Who Changed the Recipe?
Proving a project caused the loss of a living practice is genuinely hard. Pretending it is simple, in either direction, is the real failure.
By Neil Fairburn · Director, Cultural Heritage Risk Management Ltd
Let me tell you a small story, invented but true to life. A community has a dish it has cooked the same way for generations, flavoured with a particular local herb, the recipe passed from mother to daughter. A large project arrives nearby and brings in a workforce from outside the area. The newcomers do not care for the local taste and say so. The younger members of the community, hearing that the old way is outdated, start cooking the new way, and in time they teach the new recipe to their own children. The elders who still used the old herb grow old and die. The old way is lost. Here is the question that matters: did the project destroy that practice?
The honest answer is uncomfortable
You cannot say for certain. The practice is gone, and the arrival of an outside workforce plainly had something to do with it. But globalisation was pushing the same direction anyway. People move for reasons that have nothing to do with any one project, and they bring new tastes with them. Generational change erodes inherited practice everywhere. And in many regions there is more than one project exerting the same pull at the same time. The most you can honestly say is that the project's influence probably contributed. Probably is where intellectual honesty runs out, and pretending otherwise, in either direction, is the real failure.
Two ways to get it wrong
The first error is overclaiming: treating a project as responsible for every cultural change that happens in its vicinity. That is neither true nor useful, because a cause you have invented cannot be managed, and a community quickly learns that every grievance pays. The second error is the more common and the more damaging: underclaiming. Because the causal line cannot be drawn cleanly, the impact is dismissed. No proof, no impact, case closed. Yet the intangible impacts are precisely the ones that are indirect, gradual and cumulative, the slow erosion rather than the bulldozer. Demanding a clean causal line before you will acknowledge them is a way of guaranteeing you never manage the impacts that are most characteristic of this kind of heritage.
The project that insists it changed nothing and the one that accepts blame for everything are making the same mistake. Both are treating a question of probability as a question of yes or no.
Contribution, not just causation
The standards already point the way out, because they expect an assessment of indirect and cumulative impacts, not only the direct and provable ones. That is exactly the territory the story occupies. The discipline is to assess contribution rather than to litigate sole causation: to ask how much a project's presence, its workforce, its induced in migration and its economic gravity are likely to be shifting the conditions under which a living practice survives, and to say so with an explicit statement of confidence. A well reasoned probable is worth more than a falsely precise certain, and far more than a dishonest none.
Manage the probability
If the impact is gradual, the response has to be too. You cannot assess erosion once and file it, because the erosion continues after the assessment is signed. So you monitor over time, you watch the practices most exposed to change, and you put the effort where it counts, which is helping the community keep what it wishes to keep, rather than into the futile exercise of apportioning blame after the practice has already gone.
And at that point the argument about causation almost stops mattering. Whether the old way of cooking faded because of the project, because of the wider world, or simply because tastes changed, the community can be supported to maintain and record it so that it is not lost for good. That record is a legacy in its own right, and it holds even when the living practice moves on, because something written down, filmed and understood can be taught again, returned to, or simply remembered. We have lost an enormous amount of human knowledge in the name of progress and change, most of it to no project at all. So the goal is not to win the argument about who changed the recipe, but to notice, early and honestly, that the recipe is changing, and to help the community keep it, whatever the cause.
Part 6 of 7 in the Intangible Heritage series. Previous: Known Unknowns. Next: What You Can Harm Without Touching It.