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Whose Heritage Is It? Erve Chambers I want to briefly discuss two possibilities for thinking about heritage from an anthropological perspective: one broadly based in a “historical understanding” of public heritage and the other a “heritage understanding” presented through private claims of inheritance. Distinguishing between these two senses is important because the idea of heritage has crept into modern consciousness to such an extent that it has begun to play a major role in how we conceive the world in which we live, helping to reshape our relationships to each other and to our environments. We have become accustomed to associating heritage almost exclusively with the terms of history, in a way that can be extremely interesting and valuable, but that can also serve to externalize, alienate and force into a more public and less well-connected realm those genuine relationships with the past which have for most of the human experience derived their strength and meaningfulness from their more private, inalienable and culturally intimate nature. Preserving Public Heritage This public sense of heritage derives from a close association with history. Historical understanding is often promoted as a means of learning from the past, and hopefully of avoiding the mistakes of the past. The past is meaningful in large part because it is perceived (and presented) to be different from the present. Historical thinking tends to encourage us to think in terms of contrasts and differences. There are clear benefits to be gained from this perspective, which aims to democratize, broaden and make us more critically aware of our sense of the past. But there are also dangers, the greatest of which is that we might declare the past in such a public way as to make its privately meaningful recovery problematic, if not nonsensical. This treatment of heritage, for example, can separate the objects and performances of heritage from their actual heirs—serving, as have earlier and more influential ideas about heritage, to transfer these materials to a public marketplace as select commodities, where they become properties and experiences to be appreciated and accumulated by outsiders, who may well benefit from the associations, but who generally have no stake in the outcome, and feel little responsibility for the customary respect and careful upkeep that any people’s heritage truly requires. An Inalienable Inheritance In other words, this sense of heritage is invested in the idea of continuous cultural process. It encourages us to disassociate heritage from the stricter confines of history, at least to the extent that we might view heritage not as lessons contrived by duly-recognized keepers of the past, but as heritable obligations, responsibilities and privileges that are experienced and repeated in the culture of everyday life, often in such a way as to subsume the past so thoroughly into the present as to render the difference unrecognizable. This sense of heritage can be discovered in the details of routine and extant cultural practices, associated with but never bounded by the past. Identifiable cultural processes of the present can be more closely and fairly revealing of actual heritage, principally through those discrete and concrete ideas of inheritance that in subtle and barely apparent ways continue to guide so much of our lives.
Maryland’s
Eastern Shore This is not a false view, but it is distorted in that it associates community with such a limited range of possibility. A closer look at the heritages associated with the eastern shore reveals other, strikingly different traditions, in which mobility and adaptability are and long have been important parts of these communities’ inheritance. In addition to their work on the water, shore families have routinely engaged in agriculture, in perennial labor in the markets and industries of Maryland’s urbanized western shore, and participated broadly in the service and trade industries of their own and other communities. The labor practices of many eastern shore communities were and still are characterized not so much by dependency on a single occupation as they are indicative of an inherent and heritable resilience that has enabled them to adapt readily to changed economic and environmental conditions. Which of these views is right? In a sense, they are both correct, and the danger lies only in that the first view described has come, through repeated and very public presentations of heritage, to predominate in our consideration of the fate of many rural Chesapeake Bay communities. This view encourages us to consider such communities as bound to traditions associated with a limited range of ways to earn a living. These are constraining occupational “traditions” that heritage professionals have helped create for public consumption. By extension, these communities come to be viewed as not having the resources or skill to adapt to changing conditions. The second view suggests just the opposite. Perhaps the most valuable inheritance shared by many eastern shore communities is not their tie to a particular occupation, but the resilience and adaptability that has enabled them to persevere and maintain meaningful associations with each other and with their places through hard and uncertain times.
None of this suggests that we should not work to discover and celebrate diverse public heritages. Doing so can provide important lessons from the past that are useful in our constructions of the present. But we also need to be aware of the consequences of such celebratory acts when they impinge upon the more private inheritances of the people whose histories have been selected for public consumption. In the example of the “watermen” of Maryland’s eastern shore, the danger is that members of these communities should themselves lose sight of the resilience that has long been a part of their inheritance, and buy into an increasingly publicized image of them as being hopelessly lost into a dying heritage. Erve Chambers is professor and chair of anthropology at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is author of Native Tours: The Anthropology of Travel and Tourism and program chair for the 2005 meetings of the Society for Applied Anthropology. He can be reached at echambers@anth.umd.edu.
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