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Introduction

For many years now, a number of scholars have been assessing the role of communities within the field of heritage studies. This is an area that is also gathering strong political backing, evidenced by the foregrounding of the term in recent international policy, such as the independent review prepared for the IUCN World Heritage Programme, titled IUCN, World Heritage and Evaluation Processes Related to Communities and Rights (Larsen 2012), as well as that developing at the national level, such as the Australian Heritage Strategy consultation. It is a term that is equally visible within broader public policy, too, taking perhaps its most obvious form in recent community cohesion debates occurring in the United Kingdom, which revolve around issues of citizenship and national values. The relationship between heritage and community is, therefore, one that has significant currency at many different levels: conceptually, in terms of heritage management practices, and, more broadly, as something that is implicitly referenced in debates about identity and cultural difference. The latter in this list may at first appear to push the chapter beyond the scope of traditional heritage management. Yet, I will argue, it is a focus of interest that nonetheless has important consequences for any consideration of ethics, especially those that take up a social justice approach. To better understand this, the chapter will reflect upon the work of Nancy Fraser and her ‘politics of recognition’, which will be drawn upon as a framing device for illustrating that if dominant patterns of cultural value (both institutional and societal) prevent some communities from participating on a par, as peers, with others in social life, we can speak of misrecognition. Holding this in mind thus necessitates structuring the chapter around three key agendas: (1) establishing workable definitions of ‘community’, (2) examining ethically sound practices and methods of community engagement within the field of heritage studies, and (3) exploring the politics bound up with the uses ‘heritage’ and ‘community’ are put to in wider social life, particularly in terms of marginalisation. Across the back of all three, then, will be a broader consideration of the operationalisation of the term ‘community’.

Community Defined

Like heritage, the concept of community is one that has been with us for some time. And just as heritage has a tendency to settle into the role of something that is great, good, objectified and reified (Crouch 2010), so too does community tend to speak of something convivial, gentle and idealised (see Williams 1976; Bauman 2001). For both terms, these tendencies are a product of their history. Importantly, these have been pervasive histories, ones that have aided the import of caricatures of both terms into the public policy process and popular currency, where there also exists an implied and positive relationship between the two. This echoes an observation made by Elizabeth Crooke (2010), who points out that definitions of one frequently refer implicitly to the other, so much so that while the two terms are often only loosely or vaguely defined as individual concepts (we know what they mean, or so the assumption goes), they seemingly draw conceptual strength from each other and together they seem untouchable. Indeed, as Crooke (2010: 17) goes on to argue, a community ‘is defined and justified because of its heritage and that heritage is fostered and sustained by the creation of community’. Their relationship, it would seem, is both recursive and self-fulfilling.

While readers will undoubtedly be familiar with the historical emergence of the term ‘heritage’, they may be less so with that of ‘community’, which is a concept that began life somewhere other than in the field of heritage studies. For this broader history, we can trace the term back to sociological literature emerging at the turn of the last century which specifically explored rural towns and villages (see Warren 1956; Fox 1968). This rurality was characteristic of much of the work developing at the time, which also took community to mean a self-contained collection of people living within a specific geographic area or particular place, sharing in common ways of life. Nestled here were notions of tradition or that of a ‘golden age’, with appeals made to an idealisation of place (see Dicks 2000: 51). While these more traditional approaches to the term have since received sustained criticism in academic literature, they continue to linger in a policy sense where notions of community as convivial, undifferentiated and homogenous, inevitably romanticised, existing ‘back in time’ or within the strict parameters of social hierarchy, remain a stubborn assumption (Smith and Waterton 2009). This reification, as Pyburn (2011: 33) points out, brings with it an accompanying definition of the roles and terms those communities must adopt ‘in order to have a voice in the management of heritage’. But pushing aside this policy emphasis for the time being, it should come as no surprise that the term—like ‘identity’ and ‘culture’—exists as one of perennial interest, coming into dialogue with many scholars in all manner of disciplines. Indeed, by the midpoint of the twentieth century, it was widely acknowledged to be ‘one of the most ambiguous words in sociological literature’ (Smith 1940; see also Williams 1976). For some it had become a ‘fantasy’ (Clarke 2005, cited in Neal and Walters 2008: 280), a ‘weasel word’ (MacGregor 2001: 188), something tied up with so many different ways of thinking that it had come to mean virtually nothing at all (Aas et al. 2005: 30; Kumar 2005). Despite this discomfort, it remained a central interest, triggering the emergence of several key texts, many of which will be familiar to scholars working within the fields of archaeology and heritage studies. These include Colin Bell and Howard Newby’s (1971) Community Studies; Benedict Anderson’s (1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism; Anthony Cohen’s (1985) The Symbolic Construction of Community; Graham Crow and Graham Allen’s (1994) Community Life: An Introduction to Local Social Relations; Paul Hoggett’s (1997) Contested Communities: Experiences, Struggles, Policies; Robert Putnam’s (2000) Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community; and Zygmunt Bauman’s (2001) Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World.

As the literature continued to develop, thinner social relationships were acknowledged and the concept broadened beyond something confined to geography or social groupings to those that might exist as subgroups (Watson and Waterton 2011). Such studies focused on particular cultural groups that were seen to share certain sets of values or identities, like the business community, the LGBT community, the golf community, the deaf community and so forth. As before, these were essentialised groups, simplified and defined around apparently cohesive and power-neutral gatherings of people, but, at least, they broke beyond the traditional coupling of community with rural geographies. As this web of communities continued to emerge, so too did more critical accounts, particularly those associated with a range of marginalised and disenfranchised groups agitating for the right to also define and use the term. Theirs was an agenda primarily developing out of counter-colonial, post-conflict and non-Western contexts, in which marginalised groups sought to actively and politically respond to a range of injustices. Most commonly associated with this challenge were Indigenous projects for self-determination and control emerging within Australia, New Zealand, Canada and America (see Greer et al. 2002; Ronayne 2008). These, to borrow from Crooke (2010), were ‘communities of action’ dissatisfied with prevailing and denigrating conceptualisations, built in the image of a cosy and nostalgic social group. In response, scholars were forced to reject past definitions of ‘community’, and the concept itself came to be reworked as contested, nuanced and, ultimately, replete with the workings of power. This new level of complexity required us to think as much about difference as we do unity, likewise ‘conflict and harmony, selfishness and mutuality, separateness and wholeness, discomfort and comfort’, to borrow from Burkett (2001: 242).

More recently still, an additional layer of complexity has been added to the mix which draws in the elective communities developing online. All around us now, traditional areas of social life are being amended with the prefix ‘e’, such that we now have access to e-mail, e-commerce, e-learning, e-culture and, importantly, e-communities. Each year the statistics go up, so much so that by December 2011 32.7 % of the world’s population had access to—and knowledgeable capabilities with—the Internet.Footnote 1 In geographical terms, the numbers become more impressive, with five regions—North America (with 78.6 % of the population able to access and use the Internet), Oceania/Australasia (67.5 %), Europe (61.3 %), Latin America (39.5 %) and the Middle East (35.6 %)—enjoying above average Internet usage.Footnote 2 Indeed, with each year that passes, the Internet is pulled more and more into play with a fuller range of user groups and interests. Perhaps the most cited example of literature that conceptualises life online as a form of community formation comes from Howard Rheingold’s (1993) somewhat outdated concept of the virtual community. Rheingold’s evocative exploration provided an enduring image of an unregulated, open and widely available social space in which anything goes. This democratic utopia, where there are few impediments and many opportunities, was seen as free from the state-sanctioned narratives and agendas animating real life. Here, a generic and simplified understanding of ‘community’ came to dominate, which offered, as Willson (1997: 145) has argued, ‘the answer to the theorist’s search for a less exclusionary and repressive experience of community’. This tendency towards life online took up a distinctly romantic feel, where cyberspace became something almost mythical, providing significant leverage for any form of political, social or cultural action. It was, in many ways, imagined as the quintessential ‘level playing field’ (Markham 1998: 155).

Like those concepts of community that went before it, however, Rheingold’s virtual community has since come under scrutiny. Indeed, a number of scholars have responded with a reminder of the importance of acknowledging that narratives of inequality are carried forwards into cyberspace, which has a user group dominated not only by Western countries but a demography characterised by white, male and middle-class people (Nakamura 2000: 713). Indeed, those scholars go on to point out that cyberspace reflects the divisions and asymmetries of the ‘real’ world in terms of gender, sex, religion, age, class and ethnicity (Nakamura 2000; Bell 2001; Dicks 2003; McIver 2004; Brown 2007). Because of this, some scholars have characterised the Internet in decidedly negative terms, in which its endless freedom is reimagined as an inauthentic and totalising alternate reality. For these scholars, it is greeted with suspicion and distrust, and the malleability of life online becomes decidedly undemocratic. The same qualities that Rheingold took to be so positive conjure up a qualitatively different human experience, in which the endless possibilities for identities and narratives constructed online provide a potentially deceitful experience (Quan-Haase et al. 2002). Panic around these possibilities was later harnessed to wider concerns that the Internet had become an unregulated place for pornography, cyber-violence, fraud and cybersex (Benwell and Stokoe 2006: 244).

What we are left with today, then, is an understanding of community that may be place based, face-to-face based or non-face-to-face based, yet all may engender attentive and active senses of engagement. The nomenclature for these types of engagement will, of course, differ along the way. What will unite them, however, is their ability to allow individuals to engage not only with strangers but also cement and develop relationships with people who may already be a part of the same extended social network. Moreover, individuals can now be acknowledged as participating in a community even if they live and work in different places and time zones. No matter how it happens—whether online or in ‘real’ life—communities, to rehearse Neal and Walters (2008: 280), will be ‘highly contested and heterogeneous site[s] containing a range of socio-economic tensions, needs, socio-cultural exclusions and contradictions’. They will be fashioned by social and cultural experiences and political aspirations and will draw together a range of people. This is a conceptualisation that is inherently fragile and dissonant, both necessary characteristics because of their ability to draw attention to the fact that communities are continually re/constructed both consensually and contentiously. Moreover, they are saturated with complex relations of power, not all of which are distributed uniformly within any given group. As a concept, then, it is constituted and negotiated by and within, which means, as Thrift (2005: 139) points out, that not everything can be rosy all of the time, nor, as he goes on to argue, does it have to mean ‘the same thing as liking others’. The point here is that while ‘community’ may be warm and friendly, it is also something we stumble into as a means of avoiding loneliness and inactivity, or resisting marginalisation, and is thus vulnerable, contingent, changing and contested (Neal and Walters 2008: 291; see also Bauman 2001; Smith and Waterton 2009).

However it is defined, ‘community’ is a concept no longer managed at the nexus of face-to-face encounters and has become a ‘more than place’ notion existing symbolically or imaginatively beyond the parameters of geography or proximity (Neal and Walters 2008: 282; see also Anderson 1983). The grander gestures of human togetherness bounded by locality have thus been replaced by routine performances of conviviality, shared interests, constructions of otherness, structures of feeling and/or everyday labours and mundane experiences. This is an observation that we, as heritage scholars, need to come to grips with, as the alternative is to equate the term with less than satisfactory conceptualisations of tradition, timelessness and nostalgia, all of which bring with them an enduring pattern of exclusion (see Matthews 2009).

Research as a Form of Engagement

What, then, does all this mean for heritage studies? To answer this question, I want to quickly revert back to the point around which this chapter pivots, which is the idea that the intersection of heritage practice and community engagements ought to be ethical. This is a theme I have written about elsewhere with Laurajane Smith (see Smith and Waterton 2009; Waterton and Smith 2010), where we have sought to place our thoughts amongst provocative moves within the academy aimed at rethinking archaeological and heritage management practices. It seems to me that such moves spring from a general discomfort with what I see as a lack of critical debate around ‘community engagement’, which in turn bleeds into a longer standing dissatisfaction with the way communities are conceived of within the sector. With this in mind, I have used the above (albeit brief) foray into the historical constructions of community as a means to highlight that the ways in which we think about the term have not always been useful or conducive to participation in, and empowerment through, research. More importantly, the more nuanced position that has been developing steadily within the scholarly literature does not seem to play out as clearly within associated policy and practice, where one-dimensional constructions of ‘community’ continue to dominate. This is a point reinforced by Pyburn (2011: 29), who likewise remarks upon the lacklustre theorisation of community we are often asked to work with:

Here, I problematise the concept of community on three fronts: (1) any individual belongs to multiple communities; (2) community archaeology frequently reifies imaginary communities, which have been created by the archaeologists; and (3) community archaeology needs to consider not only descendent and local communities, but also those communities with political and economic power.

While Pyburn is talking specifically about archaeological practice, the broader point remains that drawing upon anything less than a critical understanding of community will lead to exploitative practice. This, I would argue, is the case whether we are thinking about the more obviously political engagements invoked by Indigenous community groups in their struggles over control and ownership, where our work is admittedly more nuanced and politically minded, or the more mundane engagements led by those seeking to have a stake in the understanding and interpretation of a local heritage (see Smith and Waterton 2009).

There are, to my mind, two ways to tackle this problem: target examples that illustrate a frustratingly exploitative engagement with community groups or attend to those spaces where a more ethically sound practice can be found. In this chapter, I have opted to go with the latter and the thoughts I have put together below draw from a number of influential sources. To begin, I want to acknowledge the influential voice of Linda Tuhiwai Smith and her volume, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (1999), which was undoubtedly at the forefront of literature dealing with intersections between ethics and research methods (see also Nicholls 2009). I have also situated the chapter alongside a handful of community engagement projects that have emerged as positive examples within the field of archaeology and heritage management. Here, I am referring to long-standing projects like the Community Archaeology Project Quseir, Egypt (CAPQ), work by Shelley Greer (2010) and Annie Clarke (2002; see also Clarke and Faulkner 2005), both in areas of Northern Australia, and more recent projects such as those commenced by K. Anne Pyburn in Central Asia (2007; but see also the work by Gemma Tully 2007). The lessons emerging from these projects have been bolstered here with more general commentary offered by Yvonne Marshall (2002) and Carol McDavid’s (2003, 2004) work, for example, to which I have also added those thoughts emerging from disciplines outside of archaeology and heritage, such as Ruth Nicholls’ reflections on critical reflexive method. The specifics of each project will not be covered here; rather, I offer a general impression of how these projects have unfolded through the lenses of recognition, particularly their attempts to dislodge the interpretive authority of disciplinary voices in favour of granting alternative voices greater parity in the process (Rountree 2007: 14).

A key lesson that emerges out of the literature listed above is that community engagement practices need to be participatory, be non-extractive and ‘give back’ (Askins 2009; see also Koster et al. 2012: 200). Implicitly invoked here is the instruction to think seriously about the risks of becoming exploitative; in other words, as Koster et al. (2012: 200) argue, we can no longer afford to see communities as passive data sources that can be mined ‘to serve the researcher’s information needs’. A shift is needed, then, from thinking about conducting research for or about communities towards conducting research with and from communities. This means first asking people if they feel they belong to the community in question: how they fit, avoid or otherwise participate in its workings and how they understand its parameters (Pyburn 2011: 34). It also means simultaneously thinking beyond a singular ‘community’ and taking into account a fuller range of groupings that exist within the broader network or assemblage. These, as Pyburn (2011) points out, could include government departments, schools, the military, collectors, tourism bodies, descendent communities, religious groups, academic interests and so forth, all of which are layered with their own relations of power and structures of feeling. Questions then need to be asked about the sorts of research that ought to be undertaken and with which goals in mind. Indeed, a significant source of friction in community engagement practices occurs when these initial questions are ignored, as it is here that heritage professionals find themselves proposing projects that are ‘designed to solve problems that do not make sense to the people they affect with strategies that depend on outside investment and pressure’ (Pyburn 2011: 39). All too often, as Pyburn (2011: 39) goes on to point out, in these circumstances, we find ourselves trying to ‘help’ a community (often one that is not really a community at all) by inviting them to participate in something that they are not particularly interested in or do not understand. The important shift that sits at the heart of these illustrations, then, is one that moves the field away from thinking about communities (and their lives, knowledge, issues, interests, etc.) as ‘subjects’ towards one that is foregrounded in thinking about accountability, building trust and, ultimately, striving for relevancy (see Ronayne 2007). Pushed a little further, as Ronayne (2007, 2008) argues, this means allowing our skills and resources to be put to use in ways that we may not always anticipate. Here, an emancipatory current can be detected, one that allows for a sense of empowerment and active engagement. This, however, will only be achievable if our handle on control is ceded away from researchers and handed over to participants, a move that needs to take place as part of a process that does not allow the former to trump the latter by default, as is often the case today (see Meskell 2007: 443). For Koster et al. (2012), this means broadening the project of decolonisation such that we seek also to decolonise the way communities are seen and understood, as well as decolonising how expertise, itself, is portrayed and privileged.

What I am arguing for here is a research process that contests and pushes against those tidy ascriptions of ‘community’ found in policy and popular parlance, replete with traditions, beliefs and shared identities, so as to reveal, to borrow from Alexander et al. (2007: 788):

…the messier contours and intersections of individuals and groups at the level of everyday life. Rather than being an abstract category, ‘community’ is lived through embedded networks of individual, family and group histories, trajectories and experiences that belie dominant representations and discourses.

Ruth Nicholls, in her 2009 article in the International Journal of Social Research Methodology, outlines perhaps most explicitly what she sees as emancipatory and critical research practice, which she hinges around concepts of empowerment, relationality and reflexivity. Hers is a practice inspired by feminist, post-structuralist and Indigenous methodologies, through which she seeks to foreground a more nuanced conceptualisation of ‘community’, along with all the complexities that such a collective entails. Key here are notions of conduct and trust, both of which are achieved only when the researcher risks moving out of a position of knowledge and control into what Nicholls terms ‘a liminal, in-between space’ (2009: 121). In these spaces, the fragile relationship between ‘the researcher’ and ‘the researched’ is teased apart and grafted together again in new ways, guided by a multilayered reflexivity (Nicholls 2009). First in Nicholls’ approach is a process of self-reflexivity, during which the researcher seeks to explicitly identify and name any hidden assumptions nestled not only within the project’s methodology and conceptualisation but in the wider research framework that constitutes their employment. Nicholls then compels researchers to reflect upon their ability to identify themselves and collaborate with others: this means considering not only the interrelations between people but so too those relationships between ‘institutional, geopolitical and material aspects of their positionality’ (Nicholls 2009: 122). Finally, Nicholls (2009:123) suggests that those involved in community engagement projects ought also to think hard about collective reflexivity, by which she means thinking about:

…how the collaboration determine[s] the frames of inquiry. It also asks what were the terms of participation, who participated or did not…and what effects did this have on the outcome of social change and practical knowing for the community participants.

Evident here are similar leanings towards broader social engagements intimated by Pyburn, cited earlier, and the work by Yannis Hamilakis (2007:15), who argues that ‘the ethical and socio-political arenas should not be treated as separate’. The pivot point, it seems to me, is attaining that level of reflexivity that allows a project of engagement to move beyond participation and become one that entails an openness towards learning about difference, creating new spaces for understanding and negotiating mutually accountable ways of thinking about the past in the present. Such an approach will take the discipline of archaeology and field of heritage studies far beyond the sorts of ethical arrangements cited in various codes of ethics and standards associated with their practice. This is not to suggest, as Ronayne (2008) makes clear, that such codes require abandonment—that, too, would lead to potentially exploitative relationships. Rather, the point is that these broader instruments of ethical practice need also to reference the personal, and here I mean acknowledge what people—those that exist in attachment to our notions of ‘community’—think, feel, want and need.

Politicising Community Engagement

Drawing from a position similar to that advocated above, Christopher Matthews’ (2009:82) provocation in a review article published in the Public Historian in 2009 made the following observation:

Truly surprising is that issues of divergent values over the marketing of artifacts or the proper uses of the past constitute the very subject of this book [Archaeological Ethics]. The fact that these issues are constructed such that they may be considered as solely archaeological problems, rather than issues in larger social, cultural, and ideological fields of ethics, speaks to a narrow-minded, self-interested stance that at least in some quarters, if not in the majority, defines contemporary archaeologists.

Though Matthews (2009: 81) is referring to quite specific contexts such as looting, the commodification of the past and a questioning of what he sees as the ‘immutable archaeological record’, he, along with Pyburn, Nicholls and Hamilakis, amongst others, draws attention towards the necessity for considering ethical engagements in a much broader context: social life. To do otherwise, to persevere with unreflexive and under-theorised notions of not only what ‘research engagement’ is but ‘community’ too runs the risk of allowing peoples’ lives to be governed, exploited and colonised by the research process. Nowhere is this issue made more strikingly clear than in the policy arena, where notions of community tend to oscillate between two distinct and limiting conceptualisations: those that circulate with convivial and overwhelmingly positive underpinnings and those that construct the notion around places of exclusion, disfunction and disappointment. As scholars attempt to engage more and more with the notion of ‘community’, it seems timely that further considerations into how those studies lend themselves to thinking through wider problems and concerns need be implemented. Here, I counterbalance the positive reflections outlined above with a more cautionary seam. This is because the potential for community engagements cannot fully be realised if we continue to work with the limited notions of community that seem to animate policy and practice. Indeed, I am not as yet convinced that community-based heritage research can be as empowering as it might at first seem. This is due to the processes of misrecognition I identified at the outset of this chapter, which simultaneously draw attention to the relations of power mediating both our understanding of ‘community’ and our approaches to heritage and its management, which, I suggested, are parity impeding. If, for example, we accept Nancy Fraser’s (1999, 2000) treatment of recognition as a question of social status, then sustained attempts within heritage studies are required that take account of the context and consequence of alternative claims for participation. In the context of this chapter, with its focus upon the ethics of community engagement, what we are being asked to examine, then, are the parameters within which a parity of participation for a fuller range of communities is being allowed for—especially when we remember that a narrow collection of cultural norms and symbols, which represent a particular social class within society, are already embedded within heritage management processes. As Fraser’s model makes clear, our ethical obligation at this point—the point at which supposedly discrete research projects spill across broader social life—is to explore exactly what is at stake when communities are denied the opportunity to interact as full partners, particularly with those communities of expertise that have traditionally enjoyed a position of dominance. This denial is a consequence not only of ‘institutionalised patterns of cultural value that constitute one as comparatively unworthy of respect of esteem’ but of the very ways in which we have traditionally conceptualised communities in the first place (Fraser 1999: 35, emphasis in original). Indeed, as Matthews makes clear above, this has seen communities of expertise operating from a position of relative worth over other communities of interest, both in terms of their aspirations and identities. Importantly, these processes of misrecognition continue to be sustained through administrative codes and institutionalised patterns of heritage management, which sees heritage as something that is best attended to—and understood—by experts.

It is in this vein that the chapter takes up an explicitly political mantel and attempts to feed into vigorous debates ongoing within a wider cultural life, where talk has focused upon systemic issues preventing the development of a more rounded and dialogically sound research enterprise. Here, we are forced to ask what is it about culture and heritage—and the way we perceive it—that makes it a predominantly white, middle-class exercise? The crux of this issue draws us to wider notions of power, in which attention is placed on the particular ‘rules of the game’ (Richardson 2007: 31) that limit opportunities for groups to influence and engage with heritage and the management process. A great deal of work still needs to be done. Foremost, we need to find ways of embedding genuine aspirations for a community-based practice within the current processes of management. This will be an uneasy and uncomfortable project, as to do so we need to address the key question of how we approach those groups, communities and public formations that are different from ourselves. How do we disarm the self-referential structural arrangements that allow us to summarily dismiss some community formations over others? How do we negotiate the asymmetrical and recursive power relations that impede a parity of participation? These are big questions. And while we are beginning to understand better the nature of difference, self-conscious efforts still need to be made if we are to promote and produce a richer form of community life within the field of heritage studies.

Added to this are the newer spaces provided by the Internet, which complicate further an already complex situation by providing different architectures of space capable of sustaining both the weak and strong ties that cut across many offline community engagements (Wellman and Gulia 1999: 188). The problem to date, however, is that groups forming online are comprised of the same sorts of people that already dominate heritage and cultural practices in ‘real’ life. These public formations predominantly emerge from the professional class of archaeologists, heritage managers and museum professionals, which are themselves most often defined along the social and ethnic lines of the white middle classes (Waterton 2010). Although groups like Ligali (a Pan-African organisation agitating for more accurate representations of African people and culture), BlackPlanet (an online community for African Americans) and several small-scale groupings have emerged, all of which utilise the Internet for self-expression, affirmation and promoting oppositional understandings of culture and heritage, exposing their network to a more diverse social world, wider information and shared interests, they are still, to all intents and purposes, in the minority. Within these instances, such self-identified community groups still struggle to find legitimacy as ‘authentic’ and ‘trustworthy’ voices, particularly as they are heard through a medium conventionally dismissed as either seemingly or potentially false. Thus, while the Internet offers a new venue for community proliferation and engagement, it brings with it a range of tensions and instances of misrecognition that cumulatively—and unsatisfactorily—render it unhelpful.

Conclusion

As may have become clear, this chapter has been somewhat disingenuously put together. In it, I have used the idiom of ‘community’ to make some quite specific statements about how I see the state of heritage and its associated practices of cultural engagement. This is because, as a growing field of academic enquiry, I think heritage scholars have a responsibility to continuously re-examine the rules of their ‘game’ and renegotiate their position within the management process, thereby lessening the risks of alienation, misrecognition and delegitimisation. At the outset, then, this paper was set up as an attempt not only to examine the validity and relevance of community engagements but to create a platform from which to examine the insidious potency of misrecognition as a key ethical issue. In the process, it has not been my intention to romanticise the diverse ways in which ‘community’ is imagined and used to satisfy our needs nor propose a single characterisation for the term. Quite the opposite, my point has simply been to demonstrate that the possibilities for people to experience and engage with each other around the issue of heritage, in a way that fosters a sense of connection, continue to be hampered by ill-fitting conceptualisations that themselves work to impede participation. If nothing else, my purpose has been to agitate for casting of a reflective gaze over the field of heritage studies, in a bid to understand how more nuanced understandings of communities can be theorised and legitimised.

Theoretically, then, this chapter has sought to contribute to ongoing debates about the meaning of community. While the phrase was vitalised some time ago within the field, the various impressions offered by heritage scholars and policymakers do not yet add up to any kind of coherent whole. Rather, they are frequently based upon different imaginings of the term, with a nebulous and tidy conceptualisation of community often pitted against the realities of heterogeneous networks that are replete with differences. Added to this are online or virtual interactions, which bring yet another layer of complexity to the conceptualisations of community engagement developing in the field. Quite how the term is understood has been central to this chapter, which I hope has shown a more nuanced (and critical) account than some of us are used to thinking about: something altogether messier, but no less real, enmeshed within a mixture of politics, power plays, social cues and cultural affiliations, and bound up with complex nests of feelings and familiarity.

The chapter has also attempted to make a contribution in terms of thinking through methodologies. Here, I see a lot of importance in continually stripping bare the practices we engage in and reminding ourselves that there are so many other ‘communities’ with which to engage beyond that of the academy. This agenda simultaneously requires us to reflect on issues of privilege and power and think about the room we make available for dissonant and subordinated voices within the heritage management process. As such, while this chapter has ostensibly revolved around community engagement, a significant seam running through its argument has been cautionary because these are areas dominated by particular groups of people and their cultural experiences. To talk of ethics, then, also requires reflection upon the broader issues of human rights and social justice, issues that entered the international policy lexicon at least 60 years ago with the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This has been my reason for including the third, political, dimension to the chapter, which taps into Seyla Benhabib’s (1992: 8) aspiration for a ‘moral conversation in which the capacity to reverse perspectives, that is, the willingness to reason from the others’ point of view, and the sensitivity to their voices is paramount’. To better understand this, Nancy Fraser’s ‘politics of recognition’ was drawn upon as a theoretical framing arguing that if dominant patterns of cultural value (both institutional and societal) prevent some communities from participating on a par, as peers, with others in social life, we can speak of misrecognition. Following from this, I suggested that dominant patterns of cultural value operative within the field of heritage—and more broadly—currently constitute some communities as comparatively more worthy than others. This, too, is a question of ethics. The agenda of the chapter thus became twofold: exploring the ethical conduct of research with community groups while also questioning in whose interest, and for what purpose, that research is being done. The key ethical issue for both of these parts is challenging relations of power, in both research and wider society.