C O N T E X T 1 3 6 : S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4 25 ‘you know it when you see it’? Judges (and sometimes planning inspectors or reporters) tend to think that there is someone called ‘the reasonable man’ who can be used as a point of reference for resolving these problems. Conservation is a cultural as well as a legal act but lawyers are enablers rather than achievers, explaining what the law allows and what it does not. Ultimately the answers to Campbell’s questions, he thought, lay in applying common sense and doing what most of us do every day: what we judge to be right. A cynic might suggest that uncertainty is good business for lawyers. Terms like ‘setting’ can never be defined in other than an open-ended way. But John Campbell did give us a salutary reminder that many of the terms we use every day are matters of judgement rather than prescription, and that the legal mind can help to structure judgement to make it as sound and accountable as possible: in Campbell’s terms ‘to make the difficult comprehensible’. If Campbell’s view of the impending Scottish legislation is right, his skills will be much in demand. Perhaps John Campbell’s title seemed forced in the context of a day considering ‘the art of conservation’. But in the end he made a case that lawyers exercise a kind of pragmatic creativity similar to that offered by some of the other practitioners we had heard from during the day. Michael Taylor ‘Touching the intangible’: why intangible cultural heritage is important Máiréad Nic Craith’s paper explored the important convergence in our understanding of tangible and intangible heritage, and considered how the conservation sector might find a new, more holistic, approach to identifying and managing heritage. Nic Craith, professor of European culture and heritage at Heriot Watt University, argued that while the Burra Charter and UNESCO initiatives such as the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage recognised the importance of the non-material dimension of cultural heritage, the two streams of heritage, the tangible and the intangible, seemed for a while to follow separate paths. It is only more recently, she suggested, that reevaluation of their relationship to one another has recognised the inseverability of the two concepts, the intangible giving meaning, value and context to the tangible. With this re-evaluation, so our notion of heritage has expanded to recognise the importance of human coexistence and interaction with buildings and landscape in shaping our understanding of them. This creates what she termed a ‘new heritage paradigm’, raising questions at a fundamental level as to how we can manage heritage in a more holistic way, creating a revised cultural infrastructure to bridge the divide between material and non-material culture. Nic Craith stated the case for a drawing together of expertise, not just the architects, historians and planners, but the anthropologists, cultural geographers and ethnologists, to ensure an approach to conservation which is valued, as well as object-based: that does not conserve material for its own sake, but to maintain the values embodied within the heritage. She acknowledged that identifying and assessing cultural values can be difficult, and so too can the questions that this process raises. Does one strive to conserve the values of those who created a building or site, or respond to the current values of the community that uses it? How does the telling of a particular story prevent its natural evolution, and how does legitimising a particular version or viewpoint undermine alternative stories and values; whose version is authorised? How should experts engage with local people, and must everyone be given a voice? Nic Craith’s underlying message was that while the concept of intangible heritage played a more clearly defined role in the art of historic building Máiréad Nic Craith: a new heritage paradigm John Campbell QC answers a question from the floor
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