Re-storied Sites and Routes as Inclusive Spaces and Places: Shared Imaginations and Multi-layered Heritage

About this project

<p style="text-align: justify"><span style="font-size: 11pt"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif">The project studies how places and routes with a religious or mythical past can gain renewed significance through processes of narration, heritagisation, and the creation of inclusive spaces attracting diverse groups of people and individuals. By exploring the changing meanings of rural places and routes, and their potential in promoting social inclusion, we aim to identify models for enhancing the integrative power of places in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Norway. In all these countries, we can observe old and new forms of place-making and revivals of pilgrimage traditions at different stages of development. Christian and pre-Christian sites and monuments, once defunct, are today acquiring additional value as sites of cultural heritage, while nature and landscape are re-evaluated as domains for spiritual growth.</span></span></p> <p style="text-align: justify"><span style="font-size: 11pt"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif">Many formerly abandoned places, practices and narrative traditions are thus being reframed in light of contemporary societal values and challenges. With a consortium that combines expertise in the fields of vernacular religion, folklore and narrative theory, heritage studies and cultural history, we shall scrutinise, how places are made meaningful; how they are imagined and represented in different kinds of media; the economic impact of such re-presentations; why some of these places become inclusive and attract people with diverse backgrounds, while others seem to fail this capacity or, moreover, become sources of division; and how people can re-narrate themselves in relation to place.&nbsp;</span></span><span style="font-size: 11pt"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif">These reanimated, multi-vocally narrated, performed and practiced places may provide the loci for locals, travellers, the socially excluded and newcomers to set in motion significant storyworlds, and emerging, inclusive socio-cultural environments.</span></span></p>

Bilateral cooperation results

The case studies provided by the Norwegian team highlight the factor of a highly institutionalized and centralized cultural heritage sector in its impact on the understanding, management, and use of religious and historical sites, which allowed us to calibrate our analyses of top-down and bottom-up dynamics in the making of place. The Lithuanian team, developed connections with phenomenology, elaborating further on the pre-existing scholarship on the holy sites and contributing the narrative perspective. Several private photo archives were discovered that provide both new insight into the levels of religious commitment in Latvia during the Soviet times and possibility to employ the visual research methods. The Estonian team coordinated the project, and offered a set of well-focused case studies ranging from life stories to pilgrimage narratives and historically multi-layered placelore – mainly in Estonia, but also in other countries, such as England, India and Russia. The project teams collaborated closely throughout the whole project period. Beyond the administrative and academic work conducted at the project workshops and field trips, becoming familiar with different research, learning from different research traditions and experiencing the living history in each country provided invaluable impulses not only to our research, but to our academic work more generally. At the University of Oslo, for example, the undergraduate course on Europe’s cultural history now features Baltic history and perspectives, inspired by the project, re-shaping narratives about Europe for a new generation of students. Collaboration between project members continues in the form of project development and joint applications for European funding as well as through Erasmus cooperations.

Project partners

• University of Oslo Donor project partner· Norway
• University of Latvia Project partner· Latvia
• Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore Project partner· Lithuania