ANÁLISIS COMPARATIVO DE LAS CONDICIONES DE LOS POZOS

Landscape is one of the key concepts in cultural geography but its status has fluctuated as

particular conceptual framings have come to prominence and then been repudiated as inadequate or obfuscatory. Although particular framings are important in cultural geography, when

landscape (and other concepts) become(s) a matter of policy, how those concepts are defined becomes crucial to deciding where and how boundaries are drawn, and thus the control of definition becomes a resource in the process of exerting power in landscape controversies. This chapter has illustrated the shifts in conceptualisation of landscape from being seen as something that is external to people and which provides an objective material record of those who have lived in it, to seeing landscape as a product of our cultural imagination to be understood discursively and interpretatively and which shifted the focus to how our ways of looking at the world are freighted with particular values, attitudes and ideologies. Both these approaches are useful for understanding the controversies, for instance, it is important to map the extent of bach settlements and understand the construction techniques used, as well as exploring the discursive constructions surrounding baches and cribs and how these influence people’s perception of baches, but they are arguably not sufficient for understanding why people develop the depth of attachment for particular landscapes, or why they dislike certain aspects of a landscape so intensely. Instead, what is needed is an approach to understanding landscape as ‘something we live in and through’ (Rose and Wylie 2011) and that entails a mode of engagement that ‘shuttles between’ (Wylie 2011) the objective facts of a landscape and the subjective perception of it, with an always lively nature and culture that is continually in process. This reconceptualization shifts the emphasis from landscape as a noun that is out there, inert and covered over with human meaning to instead focus on the way we are immersed in landscape that is experienced and sensed with the whole body, and explore how everyday practices of landscaping knit together

complex assemblages of heterogeneous others. This entails not only animating the material properties of landscape, for instance, tracing the processes of corrosion and rot as well as allowing for the agency of nonhumans, but also exploring how weather and climate, history, economy and culture unfold in particular landscapes, influenced by all manner things beyond that particular landscape.

Part of my thesis is that it is people’s embodied multi-sensory engagement with particular landscapes that allows certain attachments and dislikes to develop but these are always in conjunction with past experiences, particularly of staying in baches themselves, which are typically especially memorable experiences because they conjoin particularly affective spaces in and surrounding the bach with a distinctive sociality of extended families and friends, and the intimate relations with dramatic coastal landscapes that have enormously variable weather. Thus thinking about landscapes in these terms helps us to conceptualise why certain landscapes might start to be regarded as heritage by those particularly familiar with them, but whether they are officially designated as heritage is a complex question that is the subject of Chapter 3.

‘We conjure pasts vanished, changed and present’:

heritage and authenticity

Heritage is about more than visitors, audience and consumption. It is about more than access to economic resources. It is about people, collectivity and individuals, and about their sense of inheritance from the past and the uses to

which this sense of inheritance is put. It is about the possibilities that result from the deployment of the past (Robertson 2012a: 1).

3.1

Introduction

The first three sections of this chapter explore what heritage is considered to be, whose heritage is typically recognised, and the supposed distinction between natural and cultural heritage. It highlights a shift in thinking about heritage away from assuming that heritage is an old thing that should self-evidently be protected, towards a focus on heritage as a process, and which explores the practices involved in classifying heritage. The following three sections focus on one of the key attributes of heritage; its authenticity, and highlights the slipperiness of the term, but also proposes a way of understanding that ambiguity.

Heritage is an old word derived from the idea that property may be inherited from one’s parents and ancestors, but more recently it has been invested with so many different connotations that it may be in danger of losing all meaning, although this is not the sense one gets from dictionary definitions. For instance, The Chambers Dictionary suggests that heritage can be ‘anything

transmitted from ancestors or past ages especially historical buildings and the natural environment’ (O'Neill 2011: 714 original emphasis). In a similar vein, the New Oxford Dictionary expands the definition to include ‘valued objects and qualities such as historic buildings, unspoilt countryside and cultural traditions that have been passed down from previous generations’, but also points out that ‘heritage’ is also used as modifier ‘denoting or relating to things of special architectural, historical, or natural value that are protected and preserved for the nation’ (Pearsell 1998: 858). Three points are particularly worth noting about these definitions. The first point to note is that ‘anything’ from the past can be considered as heritage, and this promiscuity has fostered the attention of numerous disciplines, which have struggled to define what heritage is, and argued whether heritage is something which inherently exists in objects and can be identified by the appropriate experts, or should be conceptualised as a process of recognition, whose practices and

14 _{From the poem ‘Huinga September’ by Charles Brasch (1974) Home Ground. Posthumously edited by Alan Roddick,} Christchurch: The Caxton Press.

performances do explicit work. This leads to the second point; when particular things are officially recognised and preserved for the nation a question arises as to ‘whose’ heritage it is that’s recognised and preserved. Heritage protection has been widely criticised for perpetuating elite built landscapes and preserving supposedly untouched natural landscapes, but recent work, particularly in geography, has focused on how popular, vernacular and mundane expressions of heritage attachment, which can be characterised as heritage from below, are continually emergent. The third point questions the straightforward assumption that natural and cultural heritage are readily distinguishable, especially when the heritage of landscapes is under scrutiny.