1/4.0: What is Heritage?

For our first full day in Chiang Mai, we kicked our research off with a series of back-to-back lectures at the Fine Arts Division of Chiang Mai University. At the entrance of the University stood a gigantic sculpture of the Elephant, considered a sacred animal in thai culture. I wondered how much of current art has evolved from Chiang M ai’s traditional heritage, and of how the students here were taught about art and their cultural heritage.

I looked at some of the works by the fine arts students. One of the student’s fashion collection, which consisted of a series of 5-6 costumes had large influences of local culture weaved into her concept and designs, such as with the traditional Thai motifs and decorations on her contemporary dress. This brought me back to my arts education in the past, where we were taught about western art as well as a strong emphasis on local art. With this age, it is inevitable that globalization would cause cultures and boundaries to blur, but I can only hope to see what kind of globalized culture would emerge in the future.

But for now, we were to be brought back several hundreds of years back into the past, with the first lecture of the day, conducted by the Chiang Mai University of Fine Art professor Dr Vithi Panichapan. He gave us with a crash course into Northern Thailand’s rich culture – a historical, cultural and social perspective of Chiang Mai before it became a “hub for tourism”. The professor mentioned at the start that the material we were going through was actually semester long. And sure enough, there was a lot of rich history to Chiang Mai. I initially expected a dry lecture, but the rich history of Chiang Mai was too interesting to tune out. We learnt that the lanna people – the people of Chiang Mai, consisted of a rich blend of different ethnicities, and used to be a largely matriarchal society. By the end of it, I felt like I had a better idea of culture in Chiang Mai, and in slightly better position to begin to write a research paper on it. The rest of the team definitely learnt a lot too – we realised that we missed out one crucial factor in Chiang Mai’s heritage – its diverse ethnicity.

We realised then that we had to completely rethink our initial findings. We looked at food, music, clothing, tradition, but missed out completely on heritage. I appreciated this lecture at the start of our trip now, because it gave us sufficient background information to work with further during the trip.

To me, heritage is still an alien and complex idea, and I was hoping to learn more and more about it.  The lectures conducted by our professors did shed some light on the topic. Professor Andrea gave a talk about heritage science, and of how we gather information about heritage. What struck me the most was what he said about heritage objects, or relics of the past. When a heritage object is taken out of its context and placed somewhere such as a museum for remembrance, it loses 90% of its meaning. This is because the real meaning of something lies in the human experiences of it, and this is what needs to be encoded as the “Gold of heritage”.

For instance, as we have learnt, the temples in Chiang Mai are communities in themselves. People come for worship; they can even bath and sleep there. If we take that out, the temple is a hollow object that loses most of its meaning. As he described this, I sensed how accurate that statement was. At the same time, perhaps this is the best we could have done. We are able to know more about the past now because of such objects and museums, and perhaps time just wipes with it many things out.

Further, I love going to museums, especially at my own pace, because I am able to contemplate and imagine what an object of the past used to be like, or how it was like for people to live back then. But I certainly understood that I could never grasp a complete meaning of another culture that way. It was too detached, and there was still so much information left out.

Professor Walter’s talk highlighted that heritage is always political. Preservation legitimizes an ethnic culture, and those that are not will be lost forever. That, to me, was a scary and yet almost beautiful thought. How much has been lost forever, and how much do we know now? It is certainly scary that the ones in power have the ability to decide for an entire culture, and of what is relevant to it or not.

Thereafter, we interviewed several students and members of the faculty about their feelings regarding heritage in Chiang Mai. Their response to our set list of questions was heartening to me. It really showed that heritage is such a multifaceted topic and it cannot just lie on one single aspect of one’s culture. There was a question that asked to which picture they related most closely to Chiang Mai’s cultural heritage. It consisted of music, food, etc. but most, if not all, the natives pick all. It appeared that they knew of their rich heritage and were proud of it. I saw this as a positive sign, because as long as they recognised this, they would certainly want to protect their heritage.

Yet, a professor we interviewed gave an interesting response to me. Being a professor in media studies, he said that most of the people might give us certain answers because they have almost been trained to know that this is the right response to give. They may say one thing, but it remains unclear if they actually mean it. For instance, I can say that I think Moon cake festival is very important to me as a Chinese, because I know that it is the right thing to say, but me practising it or believing in its tradition may be a different matter altogether. Furthermore, it did not help that we were foreigners, where they might have wanted to give a more positive image of their nation. It really highlighted the potential biases of our research and it is good that we have that in mind. Gathering data such as these will always be heavily subjective.

My head was whirring from the lectures. I was hopeful to find out and learn more. To me, I have a personal interest in this topic of heritage preservation, because it touched close to home for me, with regards to my previous overseas trip to a village in Vietnam. As a tourist village, there are struggles between preserving their heritage and their pressure to modernise under globalization’s influence. There, I experienced this issue on a societal level – because they have yet to establish themselves uniquely from other more popular tourist villages such as the Hmong tribe, money was an issue and they sought to other means, such as farming, or parents labouring overseas, to generate more income. They were also not the most satisfied with their conditions. I recall one of the houses’ had a calendar hung on their wall that had an image of Singapore – almost like it was the IDEAL city, the ‘dream’, where everyone was rich and modernised and we had every need fulfilled. There, I wondered about the complex issue of Tourism on one’s culture, will it taint their culture, will they enhance it? I had more questions than answers.

Back in the hotel, our group got together to collate what we had learnt from the day and decide on how to go about our research. We originally decided on a split between tangible and intangible heritage. However, we increasingly found that they both overlapped too much. After much heavy discussion with help from the seniors, we eventually decided on Tourist VS local views on heritage. After all, heritage is what we make of it, and with the boost in the tourism industry today, it has played a large role in shaping a nation’s cultural identity.