Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Manuela Vinai
(University of Turin)
Audhild Lindheim Kennedy (Norwegian Industrial Workers Museum)
Francisco Rivera (University of Toronto)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Panel
Short Abstract:
This panel explores how industrialisation shapes heritage and economic growth narratives. We invite papers that examine the un-writing of industrial ‘heritage’ fairy tales and reinterpret these narratives, with a focus on ethnographic examples that challenge conventional perspectives and practices.
Long Abstract:
The waves of industrialisation that have taken place in the world since the mid-18th century have given rise to hegemonic frameworks that limit our thinking to economic growth and our relationship with the natural world and the landscapes that surround us. What occurs when industry is perceived as heritage? Laurajane Smith (2020) points out that industrial heritage is unlike other forms of heritage. It is often based on personal and familial connections to an industrial site or heritage object; moreover, industrial heritage allows for ‘empathetic reflections based on historical gratitude’ (Smith 2020, 135).
The industrial narrative appropriates the hardships of the working class, transforming them into symbols of dedication and unity, framing them as part of a shared effort toward the success of production, which in turn becomes a source of collective identity. When a process of deindustrialisation occurs, it changes not only the production model but also an entire system of cultural identification (Walley 2013). Deindustrialisation involves an un-tailoring process that necessitates a reinterpretation of the industrial narrative and ‘becomes a process of rewriting an historic identity’ (Nettleingham 2019).
In this panel, we invite papers that explore the un-writing of what we consider ‘heritage’ fairy tales, often exemplified in the form of an industrial fairy tale – romanticising and emphasising human attempts at controlling or domesticating nature (Birkeland 2008).
We encourage contributions that showcase ethnographic examples of un-writing the (industrial) heritage fairy tales, viewed as a call to reflect on our practices and how they may differ from others.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper Short Abstract:
In northern Chile, industrial sulfur mining played a crucial role in the State’s sovereignty and economic development projects. The Aucanquilcha volcano, known as the Rebel in the Ollagüe community's cosmogony, is a non-human agent affecting mining conditions and exploitation. Instead of approaching industrial expansion from an anthropocentric standpoint, I suggest adopting the volcano's perspective to understand the closure of mining projects as resulting from its rebellion against domestication.
Paper Abstract:
In the Quechua community of Ollagüe, in northern Chile, sulfur mining expansion played a crucial role in the utopian economic development project and State sovereignty. However, it also caused profound transformations in the landscape and the local Indigenous community. The Aucanquilcha volcano, known as the Rebel in the community's cosmogony, is a natural living entity, a non-human agent affecting mining conditions and exploitation. Mining acted as a control mechanism of a frontier extractive territory and a form of domestication of the volcanic space. Combining an archaeological, ethnographic, and historical approach, I explore the mining camps of Ollagüe and the deep history of its socio-economic changes through what Jane Bennett calls "vibrant matter." I suggest understanding the history of capitalist expansion from the perspective of the volcano and its rebellion against its domestication, instead of from the anthropocentric triumph of its exploitation. This perspective offers a novel understanding of Ollagüe's cultural landscapes and extractive industries' impacts. Ollagüe's abandoned industrial ruins illustrate the failure to tame the Aucanquilcha volcano, the Rebel.
Paper Short Abstract:
In this article, we seek to investigate how the economic discourse around industrialization changed between the late 50s and early 60s to meet the demands for a response to a humanitarian crisis in the Brazilian Northeast.
Paper Abstract:
Developmentalism was an active ideological current in Latin America in the middle of the last century. In Brazil, the promise of overcoming underdevelopment through industrialization and massive intervention by the State was met with serious difficulties such as strong regional inequality. In this article, we seek to investigate how the economic discourse around industrialization changed between the late 50s and early 60s to meet the demands for a response to a humanitarian crisis in the Brazilian Northeast. We argue that the privatizing sector of developmentalism, represented by Confederação Nacional da Indústria (CNI), was a key element in constructing a discourse of regional redemption by the industry. The analysis of the magazine Desenvolvimento & Conjuntura, published by CNI, indicates an industrialization policy guided by private sector representatives.
Paper Short Abstract:
The aim of this contribution is to investigate the transformations of urban imaginaries within the late-industrial landscape and the narratives of ruins and places that are generated in the memory of the community: the case of Manfredonia, an Adriatic coastal city in Puglia (Southern Italy).
Paper Abstract:
The contribution starts from the research activity which aims to investigate the transformations of urban imaginaries within the late-industrial landscape and the narratives of ruins and places that are generated in the memory of the community, with focus on the dimension of everyday living in the context of Manfredonia, an Adriatic coastal town in Puglia (Southern Italy).
The legacy of the industrial era has made Manfredonia a sort of company town, constantly balanced between the memory of the impact of the chemical industry on the territory and the imagination of a city that observes the maritime space with the aim of regenerating the urban context in the perspective of a sustainable future. From the perspective of a researcher who in walking through the city stands between towers that signal the presence of industry and towers that signal the presence of sea and land, the contribution explores the theme of urban regeneration of the post-industrial landscape in terms of the social construction of the spaces from the point of view of the inhabitants and from the point of view of the coastline as a place where to perceive and understand the social components that constitute Manfredonia. The aim is to demonstrate how much the city cannot be reduced within predefined spatial models, but must be understood as a local declination of specific cultural processes, an expression of a living that is not a simple being in the city, but is a constant redefinition of the relationship between place and individuals.
Paper Short Abstract:
Based on an ethnography with former industrial workers in a de-industrialised town on the outskirts of Lisbon, the paper discusses their at once realistic and nostalgic memories of their lost industrial work and life, taking into account the transient industrialisation they experienced and the inherent complexities of the waged labour relationship.
Paper Abstract:
In a Portuguese town north-west of Lisbon that has experienced a transient industrialisation – where manufacturing and industrial work as a dominant way of life materialised and then disappeared in the space of four decades – women create complex memories of their time as industrial workers.
While they are quite vocal about the material and relational hardships of factory work and the difficulties of their dual role as wage earners and family mothers, they nonetheless remember themselves fondly as stable, skilled, competent and well-paid industrial workers.
I will argue that this realistic nostalgia for lost industrial work is reinforced by the transitory nature of the industrialisation process that these women experienced and were part of, inviting them to evaluate their condition as industrial workers against both earlier periods of poverty and contemporary job (and hence life) precarity.
Theirs is also a realist perspective in the sense that it implicitly captures deindustrialisation (in the various forms it can take) as a political and class project that devalues labour (High 2020; Strangelman 2017) and pushes working people into low‑cost ways of life.
Moreover, these women’s complex memories of industrial work and life also capture the complex experience of waged work itself: its many, often conflicting sides, where hardship and exploitation, on the one hand, and the struggle for a subjective sense of value and purpose, on the other, typically coexist.
Paper Short Abstract:
The post-revolt government’s intervention against the working class protests in Bangladesh disrupted the years old narrative of ‘saviors’ and ‘main resources for foreign exchanges’ and labeled them as the ‘associates of the tyrant’, referring to the ousted prime minister Sheikh Hasina.
Paper Abstract:
This paper examines the post-uprising (July-August uprising in Bangladesh) governmentality in Bangladesh that tend to define working class protests as remaining of the autocratic government that was ousted from the power on August 5, 2024. This convenient portrayal of working class population, especially those protested for some basic rights during the period from August to October, 2024, largely from garment industry, was emerged on the backdrop of a prolonged and orchestrated campaign of constructing the garment workers as ‘saviors’ and main resources for ‘foreign exchanges’. That garment industries predominantly have a huge number of women workers has to do with the gendered wage pattern is altogether a different research query but has a demonstrational effect on the on-street protests that showcased a huge number of females. With reference to specific history of industrialization (or lack of it) in Bangladesh, garment industry marked extraordinary profit-making ventures in the wake of neoliberal global policies since the 90s compounded with a large number of women workers emerged and appropriated from the ruins of agrarian ‘rural’ Bangladesh. There have been a series of political and literary rhetoric produced to regard these women whereas they had to protest on regular basis to secure their basic rights and pending payments and accept police brutality against them. While it was a regular scenario during the regime, the post-revolt government’s intervention against the protests disrupted the years old narrative as the workers are now labeled as the ‘associates of the tyrant’, referring to Sheikh Hasina.
Paper Short Abstract:
The Chodzież ceramic industry operated on a factory basis in the years 1855-2020 and itself underwent many changes dependent on the political situation of the country or the state of the global economy. Its decline affected not only the socio-economic situation of the former porcelain factory employees, but also the production and commemoration of narratives about the industrial-ceramic heritage of the city. The aim of the presentation is to show the social and narrative complexities surrounding the collapse of the Chodzież porcelain factory from the perspective of post-industrial anthropology.
Paper Abstract:
In the presentation, I focus on the issue of the postindustrial heritage of the city of Chodzież and its ceramic past. Work in a porcelain factory appears in the context of local identity, both bottom-up (city residents) and institutional (local authorities). For many years, the porcelain factory in Chodzież provided the largest number of jobs, which affects the sense of identity and belonging to a specific social group - factory workers. The deindustrialization of Chodzież and the gradual phasing out of porcelain production since the early 90s have led to the invisibility of the factory workers, but not to their complete disappearance.
The bottom-up movements of the city's residents (often former factory workers), strive to commemorate the city's industrial heritage by organizing events celebrating industrial heritage, or creating private museum rooms with local ceramic collections. The microhistories of former workers regarding their industrial everyday life and work in the factory are extremely important in the context of commemorating and creating memory about the industrial heritage of Chodzież. Through their actions, these people commemorate both the tangible and intangible traces of the industrial revolution. The microhistories of former workers are associated with memory, non-memory, and nostalgia for the times of work in the factory that was closed in 2020. In addition to the memory of individuals, the memory of the city also consists of collective memory, expressed and built on the mnemotopos of Chodzież as a industrial and porcelain city.
Paper Short Abstract:
This paper examines Prince Charles’s critique of the Scottish New Town of Glenrothes, exposing how princely power, government disinvestment, and labor exploitation coalesced to shape Britain’s perceptions of New Towns as legacies of industrial, architectural, and socio-political failures.
Paper Abstract:
This paper examines Prince Charles’s influence on British architectural tastes through his 1988 TV documentary and book, A Vision of Britain, juxtaposed against promotional New Town films from the Scottish National Archives. It explores how Charles’s populist critique of modern architecture reframed public perceptions of post-war New Towns, particularly Glenrothes, a once-renowned Scottish New Town later labeled a “failure” as recipient of the Carbuncle Award for Britain’s "ugliest" architecture.
Situating Glenrothes within the industrial heritage of Scotland’s coal-driven economy and mid-20th-century efforts to relocate working-class families from overcrowded urban centers, this paper investigates the intertwined dynamics of industrial exploitation, aesthetic judgment, and systemic neglect. It interrogates how deindustrialization and political shifts during the Thatcher era dismantled the utopian aspirations of New Towns, replacing them with narratives of obsolescence and failure.
The research highlights Charles’s manipulation of these narratives to serve both personal and political agendas, using a populist aesthetic to mask deeper complicity in eroding the Welfare State. By linking Glenrothes’s trajectory to broader industrial and cultural transformations, this paper challenges the romanticized "heritage fairy tales" surrounding industrial labor and modernist ideals, exposing the systems of extraction and exploitation behind such projects. Ultimately, it calls for a re-examination of the narratives shaping Britain’s post-war built environment, emphasizing how industrial heritage is reinterpreted in the wake of deindustrialization.
Paper Short Abstract:
This contribution critically compares industrial narratives in deindustrialised towns in Norway and a former textile district in Italy. We explore how children learn about heritage and the role of cultural welfare projects, highlighting two distinct approaches to industrial heritage in different European contexts.
Paper Abstract:
How do communities learn about the local industrial heritage? In this presentation we wish to do a comparison between Audhild Kennedy’s findings on how children learn about local heritage in Rjukan and Notodden, two deindustrialised towns in southeastern Norway, and Manuela Vinai’s ethnography of cultural welfare projects held in Valdilana, a region in a deindustrialised textile district in the northwest of Italy. In our presentation we wish to reflect on how communities learn about the local industrial heritage and to un-write the industrial ‘heritage’ fairy tales and reinterpret these narratives. We focus on our ethnography from our fieldwork in Italy and Norway to challenge conventional perspectives and practices. Moreover, we want to explore how fostering a dialogue between Notodden and Valdilana as we believe such a comparison can highlight how studies on deindustrialisation can pave the way for a new narrative of industrial pasts. In her empirical examples from Notodden, Norway, Audhild Kennedy shows how a UNESCO inscription seems to strip the World Heritage site off its potential multivocality by processes that standardise the industrial narrative to take the shape of an industrial fairy tale, and thus restricting children’s potential futures. Whereas Manuela Vinai uses her ethnography to illustrate how Biella's industrialists, drawing on the tradition of spiritual solidarity, continue to uphold the symbolic role of caring for the territory and its inhabitants.