After Mining: contrived dereliction, dualistic time and the moment of rupture in the presentation of mining heritage.

Since the early twentieth century, attempts have been made to promote sites relating to mining as industrial heritage. Since the rise of the heritage industry in the 1980s, the number and size of the mining sites being managed and promoted as heritage destinations has dramatically increased across t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Extractive Industries and Society
Main Author: Oakley, Peter
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: Elsevier 2018
Subjects:
Online Access:https://researchonline.rca.ac.uk/3224/
https://researchonline.rca.ac.uk/3224/1/OAKLEY%20After%20Mining%20Accepted%202018.pdf
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214790X17301727
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2018.03.005
Description
Summary:Since the early twentieth century, attempts have been made to promote sites relating to mining as industrial heritage. Since the rise of the heritage industry in the 1980s, the number and size of the mining sites being managed and promoted as heritage destinations has dramatically increased across the West. This paper will examine how the strategies for interpreting such sites rely on different temporal constructions. As well as outlining the ‘technological development’ approach and its association with linear time, the paper will unpack the key features of the less understood strategy of ‘contrived dereliction’ and the dualistic temporal framework that it relies on. This argument will reference a range of mining heritage sites visited and researched by the author: Kennecott, Skagway and Dyea in Alaska, Bodie in California and Geevor in Cornwall. The paper will also identify how curators have used the moment of rupture that can feature in dualistic temporal constructions to promote a specific political viewpoint and consider the social consequences of accepting the dualistic temporal construction that underpins contrived dereliction.