By Jon Kohl
Image by Dimitri Castrique / community.electricsheep.org.
From within our field, we might entertain the thought that interpretation changes and evolves according to actions of our own thinkers and programs, independent of the trajectories by which other fields such as environmental education, forestry, sociology, or even hair design might travel. But a momentary step outside our box might reveal that all society evolves in a larger sweep, a giant historical track that guides the future.
To glimpse this requires that we become conscious of the universal dimension of evolution, way beyond that of Darwin. Then, we can understand from whence interpretation has come and to where it marches. And, hopefully, we can help it arrive as soon as possible.
Universal Evolution Is Accelerating
Evolution did not start with Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Evolution began with a bang. The Big Bang unleashed galactic evolution. At first only hydrogen atoms populated infant space, but from its simplest atom evolved helium, lithium, beryllium, and on down the periodic table. Atoms clumped into clouds, then stars, then solar systems and galaxies, each time more complex than the time before.
After billions of years on our planet, the rocks cooled, sedimented, heated, and metamorphosed into tectonic plates, digging canyons, building mountain ranges, and creating ever more species of minerals.
After millions of years, the first prokaryotic unicellular organisms bubbled into existence among organic-chemical soups. Then came multicellular organisms, which grew larger and more complex, able to react to more stimuli in more interesting ways. Then proto-hominids evolved to the first self-conscious organisms on the planet.
After hundreds of thousands of years, many different cultures emerged. Then civilization.
After hundreds of years technologies evolved ever more rapidly.
With each passing scale, the universe grows more complex and conscious.
Human Consciousness Is Going Somewhere
If consciousness is an organism’s ability to perceive and react to ever more kinds of stimuli, then clearly from the earliest most archaic bacteria to humans, a lot of consciousness has evolved. But now in our modern age, our egocentric consciousness asks if evolution has stopped with people—if the natural driving forces that drove speciation for a couple billion years no longer applies to the pinnacle species that can short-circuit disease and hunger, and live under any condition. It’s a tempting thought since in the 10,000 years of human civilization, our bodies, even our brain mass, have not physically evolved in any substantial way.
Yet our brain power, our processing speed, and our ability to conceptualize and identify patterns and categories have increased by orders of magnitude. Powers beyond our ancestors’ imagination have emerged from within our skulls without any material change in that same skull. Development psychologists, such as Jean Piaget, have known for a long time that human cognitive, emotional, and other strictly interior capacities expand as we mature. These psychologists warn that no one gets to skip development levels, even if we move at different paces and attain different endpoints.
A newer kind of developmental psychologist now studies the evolution of consciousness both in individuals—adults are clearly more conscious than infants—and in cultures and societies. Consciousness, like everything else in the universe, evolves and becomes more complex. After many years, researchers and philosophers have mapped the levels of consciousness that humanity has experienced.
Archaic: This early consciousness corresponds to pre-culture hominids with the basic instinct of survival. Today this level can only be found in infants or adults who have regressed due to severe cerebral injury or illness.
Tribal: With the evolution of true culture, the life conditions of hunter-gatherers was a world controlled by animistic spirits who exercise power over humans. Fear and mystery envelop tribal folks whose most successful survival strategy has been to group together into tribes where everyone does all they can to support the group. Following rites and rituals to appease the spirits, this form of existence has succeeded for thousands of years. But eventually some began to reject the complete submission of individuality to the group and express individual motivation and expression.
Warrior: In this level of consciousness warriors excel based on their own strength and intelligence. They take what they can and lead through power. Through personal initiative and expression, the warrior consciousness, manifested in the likes of the Mongols, Vikings, and barbarians, survived successfully for many centuries and still exists today in certain parts of the world.
Traditional: In time some rejected the chaos and violence of the warrior mentality and from them evolved the traditional consciousness or worldview. Such cultures have a definitive code of law, usually revealed from a higher power that none of its followers can question. The code allows much greater order and organization capable of defeating warrior cultures and ushered in civilization, division of labor, great works of art and architecture, and also great ethnocentricity to any outside the “correct” way of living.
Modernist nature interpreters focus only on nature and science, preferring to avoid cultural, social, and ethical issues of concern for postmodern interpretation. By Jon Kohl.
Modernists: Starting in the Enlightenment, people began to reject the traditionalist requirement of accepting the code based on faith and submitting to the hierarchy that mediated communication with the gods. The modernists instead wanted to progress based on personal merit, thought, rationality, and ability. They created science and believed deeply in power of the mind and the individual’s right to exercise that power and enjoy its benefits. The modernists created democracy, capitalism, and professional bureaucracies, but in the process of promoting individual rights and merits, anyone not strong enough or smart enough or powerful enough fell by the wayside. Their materialist approach stripped away anything that could not be measured by science, such as morality and spirituality, leaving minority groups and the environment to suffer at the bloody hands of progress.
Post-modernists: Since the 1960s this new consciousness has emerged to challenge the waste, exclusion, materialism, individualism, and environmental destruction of modernism. The post-modernists promoted inclusion and every cause they could think of whether environmentalism, human rights, peace, green living, back-to-earth, organic, etc. Yet despite their achievements, the world still worsens. Post-modernists apply value relativism to all situations and while they claim to be open-minded and tolerant they despise the abuses of traditionalists and modernists.
Integralists: Starting in the 1980s a few people disenchanted with the worsening conditions of the world and the ongoing culture wars between traditionalists, modernists, and post-modernists came to realize that in fact there exist multiple levels of consciousness coexisting simultaneously and depending on different sets of life conditions. They realize that individuals and groups evolve along a developmental course that brings them through these levels and ultimately all problems have a large consciousness component. This is the first level to realize that different kinds of consciousness and different values exist, none being the one right way, and each contributing something positive and negative to overall human consciousness on Earth.
Integral Theory, then, embodies this new worldview and even anticipates new post-integral worldviews to come.
Paradigm of Interpretation Goes with the Worldview Flow
Every worldview embodies a forest of paradigms, where each paradigm explains how some aspect, technology, belief system, or field works. Paradigms can pass between worldviews but evolve when they do so. For example, environmental education, adaptive management, and interpretation all were born in modernism with their principal paradigm and corresponding rules and beliefs.
Modernists created all three fields as a response to mounting damage from modernism’s own exploits. Both Enos Mills and Freeman Tilden worked in the modernism era and expressed values of trying to rectify damages to nature and national parks. With the arrival of post-modernism in the 1960s these fields began to take on post-modern ideas. Modernism had left people without meaning by stripping spirituality, community, and sacred spaces from common thought. This presented a big opportunity for interpreters who could help to instill or re-instill the notion of place, rather than just a material, utilitarian, modernist space. Interpreters could integrate multiple forms of knowing rather than just science, modernism’s sole source of legitimate knowledge. Some interpreters adopted the idea that meanings are relative to the meaning-makers rather than inherent in places, a modernist idea.
Even today, interpretation (and most other fields in society) suffers from being caught between worldviews. Many modernist interpreters, for example, focus only on science and nature interpretation and leave out social systems when interpreting environmental and conservation problems. These same interpreters employ anthropocentric universal themes (where the definition of a universal theme is one that all people, regardless of culture can relate to). Post-modern interpreters, on the other hand, have thrown themselves full into integrating indigenous messages, underground railroad, and stories of other erstwhile-ignored or suppressed minority points of view, or themes that take up causes the world over, and not just particular sites.
Integral Interpreters Focus on Evolving Consciousness and Global Crisis
To be an integral interpreter requires an even broader consciousness, to embrace universal themes that do not refer only to universal human experiences but themes about the entire universe. For integralists, evolution becomes the highest value and deepest source of interpretive themes. Understanding evolution, integralists see the directionality of greater complexity and greater consciousness. This direction gives purpose to evolution, to the universe, and all creation, much more enriching than the modernist claim that life is simply the result of random and purposeless natural selection. It integrates spirituality into interpretation, a forbidden topic in the modernist world. Evolution ties together interpretation about all other systems, whether shipbuilding or forest history or the Civil War or the Crab Nebula. Integralists integrate the modern science with post-modern spirituality. They interpret how different life conditions give rise to different worldviews, and they understand and interpret that all problems in the world have a large consciousness component. Integral interpreters, because of the gloomy life conditions in which we live today, understand that they need to interpret problems and solutions to audiences with different worldviews within the context of values relevant to each worldview. This integrates an entirely new aspect to understanding one’s audience.
Integralists, by their more holistic nature, don’t just interpret geographically bounded heritage places (and they don’t use the modernist term “resources” anymore), but the heritage’s place in the evolving universe.
Conclusion
With climate change, pandemics, peak oil, and food shortages, the life conditions—especially of Westerners in the 2000s—grow increasingly obvious and urgent. We need interpreters to look beyond the 19th-century modernist concept of protected areas and identify with a larger consciousness, at least worldcentric, if not beyond. Interpreters, to be truly relevant in this century, can’t simply hide in local sites, but must participate in helping solve problems based in consciousness. This age, though with dire challenges afoot, presents the most glorious moment in history for interpreters, but first we must evolve beyond Darwin.
Jon Kohl is a writer, interpreter, eco-village builder, and long-term consultant with UNESCO’s World Heritage Center. Visit him at www.jonkohl.com.
Sharing Ideas Across Borders: An Invitation to an International Exchange of Ideas in Interpretation
By Robert J. Hanna
The reconstructed Römerkastell Saalburg, a historic fort at the frontier of the ancient Roman Empire, offers a wealth of interesting and educational programs for school groups and pre-booked groups.
It was exactly the kind of interpretive moment Freeman Tilden was talking about. I was in the Museum für Kommunikation Frankfurt, face-to-face with a movable-type printing press for the first time. A friendly interpreter there showed me how to arrange type into a brass holder, clamp it together, ink it, and roll it through the press onto paper. Suddenly movable type was no longer some mysterious, obsolete technology to me. It became the rumbling of clunky gears and rollers behind the pull lever, an inky mess on my fingers, a practice of creation. Type became not just shapes and symbols, but fistfuls of glistening black metal cubes, crunching like gravel in my hand, the tiny soldiers of a thousand bloody and bloodless revolutions.
I didn’t learn much that day—not if learning means picking up facts and names. Instead I learned to love something. And passing on such love is, after all, our first goal as interpreters. That interpretive experience opened up what will be a lifetime of learning to me. Now I can’t see a book bound in old-fashioned folios without studying it in detail. I later decided to take a trip to Mainz to see the Gutenberg Museum and wonder at Gutenberg’s strange new books. And goodness only knows how many of my friends had to listen to stories about my exciting new experiences with printing presses—and perhaps caught some of my excitement as well.
That’s the power of interpretation—to open up new experiences, not simply to teach, but to create learners, to awaken enthusiasm for new knowledge. For better or for worse, though, this project commits us to a never-ending search for new ideas. To interpret effectively, we need to reach our audiences where they are, offering them experiences that are fresh and surprising. An exhibit or tour that could have captured visitors’ imaginations years ago can easily be stale today.
An eye-catching display case in the Historisches-Museum Frankfurt.
This seems unpleasant, of course, but it is also what makes our work a matter requiring creativity—and thus what makes it fun. We are continuously looking at our sites, our parks, our tours, our interpretive centers, and so forth and asking ourselves how we can make them even more effective and interesting for our visitors. But no new ideas come without inspiration. Even the greatest thinkers didn’t just think up their new ideas all at once. They built upon and adapted earlier ones. That’s one of the reasons the National Association for Interpretation is so important to us—it provides an opportunity for us to exchange and build upon our ideas, both allowing us to improve our interpretation in everyday practice and to improve the art of interpretation as a whole.
And where better to look for new and fresh ideas than in other countries? Studying as an American in Germany for the last couple of years has shown me that even in the 21st century, many ideas still rarely cross national borders. People in every country have a habit of communicating with those who share the same culture and language. Reaching out across borders requires deliberate effort, but the results are rewarding.
The National Association for Interpretation has indeed been making strides towards increasing our international activities. The main efforts so far are the annual international conference, the ecotour program, the international volunteer program, and international partnerships with interpretive organizations in China and Korea.
However, NAI, while being enthusiastic about the benefits these activities will bring both to the association and to our contacts abroad, is also rather apologetic for them, as one can read on the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page of the association website. There it is emphasized that the association avoids investing any money in our international activities. I’d like to contribute to a conversation about becoming more involved internationally and argue that everyone stands to benefit from such an undertaking.
Of course, if we look specifically for American-style heritage interpreters at nature reserves and historic sites abroad, we’ll find comparatively few. The idea of heritage interpretation today is mostly limited to the English-speaking world, such as Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. But if we consider anyone connecting resources and visitors in meaningful, educational, and enriching ways to be interpreting, then there are thousands of people the world over creatively seeking new and better ways to do just that. There’s a rich variety of ideas out there, and countless of them result in visitor experiences that are not only interesting and effective, but also unintentionally interpretive in the best sense of the world—like the printing press I encountered in Frankfurt.
The Museum für Kommunikation Frankfurt effectively uses masses of telephones, mailboxes, radios, and so forth to command visitors’ attention and invite them to study individual objects that interest them in detail.
I can offer Germany as just one example of a country where we might learn new ideas. The main forces for interpretation in Germany are museums, city tours, tour groups, and interpretive signage. Interpretation in the classic American sense at natural and historic sites is comparatively minimal but growing. However, if we look to museums, we’ll find a thriving wealth of new ideas—fundamentally interpretive ideas that bring natural or cultural resources and visitors together. Just a few decades ago, museums in Germany were assumed to be research institutions for scholars and experts. They weren’t really for the general public, and certainly not for kids. But you’d hardly know it now. Since then German museums have been striving with a vengeance to offer creative, attention-getting exhibits for audiences of all kinds.
One standout difference at these interpretive locations is an emphasis on local people. We who interpret in the United States often try so hard to attract tourists that we neglect people in the local area. Many German museums, on the other hand, see no reason why local enthusiasts shouldn’t visit their favorite museum as often as their favorite restaurant. There just has to be a reason to keep them coming back. Thus many German museums offer both special events and weekly classes to tempt in local fans on a regular basis. For example, a museum that interprets another culture might offer a weekly cooking class lasting several months to introduce participants to that culture’s traditional dishes. This slightly different emphasis makes sense, because local people are those we need most to thrive. One of the foremost buzzwords in German museum development today is Zielgruppen, or target groups. Such groups might be young children, teenagers, elders, or disabled people. Some museums, for example, have created tours specifically for blind visitors. To be effective, of course, these tours require an interpreter with considerable knowledge of how people with various kinds of vision impairments perceive and understand their surroundings, but they create an incredibly rewarding experience for visitors who might otherwise feel cut off from the world of interpretive sites. Dr. Sojna Schierle, director of pedagogy for the Linden Museum of Ethnology in Stuttgart, has described to me her new idea of recognizing families as a target group. She wanted to offer interactive activities that would bring parents and their children together. In one event, each family formed a team and competed against the other families to complete projects and answer questions about the exhibit. Since the resource was a collection of artifacts about Japanese Noh theater, the final project was for each family to organize a Noh-inspired puppet show.
Many of the ideas being developed are hidden behind the scenes. One of the main topics of discussion among German museum interpreters today is ethics. How does one balance bringing the resource to the public with preserving it? What should museums do with resources that came to their collections through questionable means, such as artifacts taken from colonies in earlier centuries? Is it respectful to interpret the religions of other cultures, and if so, how?
Although this Melanesian men’s house is an antique original, visitors to the Ethnologisches Museum Dahlem in Berlin are welcomed to climb inside.
Naturally, new ideas gleaned from abroad may need to be translated before we use them at home. What works well in one country might need adjustments before it works in another. For example, most interpreters in the United States cannot invest quite as many resources into seeking local visitation as German sites do, where the denser population makes for a larger pool of potentially interested locals.
Of course, people abroad would also like to learn our ideas. The ideas that NAI, the National Park Service, and each of us have been developing are valuable concepts that many interpreters in other countries would be very interested to hear about. I once spoke with a German professor who specializes in museum pedagogy about my interest in studying the subject. She encouraged me not to go into it, because all I’d find is that museums are constantly forced to compromise between educating and entertaining. Therefore I told her a little about heritage interpretation—neither exactly entertaining nor educating, but awakening visitors to a newfound interest in and enthusiasm about the resource. She was quite excited about the idea.
Sites the world over stand to benefit from the wisdom the NAI has been gathering and developing over the years, while NAI similarly stands to reap incredible new ideas from other countries. Think of a café mocha—one of the most delicious ideas in history. It took the contributions of people from Ethiopia, Yemen, the Mayan Empire, and Italy to produce it. I hope the future of heritage interpretation will be similar, with people from all over the world contributing and combining ideas into rich new interpretive experiences we can’t even imagine now.
Robert Hanna is a masters student in history at Philipps-Universität Marburg in Marburg, Germany, and a seasonal interpreter at Fort Abraham Lincoln State Park near Bismarck, North Dakota.
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