Since these issues are examined with reference to two UNESCO documents, that organisation's definitions of ICH and digital heritage must first be established. In the 2003 UNESCO Charter on the Preservation of Digital Heritage, digital heritage is defined as:
Unique resources of human knowledge and expression. It embraces cultural, scientific and administrative resources, as well as technical, legal, medical and other kinds of information created digitally or converted into digital form from existing analogue resources.
The 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage defines ICH 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. This intangible cultural heritage, transmitted from generation to generation, is constantly recreated by communities and groups in response to their environment, their interaction with nature and their history, and provides them with a sense of identity and continuity, thus promoting respect for cultural diversity and human creativity.
The contrast here between the emphasis on heritage as a sense of identity and continuity and on heritage as a resource is quite striking. Where ICH is a heritage that is being 'constantly recreated', the value implicated in digital heritage is as a unique and enduring resource. However, the flexibility of the digital format, its relational structure and its capacity for change through real-time updates would superficially ally itself with those protean qualities highlighted in UNESCO's definition of ICH. My question, then, is this: does digitisation support and provide opportunities for the spontaneous and improvisational aspects of ICH to be represented? Or does it actually bolster notions of tangible heritage (in UNESCO terms, at least) by operating according to the same principles of permanence, value and uniqueness?
Hennessy's approach is to argue that the 'the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage and the preservation of digital heritage are not separate projects' (p. 43). She explains how the Charter puts an emphasis on public access to digital cultural heritage materials, encoded through UNESCO programming as the 'Memory of the World'. Accordingly, Article 2 of the Charter states that: 'the purpose of preserving the digital heritage is to ensure that it remains accessible to the public'. The discourse of loss that permeates the Charter, in which digital media 'is at risk of being lost to posterity' (Article 3, The Threat of Loss), is reflected in the 2003 Convention:
Recognizing that the process of globalization and social transformation, alongside the conditions they create for renewed dialogue among communities, also give rise, as does the phenomenon of intolerance, to grave threat of deterioration, disappearance and destruction of the intangible cultural heritage (see p. 37).
By focusing on the connectedness of these endeavours, Hennessy makes the case that the Ridington/Dane-zaa Digital Archive is formed of both ICH and digital heritage elements, concluding that 'as heritage categories (tangible, intangible, natural) are increasingly understood to be arbitrary and interconnected (Kirschenblatt-Gimblett 2004)*, so are the meanings and consequences of words and things, in ephemeral analogue and digital form' (p. 43). While this approach is interesting, I'm wary of the extent to which she downplays the significance of media categories. I would agree that ephemeral, analogue and digital formats are related to one another but there are important differences in that they are not completely benign/arbitrary in their modes of communication and representation. My purpose here is to investigate these differences through further analysis of the definitions in UNESCO's Charter and Convention. The pairing of continuity and identity in defining ICH strikes me as particularly pertinent, and does potentially raise questions about the link between digital heritage and ICH, a point which is also highlighted by comparison with definitions of tangible heritage.
The discourse of permanence and uniqueness constructed around heritage generally has been subject to increasing criticism within the last ten years. At the forefront of this critique is Laurajane Smith, who’s central idea (as covered in Madness in the Method) is that heritage does not exist in the sense that it is embodied in grand, monumental and historic sites; instead, heritage is a discourse that 'validates a set of practices and performances' (p. 11) and, through an authorised heritage discourse (AHD), perpetuates and reinforces a view of heritage as inherently 'tangible'. Emma Waterton draws from Smith's argument and her characterisation of AHD. In the ''The Envy of the World?' Intangible Heritage in England', co-authored with Smith, she writes:
Smith (2006) has labelled this discourse the AHD, which is a way of seeing heritage that developed over a considerable period of time, and owes many of its characteristics to an evocative mixing of Enlightenment and Romanticist philosophies. A sense of permanence and continuity permeates this discourse, which brings with it a need for the protection of 'authentic' fabric from damage and/or destruction for the ultimate benefit of future generations.
Here Waterton refers explicitly to permanence and continuity as being part of a discourse that calls for the protection of heritage 'fabric', against the threat of damage or destruction. However, if we return to the Charter and the fears it expresses of digital heritage being 'lost to posterity', or The Threat of Loss section of the ICH Convention, these statements seem indicative of comparable sentiments. The similarity could either indicate the danger of loss argument having close associations with any concept of heritage (I believe this is true up to a point, i.e. memory-forgetting), or that the so-called AHD has insinuated itself into policy statements about ICH and digital heritage, which is what Smith and Waterton would and do argue in 'The Envy of the World'. Central also to this discourse is the emphasis placed on preservation and, while discussions of preservation often carry with them intimations of permanence, the pursuit of permanent solutions to preservation problems, tangible or otherwise, is somewhat misguided. As David Lowenthal writes in The Past is a Foreign Country:
Preservation itself reveals that permanence is an illusion. The more we save, the more aware we become that such remains are continually altered and reinterpreted. We suspend their erosion only to transform them in other ways.
Recognising that we can only slow, rather than halt the passage of time raises interesting questions about the preservation of ICH and digital heritage. What would be deemed an acceptable stage of deterioration? With books and manuscripts, their manifest age lends them a sort of authenticity or authority. Conversely, damaged computer files more often reinforce the perceived ephemerality of digital information and many forms of ICH are only constituted in their enactment. These examples highlight Lowenthal’s point that heritage in the broad sense is being continually reconfigured so that preservation becomes less a matter of maintaining a fixed state of things and more a case of interpreting and transforming them.
Unfortunately, although crucial to acknowledge, it is difficult to base policy on a notion of heritage that is constantly in a state of flux, which perhaps accounts for a tendency to revert to well established assumptions about value and culture. This tendency creates a potentially vicious cycle, whereby the attempts of organisations like UNESCO to delineate separate categories for heritage (arbitrary or not) are undermined by a dominant and mismatched set of heritage principles. For example, of digital heritage, Fiona Cameron writes that the 'ascription of heritage metaphors to cultural materials in a digital format means that digital media has become embedded in a cycle of heritage value and consumption' (p. 170). Likewise, Smith and Waterton suggest that 'Western discourses of heritage that stress its materiality work to make intangible memories more 'tangible' by linking them to places, objects and spaces' (p. 294).
I mentioned continuity earlier, as forming a part of this heritage vocabulary, which is taken up in UNESCO’s definition of ICH. Continuity in this sense presumably refers to the retention and continuing practice of rituals, in order to maintain a feeling of community and identity from generation to generation. Like the custodianship of artefacts or archival records, the focus is on the persistence of traditions or traditional objects. Without reiterating the argument about the shifting nature of preservation, there is also a preoccupation with time embedded in these claims. The frequency with which continuity is cited in relation to an understanding of heritage (see Smith and Waterton above, also Andreas Huyssen, p. 27), testifies to the importance of 'one thing following another'. In his account of the museum, Huyssen identifies continuity as feature of modernisation, which is characterised by 'its strong subject, its notion of linear continuous time, and its belief in the superiority of the modern over the premodern and the primitive' (Huyssen, p. 28). It is his contention that these beliefs are now being challenged to the extent that marginalised voices and excluded histories are re-entering the frame, a symptom of our museal culture. Of course another symptom, and a significant factor affecting the perceived continuity of time is the rise of digital media, nebulous and network like. In the Charter again continuity is described as 'fundamental' in ensuring the long-term preservation of digital heritage. But how can UNESCO appeal to a sense of continuity when the very form and structure of digital heritage essentially challenges this linearity?
In 'The Discrete Image', Bernard Stiegler discusses the phenomenon of 'discetization', the function by which the digital photograph is converted into a manipulable, machine readable format. The discrete of the title is indicative of digital technology’s capacity to store images as binary code, a form that is entirely quantified, and which could be seen to interfere in the process that renders the photograph whole, or continuous. It is his view that 'by discretizing the continuous, digitization allows us to submit the this was to a decomposing analysis' (pp. 157-158) – [what he describes as the 'this was' is the experience of looking at the analogue image/photograph, which invites comparison with Roland Barthes' project in Camera Lucida]. However, this form of analysis is also what destabilises the experience of continuous time. In the heritage context, a digital image/object disrupts that continuity by revealing its 'wholeness' as an illusion.
To return to the definition of digital heritage and the emphasis UNESCO puts on providing public access through digital resources, perhaps in serving this increasingly important function, it is making a fair trade-off. But it is more likely that at a policy level, there is a lack of understanding of what is at stake. In the Hidden Histories post, I described one account of digitisation where preservation and access are two sides of the same coin. However, as heritage’s older concern, preservation is still mired in the traditional values I’ve already described, while access is less bound by this discourse, and now finding a channel through the ubiquity of the Internet. Going back to a point I touched on at the beginning (an echo of 'the medium is the message'), we cannot underestimate the power of the digital medium to change the way we experience and interact with heritage, and its tendency to displace a sense of 'continuity' and history. In this way, while superficially conforming to dominant notions of heritage, and even possibly reinforcing the pre-eminence of the 'real thing', underneath the surface, as a mode of representation, it is distorting dominant and long-held heritage principles.
So where does this leave ICH? What the discussion here highlights is that while the policy pays lip-service to the process of performative revision in its depiction of ICH as being 'constantly recreated', ICH practices are in danger of being subjected to the same processes of regulation, control and preservation as tangible heritage. Hennessy challenges the necessity of distinctions like tangible, intangible and digital, and Smith and Waterton argue along similar lines, that all heritage is intangible. While this view is constructive in moving away from an idea of heritage that's bound to the material of culture, I would contend that UNESCO (particularly in its Digital Heritage Charter) is still wedded to more traditional notions of tangible heritage.
* I would argue that despite this connectedness, important distinctions between tangible, intangible and digital heritage should considered. For example, discussions of authenticity that so frequently permeate the field of digital heritage will not be as significant for ICH, where more of discussion focuses on how to document ritual and traditional practices.
Unfortunately, although crucial to acknowledge, it is difficult to base policy on a notion of heritage that is constantly in a state of flux, which perhaps accounts for a tendency to revert to well established assumptions about value and culture. This tendency creates a potentially vicious cycle, whereby the attempts of organisations like UNESCO to delineate separate categories for heritage (arbitrary or not) are undermined by a dominant and mismatched set of heritage principles. For example, of digital heritage, Fiona Cameron writes that the 'ascription of heritage metaphors to cultural materials in a digital format means that digital media has become embedded in a cycle of heritage value and consumption' (p. 170). Likewise, Smith and Waterton suggest that 'Western discourses of heritage that stress its materiality work to make intangible memories more 'tangible' by linking them to places, objects and spaces' (p. 294).
I mentioned continuity earlier, as forming a part of this heritage vocabulary, which is taken up in UNESCO’s definition of ICH. Continuity in this sense presumably refers to the retention and continuing practice of rituals, in order to maintain a feeling of community and identity from generation to generation. Like the custodianship of artefacts or archival records, the focus is on the persistence of traditions or traditional objects. Without reiterating the argument about the shifting nature of preservation, there is also a preoccupation with time embedded in these claims. The frequency with which continuity is cited in relation to an understanding of heritage (see Smith and Waterton above, also Andreas Huyssen, p. 27), testifies to the importance of 'one thing following another'. In his account of the museum, Huyssen identifies continuity as feature of modernisation, which is characterised by 'its strong subject, its notion of linear continuous time, and its belief in the superiority of the modern over the premodern and the primitive' (Huyssen, p. 28). It is his contention that these beliefs are now being challenged to the extent that marginalised voices and excluded histories are re-entering the frame, a symptom of our museal culture. Of course another symptom, and a significant factor affecting the perceived continuity of time is the rise of digital media, nebulous and network like. In the Charter again continuity is described as 'fundamental' in ensuring the long-term preservation of digital heritage. But how can UNESCO appeal to a sense of continuity when the very form and structure of digital heritage essentially challenges this linearity?
In 'The Discrete Image', Bernard Stiegler discusses the phenomenon of 'discetization', the function by which the digital photograph is converted into a manipulable, machine readable format. The discrete of the title is indicative of digital technology’s capacity to store images as binary code, a form that is entirely quantified, and which could be seen to interfere in the process that renders the photograph whole, or continuous. It is his view that 'by discretizing the continuous, digitization allows us to submit the this was to a decomposing analysis' (pp. 157-158) – [what he describes as the 'this was' is the experience of looking at the analogue image/photograph, which invites comparison with Roland Barthes' project in Camera Lucida]. However, this form of analysis is also what destabilises the experience of continuous time. In the heritage context, a digital image/object disrupts that continuity by revealing its 'wholeness' as an illusion.
To return to the definition of digital heritage and the emphasis UNESCO puts on providing public access through digital resources, perhaps in serving this increasingly important function, it is making a fair trade-off. But it is more likely that at a policy level, there is a lack of understanding of what is at stake. In the Hidden Histories post, I described one account of digitisation where preservation and access are two sides of the same coin. However, as heritage’s older concern, preservation is still mired in the traditional values I’ve already described, while access is less bound by this discourse, and now finding a channel through the ubiquity of the Internet. Going back to a point I touched on at the beginning (an echo of 'the medium is the message'), we cannot underestimate the power of the digital medium to change the way we experience and interact with heritage, and its tendency to displace a sense of 'continuity' and history. In this way, while superficially conforming to dominant notions of heritage, and even possibly reinforcing the pre-eminence of the 'real thing', underneath the surface, as a mode of representation, it is distorting dominant and long-held heritage principles.
So where does this leave ICH? What the discussion here highlights is that while the policy pays lip-service to the process of performative revision in its depiction of ICH as being 'constantly recreated', ICH practices are in danger of being subjected to the same processes of regulation, control and preservation as tangible heritage. Hennessy challenges the necessity of distinctions like tangible, intangible and digital, and Smith and Waterton argue along similar lines, that all heritage is intangible. While this view is constructive in moving away from an idea of heritage that's bound to the material of culture, I would contend that UNESCO (particularly in its Digital Heritage Charter) is still wedded to more traditional notions of tangible heritage.
* I would argue that despite this connectedness, important distinctions between tangible, intangible and digital heritage should considered. For example, discussions of authenticity that so frequently permeate the field of digital heritage will not be as significant for ICH, where more of discussion focuses on how to document ritual and traditional practices.
References
Cameron, Fiona, 'The Politics of Heritage Authorship: The Case of Digital Heritage Collections', in New Heritage: New Media and Cultural Heritage, ed. by Yehuda Kalay, Thomas Kvan and Jane Affleck. London: Routledge, 2008, pp. 170-184.
Hennessy, Kate, 'From Intangible Expression to Digital Cultural Heritage', in Michelle L. Stefano, Peter Davis and Gerard Corsane (eds.), Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2012, pp. 33-45.
Huyssen, Andreas, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Lowenthal, David, The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Smith, Laurajane and Emma Waterton, ''The Envy of the World?' Intangible Heritage in England', in Intangible Heritage, ed. by Laurajane Smith and Natsuko Akagawa. London: Routledge, 2011, pp. 289-301.
Stiegler, Bernard, ‘The Discrete Image’, in Echographies of Television: Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002.
UNESCO, Charter on the Preservation of the Digital Heritage, 2003. Accessed 18 February 2013 from http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0013/001331/133171e.pdf
UNESCO, Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, 2003. Accessed 18 February 2013 from http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0013/001325/132540e.pdf
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