Heritage and Memory

The section will first discuss the representation of sport heritage and explore how the representation of heritage changes as time goes by, memory fades out and identity builds up in the epoch of commercialisation. Last but not least, it is worth delving into what kind of values are being displayed and transmitted through the heritage and the memory related to it. As the past has become a profitable selling commodity, the following discussion will unfold how the mechanism of creativity is embedded and applied assumingly to ameliorate the homogenised representation of sport heritage by constructing of a home from home from social and cultural perspectives.

Representation of sport heritage

History has been gathered up and presented as heritage because it is often acknowledged that meaningful pasts that should be remembered; and more and more buildings and other sites have been called on to act as witness of the past (MacDonald, 2009). In the face of the world full of plurality, heritage sites endeavour to claim themselves as qualified heritage worth seeing by various ways of mediation and display.

As such, Ashworth et al. indicate that there seems to be a basic difficulty in authorising discourses of heritage, because heritage and its messages could be multi-vocal, relayed simultaneously from many sources and both public and private at many scales

(Ashworth et al.,2007). Heritage can be, contradictorily, an instrument for social fragmentation and as well as social cohesion. However, in the particular context of heritage tourism, the past is excessively sanitised to meet the demand of the contemporary world service economy and what people perceive and see might be a completely scripted spectacle with the staged authenticity as the sanitizer.

Entanglements between identity and memory raise the questions about practice of selection, preservation, cultural comparison and witnessing (MacDonald, 2009).

Despite of the increase interest in the heritage from the travelling public, sports heritage attractions are still the other, receiving too little attention for its interpretive complexity.

The growing body of sports studies helps us to understand how sport is often put to work as an expression of recent political economic transformation towards the construction of sporting experience which has also become a vehicle of mediation.

Sport heritage is part of the wider cultural landscape that often seeks to remember, enliven, teach, create personal/collective legacies and enhance the value of places for communities and society as a whole (Ramshaw, 2005). Landscape elements act as, as suggested, specialisation and compartmentalisation of power and memory, resulting in the fluctuation of power relationships when it comes to maintaining the discourse of sport heritage.

As it is often suggested, sports constantly evolve with social involvement and time.

We have arrived in an era of standardisation where our daily routines, desires and

leisure activities synchronise with the rhythms of the machine. Museums, as a result, have become the demonstrative chronicles that help people to relive the memory and be in the past once again. According to Moore, museums of sport are generally a relatively recent phenomenon in the UK (Moore, 2008). In the 1990s, British football has witnessed a noticeable increase of the practices of commemoration and memorialisation, which have become central taken-for-granted features of British football culture within the last two decades. It was also the period that museums have become the natural home for the collections so as to help the public remember the past. This situation typically involves the promotion or valorisation of a specific history, but also the politics of memory and representation of heritage

The debate of ways of seeing the stadium is more than the exhibition displayed in the museum and the politics of representation does not end at the doorstep of the museum. Therefore, I intend to open up the discussion about those little considered establishments such as the naming of grandstands and roads, the erection of statue, the practice of living memorials, the building of informal shrines, the frequent holding of minute silence and other rituals. We have ignored the cultural meanings behind those rituals for far too long in the late modern football culture, because normally we just do as what others do.

To locate sport heritage in a cultural context, I have drawn upon on the notion of the cultural landscape. The cultural landscape, together with the signs and symbols,

contributing to narratives of group identity (Whelan, 2005), but chances are that sites may find themselves being interpreted and mediated not the way they want in the representation of heritage sites.

Sport heritage attractions are not only potent tourist attractions in their own right, but also powerful creators and protectors of particular heritage values and outcomes by addressing themselves as sites of organisational propaganda, sites of worship and pilgrimage, and sites of cultural and economic consumption (Ramshaw, 2009). One man’s Utopia might be another man’s dystopia and stadium probably exemplifies this metaphor the best. In Bale’s opinion, it is often understood that most of the people regard the stadium as a religious shrine and a mediator to contextualise their love of the place and their sense of the place-loyalty in order to strengthen their bonding with places, but we cannot underestimate that football could possibly constitute a nuisance and sometimes generate real fear (Bale, 1993).

In the 1980s, the public, within and without England, had a strong inclination to see the English football stadium as a place of violence and social malaise rather than a place of the social solidarity. Indeed, the fan-generated violence in England from the mid-1960s to the early 1990s created occasions of weekly social unrest to a degree almost unknown in a politically and economically stable state (Robinson, 2010). The patterns of popular commemoration emerged since the 1980s, which problematizes the impression of football stadium. It can be seen as a salient and quasi-religious position in urban city landscape where modern rituals and pilgrimages take place, but on the

other hand, it may be a place of trauma, especially in Britain, the world hub of football memorabilia. The following section will move on to the discussion about memory politics and how the memory politics affects the ways of perception.

Always on your mind: Selective remembering

History and heritage are cultural products and social constructs that conjoin our received identities and imagined affinities of time and place (Hollinshead, 2002) and the memory derives from which, stays with us ever since. The sporting past is part of our here and now, intertwined with the complex fluidity and inter-textuality of remembering and memory accumulation. Research in tourism studies shows that tourists travel not only seeks for the experience, but also for the sake of making every moment counts.

The ways to display is never just representations of incontestable facts, but always involves the cultural, social and political implication to be presented and gazed upon (Macdonald, 1998) and prepare us with the pursuit of what never really was, a longing for becoming nostalgic. The commercialisation of nostalgia teaches us to miss the things we have never lost, alluring us to beautify everything in the past, no matter how dreadful the situation was back in the days. Through consumption, we seem to forget the trauma when all the sorrow evaporates in an instant with the expense and what remains with us is the soothed feeling and the commodity we have bought for past-evoking.

What we keep in our mind is unlikely to be a plain truth, because history always undergoes a process of tenderisation for a wider or fresher mixture of contemporary uses and consumption, connecting to the broader socio-political concerns (Hollinshead, 2002) and people could be quite selective on remembering and forgetting.

The notion of home is powerful and widespread in sport. In the scope of sport tourism, the concept of home is both culturally and economically important in the representation of sport heritage. Robinson has drawn attention to examine the role the stadium has played in transforming perceptions of English football from outside the game, as well as how practices and rituals that occur inside the stadium have extended beyond football (Robinson, 2010). It would not be an exaggeration to say that, at least in England, football stadium is considered as home to its supporters in a metaphorical way. Referring to what Ramshaw and Gammon have indicated, the construction of sport heritage and stadium tours might have become the most obvious and structured experiences for visitors to engage with (Ramshaw and Gammon, 2010) and probably the easiest access to take part in. The notion of home, sports-wise speaking, often combines both the literal and the spiritual meaning, as stadium is a tangible location of bricks and mortar where games, traditions and rituals are actually practised on site (Wood, 2007). Having said that, the construction of home en masse causes more and more people realise that they are encountering troubles in finding the uniqueness in sport heritage tourisms. The television, international transportation and the Internet have suggested that today and in the future fandom can and will exist as a community

without propinquity (Bale, 2000). It seems that the distance is sheer imagined and surpassable without making a physical presence and the community of fans is being liberated from a confined frontier, such as a city.

Served as the analytical lens, the notion of sports commodification has turned the sporting past into a collectible commodity and has transformed stadia from repositories of collective memory to memory-work tools. There is nothing we can do about the past, so why are we so attached to it? What do we obtain from buying a sporting experience?

With the more and more increase interest in tourism and the greater recognition of sport, we can see that sport stadium is becoming more readily integrated and accepted as a fundamental component of the leisure industry and tourism (Stevens, 2004), but how does a stadium ensure its consistent distinctiveness and keep its appeal to the public will be something I wish to inquire into in the next section.

Creative turn in representation of heritage

As has been discussed above, meaning and memory have the capability of transforming neutral spaces into sites of ideology and generating a sense of collective identity by the creation of a shared past, whether it exists or not, that stirs up the politics of power and identity (Whelan, 2005). The dominant predilection of consumption put the representation of sport heritage into a limbo, because sport heritage sites start to share no difference between one another.

Collecting is a significant feature in football fan culture and tourists are equally the same. It is important to collect authentic experiences in which people find meanings and anchorage to make sense of their lives. Football industry has capitalised on the proliferation of consumer goods, but has also suffered from the homogenisation. Thus, the call for the creativity touch becomes an urgent need to ameliorate the inherent opposition between culture and commerce.

Creativity is seen as a process which creates new cultural forms in a position to develop innovatory new cultural products and to nourish the cultural economy (Richards and Wilson, 2006). An enormous range of material has been produced to give football fans the access to display the objects of fandom, such as football replica jerseys, accessories and all sorts of endorsed products. In modern society, MacCannell has pointed out the fact that the commodity has integrated into the fabric of everyday life (MacCannell, 1999), while on the other hand, from the standpoint of nostalgic reflection, Fairley explains that the liminoid social experiences and the focus of associated memoires do not only depend on the sport itself, but also on the important social (or group) relationships (Fairley, 2003), because memories of group experience are also related and anchored to one’s identity.

Group experience includes intangible heritage practised at the stadium, such as club anthems and particular chants, legitimises specific heritage discourses that are important for the commercial success of the stadium. Through the particular discourse of power generated from those new cultural forms, sport heritage sites are constructed

and developed once again in the context of commodification. Football fans are being put in a tricky position: They choose to consume their favourite sport, but at the same time, they are being consumed as they are part of the commodity, the intangible and highly-mediated one.

Garnham calls attention to struggles happening in the society doesn’t restrict between economic power and material distribution, but also intertwines with the desire for recognition from sub-cultures groups and legitimation of their entity in face of a society dominated by the strong cultural hegemony (Garnham, 2005). In terms of tourism, the creative turn has turned tourism into a creative arena for the development of skills and performance (Richards, 2011), but creating bias as guides transform themselves into products and services of greater mediation. The symbolic economy of a site relies on the physical assets and also the series of contrived experiences, which result in a paradox of uniqueness that only concentrates on the upscale consumption.

Will creativity be the solution to the mediocre (re)production of culture and experiences?

Creative power in architecture

Architecture can be seen as material ideology which attempts to shape bodily comportments and ways of seeing (Macdonald, 2009) and its power over people tends to be disregarded by us. The performative and place-bound character of tourism unfolds considerably through architecture in two directions: spatial production and social production. However, it is not one-sided relying on the hard infrastructure, but also

depends on the inter-mediator. The inter-mediator is needed to tell the audience what is important about, what has happened, what to look for and what to experience so as to (re)discover and (re)construct a cultural heritage or a social identity (MacCannell, 1999).

Performative conventions and normative choreography are carried out both by visitors and guides under the power of the organised space.

The role of tour guide is seen as a performance, which requires the collaboration from the tourists in order to complete the performance. However, the existence of the guide could be a filter that decides what should be seen and remembered in advance.

Moreover, according to Bæ renholdt et al., they also address that tourist places are produced by the cooperative efforts of territorially defined relations and by mobile interactions among tourist industry, tourist organisations and tourists across places and boundaries (Bæ renholdt et al., 2004). As today the production of experiences does not necessarily depends on the organiser, tourists pick up the role as the co-maker, a dual-role combined with consumer and producer.

The staging of experience will not be harmonised, if it only depends on either guides or visitors. As tourism is seen as a distinct complex of services, tour guides have become speakers of referential discourse about sight features and motivations for tourists to get more involved with the engagement in expressive and phatic discourse (Fine and Speer, 1985). The making of the experience cannot be accomplished if either of them doesn’t exist, because the texts need to be consumed and deciphered by the people with the right cultural capital with politics involved.

Experience economy as commodified products

Following by the examination of hard infrastructure and human dimension in producing of experiences in last section, I would like to open up some ideas on consumption whether the socialisation has surrendered to the pure commercialisation of culture. This is not a recent phenomenon as Crang points out in the end of twentieth century, in an image-dominated post-modern society, tourism-related employment performances of commodified products are not simply imagined constructions, but also are temporally and spatially constituted constellation of embodied social practices (Crang, 1997). The exterior outlook becomes way too decisive on sorting out the identity crisis, as people always seek for being different from others but at the same time they still want to be identified with like-minded people to gain the sense of belonging through a great deal of conspicuous consumption.

Still we cannot underestimate that the architecture has become part of a system of signs that perpetuates distinctions among different lifestyle attitudes by reflecting and promoting social values (Klingmann, 2007). Consumption shows who you are and what sort of lifestyle you are leading. In connection of football, stadia have been endowed with the prowess to evoke and summon the crowds as the prevalent usage for an articulation of identity, in which we can see that the stadium has become a social tool to connect with the society. In the next section, I will delve into two groups of people:

sport tourists and fans, and how they leverage their influence on the making of