Heritage, Labour and the Working Classes by Laurajane Smith Paul Shackel Gary Campbell

Author:Laurajane Smith, Paul Shackel, Gary Campbell [Laurajane Smith, Paul Shackel, Gary Campbell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science, Archaeology
ISBN: 9781136698538
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2012-05-23T04:00:00+00:00

Like Stanley’s kaleidoscopic vision of autobiography, Jennings’ imaginative history offers a vision of captured experience, of reflection and to what is so often intangible and unremarked and unrecorded.

All work autobiography offers something of value to us in its rereading. Taken as a whole the range of working class autobiography in existence is immense and yet is undervalued. Its study allows us to understand changes in attitudes to work, its value and meaning, its organisation and social relations. This is true of any era, but it is worth considering the changing nature of work over the last three decades or so. During this period whole industries, communities and ways of life have been irrevocably changed beyond recognition. While a pithead wheel, a piece of industrially inspired art or even a heritage centre may mark the site, little remains of former industrial development. While material remains and their preservation are crucial in terms of heritage, we should not neglect the role and value of working class testimony to bygone ways of being and sociality, and as such working class autobiography deserves to be recognised as heritage in its own right.

As has been argued here, working class autobiography has been increasingly recognised as valuable and important. It can be found in national chain bookstores as well as in local heritage centres, and has been published by multinational publishing houses as well as in the form of local history group pamphlets with limited circulation. These memoirs can be read in many ways and for wildly different purposes – be they academic or by local writing groups. Their existence offers a powerful counter to the trivialising effects of celebrity culture by validating the importance of everyday life and in the process legitimising others to tell their own stories.

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