Bermuda heritage research, in not so many words...

Here's an article published in Bermuda Maritime Museum's magazine MariTimes 2006 Vol. 19 No.1

At the start of our programme, a professor in my academic department offered a couple guidelines to us, the fresh batch of PhD students. By the mid-point of the doctorate we should be able to state our 'original contribution to knowledge' in fifteen words or less. As if that wasn't daunting enough, he went on to recommend we eventually whittle this down to eight words! As I'm still in my first year, I'll avoid making those statements now. Instead, at a slightly longer word count, I'll share the intentions and scope of what I'm doing and will reflect on the research process so far. If my writing feels like a gradual unfolding of ideas rather than getting straight to the point that's because I'm trying to convey the unmapped and winding road of the researcher.

Despite the endless possibilities for subjects in the field of heritage and museum studies, from the PhD outset there was little question of doing anything other than Bermuda research. This resolve was part desire to address Bermuda issues, part strategy to indulge my interests, and part awareness of the limited existing research into local heritage and museums. Locking my gaze onto Bermuda, most of all, was an alertness to the rich and compelling nature of local data and its potential to contribute something valuable to the academic and local arenas.

My experiences at Bermuda Maritime Museum (BMM) have very much shaped the parameters and questions of my Bermuda research project. Interactions with BMM's artefact, information and financial donors and inquirers, community curators who are often key to putting exhibitions and projects together and our motivated volunteers are the moments of learning that really stand out. During the several years I've been affiliated, I've just begun to appreciate the staggering scope and pace of BMM's achievement in its 31-year existence at the dedicated and skilled hands of so many. BMM's accomplishments in the realms of research, education, preservation, collections, exhibition, publication, fundraising and other aspects of museum operation, have generated and sustained relationships with a variety of stakeholders. These advances have been realised in the face of relatively limited fiscal, material and human resources and have spanned the wide responsibilities of BMM's mission. It's not lip service to say that BMM's successes belie the young age and budding infrastructure of the institution. Indeed, this impressive history is perhaps only exceeded by the fantastic potential that exists to move BMM further forward in its multiple aims for public benefit.

It is in light of this proud body of achievement and exciting promise that, what is in my opinion, BMM's foremost challenge comes into relief. That challenge is to continue to bridge, in meaningful and sustainable ways, the gulf between BMM and publics in Bermuda's diverse community. This challenge has always been set firmly within BMM's mission and aims, and will always remain so as a perpetual process that can never be fully realised. Yet, the direction of my research has been steered by a sense that conscious strategies to push these connections are needed as a matter of priority.

This constructive critique of an institutional-community divide applies not only to BMM, but to Bermuda's cultural heritage sector at large. While neither meaning to generalise Bermuda's different heritage organisations, nor trivialise their significant achievements, in my view there remains a fundamental isolation and irrelevance of these institutions from their publics. I think it is fair to say that heritage, in so far as it is perpetuated, preserved and promoted by the local heritage sector remains largely peripheral to the lives of many in the Bermuda community. This statement does not suggest that the reasons underlying this dissonance are uncomplicated or easily understood. Nor does it imply that heritage, in different ways and forms, is not a part of those lives.

Zooming out even further, we can see that the challenge for heritage organisations and museums to meaningfully engage wider publics is by no means limited to Bermuda nor a new concern. Prompted by the political awakenings of the post-war era—from the rise of post-colonial nationhood, to indigenous re-determination and the fight for civil rights—mainstream museum convention has undergone fierce scrutiny and radical transformation over the last half-century. Museum constituents and practitioners have examined the colonial history of museums and their associated contemporary workings and assumptions. They have questioned the legitimacy of museums to possess the cultural knowledge and property of others and speak on their behalf. There is better recognition of the powerful ways that museums constitute and contest identities, memories and values, especially those related to heritage. New community-museum relationships have consequently emerged, changing established power relations from the un-democratic and authoritarian towards the shared and plural. Following the theoretical ideas of the museum as a 'forum' or 'contact zone', principles of collaboration and inclusion are at the heart of the community-based outreach and research being performed by museums around the world today.

Given these shifts in thinking and practice, and presented with the opportunity to investigate this museum-community divide in Bermuda, I set about devising my research programme. I initially envisioned fieldwork entirely based at BMM. To use the metaphor of the Keep (the great Dockyard citadel and Bermuda's largest fort in which BMM is located), I hoped to work from the inside of the fortress out, to bring new Bermuda publics into the walls and workings of BMM, helping us move towards an ever more open and embracing institution. By dovetailing with BMM's curatorial priorities and being constrained by the institution's working realities, the work earned a practical edge and relevance to real museum practice and the field's focus on social responsibility.

Despite the viability of such a research design, it uncomfortably maintained the dominance of BMM and the museum as an institution with respect to Bermuda's communities. There was no major shift in understanding towards those communities. Such research would perhaps merely serve as yet another example of already well-examined methods of curatorial outreach. Though museum-based research projects certainly have merit, with the support of my supervisor and BMM staff, I started to see the significance of research directly located in the Bermuda community.

Guided by the premise that heritage and museum work ought to be based in community perceptions, concerns and issues, I have established a research agenda independent from BMM and the public heritage sector. Recognising the importance of an anthropological understanding of the communities in which heritage and museum professionals think and act, I'm undertaking a study of the Bermuda community itself. While still a feature, culture history museum curation is no longer the study's central element. Far from reducing the value of the research, I believe this public orientation enhances the project's potential meaning for Bermuda's heritage sector, as well as for the fast-growing discipline of heritage studies.

My approach centers on ethnography, the making of a written account based on in-depth fieldwork. Rather than a general kind of ethnography my study specifically investigates the nature and function of heritage within Bermuda. Using qualitative methods I set out to explore some of the diverse and complex ways that heritage is conceived, expressed and used. I aim to reveal, at least to some extent, the meanings embedded within heritage and the contemporary forces and circumstances shaping those meanings.

But what do we mean by heritage and why is it important, for museum professionals in particular, to study at the regional and community level? There are, of course, generic definitions and descriptions of heritage, as well as widely held assumptions. While it has been famously said that heritage is 'everywhere', and can be 'anything you want', it is usually thought of as that which people want to save. As Dr. Edward Harris stated in one of his recent 'Heritage Matters' articles, 'heritage is essentially continuity'. Heritage indeed projects backwards and forwards through time, as inherited legacies of the past from which we extract meaning and maintain in the present for ourselves and for bestowal onto new generations. While heritage is passed down through processes such as rememberance and preservation and is concerned with future anxieties and aspirations, it resides in the present and is determined by the experiences, choices and perceptions of living generations. People actively determine heritage by sifting out certain values and meanings from among many possibilities, most often supporting accepted and naturalised norms or ways of life, but sometimes differing with them. Heritage is usually recognised, designated and classified. It is often classified in binaries such as the split between tangible and intangible heritage forms, or the distinction between natural and cultural heritage. Even though much heritage is painful, dangerous, contested or deliberately forgotten, heritage is largely assumed to be a good thing, something that benefits senses of identity and community. Equally, people lacking heritage are often viewed as deficient. Heritage is indeed strongly linked with identity, though it is just one aspect of identity, and just one of many lenses through which contemporary communities might be sighted and understood.

While these abstract descriptions provide a starting point they are limited in what they tell us about the actual social experience of heritage. Unsurprisingly, the phenomena, concept and term of heritage is at the core of the rapidly growing heritage sector, which encompasses heritage and museum studies and management and touches related disciplines such as archaeology, history, anthropology, geography and tourism. Surprisingly, despite heritage being constantly applied and referred to, and the fantastic developments in the heritage and museum fields, heritage is not actually well understood. Regardless of underlying so much in contemporary life, heritage is paradoxically underexplored and undertheorised. This conceptual inadequacy has weighty consequences for heritage and museum work at local and global levels and begs the type of research project I am carrying out.

As a social construct, heritage is shaped by complex and unstable conditions. It is subject to plural and multicultural perspectives and never fully contained by any one definition. Thus, heritage can only really be understood according to the people, terms and circumstances of particular contexts. My data and analysis consequently focuses on Bermuda communities. I assume those diverse communities contain much more dynamic, comprehensive and perhaps integrated senses of heritage than we already know, and trust that by listening carefully we can learn a great deal from these understandings. Besides having important implications for heritage and museum work, I contend these understandings are valuable in themselves.

I am especially interested in how heritage operates at grassroots levels, behind the scenes in people's lives. This could involve relationships with memory and forgetting, stories, knowledge, objects, places, spaces, history, performance, family, neighbourhood, community and the place and society of Bermuda in itself and in the world. My methods attempt to allow the Bermuda communities I am investigating to define heritage in their own terms, rather than in the terms of a museum or outsider. Towards this end, I hope to analyse how Bermuda communities actually identify and interact with heritage in an 'organic' sense. By making direct contact with those who engage with it, my work is a ground-up attempt to identify the substance of heritage from community priorities and values.

While there is no simple division of the instutional and grassroots, my approach stands in contrast to a focus on public, national or official levels of heritage. These top-down entities and values too often dominate understandings of heritage and the ways it is 'managed'. Bermuda perhaps reflects other contexts where heritage meanings are more diverse, complex and substantive than the somewhat narrow interests of public heritage instutions and professionals. What's more, professional heritage research and practice powerfully determines heritage, at times hindering, overwriting or obscuring its actual workings and meanings. With carefully prepared methods I hope to collect and analyse data to provide a more holistic and sophisticated understanding of heritage in Bermuda. In doing so I might also better identify the points at which heritage begins to become institutionalised or transformed from the 'organic' into something recognised and designated as important, public or in need of management or preservation.

Using interviews and direct interaction, the early stages of fieldwork have opened up my perspective of local communities and their heritage relationships. My masters dissertation study of local maritime enthusiasts, including salvage divers who differ with archaeologists and museum curators in some views, helped to reveal some less understood relationships with Bermuda's underwater heritage. A summer study of the Bermuda Day Heritage Parade enabled access to a variety of grassroots participant groups who shared some of the fascinating ways and reasons they articulate heritage through the parade performance and beyond it. Besides this, I've undertaken informal mini-studies with other groups, such as those who associate themselves with classic bikes, friendly societies, collecting, commercial fishing, cricket and sailing. Interviews with local heritage professionals and advocates have also helped to establish direction. Participant observation conducted at a variety of events—family reunions, town meetings, cup match, county games, emancipation ceremonies, diaspora events, church gatherings to name a few—have also helped to expand a vision of heritage in Bermuda.

In this early fieldwork I've found, as a Bermudian conducting an anthropology of home, my research has special qualities, advantages and challenges. These are to do with of being both insider, as a Bermudian, but also outsider, given the cultural diversity and social stratification of Bermuda.

My focus will narrow dramatically in the coming months, permiting me to analyse a particular aspect of the local community or heritage in greater depth. As there are so many stimulating spheres to investigate, this decision making process of who and what to focus on in the Bermuda context is perhaps one of the toughest challenges of the PhD, raising plenty of ethical issues. It's possible that as the fieldwork unfolds it may reconnect to BMM and culture history museum curation in general, though this will have to be something that emerges from the Bermuda communties under study. The path ahead is exciting and still taking shape. I welcome any ideas or feedback you, BMM's members, may have at my email cea34@cam.ac.uk. Your thoughts may help me on my way to stating an 'original contribution to knowledge' in eight words or less!