Making sense of transience: an anticipatory history

Abstract

In climate change discourse the concept of anticipatory adaptation has emerged to refer to proactive strategies for preparing communities for future change. This paper makes a proposal for what might be called anticipatory history. At designated heritage sites prevailing narratives tend to project long-term conservation indefinitely forward into the future. These narrative formulations fall short when confronted with the impending transformation, or even disappearance, of landscapes and artefacts of cultural heritage – a process that is likely to become increasingly common with the acceleration of environmental change in coastal and other contexts. Might it be possible to experiment with other ways of storying landscape, framing histories around movement rather than stasis, and drawing connections between past dynamism and future process? At the core of this paper is an experimental narration of the history of a Cornish harbour. The narrative presents a reverse chronology of moments gleaned from diverse sources ranging over three centuries, looking to a fractured landscape past to find resources for encountering a future unmaking.