Staging the Practices of Heritage

Abstract

Raphael SAMUEL begins the first volume of Theatres of Memory by sketching a contextual approach to the study of memory and history. He argues that memory, far from being a passive image bank of the past, is an active shaping force in the construction of people's lives and contingent upon historical conditions. As a dynamic force memory is dialectically related to history, itself inherently revision ist. History splinters what may have been presented as a whole and integrates what may have been divergent. Samuel views memory as an elemental object of history that is situated in the tension between integrating and displacing forces of history. He then organizes a series of essays concerned with history as an organic form of knowledge, and one whose sources go beyond real-life experience to draw from memory and myth, fantasy and desire, and the timeless past of tradition. This is a wide-ranging book concerned with how objects of history are being reinterpreted due to changes in the environment, innovations in the technologies of retrieval, and democratizations in the production and dissemination of knowl edge. (xi) Individual sections cover the reuse and reinterpretation of past building materials and decorations, what Samuel terms retrochic; resurrection of the past through heritage sites; heritage as a pedagogy and its relationship to academic history; photography and the visualization of history; and the dramatic presentation of history through cinema and theatre. Throughout his examination of profuse examples of material culture Samuel addresses possibilities for the study of history to move beyond the limitations of presupposing the existence of an objectively verifiable body of knowledge. Such a move, he proposes, must recognize that the historian's gaze fabricates contexts in the course of making order from chaos. In this process historians are faced with