Paper short abstract:

This paper suggests that the duality of mentality/materiality can dissolve through archaeological/heritage tourism. However the normative impulse that informs the latter pair cannot be maintained where this non-dualist perspective is to flourish.

Paper long abstract:

This paper suggests that the duality of mentality/materiality can dissolve through archaeological/heritage tourism. However the normative impulse that informs the latter pair cannot be maintained where this non-dualist perspective is to flourish.

In the context of tourism, heritage and archaeology can be understood as performances and face problems of veracity, of an inability to perform or be a spectator of the past without drawing (on) the present. The challenge for heritage providers becomes one of encouraging speculation, of drawing forth imagination. This implies an active spectatorship that moves beyond consumption of what is provided by the heritage industry. From a material culture perspective, individuals can be understood as inventing their own heritage, understanding of which can be approached through the objects they accumulate, through materiality. Thus material culture becomes the subject and mentality of the object of attention. Yet materialities are both the origin and the outcome of mentalities and vice-versa. Archaeology cannot provide origins for one or the other but the archaeological project becomes a moment of placement, a condensation of a fluid form except when, as the panel abstract suggests, it engages openly in a dynamic expressionism, by which I understand the manipulation of both materiality and mentality to produce meaning that is not limited by the necessity of mapping the one on the other.