The view of our town from the hill

Abstract

Many new heritage centres put on display the history of ‘a people’ and construct narratives which are organized around the trope of ‘community’. These narratives are based on prior acts of imagining that represent the social subjects of history as bound together in a social, spatial and temporal identity. This article discusses these representational strategies through a detailed examination of heritage texts in a selected case-study. It is suggested that, although heritage does trade on conventional images of olde-worlde communities, it also puts into play other more politicized discourses of collective action. However, it is argued that all representations of community involve adopting a perspective ‘from the hill’, which tends to encode community as an enclosed and homogeneous world. The alternative view of local social life, encapsulated in the ‘network’ metaphor, is incompatible with the economic and political logic of local heritage attractions.