tunbridge & Ashworth (1996), who stated that heritage is not only a resource in conflict, due to the difficulty involved in its protection and conservation, but that it is also a resource for conflict and that cultural tourism, and therefore heritage tourism, is the scenario to promote it. Similarly, these authors were also the first to designate dissonant heritage, in the sense that heritage in conflict is posited in this work, although without coming up with a classification.
This new designation does not imply that they are necessarily conflicting types of heritage, but that they conflict with the orthodox way of interpreting or studying heritage, as in some cases attempts are made to place the accent on minority patrimonies and, in so many others, simply on the debate, as they are silenced or directly ignored. In this sense, in the second block of the monograph published by Graham, Ashworth, & Tunbridge (2016), a classification is proposed in the same line advocated in these pages, highlighting: Heritage, power and collective memory, heritage and class, heritage, gender and sexuality, heritages of disinheritance and atrocity, dissonance of heritage revisited, the management of dissonance, multicultural reality, or, finally, theory and democratic sustainability. This categorisation is not presented for educational purposes and citizen training, but explicitly invites reflection on the new revision of the way heritage is classified.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Heritage Dilemmas: Heritage issues that obliges the population to reflect and take a position on the compatibility of traditions, customs, values, beliefs, etc., stimulating the debate between tradition and modernity.
Subjugated Heritage: Heritages that suffer suppression by the dominant culture, usually politically imposed, and which have been persecuted at many points in history.
Heritage in Feminine: Current of thought that analyzes the dominant reading in the different heritage spaces that continues to be androcentric and patriarchal. Advocate and recover all the heritage created and bequeathed by women, as well as analysing the invisibility and subjection that characterise it in a way that affords a reinterpretation of history and a more complex and enriching analysis of the present.
Heritage of Cruelty: This designation includes those customs that are part of the cultural tradition of peoples and which involve the exercise of some kind of physical violence on people or animals.
Anti-heritage: Heritage issues that represents the countervalues as an example of the atrocities of wars, persecutions and repressions committed by the human race.
Interested Heritage: Heritages which would refer of heritage management and conservation that allow the analysis of conflicts between the economic, ecological and social logic, which on many occasions have led to the destruction of heritage assets due to urban and/or tourist speculation.
Heritages in Transitions: Heritage elements that have been adapted and reinvented for social uses in line with the demands of a 21st century society, enabling a dual reading, that of the element in the context in which it is generated and the meaning it acquires today.