Performance and performativity at heritage sites

1The Museum of Science and Industry (hereafter the Museum) opened at Manchester’s Castlefield site in 1983. Significantly, its city centre location, and its situation in Castlefield, the first English urban heritage park, suggested that the Museum offered potential for exploring the role of heritage in urban economic regeneration. Moreover, as the Museum also claimed to be a ‘place of fun and fascination, with working exhibits bringing the past vividly to life’ (Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester nd: 4), it appeared to be a site whose approach to visitors was characterized by a shift away from traditional museum practices and towards a more democratizing style. Wigan Pier (hereafter the Pier) was opened in 1985, and is an important example of attempts by local authorities to use tourism and tourist sites to transform an area’s image. Furthermore, the Pier with its use of live performances, simulacra, and tangible reconstructions appeared to epitomize many of the recent developments in the heritage industry. The research design was based on a comparative case-study method of inquiry. 2 The data derived from this study have led me to challenge the view, frequently to be found in museum literature, that visitors to such sites are passive, uncritical consumers of ‘heritage’. Rather, as I argue here, the heritage consumption process is characterized by complexity and diversity in respect of visitors’ faculties. The findings reported in this article show how a form of reminiscence is practised at the sites, a reminiscence that is informed by performativity (Kershaw 1994). I argue that performance and performativity are key social practices at such sites, and that the relationship between visitors and the sites is based as much on emotion and imagination as it is on cognition. Moreover, this emotional and imaginary relationship is engendered by the physicality of the process of consumption. My findings also confirm recent developments in audience research and particularly those associated with the work of Nicholas Abercombie and Brian Longhurst who identify an emergent paradigm of spectacle and performance (Abercrombie and Longhurst 1998). These sociologists suggest that contemporary society is characteristically performative and that there has been a spectaclization of place and person, in the sense that people themselves become the spectacle. They argue that the distance between audiences and performers has diminished; people perform and they see others as performers, they perform for an audience yet they are also members of a range of audiences. 3 Thus, the visitor research which is reported in this article is underpinned by two key arguments. First, visitor research needs to take account of new directions in the sociology of audiences which suggest that in contemporary western societies people are both cultural consumers and producers. Secondly, as a growing body of research (Campbell 1987, Bagnall 1996, Abercrombie and Longhurst 1998) suggests, the emotions and the imagination are key dimensions of this aspect of contemporary audience activity. In this article I also suggest that this ability to perform is related to the cultural literacy and competency of the visitors; that omnivorousness with respect to cultural consumption provides visitors with a range of resources with which to perform. However, I highlight the key role of memory, life histories, and personal and family narratives in enabling visitors to relate the consumption experience to a range of experienced and imagined worlds. The experience