INTRODUCTION
We humans have an ancient evolutionary heritage that is biological, psychological, and cultural, as recently outlined by, for example, Merlin Donald, Yuval Harari, Todd Feinberg and John Mallatt, Daniel Dennett, and Antonio Damasio.Footnote 1 For just over 5,000 years—the mere blink of an eye on evolution’s timescale!—culture has had an increasingly rich and complex history, most of it instantiated in, and perpetuated by, architectural ruins, technological remains, art, ideas and, most especially, kinds of writing, notation, and other symbolic systems. Symbolic systems like writing externalize “memory” and thereby make it shareable.
Psychological concepts and phrases are never far from such discussions and, more specifically, from discourses on the policy imperatives of cultural heritage. Here are a few examples of terms used in the proceedings of the 2016 Colloquium on Post-Trauma Reconstructions, which was held at the headquarters of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) in Paris on 4 March 2016: “mental landscapes of people,” “intangible perceptions and uses,” “tools of future making,” “changes over time in perceptions and attitudes,” “creation of new identity for a community,” “retrieval of identity,” “connection to place,” “what people want and value,” “changes in significance and meaning,” “the mental map (associated with intangible values) of the inhabitants,” “universal value,” “typology of the diverse ‘kinds’ of community,” and so on.Footnote 2
All of these ideas are familiar to cultural-historical and social psychology. There is an analogical relationship between the language of individual psychology—memory, perception, meaning, tools for thinking, identity, values, belongingness, acts, and so on—and the language of groups and communities such as “national identity,” “cultural memory,” “mentalité,” “weltanschauung,” and so on.Footnote 3 But there are many questions about these analogies that might be helpful to note in passing. How, for instance, are collective psychological attributes embodied in individual personal ones and vice-versa? Is the language of “collective memory” metaphorical, and, if it is, what cautionary notes should accompany it? After all, we do “live by metaphors.”Footnote 4
What relevance might psychological reflections on individual “memory” have for the kinds of question facing ICOMOS, questions to do with how donor power and influence shape thinking about the social functions of heritage, debates over the desirability or not of reconstructions, and concerns about the weight to be carried by criteria like “authenticity”? Are notions of authenticity historically and culturally relative? Will conceptualizations of “the significant past” be altered by, for instance, the large-scale and rapid urbanization of the world? Will the oncoming transformations of ideas of reality, posed by new technologies that create compelling virtual worlds, alter lived and remembered “reality”?Footnote 5 These questions are beyond the scope of the present article, but, nonetheless, they shadow it and should be noted. What does follow are some psychological reflections and clarifications on a few of these themes. They address terms like “memory,” “imagination,” and “time” as found in the kinds of debate that currently animate ICOMOS.Footnote 6
“WORLD HERITAGE” AS A FUTURE-ORIENTED IDEAL FOR A COMMON HUMANITY?
In 1972, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) inaugurated the World Heritage Convention to promote cooperation amongst nations in the preservation of outstanding examples of heritage, both cultural and natural.Footnote 7 In its most literal sense, this project to designate world heritage sites and achievements is a work still in its early stages. Its ostensible importance is its sense of preserving “memory” in the form of perceptible historical traces of human significance and natural sites of outstanding universal value and significance. The project, thus understood, is essentially retrospective and conservative. Some might question whether the very idea of “world” heritage is itself desirable, rooted as it might be in an uncritical acceptance of economic and cultural globalization as an ideal. From a political perspective, issues of selective “heritage” can be flashpoints between contemporary insurgent nationalisms and fragile, supranational aggregates often thought to be agents of economic globalization.
Notwithstanding these political and cultural tensions—indeed, because of them—the more fundamental importance of the World Heritage Project, it seems to me, is prospective and lies in the normative vision implicit in it, a vision that is less an act of “retrieval” (though, of course, that is an essential prerequisite) and more an act of construction. But, it is a construction of what? The answer to this might be an “imaginatively constructed moral ideal,” but, amongst other things, this needs an elaboration of key concepts like memory and time and their intrinsic connection to imagination. In what follows, I will review some ideas from contemporary psychology that might contribute to the debates in this area of heritage.
Whatever it is, each site that is designated as having “world heritage” significance and “outstanding universal value” is an element or character in an unfolding story, a tale that might, or might not, have a coherent or desirable ending. The Nara Document on Authenticity is a good guide to this implicit narrative:
4. In a world that is increasingly subject to the forces of globalization and homogenization, and in a world in which the search for cultural identity is sometimes pursued through aggressive nationalism and the suppression of the cultures of minorities, the essential contribution made by the consideration of authenticity in conservation practice is to clarify and illuminate the collective memory of humanity. Footnote 8
There is an assumption and an aspiration here to the idea of a “common humanity” in that the reference is to the “collective memory of humanity” rather than to the “collective memories of humanity.” Article 4 of the Nara Document on Authenticity, quoted above, explicitly recognizes that nationalistic and other such forces can be the enemy of this ideal of unity as well as of the ideal that the cultural heritage of each is the cultural heritage of all.Footnote 9 The underlying desire is to create some kind of ideal umbrella identity for humanity that can accommodate difference, historically and culturally, while, at the same time, forging a superordinate common identity.
The concept of authenticity here carries a heavy intellectual weight, and, yet, curiously, the concept remains undefined in the 1994 Nara Document on Authenticity. But there is a wisdom to this ambiguity that is reminiscent of the framing of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.Footnote 10 This declaration deliberately avoided the question of where such rights came from in order to achieve a consensus that the declaration would, in time, be justified by what it might subsequently enable.Footnote 11 Since the 1994 Nara document, the concept of authenticity has similarly evolved.Footnote 12 Sometimes, as in these instances, the very absence of an early delimitation of a concept’s meaning is exactly what enables such meaning to grow and collectively establish itself. Evolving usage is evolving meaning.Footnote 13
This is the context for the following observations from a psychological perspective. Uncertainty is rigor’s twin. This can be seen from the earliest designations of world heritage status. The decision to designate a site of the very worst of human behavior—Auschwitz-Birkenau—in just the second year of world heritage inscriptions (1979) was a clear indication that the worst, as well as the best, of human cultural enterprises would be included. A year later, in 1980, the Historic Centre of Rome was inscribed. I mention each of these as examples of the challenge to visitors to such sites, and the challenges for the guardians of them, to distinguish “history” (the systematic study of the past) from “memory” (personal traces subjectively retrievable by one or more subjects).Footnote 14
As the controversy around Confederate monuments in the United States raged over the summer of 2017, James Grossman, the executive director of the American Historical Association, said that President Donald Trump’s comments failed to recognize the difference between history and memory, which is always shifting. When you alter monuments, Schuessler reports Grossman as saying, “[y]ou’re not changing history. You’re changing how we remember history.”Footnote 15 This is an important clarification in that the object of “memory” here is “history,” and history is a systematic study governed by rigorous rules of evidence. The use of the term “memory,” however, in discourses prevailing in this field, builds on psychological notions of individual memory. For that reason, a review of contemporary psychological ideas of memory may contribute to elaborating, and adding further complexity to, historical and heritage usages.
Even in a field as well researched as the historic center of Rome, problems confront the visitor trying to imagine how that part of Rome might have looked to the Romans who once traversed the same route. Mary Beard, professor of classics at the University of Cambridge, recently had this to say about the visitor experience of classical Rome, after lamenting the work of Mussolini’s “restorers” in the 1930s:
The ground surface is largely a confusing mass of rubble and masonry, interspersed with equally confusing holes left by archaeologists digging down in search of the structures, shrines and burials that formed the first layers of human occupation in the city of Rome, as far back as the eighth century BC. Even the trained eye finds it hard to work out how any of this fits together, or what the place would have looked like at any particular period of antiquity. Most visitors walk through the Forum baffled. Cicero would not have recognized it.Footnote 16
Visitors, in other words, would require a very sophisticated and informed historical and topographical knowledge in order to use what they see en route to imagine this aspect of daily life in ancient Rome.Footnote 17 Accepting the imprimatur of authenticity, even in the most prominent world heritage sites, is clearly just a beginning for visitors’ understanding of those sites. Coupling “authenticity” with the idea of “collective memory of humanity,” as in the Nara document is, however, a fertile connection to unpack and develop. As with many interesting issues in our construction of reality, it is the linking prepositions in the sentence that signal the problem. Here, it is the “of” that is the problem! Does it mean that “humanity” is the “subject” of the remembering, or does it mean that the “memory” is of some version of the history of humanity? I will return to this below. There is also the other side of this in that the correlate of the inevitable selectivity of “collective memory” is the associated issue of “collective forgetting.”
Both “collective memory” and “collective forgetting” are part of the problem that the designation of world heritage sites is trying to address. That is why some acquaintance with the contemporary findings on memory from a psychological perspective might be helpful as background to policy formulation in this area. Specifically, I have in mind the ideas of “mental landscapes of people” (mentalités; Weltanschauungen) and the “tools of future making,” such as appeared in the ICOMOS colloquium.Footnote 18 As a prelude to this, we must briefly consider the fundamental concept/phenomenon that lies behind all such considerations of heritage, memory, imagination, and future making: the concept of “time.”
NOTIONS OF “TIME” AS THE PARENT OF CONCEPTS OF “HERITAGE”?
Despite the fact that the word “time” is the most commonly used noun in the English language (closely followed by other nouns connected to time like “day” and “year”), our collective understanding of that little word—whether by physicists or by psychologists—is complex and contentious.Footnote 19 “Time,” or, more precisely, our “concepts of time,” may be the parent of ideas of “heritage,” but time as conceived by physicists and time as construed by psychologists—or time as unreflectively deployed by most of us in our own lives—are not the same concepts. First, a caveat about reification: just because there is a noun for something—time?—does not mean that there is some “thing” corresponding to it. For physicists, and especially for quantum physicists, there is no thing called time conceived as fixed and unchanging. Post-Einstein, time is understood to change with proximity to, or distance from, mass and to be connected to relative speed. There is no universal “present” across the universe, let alone across the solar system. There is just constant change. As the theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli concludes, “[w]e are struggling to adapt our language and our intuition to a new discovery: the fact that ‘past’ and ‘future’ do not have a universal meaning. Instead, they have a meaning which changes between here and there. That’s all there is to it.”Footnote 20
Rovelli makes an especially useful point in emphasizing that reality is best understood as being about “events” rather than about “things.” It is the dynamic interconnectedness of events in their own respective parts of the universe that we should concentrate on, rather than on the frozen isolation of “things” as suggested to us by our use of nouns. We humans are best understood as unfolding events enmeshed in unfolding events, but we should be very mindful of the traps that our language lays before us, especially in our use of those nouns. Focusing on process, not product, is a more fertile strategy when thinking about, for example, the connections of memory and heritage sites. From this perspective, world heritage sites are culturally much more fertile when considered as events unfolding in time (and through personal encounter) than as things (buildings, images, and so on) sitting in detached isolation on a “to-be-visited” list.Footnote 21
When we think of our own lives, and order the significant events we live through, it is most likely to be in terms of how we measure “time,” especially chronological time. The history of how we came to measure time, and why, shows the intimate connections between practical purposes and temporal measurements. In the Roman calendar, for example, tradition had it that the year for Romulus was just ten months beginning on 1 March. Why? Because for the early Romans, being a primitive agricultural community, as Paul Harvey points out, the dead wintry part of the year when they rested did not need to be included in the calendar to regulate their labor.Footnote 22 Medieval monks needed to regulate their periods of daily prayer, and this also warranted new ways of measuring and marking time. Salisbury Cathedral, for example, has one of the oldest working clocks in the world. It has no visible face or dial but audibly measures time in hours with the sound of a bell. Since Christiaan Huygens invented the first advanced precision pendulum clock in 1657, accuracy in measuring time has advanced astonishingly. Huygens’s clock lost 10 seconds each day. A contemporary atomic clock might lose 10 seconds every 4.5 billion years!
Science has come to know “time” in this way and to achieve these extraordinary advances in its measurement, but that is not the time according to which we live our everyday lives. Nor is it how most visitors to a heritage site might think about what they are encountering. In normal human discourse, “past,” “present,” and “future” have real meaning for us since they are the conceptual metrics by which we structure and organize our own experience and selectively remember it. We measure the continuity of our “selves” in events tied to chronological time. But what often escapes our attention is that these are metaphors rather than literal references to temporal entities. Again, we must be cautious about reification: there is no such “thing” as “the past” or “the future.” Many of our unnoticed and taken-for-granted metaphors describe “time” in terms of space and place.Footnote 23 We speak of “a short space of time,” for example. Over many years, the American cognitive scientist George Lakoff, and the philosopher Mark Johnson, have cogently shown how these “metaphors we live by” work.Footnote 24
They identify key ways in which we metaphorically conceive of time using metaphors that we derive from the fact that we are embodied in the world. There is, for instance, the “position metaphor” in which we think of where we are “now” as the present, with the future “in front” of us and the past “behind” us. This is the case in English and in most, but not all, other languages. In the Aymara language of the western Bolivian highlands and northern Chile, for instance, the word for “past” also means eyes/sight, whereas the word for “future” also means back/behind. Rafael Nunez reported on how the Aymara often pointed forward when speaking of “the old times” and gestured behind them when speaking of the future.Footnote 25
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson also elaborate on “the moving time” metaphor where objects are thought of as “times,” and their moving past us is conceived as the “passage” of time.Footnote 26 If ever you thought that time was “flying by” or that a deadline was fast “approaching,” then you were deploying the moving time metaphor. As Lakoff and Johnson indicate, in physics, time is a more primitive concept than motion whereas, psychologically, motion is primary and time is conceptualized as motion.Footnote 27 Even Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity is metaphorically rooted, as Lakoff and Johnson note, but that in no way diminishes its extraordinary usefulness in describing and predicting physical reality. Metaphors play centrally important roles in how we live our lives.
All of this is the background to the assertion by neuroscientists like Dean Buonomano that the brain is a time machine: “[T]he brain is an anticipation machine and a machine that tells time. It quantifies the passage of time across a range of over twelve orders of magnitude—from the tiny difference in the time it takes a sound to arrive at the right ear versus the left ear, to the ability of some animals to anticipate the seasons.”Footnote 28 What is of the most relevance to our present discussion are the ways in which human beings construct images of the world, and of themselves as a part of those worlds, in frameworks of time. In psychological discourse, these are the capacities we call “memory” and “imagination.” It may seem paradoxical, but the function of remembering, whether individually or collectively, is fundamentally future oriented.Footnote 29 This argument was persuasively made by Daniel Schacter, Donna Addis, and Randy Buckner when they outlined the case for what they called the “prospective brain,” suggesting that processes such as memory can be freshly understood if one recognizes that “a crucial function of the brain is to use stored information to imagine, simulate and predict possible future events.”Footnote 30
If this is true, then it supports the idea of “collective memory” as a signpost toward the ideal of an anticipated universality underpinning the work of UNESCO and ICOMOS. Our “past” is something to be anticipated. This “past,” whether individual and personal or collective and cultural, is re-constructed each and every time we come to re-visit, re-view, re-member, re-call, re-imagine, re-cognize and freshly understand it. In this metaphorical sense, the “past” lies before us!Footnote 31
KINDS OF INDIVIDUAL MEMORY AND THE QUESTION OF RETRIEVAL OR RECONSTRUCTION?
What kinds of memory do individual visitors consciously deploy when visiting a heritage site, and how can those kinds of memory become the kinds of “collective memory” that the 1994 Nara document envisages and champions? And where does imagination, whether individual or collective, come into play? These questions shape what follows. Students of memory have learned many lessons over the past century. Perhaps the most significant for present purposes is that the vernacular understanding of memory as the retrieval of some trace that has been accurately and permanently stored in the brain has not been supported. In addition, to have a memory requires having someone to do the remembering, some subject to whom what is remembered is connected, whether directly or indirectly. This could be a memory from the past or a memory of the past. When this idea is metaphorically extended to collectives (groups, nations, cultures), the question arises as to whether the term “memory” best applies to the individuals comprising the group—each of whom is individually sharing similar personal memories—or whether the group itself can be said to “have memories” even if the individuals comprising the group have no direct personal connection to what is remembered.
If what is being referred to is actually engendered and created as “knowledge” by education, media, propaganda, art, or science, can it accurately be spoken of as “memory”? Do we need further distinctions as to what kinds of memory are involved? We know, for instance, that direct personal memories of events, unsurprisingly, peter out after about two generations.Footnote 32 These questions were addressed by Sir Frederic Bartlett in his seminal 1932 text on remembering. On the evidence of his experiments, Bartlett opposed the idea that memory is simply retrieval and, instead, argued that it is always constructive. His conclusion was that
[m]emory, and all the life of imagery and words which goes with it, is one with the age old acquisition of the distance senses, and with that development of constructive imagination and constructive thought wherein at length we find the most complete release from the narrowness of presented time and space.Footnote 33
Research since Bartlett’s time has strongly confirmed his conclusion about the inherently constructive and reconstructive nature of memory. So what have we learned in the intervening 88 years since Bartlett’s text Remembering?Footnote 34 Two famous case studies serve to illustrate the extremes of memory. One concerns the unfortunate Henry Gustav Molaison, who lost all capacity to lay down new long-term memories from the time of a controversial brain operation for epilepsy at 27 years of age. At the other end of the spectrum lies the case of Solomon Shereshevsky, the mnemonist made famous by the Russian neuropsychologist Alexandr Luria in 1968.Footnote 35 Each case illustrates one pole on the spectrum of memory; Molaison was unable to remember what occurred after his surgery, whereas Shereshevsky developed an exceptional capacity not to forget. What general points of current relevance can be gleaned from studies like these? We know that each time the brain activates “a memory trace” that that memory changes. We know that remembering is, as Bartlett surmised, highly dynamic and that each and every time you remember something you never remember it in exactly the same way. We know that the neural connections underpinning memory constantly alter.
The Nobel prize-winning research of John O’Keefe, assisted by Lynn Nadel, as well as of others, on the nature and functioning of “place cells” in the hippocampal area of the brain has shown how mental maps, which code for an organism’s relationship to landmarks on that map, occur.Footnote 36 We know that remembering at an individual, personal level is inherently about reestablishing relationships that constantly change. Molaison lost that capacity. Perpetual reconstruction, not repetitive retrieval, is the hallmark of personal memory.
What can we learn from Luria’s research on Shereshevsky and his remarkable abilities to remember? First, Shereshevsky could be forgetful unless, that is, he consciously used his mnemonic devices and methods to remember. These devices involved imagining spaces—the main street of his native village, for example—along which he would connect and distribute what it was he wanted to remember.Footnote 37 Shereshevsky was a showman who worked hard to perfect these devices for remembering. What this shows is not only that creating scenarios for remembering is highly effective but also that the creation of such scenarios requires using different kinds of memory, such as spatial memory, in conjunction with acts of imagining.
There is a now established distinction between two specific kinds of personal memory that can serve to clarify ideas about the architecture of “collective memory” and “collective imagination,” as used in heritage studies. In 1972, the Canadian psychologist Endel Tulving was the first to argue for distinguishing “semantic memory” from what he called “episodic memory.” “Episodic memory,” proposed Tulving, “refers to memory for personal experiences and their temporal relations, while semantic memory is a system for receiving, retaining and transmitting information about meaning of words, concepts, and classification of concepts.”Footnote 38 These are long-term kinds of conscious memory. I can search for and reconstruct instances of them from within my own memory systems. Over the past 50 years or so, Tulving’s taxonomy of memory kinds has been confirmed and intensively researched. We now know that there are many types of memory and memory systems, and we also know that there are no specific memory centers in the brain and, probably, as Tulving and Lepage note, no specific sites where memories are stored.Footnote 39 There are neuroanatomical sites where kinds of memory are encoded and sites from which they are recalled and reconstructed.
Semantic memory is basically our knowledge about the world. I know, for example, that the Valley of the Temples at Agrigento in Sicily was founded as a Greek settlement in the sixth century bc and was designated by UNESCO as a world heritage site in 1997. I rely on my semantic memory for that knowledge. But I also vividly remember my visit to Agrigento in the early summer of 2014, the feel of the heat in the mid-morning and the walk along the ridge toward the Temple of Olympian Zeus. This is an episodic memory, a memory that ties me to that specific place and time in the past. I also recall how my feelings about the magnificence of this site sharply changed as I learned about its dark past of slavery and the misery of the lives that built and sustained life at Agrigento for much of its active history. Here, a change in my encoded semantic memory transformed the feelings coloring my episodic memory and added to the complexity of the experience of my Agrigento visit. With episodic memories I can, with reasonable precision, recall when I had them. I am far less likely to accurately recall the time I first learned that the Greeks founded a settlement there in the sixth century bc.
The key point here is that semantic memory feeds and enriches episodic memory and vice-versa. Recall the idea that most forms of memory are future oriented but now note this exception of episodic memory. In evolutionary terms, episodic memory is the most recent kind of memory and is arguably unique to humans. It allows those who possess this capacity to pass self-consciously and deliberately through subjective time from the present, to the past, to the future.Footnote 40 Both semantic and episodic memory are utilized by a visitor to heritage sites. And both provide the individualized building blocks for “collective memory,” which, in turn, is the seedbed for “collective imagination.” Arguably, it is the idea of “collective imagination” that is underemphasized in heritage studies.
COLLECTIVE MEMORY: THE SEEDBED FOR COLLECTIVE IMAGINATION?
The concept of “collective memory” is most associated with Maurice Halbwachs who, in 1925, outlined his understanding of it in his Les Cadres Sociaux de la Mémoire. Footnote 41 Following Émile Durkheim, Halbwachs argued that the social group constitutes a psychical entity very similar to that of individuals. This, for him, was not “mere” analogy or metaphor. He saw such “memories” as models for education and development. While admiring of Halbwachs’s work, Bartlett argued that Halbwachs was speaking “only of memory in the group and not of memory of the group.”Footnote 42
Such doubts about the notion of “group memory” have persisted since then.Footnote 43 Analogously, we might say that collective memory “in the group” is rooted in the semantic memory of group members, whereas collective memories “of the group” are the pooled episodic memories of its members. These memories can be externalized and objectified in languages—spoken and written—and in images, buildings, practices, and places. Bartlett’s problems with the idea of “collective memory” may be resolved with Tulving’s distinction. Collective memory that is constituted by episodic memories may fade out of currency with the death of members of the group with those episodic memories (within two generations or so, such as we poignantly see at present as the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Russian liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau is marked). But collective memory that is fabricated with the semantic memory of members of a collective transcends time and place and is culturally transmissible. This is the territory of organizations such as ICOMOS and UNESCO.
Irrespective of whether “collective memory,” or “cultural memory,” is to be understood as a literal or metaphorical extension of personal memory, the question remains as to the implications of our current understanding of kinds of personal memory for our conceptualization of “collective memory.”Footnote 44 Indeterminacy and uncertainty, openness to reinterpretation according to current demands, and the highly selective nature of what is “remembered” and forgotten, would be already familiar to historians and heritage experts for whom the idea of collective memory is a core analytic tool. But it is Bartlett’s comments on “constructive imagination,” I suggest, that deserve more attention in heritage studies. We now know that the neural bases of memory are closely connected to those of imagination.Footnote 45 There is a symbiotic relationship between forms of memory and imagination. If episodic memory is nourished by semantic memory, then both of these kinds of memory, and others, feed imagination. And if the primary function of memory is oriented to the future, then imagination is what puts those forms of memory to work in both predicting and creating the future. Our ability to imagine—to mentally project forward—is heavily dependent on what we know—that is, on semantic memory. This is true whether it is a person, or a group, that is imagining and visualizing future possibilities.Footnote 46
Dean Buonomano concludes that “[f]uture-oriented time travel is a complicated task that requires the orchestration of a number of different cognitive functions, including accessing past episodic and semantic memories, using these memories to conjure up future scenarios, understanding the difference between the past and the future, and the ability to judge whether the simulated outcome is desirable or not.”Footnote 47 Buonomano is here writing about individual functioning, but he could equally well be addressing the institutional functioning of ICOMOS and UNESCO as they work to create a future where the remains of the past, properly understood, scaffold a desirable future understanding of humanity’s “unity of values” and, ultimately, “common culture.”Footnote 48
CONCLUSION: WHAT SHOULD BE EXPECTED OF THE IDEAL VISITOR TO WORLD HERITAGE SITES?
In 1991, Marc Gauthier posed the choice of “[t]raiter la ruine, ou le visiteur” (“[t]o deal with the ruin, or with the visitor”), a question that seems alert to a possible imbalance of attention between the needs of the visitor and the requirements of the conserved “visited.”Footnote 49 I have concentrated in this article on some of the psychological background to the idea of visitors to world heritage sites becoming agents in the construction of collective memory—in particular, the idea that individual semantic memory (what the visitor knows about the site, for example) scaffolds individual episodic memory (what they remember of their being at the site). Both semantic and episodic memory, in turn, supply the materials for imagining how the significance of the site can be situated in cultural-historical time. Knowing historical time lines, for example, is particularly important here, as is the guidance at the site, which elaborates and primes understanding. Such individually shaped memories, and their associated visualizations and imaginings, feed into the construction of collective memories and collective imaginings. Both the site itself and the guardians of the site are the primary fabricators of memorability and significance for the visitor. But, from a wider perspective, there is an ethical responsibility here, one that revolves around ideas of authenticity—in this case, as it is loosely used in the 1994 Nara Document on Authenticity.
Our current understanding of memory’s reconstructive dynamics comes with an ever- present warning that remembering, whether individual or collective, is always shadowed by uncertainty and, from a responsible moral perspective, ought to be accompanied by a knowledge of that possibility. We can believe false, implanted memories to be ours, and we can do so persistently and with the utmost sincerity.Footnote 50 We can imagine an event and remember it as “true” despite evidence to the contrary. We can ourselves be the source of that act of imagination, or we can acquire it from others. In a similar sense, the rules for reconstruction of sites and monuments have their own safeguards against falsity.Footnote 51 These are condensed into the word “conjecture,” as in Article 9 of the 1964 Venice Charter:
The process … is to preserve and reveal the aesthetic and historic value of the monument and is based on respect for original material and authentic documents. It must stop at the point where conjecture begins, and in this case moreover any extra work which is indispensable must be distinct from the architectural composition and must bear a contemporary stamp.Footnote 52
Kinds of corroborative evidence are constantly needed whether in the form of, say, diaries, photographs, or the testimony of witnesses in the case of personal memories or, as in Article 9 above, original material and authentic documents in the case of monuments and sites. In each case, it is trust in the means of verification that underpins the value attached to authenticity. In a real sense, trustworthy recollections, whether personal episodic memories or collective semantic ones, must be underwritten by trusted forms of authority. Does that completely rule out the role of conjecture in the imaginative mental reconstructions of visitors to these sites? After all, monuments and sites are, by their very nature, “incomplete” and therefore demand conjecture from attentive visitors. Any such visitor or visit, however, is always part of bigger political pictures and projects.
These are centrally important questions that are beyond the present discussion, but they include all of the varieties of group identity and perspective that are part of the processes of memory and imagination.Footnote 53 There are also key issues to do with ideas of “associative memory” and decision making, all of which are beyond the current scope of this article but which would be key elements in a more complete account.Footnote 54 This could involve presenting sites and presentations as being authentically from the past but as objects for imaginative reconstruction that will be integrated into collective, identity-forming narratives such as the United Nations’ ideal narrative of a unified, common humanity. This is the idea of world heritage sites as “tools for future making” that is already current in heritage thinking.Footnote 55 The currently popular “big history” approach of writers like Jared Diamond and Yuval Harari also come to mind insofar as they treat the interconnections of cultural achievements and practices across wide time scales while also looking to the future in the light of their analyses of the past.Footnote 56
In a contemporary world where evidence, truth, and trustworthy sources are under vigorous attack in favor of unquestioned group allegiance, there is an inescapable political dimension to questions of heritage authenticity and the material with which “collective semantic memories” are constructed.Footnote 57 Constructing a superordinate narrative to harmonize conflicting collective memories is a major contemporary challenge. The volatile tensions in our contemporary world between the aggregating forces of globalization and internationalism, and the fragmenting forces of nationalism, ethnicity, or false belief, urgently demand resolution especially in the face of the oncoming global climate crisis. Ideals that attempt to forge common purpose, from the initial faltering steps of the League of Nations in 1920, following World War I, to the founding of the United Nations in 1945, following World War II, are laudable steps, however flawed, toward the creation of such a superordinate narrative. That kind of narrative requires the forging of an empirically informed, collectively imagined future. Heritage, and its lessons, has a central role to play here. If that future is not merely to be passively predicted but also actively created, as in the governing ideal of UNESCO with which we began, then we need to shift the balance from the current pervasive politics of origin, collectively remembered, to a politics of destination, collectively imagined.
