I’m currently developing a programme of research related to a topic which has fascinated me for some time—countercultures—and how we might develop an understanding of what I call ‘countercultural heritage’. What follows is a brief explanation of this idea, building on what appears to be new wave of thinking towards alt- and counter- movement in response to a number of hegemonic practices and worldviews.
When we talk about ‘countercultures’ in popular discourse, we often make associations with the 1960s and 70s anti-Vietnam War and environmental movements—the so-called hippie movement of communal living and sexual liberation1. This form of counterculture is exemplified by Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog (a “new kind of information delivery service” [Kirk, 2007, p.1] and the events and alternative technologies which fuelled environmentalism2. Cutler’s definition of ‘countercultures’ (1) as “radical groups of people who reject established social values and practices and who embrace a mode of life opposed to the mainstream” is probably not far from both the Californian environmentalists and our own understanding of the meaning of countercultures. Indeed, Cutler argues that there have been few examples of movements that could be classed as countercultures in the 1990s and 2000s, citing anti-corporate globalisation protests in Seattle in 1999 and Genoa in 2001. To this, we would comfortably add the Extinction Rebellion (XR) movement and, arguably, Black Lives Matter (BLM) as countercultural movements which are made up of ‘radicals’, although this plays into a conservative, neoliberal language of fear that sees democratic freedom of protest reduced to anarchic threat to civil society (see also here the Bristol ‘riots’ in 2021)
The American and British countercultural movements of the 1960s (with accepted origins in the decade before3) have become a shorthand for the term ‘counterculture’, yet it is worth noting, as Sheila Whiteley has suggested, that the idea of counterculture is a sociocultural-political analogy for what Andy Bennett has called “the hegemonic struggles that continue to inform everyday life in myriad societies and cultures across the globe” 4. For Bennett, a re-theorising of counterculture recognises that counterculture is not simply an ideological or aesthetic term of opposition (that we associate with particular lifestyle sites/strategies/choices) but a “contemporary social process through which the cultural fabric of everyday life is diversifying in ever more rapid cycles of change” (Bennett, p.23-24). Distinguished from ‘subculture’—which suggests a “small scale…perhaps underground or quasi-devious” orientation towards responses to social problems—counterculture is connoted as a larger scale movement or series of movements directed towards larger, global socio-economic problems and issues which may link (or appear to link) with the aesthetic, political and cultural ideas of the 1960s. Perhaps the resonance of counterculture in contemporary society remains so simply because the environmental, social and economic concerns of the 1960s are still prominent in everyday life today? Animal welfare, racial inequality, planetary futures and neoliberal lifestyles are still domains of contestation amongst a growing community of diverse people: black and white, Muslim and Christian, intersectional and heterosexual, teal or red.
If counterculture is read then as a description for those moments when diverse peoples come together with specific counter-hegemonic goals, what does this mean for ‘heritage’ in a countercultural heritage? Here, my articulation of countercultural heritage is not about the preservation of the heritage of countercultures, but instead an idea of a countercultural approach to heritage.
The word ‘heritage’ is derived from the French word eritage (meaning inherited) and the Latin heres (meaning heir)5. There is a sense here that heritage refers to objects or qualities of objects which are preserved for future generations. In developing countercultural heritage I build on Rodney Harrison and others’ work which explored alternative futures in natural and cultural heritage through a UK Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded project culminating in the publication of Heritage Futures6, and on the work of Shelley R. Butler and Erica Lehrer in Curatorial Dreams 7.
In the Introduction to Heritage Futures , Harrison argues that a reframed notion of heritage can be considered as “processual and discursive, as well as material” (p.5) and that heritage studies is to be seen as a study of “future-making or worlding practices” (p.6). This view aligns with Butler and Lehrer’s earlier work which sees the work of curation in museums and heritage as offering “conciliatory potential”, able to bring together ethno-cultural and class relations, aboriginal and diasporic communities, and transnational networks. In both volumes, we see an articulation of heritage studies and museology as current acts of preservation of the past in readiness for the future and it is this futuring that pulls audiences away from the nostalgic and the historic towards an engagement in socio-cultural issues of the here and now and a critical reflection on where we might want to be. Butler’s “curatorial collective” (Butler, p.14) also recognises that the production of exhibitions that present culture, history or identity are best conducted in a dialogical rather than consultative manner and it is this spirit that her and others work in the same volume so creatively imagines how cultural heritage-building need not be the sole preserve of an elite cadré of museum professionals.
When we bring together these two progressive ideas of counterculture and heritage as a form of working with the present to shape (better?) futures, we can see an operational landscape open up for design. After all, in a pragmatic understanding of design, the creation of a countercultural heritage—a heritage-building that recognises the plurality of voice and representation in processes of co-creation—will rely on the design of texts, signs, things, systems and processes to bring exhibitions, events and publications into being. Hence, designing for countercultural heritage.
Back in the late 1980s-early 1990s, a Thatcherite Government saw the potentialities of heritage-building as a business opportunity. Heritage-led projects (e.g. Ironbridge) not only offered financial reward for cultural investors (shifting a once-leading manufacturing base towards one of retail and service experiences) but also provided leisurely distraction for a growing under- and un-employed labour class 8. Now, perhaps, these sites of cultural heritage—historic houses, mills, museums and galleries—may become centres of countercultural heritage in which diverse communities can use these vast infrastructures of cultural production to present their alternate, counter-views on where we should all be headed.
References
1. Cutler, C. (2006). Subcultures and Countercultures. In Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics (pp. 236–239). Elsevier.
2. According to Kirk, Brand and his community of alternative technology and ecological designers actually disliked the idea of both ‘hippie’ and ‘counterculture’ in relation to their work and identities. See Kirk, A.G (2007) Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism. University Press of Kansas.
3.. Whiteley, S. (2015). Counterculture: The Classical View. in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 5, pp.80–86. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.32032-3
4. Bennett, A. (2014). Reappraising “Counterculture.” In S. Whiteley & J. Sklower (Eds.), Countercultures and Popular Music (pp. 16–26). Taylor & Francis Group.
5. Taylor, R. E. (2024). Chapter 1: Illustration and Heritage. In Illustration and Heritage. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350294202
6. Harrison, R., DeSilvey, C., Holtorf, C., Macdonald, S., Bartolini, N., Breithoff, E., Fredheim, H., Lyons, A., May, S., Morgan, J., & Penrose, S. (2020). Heritage Futures: Comparative Approaches to Natural and Cultural Heritage Practices. UCL Press. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787356009
7. Ruth Butler, S. Y., & Lehrer, E. (2016). Introduction: Curatorial Dreaming. In S. R. Butler & E. Lehrer (Eds.), Curatorial Dreams: Critics Imagine Exhibitions (pp. 3–23). McGill-Queen’s University Press.
8. Lumley, R. (1988) The museum time-machine : putting cultures on display. London: Routledge (Comedia book).
