Assessing the Values of Cultural Heritage: Research Report

Assessing the Values of Cultural Heritage

Research Report The Getty Conservation Institute, Los Angeles

Assessing the Values of Cultural Heritage

Research Report Edited by Marta de la Torre The Getty Conservation Institute, Los Angeles

Project coordinator: Marta de la Torre Report editor: Marta de la Torre Design/Production coordinator: Joe Molloy Copy editor: Sylvia Tidwell

Copyright ? 2002 The J. Paul Getty Trust

The Getty Conservation Institute 1200 Getty Center Drive, Suite 700 Los Angeles, CA 90049-1684 Telephone 310 440-7325 Fax 310 440-7712 Email gci@getty.edu

The Getty Conservation Institute works internationally to advance conservation and to enhance and encourage the preservation and understanding of the visual arts in all of their dimensions--objects, collections, architecture, and sites. The Institute serves the conservation community through scientific research; education and training; field projects; and the dissemination of the results of both its work and the work of others in the field. In all its endeavors, the Institute is committed to addressing unanswered questions and promoting the highest possible standards of conservation practice.

The Institute is a program of the J. Paul Getty Trust, an international cultural and philanthropic institution devoted to the visual arts and the humanities that includes an art museum as well as programs for education, scholarship, and conservation.

Contents

Introduction

Marta de la Torre and Randall Mason

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Essays

Assessing Values in Conservation Planning:

5

Methodological Issues and Choices

Randall Mason

Anthropological-Ethnographic Methods

31

for the Assessment of Cultural Values in

Heritage Conservation

Setha M. Low

Economic Valuation of Cultural Heritage:

51

Evidence and Prospects

Susana Mourato and Massimiliano Mazzanti

Numbness and Sensitivity in the Elicitation

77

of Environmental Values

Theresa Satterfield

Cultural Capital and Sustainability Concepts 101 in the Economics of Cultural Heritage

David Throsby

Meeting Participants

119

Acknowledgments

THIS REPORT IS INDEBTED to the contributions of many who helped us define directions and identify critical issues. The work of Randall Mason and Erica Avrami at the start of this research set the stage for the discussions of a group of specialists that met at the Getty Conservation Institute in March 2000. The names of those participating in that meeting are included at the end of this report. We would like to acknowledge their valuable contribution and continued support of this project.

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Introduction

By Marta de la Torre and Randall Mason

THIS IS THE THIRD REPORT on the research on values and economics of cultural heritage which was started at the Getty Conservation Institute in 1995.1 The early results of this project highlighted some issues fundamental to the field that were in need of further consideration. Among these were the lack of recognized and widely accepted methodologies for the assessment of cultural values, as well as the difficulties of comparing the results of economic and cultural values assessments.

The research we report in this publication starts to address these issues by focusing on methods of identifying, articulating, and establishing cultural significance. Cultural significance is used here to mean the importance of a site as determined by the aggregate of values attributed to it. The values considered in this process should include those held by experts--the art historians, archaeologists, architects, and others--as well as other values brought forth by new stakeholders or constituents, such as social and economic values.2

Value has always been the reason underlying heritage conservation. It is self-evident that no society makes an effort to conserve what it does not value. Why, then, this current interest in values? Until recent times, the heritage field was relatively isolated, composed of small groups of specialists and experts. These groups determined what constituted "heritage" and how it should be conserved. The "right to decide" of these specialists was validated by the authorities who funded their work. There was a tacit agreement between the groups with the power to act.

In recent decades, the concept of what is heritage has evolved and expanded, and new groups have joined the specialists in its identification. These groups of citizens, of professionals from other fields, and of representatives of special interests arrive in the heritage field with their own criteria and opinions--their own "values"-- which often differ from our own as heritage specialists.

This democratization is a positive development in our field and bears witness to the importance of heritage in today's society. Nonetheless, this aperture has brought new considerations to the discussions and has made them much more complex. Today the opinions of experts are often a few among many, in an arena where it is recognized that heritage is multivalent and that values are not immutable. In this changed environment, the articulation and understanding of values have acquired greater importance when heritage decisions are being made about what to conserve, how to conserve it, where to set priorities, and how to handle conflicting interests.

As conservation professionals, we are familiar and comfortable with the assessment methods used by traditional heritage experts. However, to identify and measure "social" values, we must venture into new areas. The stakeholders of social values are usually members of the public who have not traditionally participated in our work or had their opinions taken into consideration. Today, as we recognize the importance of including all stakeholders in the process, we must turn to other disciplines to bring these new groups into the discussions.

The papers in this report present some tools that have been used in other fields and that hold promise for the tasks at hand. The first paper offers a review of the issues associated with the assessment of values in relation to cultural heritage. As an introduction to the methods presented in other contributions, it includes an overview of the "expert" methods already in use in the cultural field and identifies some of the challenges that lie ahead as we attempt to integrate these more traditional tools of the cultural field with others that must be imported to serve new needs. The anthropological and ethnographic methods presented by Setha M. Low are some of the methods introduced relatively recently to assess social values, and they are already being used to bring new groups of stakeholders into the values identification process. The field of environmental conservation has a relatively long tradition of consultation with a broad spectrum of stakeholders. Approaches from the environmental field are often held up as examples to be emulated in the heritage field, and

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Theresa Satterfield's contribution analyzes the assessment tools most used in that discipline. Her balanced evaluation should help us as we consider importing into our field some of those methods.

Economists seem to have the most developed and widely accepted value assessment tools. However, as has been discussed in our earlier report on the economics of heritage,3 these tools might not be as accurate in measuring cultural values as has been accepted in the past. A number of economists are now searching for ways of honing their tools to make them more useful in the heritage field. Susana Mourato and Massimilano Mazzanti give us a detailed account of the tools used in their field and of the weaknesses and strengths of the various methods. Not surprisingly, recognizing that conservation is multidisciplinary, their conclusions point to collaboration with other disciplines.

Discussions of values, of how social contexts shape heritage and conservation, and of the imperative of public participation are issues that challenge conventional notions of conservation professionals' responsibilities. How to champion conservation principles (traditional ones, centered on the sanctity and inherent meaningfulness of material heritage) while managing an open, democratic process that may conclude by underselling conservation in favor of other social goals? This issue gets to the essential nature of the field and of conservation as a profession: "Are we advocates? Are we neutral professionals and experts?"

Conservation professionals are faced with two particular challenges arising out of these social and political contexts: challenges of power sharing and challenges of collaboration. Broader participation poses a challenge to the roles and responsibilities of conservation professionals: some suggest that bringing conservation policies and decisions in line with democratic values would undermine the authority of conservation professionals and would even amount to an abdication of professional responsibility. In other words, democratization of conservation decision making could contradict the professional devotion to conservation--what happens when the democracy of voices decides that a heritage site can be destroyed? Do we as conservation professionals have a right, or even a responsibility, to speak against the democratic will?

But the probability is not that actual decision making power will be democratized but, rather, that the process of value elicitation will be included. Democratization of the processes of consultation and assessment of

heritage values is not likely to be a threat to the sovereignty of the field, but it still requires a change of attitude and training. The inevitability of trade-offs and compromises and the respectful and meaningful gathering of different modes of valuing have to be recognized.

Using new methods from different fields means collaborating with more and different professionals (anthropologists and economists, for instance). Such collaboration raises questions about who is in charge of which part of the process. What are the relative roles and contributions and responsibilities of this different cast of characters? Does the conservation professional's role become that of an orchestrator of specialists? Or of one specialist among others? It seems that the conservation professional has moved to play the dual role of specialist and orchestrator. The tasks associated with the latter function call for new ways of thinking as well as for new skills.

In the last paper of this report, David Throsby provides us with some principles that can help to shape the new role of the conservation specialist. Advocating the principles of sustainability, we can moderate the discussions of a broad set of stakeholders while setting in place a number of filters that will promote decisions in this arena that protect the heritage while making it relevant to society.

The challenge ahead is to continue searching for the means to serve the public good by preserving material remains of the past.

Notes

1. R. Mason, ed., Economics and Heritage Conservation (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 1999); E. Avrami and R. Mason, eds., Values and Heritage Conservation (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2000).

2. Value can be defined simply as a set of positive characteristics or qualities perceived in cultural objects or sites by certain individuals or groups.

3. Mason, ed., Economics and Heritage Conservation.

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