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Given the volume of literature dealing with the ‘politics of the past’, it should come as no surprise that we have chosen to align these com­ ments with the growing recognition that archaeological practice is af­ fected by contemporary political affairs. In particular, our comments have much in common with recent, and strident, debates critiquing the instances in which heritage, archaeology, art and culture have been tac­ tically mobilised to encourage national subjects to act in often harmful ways towards ‘the Other’. Yet while these critical reflections on the po ­ litical uses of archaeology are certainly useful, we, like Gustafsson and Karlsson, take issue with an implicit limitation that lingers within them: that such debates can be confined to particular instances or episodes. By contrast, the bigger issue for us revolves around the significant hesi ­ tancy archaeologists have towards fully acknowledging that their own work is in and of itself political. For Gustafsson and Karlsson, who find themselves operating within an increasingly alarming political situation in Sweden, this reticence can no longer be confined to the purview of the archaeological theoretician; rather, it is an issue that should be ex­ ercising us all. With this, we wholeheartedly agree. The Swedish context documented by Gustafsson and Karlsson is by no means unique. Indeed, it is in many ways influenced by dwindling sup ­ port for multicultural policies evident across much of Europe, including within the Council of Europe but particularly pronounced in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Austria and Britain, and as recent speeches by David Cameron, Angela Merkel and Nicholas Sarkozy attest. In their stead, policymakers have been busily developing a new orthodoxy that

Prior to 7 December 1941, Pearl Harbor was perhaps best known for its associations with the Hawaiian Shark Goddess, its pearl-producing oysters and as a strategically important US naval base. It wa...

The serial property, Australian Convict Sites, was recognised as ‘world heritage’ by UNESCO in 2010 and consists of eleven penal sites connected to Australia’s convict past. One of those eleven sit...

A lot has changed in the year between the penning of this Editorial, which commences Volume 46, and that which was written for Volume 45. One thing, however, has remained the same: a sense of crisi...

As a place of heritage, the Port Arthur Historic Site in Tasmania, Australia, provides a substantial representation of a colonial landscape. Principally associated with Australia’s convict history,...

There was a lot going on as I sat down to write this Editorial at the end of 2019. Heavy rains in the UK were prompting their usual chaos; droughts in parts of Africa had all but halted agricultura...

This systematic review aims to understand the impact of heritage tourism on sustainable community development, including the health and wellbeing of local host communities. The protocol is guided by the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses Protocols (PRISMA-P) guidelines. It highlights the scope and methodology for the systematic review to be conducted. Studies will be included if they: (i) were conducted in English; (ii) were published between January 2000 and December 2018; (iii) used quantitative and/or qualitative methods; and (iv) analysed the impact of heritage tourism on sustainable community development and/or the health of local host communities. Data extraction will be informed by Cochrane Collaboration. The quality of evidence of the studies included will be assessed using validated tools. Findings will be summarised into themes and narrated. The systematic review will establish the impact of heritage tourism on sustainable community development including health and well-being. It also aims provide a theoretical framework which will inform recommendations to improve the life-worlds of local host communities and moderate any tensions between the expanding heritage reach of states and the maintenance of customary and traditional value systems, community governance structures, and associated community development and health benefits.

The final chapter of this book provides a reflection on the multiple, fluid and emergent encounters and engagements with geographies of commemoration of Anzac, emphasizing their malleability to new contexts and contingency on personal histories and experiences. To reinforce this position, we locate our own relationships with Anzac in a set of personal vignettes that reveal not only how our approach pulls together concepts, empirics and methodologies, but also how we, as researchers, are surrounded by the same cultural tropes as our participants. The chapter concludes with a new agenda for geographies of commemoration in a digital world, one that reiterates our recognition of the importance of thinking-with the digital, and which can also be applied beyond the specific case of Anzac or Australia.

In this introductory chapter, we outline three key points of distinction in our examination of geographies of commemoration in a digital world. First, we discuss our characterization of geographies of commemoration and its importance. Second, we outline our approach to tropes of Anzac, and explain how these tropes link to memories, places and experiences of Anzac and how they play out and transform, or not, in and through a digital world. Third, we detail our position on geographies of commemoration in a digital world, proposing that the digital constitutes opportunities to influence how we remember. Our discussion threads along the productive value of the digital, and how it reveals in the dialogues between concepts of commemoration and ethnographic methodologies and how these operationalize through commemorative geographies.

In this chapter, we proffer a new epistemology of memory. We discuss why we think this new epistemology of memory is necessary, and we link this requisite to the complexity of geographies of commemoration. This complexity relates to the in-depth place-based acumen required to comprehend the complicated geopolitical terrain of the sites, places and events of commemoration. Integral to our approach has been an embodied and mindful cognisance of our own positions within/on memory research (including about Anzac), and how we have often felt our research, as much as we have thought about it. We detail a methodology and method geared towards a ‘thinking-with’ approach, one that crosses disciplinary boundaries, and operates between and within layers of memory/place/identity, to thinking-with-body across material and digital spaces.

In this chapter, we examine Anzac tropes and symbols and consider their relations to Anzac events through, across and within a digital world. We explain what it means to ‘think-with’ Anzac and unveil a range of different encounters with it by our research participants. We explore how Anzac conjures feelings of collectivity, connecting people to each other and to the nation. Homing in on its affective and sensory dimensions, we close the chapter with a consideration of Anzac as a commemorative spectacle. We discuss how digital technologies are used to record commemorative events, and how Anzac is encountered through the screen. Both make clear the myriad ways through which a digital world shapes our engagement with, and understandings of, the symbols and stories of Anzac.

The Australian Cultural Fields’ interview data illustrates contemporary Australians’ readiness to present their cultural consumption in terms that are ethical and/or hedonistic and that evince certain senses of belonging to some kind of community. First, we show interviewees liking or disliking heritage in terms of feelings of various kinds: spiritual connection, national belonging, moral obligation. Second, we note the moralisation of sport and the alternative of refusing to allow athleticism to stand for any value higher than itself. Third, we witness some interviewees’ sense of taking their pleasures within a field of more or less authorised tastes. Our fourth section illustrates that when people talk about watching television they are apt to comment on the different ways TV inflects what is ‘real’. Having evoked the interviewee as a choosing customer, relishing personal autonomy, we then return, in our fifth and final section, to a quality of response that is also evident in our first section on ‘heritage’ – a sense of obligation to imagined moral communities. We argue that Reconciliation discourse evokes Australia as a nation engaged in self-transformation, and this discourse has established the terms of a new form of ‘collective or group involvement’ in which liking Indigenous things signifies a re-positioning of self in relation to the nation’s imagined community. Australian Cultural Fields questionnaire data suggests what kinds of contemporary Australians are more likely to be susceptible to this appeal.

Book Review EssaysSustaining the Past into the Future: Some Reflections on Mechanisms to Keep Heritage Meaningful and SustainableTheory and Practice in Heritage and Sustainability: Between Past and Future. Elizabeth Auclair and Graham Fairclough, eds. London: Routledge, 2015.Crowdsourcing our Cultural Heritage, Mia Ridge, ed. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014.Museums, Power, Knowledge: Selected Essays. Tony Bennett. London: Routledge, 2018.Book ReviewsCollecting, Ordering, Governing: Anthropology, Museums, and Liberal Government. Tony Bennett, Fiona Cameron, Nélia Dias, Ben Dibley, Rodney Harrison, Ira Jacknis, and Conal McCarthy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.The Museum of the Senses. Constance Classen. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.New Museum Practice in Asia. John Reeve and Caroline Lang, eds. London: Lund Humphries, 2018.

In a bid to join recent efforts to develop innovative approaches to heritage, this article argues that adopting a collaborative mode of inquiry is a useful way of coming to terms with the plurality...

This article intervenes in the debate about whether and how the ‘Frontier Wars’ should be represented in Australia’s military heritage. If they were to be represented, those who resisted British colonial occupation would figure as Aboriginal patriots in a renovated heritage of Australian service to country. We point out, however, that certain historical actors have been, so far (and perhaps forever), excluded from such a revised Indigenous military heritage: those Aboriginal peoples who ‘served’ in the Native Mounted Police. While the archival record is patchy, scholarship tells us that, in their pacification of frontiers, the Native Mounted Police killed many Aboriginal peoples. Interrogating the meaning of war heritage in Australia, we discuss the politics of forgetting against the obligations of historiography to collective memory and ask: must scholarship always interrogate identity-sustaining myth, in service to the truth? To explore this question, we adopt Sharon Macdonald’s concept of ‘difficult heritage’.

This article presents a field analysis of heritage tastes and patterns of engagements in Australia. Using multiple correspondence analysis, it examines a dimension of data collected as part of the 2014–2015 national survey on Australian cultural practices. The data are positioned against the recently published Australian Heritage Strategy, released in 2015, which marks out heritage as a cultural orientation of relevance ‘for all Australians’ (12), thereby alluding to a field that might be defined by openness and far-ranging levels of cultural engagement. The social spaces of heritage captured by the Australian Cultural Fields survey reveal an alternative picture, however, and suggest that there are significant social divisions regarding recognition of, taste for and participation in heritage within the Australian context.

This paper explores the nexus of historical geography and heritage studies, using the case study of the Sovereign Hill outdoor museum in Ballarat, Australia. It reports on the application of more-than-representational thinking to spaces of heritage, and advances the argument that Sovereign Hill can be usefully understood as a semiotic landscape animated by the making, knowing and re-creation of the past, replete with both designed and incidental affective resonances and emotional affordances. The research upon which the paper is based aimed to capture the essences of encounters, engagements and moments of emergent meaning within a site that speaks to both an historic and newly made heritage. Key to this exploration were the energies, realities and responses of actual bodies as they moved around and interpreted the various ways in which Sovereign Hill presents the past to its visiting audiences. Methodologically, the paper draws from a series of qualitative visitor interviews gathered in 2014.

This photo essay explores intimations of Nepal’s heritage – tangible, intangible and ‘living’ – with a focus on the earthquake-ravaged city of Kathmandu. Linking heritage with wider observations ab...

In the fields with which we are most familiar (archaeology and heritage studies), agitations for Indigenous land rights and the emergence of an interest in environmentalism are often traced, togeth...

Remembrance of war and conflict exposes the intricate interweaving of cultural memory and identity. Nations commemorate war to link narratives of the past with the present. This linking creates shared national narratives that temporally reinforce identities across the geography of the nation and among diverse citizenry. In this paper, the authors turn their attention towards the experiential and place-based concerns of the politics of memory within the context of war. It is argued that through attentiveness to individual experience we can better understand how cultural memory is enveloped into constructions of identity and critique such constructions alongside official narratives.

For centuries, if not millennia, the north–south valley systems of Nepal’s Himalayas have acted as a capillary network for communication, exchange, veneration, discriminating cultural difference an...

The terms memory, place and identity exemplify the core concerns of geographical inquiry – focusing on linkages between people, place, and culture. In this review, we hone in on the intersections between these three terms in the context of the remembrance of war and conflict. We seek to highlight how memory informs the construction and maintenance of identities (personal, national, and supranational) post-conflict and post-war, and how these identities are drawn upon and articulated through place. In doing so, we also explore how investigations of and in memory benefit from methodologies that engage with more-than-human and more-than-representational approaches. We take this stance because memory is a powerful force invoking experience, emotion, and an awakening of the senses. Its affective capacity moves beyond stoic representations of memory in stone and marble, for example; it can be smelt, touched, felt, imagined, tasted, and heard. Any one of these sensations has the agency to transport us not only to different times but to different places. With this in mind, we use this review to investigate how memory (re)produces and maintains the identity of places, communities, and nations. Understanding the links between memory, identity, and place also leads to a concomitant process of comprehending the influence of a politics of memory in the (re)production of both places and identities.

On the 22 January 2016, Steve Watson, Professor of Cultural Heritage at York St. John University, passed away suddenly and unexpectedly at the age of 57. He was a remarkably clever man. He attained...

This photo essay explores the notion of cultural resiliency in the Nepali Himalayas, and carries a geographic focus that is centred on the village of Langtang. Our interest in capturing this area photographically emerges from several recent fieldwork excursions to Nepal and associated experiences of trekking through two distinct areas: the Langtang Valley and the Annapurna Conservation Area. During our visits to each area, we were struck by local efforts to secure a future in a rapidly changing environment. In the Annapurnas, an overarching story of encroaching development emerges, which has destabilised the fragile balance between conservation and development. In Langtang, by contrast, there is a more positive testimony of nearly half a century of cultural compromises necessary for ecological security (e.g., regulation of medicinal plant harvesting), entailing cultural adaptations into a more diverse range of vocational enterprises (like a community cheese-making factory, tourism and so forth). Our purpose in this essay is to engage with, and illustrate, some of the differences between the two.