Thinkers and Feelers’: A Psychological Perspective on Heritage and Society

Abstract

Cultural heritage agenda are often, it seems, driven and determined by ‘thinkers’, people who can make rational ‘scientific’ decisions about things — that ‘site X or building Y should be preserved at all costs, as one of only 23 examples of its type left standing, and this one has the best preserved gable end’ … or whatever. It would seem likely that ‘thinkers’ created these systems in the first place. And they are good systems, and necessary for meeting heritage protection agendas, among others. Yet, increasingly, and certainly over the past ten years or so, through the work of Common Ground (Clifford, 2011), the terms and aspirations of the 2000 European Landscape Convention (Council of Europe, 2000) and notably the 2005 (Faro) Framework Convention on the Value of Heritage for Society (Council of Europe, 2005, 2009), as well as work in Australia under the umbrella ‘heritage as social action’ (e.g. Byrne et al., 2013), the focus of heritage has extended to something more aligned with social and community value; where emphasis on rarity and historic significance, for example, is being overlain, if not at times replaced, by values attached often to everyday and unremarkable places by the people for whom these places are part of everyday experience. Heritage, in other words, has become increasingly people-centred. But there is a problem. This approach to heritage requires ‘feelers’ to implement and facilitate it, people who follow their emotional instincts. It is my impression that much of cultural heritage practice is led by thinkers, and this may need to change.