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Anthropology, Representation and Reality In online UNESCO World Heritage Sites In "Hybrids of Modernity"
anthropologist Penelope Harvey examines the relationship between representation
and reality vis-à-vis anthropology, the universal exhibition, and the nation
state. Harvey synthesizes an ethnographic approach with a text-based,
semiotic approach to produce a hybrid interpretation. Not only does
she shape a novel analysis of a modern social phenomenon, Expo’92, but
her hybrid anthropological synthesis also proves theoretically useful
for examining related social phenomena such as on-the-ground and online
UNESCO world heritage sites. Utilizing Harvey’s analysis I want to examine
some of her fundamental questions and their assumptions in relation
to online UNESCO World Heritage, very recently developed technologies,
and information technology developments to come. I then want briefly
to examine the significance of auto-anthropology for studying UNESCO
world heritage and finally suggest ways in which Trouillot and Blim’s
arguments might provide useful approaches to UNESCO world heritage.
I want to suggest that the Internet and emerging information technologies
further blur distinctions between representation and reality and contribute
to shaping new questions for anthropology. Online UNESCO world heritage related web sites are beginning to shape
a set of representations, which not only depict UNESCO world heritage
as representation but also allow for the possibility of interaction
as well as the potential for the end user to shape his or her own set
of associations in these technologically-mediated interactions. In addition
for example, these rapidly developing emergent technologies will also
allow the end user to assume the persona of a graphical representation
in the form of an avatar, (an increasingly life like graphical representation
of the user in virtual environments, viz. Microsoft’s Xbox), and thus
potentially interact in the future with virtually represented world
heritage sites in increasingly complex ways.
In "Hybrids of Modernity," Harvey asks in the context of Expo’92,
a world fair of nation states, “what happens to phenomenology when
people live their world as picture? And how does this way of dwelling
in the world co-exist with other ways of dwelling?” (Harvey, 1996,
p.2) Harvey posits that “that
the presence of both modern and postmodern forms of representation in
Expo 92 shows that the Expo, as an institution, has become a hybrid
form. A mixture of modern and postmodern forms also characterizes nation-states.
Visitors were viewed as modern citizens encouraged to identify with
their country, and, simultaneously, as postmodern consumers who had
a choice of what to believe, identify with, or find pleasurable. Further,
the Expo treated nation-states and multinational corporations as equivalent,
giving pavilions to each, further blurring the modernist idea that corporations
are part of the technological force of nations” (Alexander, 1998, 1105). Harvey’s fundamental questions in the context of her main argument take
on newly blurred implications and meanings in relation to current Internet
developments. I want to suggest that presently the phenomenology of
the Internet in relation to online UNESCO world heritage (e.g. St. Kilda
and those sites depicted in Schätze
der Welt) suggest a development of phenomenological embodiment / “dwelling-in-ness”
where the viewer/visitor/end user moves beyond simply viewing the picture
and starts to actively interact with media-mediated representations
as communication processes. In very recently released gaming technologies
(see Microsoft’s Xbox and Sony’s Playstation) for example, Avatars --
where one can 1) feel through the control box the impact which their
steps make or 2) glance, with the Avatar, in one direction or another
as the room shifts, or 3) guide and navigate with them through halls
and structures -- are examples of virtually embodied technologies which
further reshape Harvey’s fundamental questions. They graphically represent
an embodiment of the end user with the potential for a virtually “dwelling
in” life-like experience; the user and the avatar become two forms similarly
engaging in a virtual environment. In the context of online UNESCO world
heritage to come, the present way of dwelling in the world with images,
which Harvey analyzes as significant to face-to-face ethnographic methods,
begins to reshape itself yet again where the dwelling with picture becomes
dwelling with interactive, hypermedia (Packer and Jordan, 2001) representations,
which then becomes dwelling with increasingly realistic avatar-oriented,
fractal-geometry-based graphical representations with the potential
to visit and engage graphically mediated UNESCO world heritage sites.
Anthropologically, Harvey’s emphasis on the significance of the picture
as text in ethnographic interpretation in the modernist/postmodernist
Expo’92 requires reexamination where graphical simulations become more
and more life-like.
The UNESCO world heritage site
St. Kilda offers end users – many of whom have visited this destination
- not only the opportunity to see and learn about these difficult-to-get-to
Scottish islands through sound, flash animation, slide show presentations,
text, quizzes and Quicktime panoramic movies, but also for end users
located anywhere in the world to “sign” a guest book about their experiences
with St. Kilda, thus shaping the web site and representations of St.
Kilda in ways other than those of the producers. By contributing to
the representation of St. Kilda from diverse world wide locations and
over time but in a kind of time space compression, the end user / visitor
thus rearticulates the phenomenological idea of ‘dwelling in’ or ‘having
dwelled in’ by participating across great distances and thus in a face
to face, or at least representation to representation, ethnographic
sense, rearticulates the image with a kind of embodiment of participation/interaction
in a compressed time space continuum. Thus these remarkable information
technologies at this UNESCO world heritage site, which already seem
mundane compared with some computer gaming technologies mentioned above,
contribute to a further blurring of the natural distinctions between
representation and reality.
Harvey’s analysis of Expo’92
emphasizes the role of auto-ethnography – “‘anthropology carried out in the context which produced
it’ (Strathern 1987a: 17), a mode of analysis that draws on concepts
which belong to the society or culture under study and cannot depend
on the more usual appeal to concepts of difference and incommensurability
or the provocation of culture shock (Wagner 1975) which defines so much
anthropological practice (Strathern 1987b)” (Harvey, 1996, 13). To ethnographically
understand the universal Exposition’92 which sought to construct a global
/ local representation of nation states as well as UNESCO world heritage
on the ground and online, the anthropologist can no longer rely on implicit
assumptions of difference but instead develops a hybrid approach enabling
an analysis of culture and context which have become explicit, focusing
specifically on “institutions (the exhibition, the nation state, culture
theory) that have embraced the possibility of treating culture as representation,
of acknowledging the world as exhibition” (Harvey, 1996, 24). Briefly,
Harvey’s analysis provides a very useful theoretical approach to look
at online and on the ground UNESCO World Heritage Sites, where not only is culture explicitly invoked
for inclusion in the UNESCO register, but also where culture and exhibition
are used to represent on the ground sites to the tourist/visitor and
the developing hypermedia online representations to end users.
Trouillot’s
article, which argues that states have no fixity historically or theoretically
similarly emphasizes their significance as practices with specific effects
which are being reshaped in a globalizing world. He outlines an ethnographic
approach to the state analysis, which emphasizes the state as a combination
of practices, processes and effects. In relation to an ethnographic
understanding of on the ground and online UNESCO world heritage, Trouillot’s
argument points to an analysis of the effects which UNESCO world heritage
practices, processes and effects entail. Blim’s article similarly articulates
the significance of changes in capitalism due to globalization and emphasizes
the role consumption plays in shaping capitalism; consumption is a useful
approach to look at UNESCO world heritage as well. Both articles provide
tools useful for an analysis of UNESCO and possibly world heritage in
a globalizing world.
In conclusion, I want to suggest
that the Internet and emerging information technologies further blur
and rewrite distinctions between representation and reality, and contribute
significantly to shaping new questions for anthropology. Harvey’s synthesis
of face-to-face, processual, ethnographic approaches with cultural studies,
text based approaches highlight changes in anthropology resulting from
modernizing and globalizing processes. Harvey’s analysis of Expo’92,
whose simulation as an expression of a ‘hybrid of modernity’ was for
some visitors not as good as Disney but better than the Welsh Gardens
(Harvey, 1996, last page), provides very useful tools to examine on
the ground and online UNESCO World Heritage sites in the context of
information technologies. As a form of a (now) World Wide Web mediated
‘universal’ forum (which is only partly an exhibition), on the ground
and online UNESCO World Heritage sites, and the way people interact
and shape them, contribute to extending and reformulating anthropological
approaches. In relation to UNESCO world heritage, emergent information
technologies will continue to significantly rearticulate these questions. Works Cited Alexander,
Victoria D. Jan 1998. Book Review of Hybrids of Modernity: Anthropology,
the Nation State and the Universal Exhibition. American Journal of Sociology. Volume
103, No. 4, pp. 1104-1106. January 1998. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, Journals Division Blim, Michael. 2000. `Capitalisms
in late modernity.' Annual Review of Anthropology. 29: 24-38. Harvey,
Penelope. 1996. Hybrids of modernity: anthropology, the nation state
and the universal exhibition. New York: Routledge. National
Trust for Scotland. December 2001. “St. Kilda World Heritage Site.”
http://www.kilda.org.uk/ Online: 8 April 2002 Packer,
Randall and Jordan, Ken (eds.) (2001) Multimedia: from Wagner to
Virtual Reality. New York: W.W. Norton. Strathern
Marilyn. 1987a. ‘The limits of auto-anthropology’, in A. Jackson (ed.)
Anthropology at Home. London: Tavistock Pulbications. Pp. 16-37. Strathern
Marilyn.1987b. ‘An awkward relationship: the case of feminism and anthropology’,
Signs 12(2): 276-92. Sudwest
Rundfunk. “Schätze der Welt.” 2001. http://www.schaetze-der-welt.de/sdw_index.html
Online: 8 April 2002 Trouillot,
Michel-Rolph. Feb 2001. `The anthropology of the state in the age of
globlisation: close encounters of the deceptive kind.' Current Anthropology
42, 1: 125-38. UNESCO
“The World Heritage List: Alphabetically by
State Party.” November 1972. Update:
16 December 2001. http://www.unesco.org/whc/heritage.htm
Online: 14 February 2002. Wagner
R. 1975. The Invention of Culture. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey:
Prentice-Hall.
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