Revitalising place-based commercial heritage: A Cultural Political Economy approach to the renaissance of lambic beers in Belgium

Arie Stoffelen

doi:10.1080/13527258.2020.1862275

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper studies the intricacies related to the revitalisation of commercial products that have recently been assigned with cultural heritage values in the context of post-Fordist consumption. Underpinned by a conceptual lens that combines reflections on heritage dissonance and Cultural Political Economy (CPE), the paper describes a qualitative study of lambic beers in Belgium. After being almost wiped out by the 1990s, lambic brewing has made a spectacular recovery due to a combination of global economic drivers and local sector-wide collaboration. However, the addition of cultural heritage values to the commercial product, which fuelled the sector’s economic regeneration, brought along challenges now there is less concern about the sector’s immediate survival. Alongside governance complexities, different interpretations among stakeholders of what constitutes ‘tradition’ have complicated defining the boundaries between collective and individual interests, which runs parallel with identifying where cultural values stop and economic values begin. Heritage dissonance, in this case, centres around struggles of finding a collective semiotic response to safeguard the sector’s agency in the context of its post-Fordist embedding, including prevailing ‘craft’ cultural/economic imaginaries. Concluding, the application of CPE to the lambic beer study reflects the framework’s value for understanding dissonant heritage values.

Highlights

There is widespread awareness that the values people, organisations and companies assign to heritage objects, practices and symbols are diverse and often contentious
This paper studies the intricacies related to the revitalisation of commer cial products that have recently been assigned with cultural heritage values in the context of post-Fordist consumption
This paper zooms in on the intricacies related to the revitalisation of commercial products that have recently been assigned with cultural heritage values in the context of post-Fordist consump tion

Summary

Introduction

There is widespread awareness that the values people, organisations and companies assign to heritage objects, practices and symbols are diverse and often contentious. Cultural heritage is simultaneously employed in many places for urban and rural (re)development (Al Rabady 2013; De Cesari and Dimova 2019; Wang and Aoki 2019; Hayes 2020), symbolic consump tion and lifestyle creation (Featherstone 1990) and economic accumulation (Holt 2006). While heritage tourism could lead to civic pride and local awareness of heritage values, it remains a commercial sector in which achieving both profit generation and heritage conservation from a social and cultural perspective is a constant balancing act (Orbasli and Woodward 2009). Cultural heritage preservation and urban regeneration may go hand in hand, yet often lead to one-dimensional heritage inter pretations favouring capital accumulation (Orbasli and Woodward 2009; Firth 2011; De Cesari and Dimova 2019)

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Results

Conclusion