Abstract

The 2011 disasters precipitated widespread concern among heritage scholars about the fate of Tohoku’s cultural properties, tangible and intangible. Damage to not only buildings and landscapes but also ‘formless’ heritage, some worried, could weaken social infrastructure and thus slow or undermine recovery. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in, and critical heritage studies of, the disaster regions, this article proposes 3.11 has in fact stimulated the expansion of heritage regimes and their associated culture industries in the Northeast: what, following Gerald Suttles, I call ‘museumification’. I illustrate this through case studies of unmarked rituals becoming ‘unregistered heritage’, the ‘experientialization’ (taikenka) of declining industries, and preservation of ruined buildings as a new category of disaster heritage, shinsai ikō. In all cases, museumification endows precarious folk arts, industries, and objects with a second life as assets through which locals can represent themselves not only to themselves, but also to tourists. This can help communities rebuild financially in the short-term. However, I argue that as a longer-term strategy for revitalizing regions, museumification amounts to building new economic structures around a ‘folk’ still vanishing due to the same political-economic forces driving heritage’s expansion pre and post-disaster.

摘要

2011 年的灾难引发了遗产学者对东北有形和无形文化财产命运的广泛关注。一些人担心，不仅建筑物和景观遭到破坏，而且“无形”遗产也会受到破坏，这可能会削弱社会基础设施，从而减缓或破坏恢复。借鉴在灾区的人种学实地调查和批判性遗产研究，本文提出 3.11 实际上刺激了东北地区遗产制度及其相关文化产业的扩张：我在 Gerald Suttles 之后称之为“博物馆化”。我通过未标记的仪式成为“未注册的遗产”、“体验化”（taikenka）的案例研究来说明这一点) 衰落的工业，以及作为新的灾害遗产类别的废墟建筑的保护，shinsai ikō。在所有情况下，博物馆化都赋予了不稳定的民间艺术、工业和物品作为资产的第二次生命，当地人不仅可以通过这些资产向自己代表自己，还可以向游客代表自己。这可以帮助社区在短期内重建财务。然而，我认为，作为振兴地区的长期战略，博物馆化相当于围绕一个仍然消失的“民间”建立新的经济结构，因为相同的政治经济力量在灾前和灾后推动遗产的扩张。