G.J. Ashworth - Senses of Place: Senses of Time

The overall aim of this book is to examine the relationships between place and time as these are related though the medium of heritage. In defining the discourses of inclusion and exclusion that constitute identity, people call upon an affinity with places or, at least, with representations of places, which, in turn, are used to legitimate their claim to those places. By definition, such places are imaginary but they still constitute a powerful part of the individual and social practices which people use consciously to transform the material world into cultural and economic realms of meaning and lived experience. Senses of places are therefore the products of the creative imagination of the individual and of society, while identities are not passively received but are ascribed to places by people. While commonplace, such statements need re-stating here for two reasons. First, as occurs with nationalist ideologies, people do often assume that identities are intrinsic qualities of landscapes and cityscapes. Secondly, it is not enough to conclude that places are imagined entities. Rather, if individuals create place identities, then obviously different people, at different times, for different reasons, create different narratives of belonging. Place images are thus user determined, polysemic and unstable through time.

This raises a number of general issues. First, given this intrinsic variability in time, through space, and between social groups, it may seem perverse to attempt to generalize at all about a phenomenon that relates ultimately to a particular individual person, moment and location. The concept of collective identity, like the notions of collective memory or collective heritage, with which it is strongly related, does not supersede or replace individual identity. It does, however, allow generalization and the location of ideas of belonging within political and social contexts.

Secondly, if it is axiomatic that place images are created, then someone creates them for some purpose. This leads directly to the formulation and execution of policy. Place images do not simply come into existence. Instead, they are created by and through processes of identification which are both internal to the individual or group and external in the sense that they are imposed by outside agency. This leads to questions such as: who is identifying and for what purpose? Place images are not generally explicable in terms of a single simple dominant ideology projected from definable dominant producers to subordinate passive consumers. The peoples, the identities, the images and the purposes are just all too plural to be reduced simplistically in this way.

Thirdly, senses of place must be related to senses of time if only because places are in a continuous state of becoming (Pred, 1984). The key linkage in this process is heritage. At the outset, it is vital to understand that this concept does not engage directly with the study of the past. Instead heritage is concerned with the ways in which very selective material artefacts, mythologies, memories and traditions become resources for the present. The contents, interpretations and representations of the resource are selected according to the demands of the present; an imagined past provides resources for a heritage that is to be bequeathed to an imagined future. It follows too that the meanings and functions of memory and tradition are defined in the present. Further, heritage is more concerned with meanings than material artefacts. It is the former that give value, either cultural or financial, to the latter and explain why they have been selected from the near infinity of the past. In turn, they may later be discarded as the demands of present societies change, or even, as is presently occurring in the former Eastern Europe, when pasts have to be reinvented to reflect new presents. Thus heritage is as much about forgetting as remembering the past.