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ABSTRACT
Keywords: Culture, Communication, Evolution, Heritage, Museology, Memory,
Relevance.
“Where one person sees in an object evidence of a military victory,
another person sees in the same object a criminal act of colonialism; where
someone sees in an object the positive side, another person sees the negative
side. The object is at the same time the front and the back, the statement
and the negation, the reminder of something and the oblivion of another part.
More so than in other areas, before a heritage object it is hard to find a
full answer to the questions: “What is it that I am seeing? How, within me,
and by which part of me, am I seeing it? What have I always seen from what I
am seeing, and what may I not have seen yet? What has this seeing not allowed
me to see? What is the responsibility in the communication it is made of it
to the community?”
The problem of a heritage object lies in the fact that it takes on
various meanings, and that it is always beyond the empirical evidence and the
positivism of the context where it is found. The plurisignificant nature of
Heritage and the need to constantly solve this problem in the communicational
acts that are the expographies, these are the challenges which culture faces
and which turned out to be the starting point of this project.
This starting problem is connected with a very ancient debate to which
Junqua & Lacouture made a recent contribution regarding the heritage of
gestures, when they stated that “The
error of empiricism is to believe that verified facts already contain the
explanation of the phenomenon. Exactly its opposite, it is necessary to find
it.” (Junqua & Lacouture, 2001, p.9). Before them, Karl Popper had
claimed that “the root of that problem
lies in the apparent contradiction between what can be called «the
fundamental thesis of empiricism» – a thesis according to which only
experience can decide about the truth or falsehood of a scientific statement
– and the fact that Hume realized the inadmissibility of inductive arguments.”
(Popper, 1985, p. 44). And Fernando Gil would add to the debate the claim
that “Experience and Judgment stem from
the same point. Experience is «evidence of individual objects» and the
evidence of individual objects is «the concept of experience in the broadest
sense». (...) Evidence of the individual object and Experience are defined by
each other. (...) the realization of the individual is expressed by a power
of fascination which involves the function of presentation: here is the
secret of the operation of evidence.” (Fernando Gil, 1986, pp. 253/254).
The results achieved by this project indicate that in order to achieve
the understanding of the apparently undecidable nature of Heritage it is
necessary to consider a different context from those that have so far been
used, and that this understanding takes place in the field of the phenomenon
of Relevance. Still, we refute the statement that “a supposition is relevant within a context if, and only if, it has
some contextual effect in that context” (Sperber & Wilson, 2001, p.
194), since the results indicate that the relevance of heritage does not
occur merely in this way – closed in the particular specificity of each
social-historic context; or in the material, formal or aesthetical properties
of each heritage object. It was possible to demonstrate that the algorithmic
reduction of Relevance to codes has enabled the development of increasingly
sharper and more effective cognitive capabilities, and as it is possible to
encode the heritage value of ‘objects’ the conditions are created to convey
it to future generations under the form of codification. Therefore, to be
relevant in one context (age) may have an effect in another age and in
another context.
That codification process was, at least in part, responsible for the
emergence of abduction, analogy, deduction, homology and the remaining
capacities inherent to the nine heritage values which were found to exist in
that mental map which we call the Heritage
Value Structure or Relevance
Structure (Manuel-Cardoso, 2010). They are the ones which serve as
criteria-instructions to select the objects we regard as ‘heritage’, and
endow them with heritage quality. These are the criteria that transform
reality and objects into Heritage, and which work to perfect the mind’s
ability in that search for Relevance. The management of Relevance during
phylogeny, due to the importance which it turns out to have for the adaptive
success, has a high probability of being part of an explanation of the origin
of cognition itself. Facts indicate that this is a path worth treading in
research and in the interpretation of Heritage.
The results of this work also show that, in the case of Heritage, it is
not true “that there is no expectation”
of human beings managing Relevance in a “balanced
and satisfactory” manner, as Dan Sperber and Deirde Wilson claimed
(Sperber & Wilson, 2010, p. 240). This hope lies in the heuristics whose
existence these same authors acknowledged, “some being innate, others developed through experience” (ibidem),
and which in this project we ascertained are coded in mnesis. Arthur Koestler
had already called them “rules of the
game”, assuming they governed “organic
life, in all its manifestations, from morphogenesis to symbolic thought”
(Watzlawick et al., 1972, p. 21). Heritage, by resisting the different
contexts which have followed one another, and by ceasing to be a mere
introspective conjecture, helps to understand human thought and action, and
contributes to reinforce the “(...) connection
between sciences traditionally oriented to nature and the physical world and
the humanities.” (Squire & Kandel, 2002, p.223).
In theoretical terms, one can conclude that the Study of Heritage aims to
understand the process which gives reality-existence the quality of heritage through
an interpretative model which relates the processes of patrimonization,
musealization and memory, the context of which is a permanent fluctuation
between Phenomenology and Positivism. In practical terms, this understanding
of Heritage leads heritage work to have as objective to obtain a ‘support’
with ‘documents/data’ from the ‘parts of reality-existence considered
Relevant’ and access to which through memory-cognition knows no limitations
(of space, time, context or otherwise), so as to obtain a possible adaptive
advantage. The so-called ‘museum’, ‘library’, ‘archive’, and other similar
infrastructures are used to involve some types of heritage in order to manage
and preserve them better.
In the path of this line of thinking which has led to that conclusion,
the following contributions stand out: i) the contemporary heritage reality
was characterized, the consequences of the impact of the Development ideology
were identified, and the emergence of the ‘Object-code’, of the ‘Total
communication use’ and of the ‘Transformational value’ was established; ii)
the factors and variables which characterize heritage as object of knowledge
were systematized; iii) the Heritage Value Structure which encodes nine
criteria which guide the transformation of reality (objects/documents/uses)
in heritage; iv) the manner of identifying the patrimonization process was
redefined; v) a process understanding was proposed for the interpretation of
heritage; vi) the distinction was made between patrimonization process,
musealization process and memory process, and the relation between these
three processes was put forward as methodological path to research heritage.”
(Pedro Manuel-Cardoso, 2011)
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