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Photography ©
aughty.org 2006 |
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Notes from the Aughty People &
Earth Day Heritage discussion group, recorded by Tom Varley.
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I realise why I like working in Archaeology - and Biodiversity
as well:
- The nature of the excitement that each of the groups share with
how they see the world touches parts of ourselves.
- It is a reflection of aspects of ourselves.
Very quickly some of the things that were raised in our group were:
- Heritage is difficult to define.
- Heritage seems to include and yet divide.
- Yet I think in this room people are defining it according to
them.
- But also they are sharing it in parallel with other disciplines.
- Normally it has been corralled as "my heritage".
- Often in a personal and beautiful way.
- Or an official way to express it.
- So what we were thinking about is that "Dúchas"
as a word has a cultural milieu as well, rather than just "heritage"
which is often seen as a scientific or an isolated word.
- We admit for a lot of people heritage doesn't exist.
- Possibly one of the reasons is that for the generation before
us this was a common denominator - heritage didn't exist - it
was more to get food into your belly or get on the emigration
boat.
- So we are in a time frame where we have responsibilities to
look at it now.
- The structures that are in place are perhaps almost too official
in that they exclude certain parties from expressing heritage
in a user friendly way.
- What we came to see is that we need to find ways to express
heritage that are comprehensible to the majority of the people.
- It is a community resource.
- It isn't an isolated, exclusive commodity for any one person
or group.
- It is actually a shared heritage, a global shared heritage.
- We are in a position where we have a new generation of people
coming to maturity now and we include in their future some of
the information we are able to pass on.
- One of the keys is that its going to take new ways to bring
heritage out as a word.
- That is not an exclusive minted first edition stamp, but is
a common stamp that is posted everywhere, simultaneously.
- Not the 19th Century stamp - but perhaps the Internet is one
way.
- What we could do practically this summer is we could invite
our community neighbours in the next parish in Beatha to come
here to Crusheen.
- We can go an explore some secret places (this is one word that
was used last summer).
- A secret place that we perhaps know about, we can share with
the next community.
- We can walk there and as we walk along the way we can have a
meeting like we're having here, except we are not sitting down.
- We're walking and we're talking.
- So, in fact, it's a journey we're on rather than a destination.
- And the secret place isn't like a private place.
- It belongs to us all.
- It's a holy well.
- It has more a communal nature both from the past and the present.
- It's an interesting mixture of both a natural resource and the
spiritual.
- Because it's so difficult to define heritage, it's really up
to us now to find the ways and means to express that for the future.
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Scoil Áine |
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Ardrahan |
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