Emotional engagement in heritage sites and museums: Ghosts of the past and imagination in the present

Certain forms of knowledge and organisational practices and cultures prioritise dispassionate appreciation of factual information about the past and this, in turn, masks their potential to elucidate personal and community meanings. Emotions are regulated not only by different cultural attitudes to events, objects, places and commemorative practices, but also by a tacit acceptance by museums and heritage sites that some types of emotions and feelings can be encouraged but not others, as we shall see in the case studies below. In addition the exploration of certain non-academic or unprofessional feelings about heritage, such as those relating to the supernatural, (which have been mostly ignored in official interpretation), helps us to understand how communities engage with the past. It suggests that official and private meaning making are sometimes very different and this may, in part, help to explain indifference by some to certain forms of officially sanctioned heritage.