Journal of Sociolinguistics 18/4, 2014: 495–517

The authenticating discourses of mining

heritage tourism in Cornwall and Wales1

Bethan Couplanda and Nikolas Couplandb

a. Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
b. Copenhagen University, University of Technology Sydney and Cardiff
University

Heritage tourism commonly involves displays designed to represent and

commemorate a valued cultural past. Our particular focus in this paper is
mining heritage, and how it has been developed in Wales and Cornwall to
reflect their rather different, but culturally and nationally defining,
industrial histories. From some historical and critical perspectives,
heritage is still a controversial concept involving simulation and
commercialisation, which is often perceived as inauthentic. Yet heritage
sites like Geevor in Cornwall and Big Pit in Wales, our two empirical foci,
are promoted largely in terms of their authentic value. Visitors can
‘experience the past’, e.g. by going underground, being guided by ‘real
miners’ and engaging with material artefacts of mining, not merely observe
it. We draw on recent critical perspectives that move beyond essentialising
conceptions of (in)authenticity, to analyse the competing claims to
authenticity that we see in the promotional and interpretive discourses of
mining heritage. We argue that, at the two sites, such discourses are
organised within four frames, which we refer to as material, cultural,
performative and recreational. Each frame defines a social dimension in
which authenticity can be experienced. Together, the four frames provide a
productive means of discursively managing the competing priorities that lie
at the heart of heritage tourism.
Mewn twristiaeth treftadaeth defnyddir yn fynych arddangosion a luniwyd
i gynrychioli a choff

au gorffennol diwylliannol a drysorir. Ar dreftadaeth
mwyngloddio yr ydym yn canolbwyntio’n benodol yn y papur hwn, a’r
modd y datblygodd yng Nghymru ac yng Nghernyw i adlewyrchu hanes
diwydiannol y ddwy ardal, hanesion eithaf annhebyg, ond rhai sy’n diffinio
diwylliant a chenedligrwydd y ddwy ardal. O rai safbwyntiau hanesyddol a
beirniadol, mae treftadaeth yn parhau’n gysyniad dadleuol, un sy’n
ymwneud ag efelychu a masnacheiddio a ystyrir yn fynych yn
anawthentig. Ac eto, caiff safleoedd treftadaeth fel Geevor yng Nghernyw
a’r Pwll Mawr yng Nghymru, ein dau ffocws empirig, eu hyrwyddo i
raddau helaeth o safbwynt eu gwerth awthentig. Gall ymwelwyr ‘fyw’r
gorffennol’, e.e. drwy fynd o dan y ddaear, cael eu harwain gan
‘fwyngloddwyr go iawn’ a thrin a thrafod arteffactau materol
mwyngloddio, nid dim ond edrych arnyn nhw. Rydym yn tynnu ar

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496 COUPLAND AND COUPLAND

safbwyntiau beirniadol diweddar sy’n mynd y tu hwnt i gysyniadau sy’n

hanfodoli (an)awthentigrwydd, i ddadansoddi’r gwahanol enghreifftiau o
hawlio awthentigrwydd a welwn mewn disgyrsiau hyrwyddo a dehongli
yn nhreftadaeth mwyngloddio. Rydym yn dadlau y caiff disgyrsiau o’r fath,
ar y ddau safle, eu trefnu yn o ^l pedair ffr^
am, sef beth a alwn yn ffr^
am
faterol, ffr^
am ddiwylliannol, ffr^am berfformiadol a ffr^
am hamdden. Mae pob
ffr^
am yn diffinio dimensiwn cymdeithasol lle gellir cael profiad o
awthentigrwydd. Gyda’i gilydd, mae’r pedair ffr^ am yn ffordd ddefnyddiol
o drin, drwy ddisgwrs, yr amryw flaenoriaethau sydd wrth wraidd
twristiaeth treftadaeth. [Welsh]

KEYWORDS: Mining, heritage, tourism, authenticity, metaculture,

performance, Geevor, Big Pit

Heritage tourism involves metacultural displays designed to represent –

typically to explain, celebrate and commemorate – a valued cultural past. Our
particular focus in this paper is on mining heritage and how it is currently
promoted and experienced in two mining heritage sites in Wales and Cornwall
– Geevor Tin Mine in Cornwall and Big Pit (coal mine) in South Wales.
Considerations of authenticity have particular salience at these two sites,
particularly because, in the name of heritage conservation, each site can claim
to commemorate a culturally defining industrial history. We are interested in
how the sites’ marketers, managers and workers rely heavily on claims to
authenticity in many different respects, ultimately to legitimise the status of
these heritage sites as national (or, in the Cornwall case, proto-national)
monuments. We engage recent theory from sociolinguistics, anthropology and
history to move beyond a simplistic dichotomy of authentic versus inauthentic
in heritage contexts, and to expose the many social dimensions in which
authenticity can be meaningfully experienced.

AUTHENTICITY IN HERITAGE
Heritage and authenticity are contested concepts across a wide range of
disciplines. In sociolinguistics, the concept of heritage has often been
understood quite neutrally. The term ‘heritage languages’, for example, has
been invoked as a simple descriptive category, referring to the historically
dominant languages of migrant minorities (e.g. Clyne 1991; Peyton, Ranard
and McGinnis 2001). Where value is attributed to heritage, this has tended to
be on the simple basis of historicity, for example when speaking a heritage
language is felt or presumed to be an authentic cultural practice, a legitimate
expression of cultural belonging. More recently, sociolinguists have explored
the political economy of heritage, asking how ethnically salient languages find
more specific values in changing market conditions (e.g. Duch^ene and Heller

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DISCOURSES OF MINING HERITAGE TOURISM 497

2007; Heller, Duch^ene and Pujolar this issue). From this perspective, heritage
is not necessarily authenticating, and authenticity itself potentially becomes a
marketable commodity (Heller 2002).
From some historical and cultural criticism perspectives, heritage, and
heritage tourism in particular, have been controversial. In a conservative
tradition, historians have associated heritage with inauthenticity, because the
creations of heritage institutions could never achieve a required level of
historical accuracy. In this absolutist view, heritage was devalued as a
nostalgic pursuit of an idealised past, dressed up for commercial gain,
amounting to ‘bogus history’ (Hewison 1987; see also Lowenthal 1999).
MacCannell (1999 [1976]) similarly pointed out that heritage tourism displays
are inevitably staged histories (see also Lindholm 2008: 43–46), historical
circumstances created in performance, and assumed to be inauthentic on those
grounds. MacCannell perceived a paradox in which the tourist pursuit of
authenticity (the ‘authenticity quest’) was doomed to failure, and where the
quest itself might be considered deauthenticating. In terms of Goffman’s front
stage/ back stage distinction (Goffman 1959), the assumption was that tourists
could never ‘get behind’ the front stage performances and representations of
heritage displays. In extreme cases, critics who take this line have found
heritage positively objectionable. Frow (1997), drawing on Culler (1981),
argues that heritage tourism is locked into a ‘spiral of simulations’ and into
rosy-eyed cultural nostalgia.2
These positions have been challenged by more contextual and fluid
understandings of both heritage and authenticity, where cultural meanings
and values are seen as situated and negotiable (Bruner 1994; Bunten 2008;
Edensor 2001; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1995; Smith 2006). From this
standpoint it is unnecessary to presume that all acts of cultural
recontextualisation are inherently inauthentic, when objects and narratives
from the past take on pertinent new meanings through metacultural display in
their ‘second life as heritage’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2004). As Urry (2002
[1990]) notes, cultural values are not fixed but are contextually remade, not
least in tourist experience. Urban (2001) explains how cultural values and
norms become visible precisely through metacultural representations and
discourses. Culture, he says, ‘moves through the world’ only by virtue of
metacultural processes – processes that take place in a culture but which also
construct definitional or evaluative accounts of that culture. In this view,
metacultural representations are in themselves ‘the real stuff’ of culture and of
cultural change.
Research in the fields of public history and heritage studies similarly
recognises that heritage often exists, and finds its purpose, in a middle ground,
bridging between the past and the present and finding ways to negotiate
relevant questions of representativeness, ownership and historical accuracy.
The emerging critical discussion among public historians engages closely with
the way the past is both represented and consumed, again throwing emphasis
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498 COUPLAND AND COUPLAND

onto the discursive construction of cultural meaning. Public history is

therefore redressing the dismissive account of heritage that can be found in
the historical mainstream3 and moving into an interdisciplinary field that gives
priority to local contextualisation and to discourse. Tunbridge and Ashworth
(1996) note that heritage practices can be characterised as ‘dissonant’,
because the act of preservation recontextualises the past for a wide range of
purposes, e.g. cultural preservation, local community commemoration,
economic regeneration, and tourist recreation. Authenticity can be salient in
all these functions, but needs to be discursively projected and claimed within
particular framings of experience.
In the present study, and following Bruner and others, we focus on the wide-
ranging claims to and interpretations of authenticity in heritage tourism, and on
how these claims are discursively managed in salient texts and spoken
accounts. Heritage site managers, for example, are fully aware that visitors
bring their own criteria of authentic experience to the consumption of heritage
tourism displays (Urry, 2002[1990]; cf. N. Coupland, Garrett and Bishop
2005), and what we might call authenticities of consumption need to interface
with authenticities of heritage construction. Mining heritage sites function as
tourist attractions, in the (generally ill-defined) domain of cultural tourism,4
and they undoubtedly show some of the design characteristics that Adam
Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow identify in many tourists’ fleeting encounters
with cultural difference. These include the exaggeration and commodification
of cultural difference and a created sense of ‘exotic familiarity’ (Jaworski and
Thurlow 2013: 280; Thurlow and Jaworski 2010: 182). But as we have
already noted, Geevor and Big Pit aspire to facilitate significant cultural
experiences, performing a commemorative function, opening windows on
industrial histories in Cornwall and Wales that might be necessary to achieve
cultural coherence in the (post-industrial, late modern) present. Social changes
linked to de-industrialisation can be seen as an imposed process of cultural
deauthentication, the loss of a socio-economic rationale and practical basis for
the existence of mining communities. In discourses at Big Pit and Geevor,
therefore, accounts of cultural authenticity – how the mining past has
validated and might still validate patterns of class-linked community being –
come into complex relations with efforts at metacultural representation and
the priorities of heritage consumption.
In the next section, we briefly explain the histories of mineral extraction in
Cornwall and Wales, introduce the two heritage sites in more detail, and
describe the analytic perspective we adopt.

MINING AND MINING HERITAGE IN WALES AND CORNWALL

Mineral extraction in Wales and Cornwall was culturally transformational; it
left substantial and enduring imprints on cultural values and identities. In the
Welsh case, Raymond Williams took the view that the experience of coal
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DISCOURSES OF MINING HERITAGE TOURISM 499

mining in south Wales was one of two competing cultural ‘truths’ that came to
define Wales (Williams 2003); the other was the long history of Y Werin, or
‘folk’ Wales, which posited the values of rural life, the land and the Welsh
language. The ‘truth’ of industrial south Wales embedded socialist values, as a
communitarian response to harsh and dangerous working lives underground
and oppressive management regimes. For Williams, the history of mining in
south Wales was a truth that needed to be recalled, as he consistently did in his
own semi-autobiographical literary works as well as in his cultural criticism
(e.g. Williams 1960).
Historical accounts attribute a similarly intense sense of regional and indeed
national identity in Cornwall5 to the (mainly tin and copper) mining boom in
Cornwall (Deacon 1997). According to Payton (1992), the sweeping
industrialisation of Cornwall redefined but maintained its ‘difference’ from
England, in a shift from an ‘old peripheralism’ to a ‘second peripheralism’,
transforming the image of Cornwall from a ‘West Barbary’ (a romanticised
rural idyll) to a dynamic, internationally significant industrial region.
However, in the post-industrial era, Cornwall has seen a resurgence of ‘old’
symbols of Cornishness, or rather ‘invented traditions’, as embodied in the
‘Celtic revival’ (Deacon 2007; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). Cornwall
therefore has its own ‘two truths’. These ‘old’ symbols (e.g. of sea-faring
culture, piracy and the Cornish language) have been particularly influential in
tourist marketing, whereas the material and cultural legacies of mining, in
Cornwall as in Wales, have been less prominent. In these terms Cornwall and
Wales have related but ultimately unique metacultural resources available to
them, although mining heritage is likely to play an increasingly important role
in focusing both local cultural identities and tourist activities.
Our data come from two of the U.K.’s most prominent mining heritage
facilities – Geevor Tin Mine in the west of Cornwall and Big Pit in south-east
Wales. The long historical trajectories of mining in Cornwall and Wales differ.
Cornish copper and tin mining dates back to the Bronze Age, but most
large-scale extraction took place between the early-18th and mid-19th
centuries. At its peak in the 1860s, there were over 340 mines in Cornwall,
employing about a third of the population (Buckley 1992; Deacon and Payton
1993). The industry had contracted significantly by 1900, and by 1950 only
two mines remained operational – South Crofty in mid-Cornwall and Geevor in
Pendeen. In the south Wales Valleys, coal mining began in the mid-19th
century, boomed in the 1920s, and was equally influential, employing 35
percent of the Welsh working population at its height in 1913–14 (Davies
2007), a development which led Gwyn Alf Williams to describe the south
Wales coalfield as the ‘new centre of gravity’ in Wales (G. A. Williams 1985).
However, from the 1920s, mining in Wales suffered a steady decline until its
eventual demise in the 1980s, when the industry came to an end in the
shadow of bitter industrial disputes.

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Big Pit coal mine (Y Pwll Mawr in Welsh) is situated in Blaenavon, at the
eastern end of the south Wales coalfield. The mine closed in 1980 and
reopened in 1983 as a heritage site, a joint venture between the Wales Tourist
Board and a collection of local and regional Councils. In 2001 it was
incorporated into the National Museum of Wales, making admission free and
boosting visitor numbers to roughly 150,000 annually. Geevor tin mine made
a similarly rapid transition to heritage after its closure in 1991. Under the
ownership of Cornwall County Council, the mine was transformed into a
heritage site in 1993 and now receives in the region of 40,000 visitors per year
(visitor numbers provided by Big Pit Mining Museum and Geevor Tin Mine).
Both sites now have UNESCO World Heritage Status (recognising their
‘outstanding universal value’), Big Pit as part of the Blaenavon Industrial Area
and Geevor as a ‘gateway site’ to the Devon and Cornwall Historic Mining Area
(Blaenavon Industrial Landscape: http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/984;
Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape: http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/
1215).
Visitors to both Geevor and Big Pit can actively explore the material remains
of mining at the sites, including taking underground tours guided by ex-
miners, as well as viewing more traditional museum displays. As we noted
earlier, this sets up a number of different discursive contexts for the display and
negotiation of authenticity, and the two sites are in fact promoted largely in
terms of their authenticity. The two heritage sites, of course, have their
distinctively individual characteristics. At Geevor, for example, the
underground tour takes place in an old mine section (thought to have been
mined in the 17th century), rather than the modern underground section
which was flooded after its closure in the 1990s, and in many other ways also
(e.g. in displayed material objects, commemorative texts and tableaux) the two
sites put unique aspects of their histories on display. We do not offer a directly
comparative analysis here. But there are striking similarities between the two
sites in how they discursively construct authenticity, and this is what we call
attention to below.
We focus mainly on oral history interviews and accounts within them by
former miners who are now employed as tour guides, curators or site
managers.6 Interviews took the form of semi-structured oral history
interviews, following the interview protocol suggested by Valierie Yow
(1994) in Recording Oral History. In these conventions, similarly to in
ethnographic interviewing, a flexible interview approach is taken, raising
themes and issues in general terms, and allowing space for narrators to develop
their own lines of accounting. Oral history interviews are, of course, shaped by
interviewer-interviewee dynamics. Alessandro Portelli notes that oral history is
a dialogic discourse, created not only by what interviewees say but by how
interviewers occasion interviewees’ accounts, and also by the historian’s prior
knowledge and orientation to historical details under discussion (Portelli
2004). Inevitably, there is some extent to which the interviewer may have
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DISCOURSES OF MINING HERITAGE TOURISM 501

shaped the responses and stories which were told, for example in terms of age,
gender and class relationships (in this case, all interviewees were older men,
and the researcher a younger female, so age and gender dynamics may have
shaped the way accounts were given). Nonetheless, interviewees were open
and disclosive, needing few prompts to give their accounts in response to
general and open-ended questions. As far as this can be ascertained, there was
no evidence of wariness or self-censorship, or of shaping accounts in line with
any particular agenda that informants might have inferred to exist. One
possible exception is that the interviewer’s position as an academic historian
(because informants were made aware that her interests arose in the context of
‘University research’) may have led informants to place particular emphasis on
notions of historical accuracy in their accounts.
On the other hand, miner-guides and curators had considerable
experience of discussing their personal and social experiences in public as
part of their professional roles, and to that extent, the accounts we analyse
here have an existence outside of the local circumstances in which we
recorded them. At both Geevor and Big Pit, guides are relatively
autonomous in terms of how they manage and perform their role. Guides
are required to learn certain basic facts (primarily dates of major events in
the history of the mines and statistics regarding mineral outputs, etc.) and
are given some general advice on communicating with visitors (see Extract
4, below). Beyond this, they are encouraged to draw on their own
experiences and tell their own stories (this information is drawn from
interviews with curators; more detail on the data and research contexts is
available in B. Coupland 2013). This creates interestingly complex footings
for accounts, which are certainly individuated (e.g. in that particular guides
will refer to their particular histories of working underground) but also
normatised, through repeated narrative performances in the presence of the
public and, on occasions, their peers.
While both sites are council-owned (and hence publicly funded), they are
nevertheless under an obligation to remain economically viable as tourist
attractions. As well as their personal investment in the historical narrative
they are representing, guides and curators/managers all earn their living
through being employed at the sites. For guides in particular, this further
complicates their role as ‘real miners’. They generally prefer to be referred to
as ‘miners’ or ‘colliers’ (‘collieries’ are underground coal mines), reflecting
their preference to act as elements of (what we call, below) the material
authenticity of underground tours and the immersive experience, for visitors,
of being in ‘a real mine’.7 But in oral history interviews, miner-guides prove
to be sophisticated critical analysts of, and performers of, the multi-
dimensional authenticities of heritage tourism. To provide further
background, we also comment on some details of online texts used to
promote each of the two sites.

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FOUR AUTHENTICITY FRAMES IN PLAY AT THE TWO SITES

Seeing authenticity as articulated in different frames extricates us from the
simplistic assumption that heritage displays and heritage tourism in general
either are or are not authentic (for a theoretical discussion of frame analysis
see N. Coupland 2012; Entman 1993; Goffman 1974; for a wider discussion of
language and authenticity see N. Coupland in press). Heritage tourism, as we
have suggested, emerges from the intersection of different social and
metacultural priorities, and it would be surprising if each set of priorities did
not impinge on how informed social actors talk about their own heritage sites.
But in referring to authenticity frames we are claiming that each frame
mobilises a distinctive value system in which authenticity has some specific
salience, and brings into play different forms of symbolic capital and different
subject positions. Four such frames emerge from the data.
The first is the frame of material authenticity. The inalienable ‘realness’ of
mines as physical spaces, and of miners who are or were occupationally placed
within those spaces, is the most pervasive authenticating resource in the data.
As will be shown, miner-guides often point to the preservation of the mine and
its associated artefacts, where historical continuity is taken to be a marker of
authenticity. Visitors are encouraged to view and engage interactively with
these physical elements: the dark underground spaces, the metallic hardness of
trams (mineral-carrying railway trucks, sometimes more locally referred to as
‘drams’) and railway tracks, mining tools (e.g. picks and shovels), belts, caps
and lamps – miners’ paraphernalia which can also be worn by visitors during
tours. Material objects and experiences of this sort resonate with the most
traditional interpretation of heritage as a practice – preserving and
safeguarding material artefacts of the past, which are commonly referred to
as ‘tangible heritage’.8 However, as Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (2004) and others
have shown, the distinction between tangible and intangible heritages is
increasingly found to be arbitrary. Firstly, preserving tangible heritage is often
bound up with and contextualised by the discursive presentation of associated
cultural histories. Secondly, preservation practices are shaped by specific
understandings of cultural value, and by the social practices through which
material objects are (re)contextualised. This makes it appropriate to see the
frame of material authenticity as a first-stage resource, feeding into and
contextualised by the other three frames.
The second frame refers to intangible elements of heritage, which lie behind
– and operate as a resource for – the two sites. The frame of cultural authenticity
– the ‘real culture’ and ‘truth’ (in Raymond Williams’ term) behind and
through mining practices, lifestyles and communities which lie at the heart of
the commemorative function of mining heritage. In the data we get a rich
sense of the realities of culturally defining practices – heavy manual work,
social class and community experiences in industrial Cornwall and Wales,
cultural histories that have in turn authenticated major strands of group

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identification and which the heritage sites aspire to evoke. Not all visitors will
be disposed to engage with the sites on these metacultural terms, but this
interpretive frame is made liberally available to those who are. The
miner-guides tell stories based on their shared experience of mining – the
opportunities and challenges that came with everyday life in the mines. In this
sense, they provide privileged access to cultural ‘truths’, as they are ascribed
and evaluated through particular discourses. Importantly, as we show below,
articulations of the cultural authenticity frame are commonly interspersed
within discourses that imply authenticities of other sorts.
The first two frames (above) are retrospective, orienting to the material
and cultural past. As we have suggested, they reflect rather conventional
orientations to authenticity in the theory and practice of heritage. However,
the complexity of heritage (and of authenticity in relation to heritage) lies in
how heritage displays inevitably recontextualise the past within the demands
and priorities of the present. Our third and fourth frames help to theorise this
process of recontextualisation by addressing how heritage displays are
presented, performed, consumed and interpreted in the present. These are the
aspects of heritage that have sometimes been discredited for their
inauthenticity. But rather than seeing these as deauthenticating, we view
performative and recreational dimensions as fundamental to heritage
practices. By focusing on the combinations in which these frames are
evoked and how they contextualise one another, claims to and
interpretations of authenticity in heritage are, we think, more clearly
illuminated.
The third frame, the frame of performative authenticity, foregrounds the reality
that the sites, despite their material and cultural authenticities, are selective
and to various extents scripted representations of cultural histories,
constructed partly for economic purposes. Alexis Bunten suggests that tour
guides can be ‘sophisticated culture brokers’ (2008: 382) who construct
‘commodified personas’, allowing them to negotiate the multiple demands
present in the tourist encounter. When the performative frame is made visible,
curators and miner-guides acknowledge the actual constraints and devices of
representational processes. They imply that performance is a necessary and, on
its own terms, an authentic mode of heritage construction, rather than being a
flight from authenticity. In several texts we see subtle shifting between this and
the two previous frames, with which it, of course, potentially conflicts. The
tension between these frames needs to be discursively managed, and where it is
successfully managed, accounts are able to recognise that culturally authentic
values do outlive (or perhaps, taking Urban’s line, come into existence
through) the staged performances that evoke them.
Finally, in the frame of recreational authenticity, texts acknowledge the
realities of visitors’ needs as heritage consumers, and indeed as tourists. John
Urry defined the ‘tourist gaze’ as a ‘performance that orders, shapes and
classifies, rather than reflects the world’ (Urry and Larsen 2011: 2).
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Consequently, there are preconceptions and expectations by all parties

involved in heritage tourism that shape visitors’ engagement with a heritage
display. Heritage as an object of consumption rises to the textual surface.
Visitors to Geevor and Big Pit bring their own criteria of what it authentically
(relative to local contingencies) means to be a recreational tourist, meaning,
for example, that miner-guides cannot escape the economic reality of their
roles as heritage guides. From certain perspectives, the performative and
recreational elements of heritage sites could be seen to be directly at odds with
material and cultural authenticities. But taking a more fluid, dynamic
approach to authenticity, we see that the frames identified are brought into
complex relationships and tensions with one another, and that it is precisely
this discursive admixture of values that defines heritage practices. The
rationale for a frame-analytic approach is precisely that authentication often
needs to be approached as a complex nexus of discursive footings and
orientations to personal, material and socio-cultural values. It is only on these
terms that authenticity can be meaningfully rationalised, claimed and
interpreted in specific contexts.
Individual texts and interview accounts invoke more than one authenticity
frame. Unsurprisingly, online promotional texts tend to emphasise the material
authenticities of the two sites and the availability of experienced miner-guides
as key elements of the tourist offer.

Extract 1: Text from Geevor’s promotional website

The processing mill, compressor and winding house offer an incredibly visual
and atmospheric illustration of physical and material processes, both past and
present. Take a look in the drill shop to see how drill bits were re-sharpened and
stand under the iconic Victory Headgear. There is mining machinery everywhere
you look . . .
The Geevor guides will take you around the workings, sharing their mining
experiences with you. Get coated up and keep your hard hats on as you go from
the 20th-century mine down into the early days of mining.

Extract 2: Text from Big Pit’s promotional website

Go 300 feet underground with a real miner and see what life was like for the
thousands of men who worked at the coal face . . . Visitors wear the very same
equipment – helmet, cap lamp, belt, battery and ‘self rescuer’ – used by miners
. . . The Tram Circuit nearby is the route taken by the filled drams. Raised to the
surface by cage, they ran along the rails and were turned upside down, emptying
the coal on to screening belts to be graded into various sizes according to market
requirements.

Both Geevor and Big Pit’s websites (http://www.geevor.com/ and http://www.

museumwales.ac.uk/en/bigpit/) richly lexicalise the hard landscapes,
machinery and working spaces of mineral extraction, sometimes in

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unfamiliar terminology (‘headgear’ is rotating winding gear at the head of a

shaft; ‘drams’, as we noted earlier, are coal wagons, as they are referred to in
south Wales). But in each extract the address is to potential visitors, and the
materiality of the sites is characterised from visitors’ viewpoints. For example,
in Extract 1, the three instances of ‘you’, following the implied addressee in the
imperative ‘Take a look’, clearly reference ‘you as visitor’, so that ‘There is
mining machinery everywhere you look’ projects the reader into the
anticipated role of witness or consumer. Evaluative descriptions such as
‘incredibly visual and atmospheric’ similarly anticipate, and shape, Geevor
visitors’ responses to material realities at the site. Technicalities are
selectively explained for visitors. The text therefore brings different frames
into alignment – mainly material and recreational authenticities in Extracts 1
and 2 – liberally exposing the material authenticities of the sites, but doing this
in the context of tourists’ understanding of them and (presumed and primed)
affective responses to them.
Miners working as guides materially authenticate each site, but (in Extract 2),
the use of helmets, cap lamps and so on is constructed in comparative terms,
when ‘visitors’ are described as ‘wear[ing] the very same equipment’ as miners.
Again, the material authenticities of the two sites are readily recontextualised
into the recreational frame, where the sites’ initial claims to material
authenticity serve to legitimise subsequent performative claims. As we noted,
the promotional texts cannot avoid reference to the tourist ‘you’ (in Extract 1) or
‘visitors’ (in Extract 2), and, grammatically, cannot avoid representing actions
happening in present or future time – that is, in tourist time or recreational time.
But they manage to blur both social roles and time-frames, so that, at Geevor, a
potential visitor addressed as ‘you’ can ‘go . . . down into the early days of
mining’, and, at Big Pit, visitors can ‘see what life was like’ in a past that is made
accessible through the presence of a ‘real miner’.9
Miner-guides’ accounts often describe material authenticity in terms of
historical continuity, preserving the material artefacts of mining and the
physical infrastructure of the mine sites, as in Extract 3. There is another
potential frame-conflict to be resolved here, between the mediation/ staging of
objects for tourist consumption and ex-miners’ desire to retain the site’s
original, materially authentic qualities. In the following extract, Peter orients
very directly to the concept of authenticity and provides his own analysis of its
importance to heritage interpretation at Geevor.

Extract 3: Interview with Peter, a Geevor miner-guide10

If you preserve the authenticity, without any frills, you know, if there’s a bit of
board nailed up, a hole in the roof that’s always been there, well it should always
be there. And that’s what people appear to enjoy. You can go and see clones in
museums with the standard sort of presentation anywhere in the world or the
U.K., and there are fewer and fewer places where you can actually step back in
time as it were . . . It might not necessarily always be accurate, although we try

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to make it accurate, because obviously working in a place like this was hard
work and if you portray the hazards and hardships of working but don’t
glamorise it then authenticity is the key word. People know straight away if
something’s authentic or not, so the place is authentic and will continue to be so.

Peter frames authenticity in both material and cultural terms. His examples of
material authenticity are vernacular, mundane details of physical
infrastructure (‘a bit of board nailed up’) that acquire their authenticity
value by virtue of continuity (‘a hole in the roof that’s always been there’);
even physical imperfections take on a symbolic, auratic (aura-bearing),
metacultural value. Peter clearly has discursive resources for distinguishing
between authentic and inauthentic representations of material objects.
Authenticity to him means not correcting or elaborating on these historical
details (‘without any frills’, ‘don’t glamorise’) and not ‘standardising’ them,
which would result in ‘clones in museums’. For Peter, material authenticity
also resides in suppressing museological processes of replication. His stance is
that cultural authenticity, dignifying the ‘hard work’, ‘hazards and hardship’
of mining, depends on this sort of restraint, which he frames in moral terms
(‘it should always be there’). But, at the same time, Peter builds into his
account an awareness of the performative context of display; he problematises
representational accuracy, which is not always achieved but which he says is
an explicit goal; he mentions ‘presentation’ and ‘portrayal’. Peter’s account
also orients to tourists’ own frame of reference; he has an eye to how visitors
consume mining authenticities within a recreational frame (‘that’s what
people appear to enjoy’). Even though the miner-guides are willing to
acknowledge the performative and recreational frames, they still tend to be
purists when it comes to material authenticity. Peter’s response is an example
of how the performative and recreational frames are given value – or can be
made meaningfully authentic – when contextualised by claims to material
authenticity.
Heritage display curators and site managers are metacultural agents
(Bunten’s ‘culture brokers’) whose institutional roles position them at the
intersection of the four authenticity frames that we are considering. In the
worst case they might be targeted as purveyors of cultural simulation or
‘cloning’ (in Peter’s term). But Glyn, a Big Pit curator, himself a former miner,
comments during an interview that ‘We are the coal industry. It’s our story,
we tell our story’. This curator aligns himself directly with the miner-guides
who authenticate mining heritage. He shares the view that they provide direct
cultural access, not least in the fact of their material presence. In Glyn’s
account, authenticity is again located in the miners’ ownership of the salient
historical narrative. He suggests that former miners provide a largely (in his
own judgement) unmediated narrative of mining history for visitors, for
example during underground tours, and that he himself actively minimises
institutional constraints on miner-guides’ discourse.

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DISCOURSES OF MINING HERITAGE TOURISM 507

Extract 4: Interview with Glyn, a Big Pit curator

It’s what the boys think. They’re not told to say anything. They’re told not to
swear, not to be racist and not to be misogynist, but apart from that it’s how they
saw it. They may not be able to give you a run-down of what happened in the
Tonypandy riots, but they can say what it felt like to work at the coal seam.
They’re not trained historians but they pick up what they need to know.

As Peter does, the curator asserts the culturally authenticating function of

miner-guides by refuting implicit claims that they might be performing to a script
– authentication through precluding specific modes of deauthentication. When
Glyn acknowledges that miner-guides at Big Pit are schooled in how to avoid
swearing, racism and misogyny, he of course indicates that their narratives are in
fact ‘mediated’, by their talk being edited for public consumption. And there is no
doubting the fact that doing heritage interpretation as a miner-guide is
performative (and so mediated) practice. But Glyn’s comments reveal very
delicate management of the frame of performative authenticity in this instance,
particularly in relation to the demands of (recreational) tourists. On the one
hand, by acknowledging specific elements of performance control, Glyn
recognises the importance of performative and recreational frames – guides
need to be aware of potentially causing offense to visitors; guides must orient to
visitors’ needs in their performances. On the other hand, Glyn represents these
performative constraints as being quite minor relative to the miner-guides’
materially and culturally authentic accounts. He asserts that miner-guides’ are
able to represent mining practices to visitors authentically, and that the guides
are true to their beliefs (‘It’s what the boys think’) and their feelings (‘they can say
what it felt like to work at the coal seam’).
In her analysis of similar data at Rhondda Heritage Park (another mining
heritage site in south Wales), Dicks (2008) notes that the vernacularity of
miners’ voices is a salient feature of their accounting. She writes that
‘[heritage] both effaces and summons up class and presents the autonomous
individual as a stand-in for the collective’ (Dicks 2008: 440). In Extract 4, ‘the
boys’ is a vernacular, ingroup form of reference, but it is also interesting to note
that Glyn distances ‘the boys’ at Big Pit from academic history (‘they’re not
trained historians’), and introduces this fact as a further warrant for their
authenticity. He says that Big Pit miners may not know the historical details of
‘the Tonypandy riots’ (historically salient, violent clashes between miners and
police in 1910 and 1911 over miners’ working conditions in the Rhondda
Valleys), but that they can tell the culture from their own immediate
experience, which is credentialed as a source of authenticity ahead of
professional academic analysis. Dicks’ argument is supported in the fact that
‘the boys’ in our own data mark their local community status (as ‘Valleys’
speakers of south Welsh English) in their vernacular accent/dialect styles (see
below), which overlays a dimension of local symbolic indexicality over claims
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and demonstrations of local experiential knowledge. The projection of cultural

authenticity is therefore complex and multi-dimensional in its own right.
In our data too, miners’ ways of speaking are a focus for comment and
represented as being culturally authenticating (cultural authenticity in
performance), and they are integrated with other aspects of material
authenticity. When asked why Big Pit has been a success, Thomas, a Big Pit
manager, comments:

Extract 5: Interview with Thomas, a Big Pit manager

You could simplify it, cut it down to its bare bones, and say it’s a real coal mine,
real miners . . . That first-person interpretation is important. They don’t use
‘they’, they use ‘I’ and ‘we’ . . . They’re not historians and they’re not mining
engineers, they have their own views on things. What you get is the real thing as
it were.

Speaking as ‘I’ and ‘we’ is credited to be a characteristic of being ‘real miners’,

who once again are differentiated from professionals (historians and
engineers), implying a social class distinction. Together, Glyn and Thomas
neatly invert the well-trodden heritage critique popular among historians –
that heritage is ‘bad’ or ‘bogus history’. Their view is that miner-guides provide
access to authentic cultural experience because they are not historians or
engineers. Glyn and Thomas give priority to the dimensions of authenticity
that they deem to be most telling – the authority of personal voice and
experience underpins authenticity (cf. Olsen 2002), but most tellingly when it
is personal voice ‘from below’, validated by direct material and cultural
experience. (It is interesting to note that the opposite might be claimed by
traditional historians relying on documentary sources and consensus of expert
critical opinion.)
As we noted earlier, in interviews miner-guides inevitably draw from the
discursive repertoire that they use when speaking to visitors. But they are also
prepared to comment reflexively to the interviewer about how they think their
talk as miner-guides impacts on visitors. In Extract 6, John at Big Pit is
responding to the interviewer’s prompt: ‘What about the tours? What do you
think people enjoy about them?’

Extract 6: Interview with John, a Big Pit miner-guide

There’s a couple of things, the banter and the history. We can’t tell them
everything but we can tell them how the conditions was, the social conditions, a
bit of your own experience. In ten years’ time we’re not going to have no miners
about. We’re a dying breed. The tours will be manufactured because they’ve got
no experience like the rest of them have. It’ll diminish from what we have now.

‘Banter’ refers to a repertoire of mock-aggressive, teasing and humorous talk

that John takes to be a feature of miner-to-miner talk at work but also of

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miner-guide-to-visitor talk, one element of what he thinks people enjoy about

the tours (some instances of stylised miners’ banter, performed for visitors
and captured during a Big Pit tour, are reproduced in N. Coupland et al.
2005). John therefore acknowledges that banter is knowingly performed for
visitors, but he also implies that such performance adds to rather than
detracts from the culturally authenticating performances of miner-guides like
himself. ‘The banter’ is directly referred to by other miner-guides at Big Pit,
including Dewi who says, ‘I think people [visitors] like that as soon as they
come through the top of the pit there, put their helmets on . . . they like the
banter of the boys, the atmosphere of the place’. He contrasts miners’ banter
with the prospective tour commentaries of non-miners as guides, who he
says ‘won’t have been underground. It will be read off a script’. Although,
like John, Dewi acknowledges that banter is to some extent performed, he
claims exclusive ownership of that performance resource for genuine ex-
miners. In relation to Bunten’s ‘commodified persona’, miner-guides claim
licence to engage in some ‘staged’ aspects of heritage tourism, because this is
underwritten by their embodied memory of real mining and their specialist
insider knowledge.
Banter of this sort among south Walian miners, just like in John’s own
speech in the interview, is likely to carry familiar dialect indexicals of class and
region. As dialect features, ‘was’ for ‘were’ (line 2 of Extract 6) and double
negation (lines 3–4) index a grammatical style of vernacular English that is by
no means unique to south Wales, but socially embedded there. However, these
are very small indexical elements of a more generally vernacular construction
of local experience linked to mining in south Wales. Once again, John
implicitly contrasts his own (and his peers’) cultural authenticity with the
‘manufactured’ tours that he says will result from the absence of the ‘dying
breed’ of real miners. (‘They’ and ‘the rest of them’ in the last two lines of
Extract 6 refer to the less authentic replacements and the ‘dying breed’ of real
miners, respectively.) At both Geevor and Big Pit miner-guides will, as John
says, inevitably need to be replaced over time by others who have not worked
in the mining industry11 and who can therefore claim less direct and less
authoritative ownership of relevant narratives. While the authentic speaker
may be an elusive and contested sociolinguistic concept (N. Coupland 2010;
Eckert 2003), this is precisely how John constructs himself and his ex-miner
colleagues.
Historical depth and continuity, as we saw earlier with the continuing
existence of material objects, are familiar criteria for perceived authenticity,
and we have seen how these qualities lie at the heart of miner-guides’
claims to cultural authenticity and associated metacultural values. But we
find some highly nuanced accounts of continuity too. In an interview at
Geevor, Clive reflects as follows on the complexities of what he calls ‘living
in the past’.

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Extract 7: Interview with Clive, a miner-guide at Geevor

Guys like myself, and there’s about six others here that were all here together at
one time, we still look back a bit, you know. I don’t know if people, um, some
people here on this site don’t, they think we live in the past too much. But we’re
relating to people at the moment, people who walk into this shed and we can tell
them, you know, we can relate and tell them what our experience is. Cos that’s
what they want to know, that’s what they’re here for. We tell it as it was. We
hope it’ll stay alive but again, you know, in a way we’re the last of a line really,
because some of us now are coming up for retirement and there’s no young
people that want to do this, you know?

Clive acknowledges that to ‘live in the past too much’ draws criticism from
some Geevor workers. This phrase evokes the spectre of ‘rosy-eyed cultural
nostalgia’, common in the early critiques of heritage that we outlined, and he
seems to accept the validity of that critique to some extent. But he then reframes
his account from the perspective of visitors’ priorities – ‘it’s what they want to
know’, where ‘it’ refers to miner-guides ‘telling it as it was’. In this discourse he
minimises the potential conflict between cultural and recreational/tourist
authenticities – visitors want to know what only miner-guides can tell. As a
result, the demands of the tourist authenticity frame actually reinforce cultural
authenticity by affirming not only the inherent cultural value of the miners’
stories, but also their immediate value within the tourist authenticity frame –
it’s ‘what they’re here for’.
Mining heritage therefore needs to achieve a sort of time-travel, for example
Geevor as a place to ‘step back in time’ (Peter’s comment in Extract 3). In order
to be experienced as authentic, mining heritage sites need to credibly perpetuate
lived realities of the past while catering for different realities in the present. In
several accounts this tension emerges as discursive negotiations around the
concept of ‘experience’ itself. Thomas, a Big Pit manager, responded to a
question about why Big Pit had been so successful as follows.

Extract 8: Interview with Thomas, a Big Pit manager

A number of factors. The first thing was, virtually unique. There are other
mining museums around the country. Obviously I would argue none of us are as
good as us [laughs]. But obviously people running those would say exactly the
same. But certainly out of the ordinary, so a trip here is not a normal trip to a
museum. It’s very much an experiential thing as opposed to just going and
looking, a bit like the difference between playing football and watching football if
you like. You are involved. Yes, you’re not mining coal, but you’re putting all the
gear on, you are going down a hole in the ground. There’s no simulation in that.

‘Experience’ can be a glib concept in heritage marketing (and in the promotion

of all sorts of metacultural performances), too optimistic about the level of

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meaningful engagement that consumers are likely to have with a staged

cultural environment. But for the Big Pit manager in Extract 8, ‘experiencing’
has a particular value in being distinguished from ‘just going and looking’.
Thomas suggests that experiencing is a matter of active rather than passive
participation (begging some significant questions about whether ‘watching
football’ is or is not an active process), and he comes back to material
authenticity as his touchstone for active engagement. He concedes that the Big
Pit experience stops short of actually digging out coal (‘Yes, you’re not mining
coal’), but he returns to the material processes of ‘putting all the gear on’ and
‘going down a hole in the ground’ as the central claim to authenticity. He
heavily implies that the ‘experiential thing’ of visiting Big Pit ‘as it was’ is more
meaningful than ‘just looking’, but (in his last utterance) refuses to align this
experience with ‘simulation’.
The real and the simulated are relative concepts in heritage practices; there
is no simple distinction between ‘pre-heritage’ and ‘in-heritage’ experiences.
This is presumably why the apparently paradoxical fusions of material and
recreational authenticities that we have encountered in many data extracts
(most clearly in Extracts 1 and 2) are not destructive for heritage institutions.
At some mining heritage sites, for example, visitors do come closer (in a
physical sense) to digging for coal or other minerals than they do at Geevor
and Big Pit. At Sovereign Hill, a 19th-century gold mine in Victoria (Australia)
visitors are invited to go panning for gold in the streams accompanied by
costumed interpreters (see http://www.sovereignhill.com.au/). This is a more
directly interactive form of engagement with the materiality of a mining site
than the Cornish and Welsh cases permit, but it is still an experience that is
regulated by and contained within the exigencies of recreational tourist
experience. In fact, it is an instance of the familiar ‘have a go’ mode of tourist
experience, where some small-scale agentive activity is facilitated as an
emblem of ‘original’ large-scale cultural practice. Even visitors who pan for
gold re-enact mining in a highly limited way, without being exposed to the
historical, cultural and economic realities of lives lived as miners.
As we have stressed, the recontextualisation of material objects and
practices does of course involve simulation (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1995;
MacCannell 1999[1976]). No matter how convincing miner-guides are, or
how profoundly visitors engage in the experience, wearing helmets and going
down a mine shaft have undoubtedly been transformed into symbolic
commodities that attract visitors to a restricted form of role-playing as
miners. But in Extract 8 Thomas is adamant that, as a visitor at Big Pit, ‘You
are involved’ and that this is ‘not a normal trip to a museum’. While he
repeatedly refers to Big Pit’s material objects and places, he clearly believes that
these resources do not fully account for its authenticating power as an
experience. His formulation, ‘going down a hole in the ground’, hints at the
elemental demands and (in Raymond Williams’ term) the ‘truth’ of

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underground labour that allowed mineral extraction to define working-class

cultures in Cornwall and in Wales.

CONCLUSION
By modelling four frames of authenticity in play in our mining heritage data,
we have tried to show that heritage and the metacultural process of
heritageisation are not inherently deauthenticating in the ways that some
historians assume them to be. Rather, they enter into complex and
multi-faceted relations with authenticity, which is rationalised and given
value in different discursive frames. Heritage discourses, the discursive
constructions and performances through which a valued cultural past is
staged and made available for cultural scrutiny and reassessment, whether for
tourists or for others, are the means by which salient meanings, identities and
values are exposed. At Geevor and Big Pit, two of the most prominent British
mining heritage sites, those discourses prove to have particular nuances and
salience, linked to the historical and cultural importance of tin mining and coal
mining in Cornwall and Wales, respectively. Following principles of curatorial
integrity, curators strive for historical accuracy in their representations, which
certainly provides one basis for the sites’ claims to offer authentic experiences,
but which is only one consideration among many.
Heritage is poised at the intersection of the cultural past and the cultural
present. If we take a dynamic view of cultural knowledge and experience,
heritage is simply a more sharply focussed particular instance of very general
metacultural processes. It creates opportunities for metacultural (re)
assessment by exposing people to reflexively staged versions of cultural
histories, in much the same way that (according to Urban 2001) a new
artefact or ritual performance of a known genre makes cultural traditions
available for inspection and for evaluative assessment. As we noted earlier,
cultures in this view are mobile and emergent and, in the absence of
metacultural action and awareness, they are largely invisible to members. The
particular function of heritage institutions, however, is to appoint metacultural
agents or brokers specifically charged with managing links between past and
present.
In our own study, miner-guides are the clearest category of metacultural
agents. They are positioned both inside and outside of the mining cultures
being commemorated at Big Pit and Geevor. They are, by virtue of their
physical presence in the hard landscapes of underground mines, part of the
material reality of mineral extraction. But they are also interpreters of and
commentators on mining practices and their cultural values. Supported by
curators and managers (who, in our data, align closely with former miners’
stances and priorities), miner-guides authenticate the cultures they represent,
both directly (materially) and through their discursive accounts. Their
discourse is framed as performance, in its address to us as researchers as
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well as to site visitors. To this extent there is a clear disjunction between, for
example, banter among working miners and banter that is knowingly
recreated for tourists. Heritage sites are not able to create authentic
ethnographic experiences for visitors of the sort that academic researchers
like to believe they can create for themselves.
All the same, miner-guides and others at Geevor and Big Pit are clearly
motivated by their own and their institutions’ ambition to keep cultural
authenticities alive in performance. They value preserved material artefacts of
mining and assert cultural authenticities in relation to them. The nuancing of
these assertions is significant, however, when accounts recognise that access to
‘authentic experience’ via heritage is challenging and often constrained – most
obviously, visitors to Geevor and Big Pit do not extract minerals under harsh
and dangerous conditions. But in sifting through what is and is not authentic,
materially and culturally, miner-guides accounts become credible in their
authenticity claims. A more general constraint comes in the form of what we
have called performative and tourist authenticities – recognising the fact that
visitor experiences at each site are framed as performance for visitors who
bring their own legitimate expectations and priorities, with a wide range of
demands for (and meanings of) authenticity. Miner-guides’ discourse, we have
suggested, is all the more authenticating of mining culture and mining
lifestyles for the ways in which it does not try to edit out those experiential
dimensions. Their accounts open up and integratively manage different
footings for authenticity, which we see as central to heritage performance.
Heritage tourism discourse is best characterised as a complex of authentication
moves, reflecting heritage’s complex social constitution – the past
meaningfully reconstructed for consumption and commemoration in the
present.

NOTES
1. We are grateful to Monica Heller, Adam Jaworski, Crispin Thurlow and an
anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.
The paper was developed when the first author was affiliated to the University
of Exeter and to Brown University, supported by the (U.K.) Economic and Social
Research Council. The second author’s input was supported by the Peripheral
Multilingualism project, funded by the Finnish Academy (2001–2015), with
Sari Pietik€
ainen as Principal Investigator.
2. This perspective is largely dismissive of professional curators who are no doubt
sensitive to the potential pitfalls of (mis)representation and in heritage
interpretation, which is considered measurable by academic and professional
standards. See for example the International Council on Museums at http://
icom.museum/what-we-do/professional-standards.html and the Arts Council
Accreditation scheme at http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/what-we-do/

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supporting-museums/accreditation-scheme/. (All web sources listed in this

paper were last accessed on the 3rd of March 2013.)
3. The sub-field of public history has recently emerged in Britain, drawing on
developments in American scholarship. For an introduction to public history,
see Frisch (1989), Hoock (2010), Jordanova (2000) and Liddington (2002).
There are two journals dedicated to public history: the American journal The
Public Historian (established in 1978) and its Australian counterpart Public
History Review (established in 1992).
4. The status of Geevor and Big Pit as ‘tourist attractions’ is resisted by those who
emphasise their (meta)cultural significance, but they are not in any simple
sense ‘museums’ either. We follow the editors of this journal issue in
emphasising mobility as a defining characteristic of how our two sites are
experienced, in the specific sense that they are engaged in putting local
community practices on display for mobile (‘from anywhere’) consumers
(whether or not they are tourists in the narrowest sense of that term) who opt
into experiencing work underground.
5. A sense of (proto-)nationhood has often surfaced in Cornwall in opposition to
institutional processes that have positioned it as ‘an English county’ or as part
of a south-west England hinterland that has been referred to as ‘Devonwall’
(Devon and Cornwall). Cornish mining history and the Cornish language have
been invoked as warrants for the existence of a Cornish nation.
6. All interviews were undertaken by the first author in 2010 and 2011.
Informants were contacted either directly or through the heritage sites’
administrative offices after several preliminary visits to each site. Interviews
were carried out on a one-on-one basis. We are very grateful to all interviewees
who gave permission for audio recordings to be made and used for the purposes
of research and publication. We have assigned fictional names to all
informants, although they granted permission for research reports to specify
their employment roles at the two sites. English is the dominant language used
to promote both sites and the preferred language of all people interviewed in
the process of the research.
7. It becomes clear in interviews that miner-guides were heavily invested in
staying true to their identities as working miners, and were wary of ‘selling out’
and of filling commercial roles in tourism (see the discussion of Bunten’s
research, below). One individual said he thought the term ‘tourist guide’
‘sounded stupid’, and that this wouldn’t be thought of as a real job.
8. UNESCO works with the categories of ‘tangible cultural heritage’ and
‘intangible cultural heritage’ in its listing process. See http://www.unesco.
org/new/en/cairo/culture/tangible-cultural-heritage/ and http://www.unesco.
org/new/en/cairo/culture/intangible-cultural-heritage/.
9. As Crispin Thurlow comments in a personal note, the strategic blurring of past
and present is a very common trope in tourism. In the case of mining heritage,
and particularly in the context of quite recent de-industrialisation (as we see it
in Wales), the notion of ‘reliving the past’ has particularly deep metacultural
poignancy.
10. We offer a broad orthographic transcription of interview responses,
representing a few particular lexico-grammatical features of local dialects,
but with no attempt to give details of prosodic or segmental phonological
features (although we comment briefly on the relevance of some pronunciation

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features, below). We give a rough impression of utterance boundaries and

pausing by super-imposing conventional orthographic punctuation.
11. At Big Pit, tours with miner-guides have been recorded by site staff in order to
try to preserve the miners’ stories. At Geevor, there are already two guides
employed who have no direct mining experience, and this reduces their
resources to evoke mining authenticities. In this paper we have chosen to focus
specifically on the majority who are ex-miners. For further detail and
discussion of these issues, see B. Coupland (2013).

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Address correspondence to:

Bethan Coupland
History Programme
Victoria University of Wellington
PO Box 600
Wellington 6140
New Zealand
[email protected]

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