Anthropological Journal of European Cultures

Previous studies of place attachment have tended to focus on the positive (rather than negative) reasons why individuals associate themselves with a particular place, while studies on memory and identity have frequently been based on negative experiences of and in place. Drawing on interviews and focus groups, this article highlights how Germans and Poles with a history of forced migration have different perceptions of the same geographical ‘home’, and how their tangible and intangible encounters during a museum visit helped to generate these understandings. It argues that a people-place-process complex of attachment provides a more useful conceptualisation of belonging than either place attachment or memory, because it encapsulates a greater breadth of ideas that contribute towards these feelings.

This article questions notions of belonging in the case of displaced communities’ descendants and discusses such groups’ efforts to preserve their heritage. It examines the instrumental use of nostalgia in heritage discourses that drive preservation efforts. The case study presented is focused on the Russian Old Believers in Romania. Their creativity in reforming heritage practices is considered in relation to heritage discourses that emphasise continuity. The ethnographic data presented in this article, derived from my doctoral research project, is focused on three major themes: language preservation, the singing tradition and the use of heritage for touristic purposes.

In this article, I offer some discussion of the meaning, use and development of the Sikh gurdwara in Britain. The research moves beyond typologies of the development processes of minority religious space, and traditional approaches to the identification of the heritage significance of buildings. The focus is on the perceived meaning and value of the gurdwara, investigated through narrative recollections of their everyday use and ongoing development by gurdwara attendees. I argue that this approach is a useful way of understanding the value of gurdwaras at local and national scales, where meanings either entwined with or independent of physical form may be context specific and difficult to reconcile with existing national frameworks of heritage significance. This research has implications for the ways in which heritage professionals, and others, approach their understanding of place and value, and the subsequent appropriate management of built heritage.

This article explores the relationship between my cultural inheritance and its impact on my work as a visual artist. Questions in the work related to language and geography are tied to my lived experience. These themes led me to explore the contemporary context of German clubs in the United States. I found the art process of collage – cutting and pasting to rearrange parts on a surface – to be an apt visual for the position of the German clubs today, arriving at the term ‘collaged culture’. Similarities between visual art and life reveal that both carry histories. By investigating the relationships between these, we can better perceive the current state of the work of art.

The current discourse of heritage interpretation, based on Tilden’s book Interpreting Our Heritage (1957), centres on ideas of education, materiality of heritage, expert knowledge and conservation. As such, it shares in the key characteristics of the Authorised Heritage Discourse (Smith 2006) and is subject to the same challenges that stem from definitions of heritage as immaterial, as a process and as a key factor in creating futures. The inadequateness of the Interpretive Authorised Heritage Discourse to respond to these challenges has become more apparent due to the size and speed of recent migrations. In response, I propose a new paradigm of heritage interpretation that is based on Mouffe’s (2013) concept of agonistics. Agonistic interpretation seeks to make visible the representations, meanings and emotions that underpin heritage, and to provide an infrastructure that visitors to heritage sites and museums may use to continue to build their identities and futures.

Land is central to Icelandic identity. It is birthright, heritage, a site of memory and belonging; mountains and fjords are the stuff on which Icelandic dreams are made. Land is made culture through story and song, told at family gatherings, and sung at schools and on hiking trips. Icelandic identity was built on this imagining, coupled to a vision of Icelanders as an exceptional people, a Viking race. The events of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), which exposed institutional corruption, caused many Icelanders to doubt the Viking image. At the same time, Iceland has been invaded by tourists. This article, based on participant observation, a survey and interviews, argues that one significant effect of the post-GFC foreign invasion has been a transformation of the cultural and moral order in Iceland, away from the boasting Viking and towards a new set of values within which land and nature occupy an even more central place.

How do stereotypes – as rhetorical, homogenising claims about the Self and Other – survive despite their users having personal experiences that contradict them? This article addresses this question by examining why the Christian and Muslim inhabitants of the Spanish enclave of Ceuta insist the ‘moro’ is a cunning, hostile antagonist, even when their interactions with Moroccans tend to be profitable, and even as ethnographers of mainland Spain report widespread revisions of the Moorish migrant’s negative image and the country’s Islamic past. Building on the interpretative model of stereotypes developed by Herzfeld, Brown and Theodossopolous, I argue that the ‘moro’ persists as an unequivocally malevolent character because it (1) is cultivated by a number of financially interested actors and (2) is central to the discursive strategies Ceutans use to respond to the political threats to their españolidad from both north and south.