deb bledsoe wrote:
> *She talks about Staged Symbolic Communities.*
>
> This one made me laugh. Us folks in the lower echelons of histo-presto 
> have always called this "the Disneyland method". Ran into a lot of 
> that in NJ.   ;) 
deb,

Barthel as a sociologist works her way out from the "Disney" aspect of 
histo presto. The Staged Symbolic Community, to paraphrase, the 
recreated village, the blacksmith shop, the blacksmith who day-to-day 
does blacksmithing to an audience of families that come to see the 
blacksmithing and to hear the stories, and the baker, the grocer, the 
gardener, the weaver... and the narrative is one of people who look like 
they are living in harmony at an ideal Utopian time frozen in the past 
(better, of a higher moral authority than our own, sanitized, good 
smelling), but orchestrated by a small non-profit corporation with 
managers with bottom-lines in the background. What the author evokes is 
the social politics underlying the preservation of the past. How 
Colonial Williamsburg or Greenfield Village came to be and how we 'lower 
echelons' think about all that when we dismantle and move an old barn. 
Our very best attempts at a desire for 'authentication' of historic 
fabric take place within a very bizarre Staged Symbolic Industry.

One of the themes that is slowly evolving least ways w/in PTN, and that 
in great measure comes out of the on-the-ground experience at Holy Cross 
post-Katrina, is that beyond a romanticism of traditional trades 
practices that there was an evident 300 year history of building 
technology that survived Katrina, that was derived from the French 
colonial experience, and that was lost during 200 years of 
industrialization in a 'use and throw away economics' and that there is 
something more than a symbolic act when you have someone that actually 
knows how to repair a slate roof, or a house trailer, or to repair and 
maintain existing wood windows, or to fix the bullet holes in their 
stone wall, or to take the existing building and make it more energy 
efficient without causing it to rot away faster.

Then, if there is relevance to knowing how to fix old things... a 
question as to what to do about all the cultural baggage that is 
attached to 'preservation'. To a great extent the discussion leans 
toward couching it in terms of 'maintenance of the existing built 
environment', and that re-framing regardless of when it was built, 
where, or exactly what. Portable fiberglass toilets for starters.

][<en

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