Part 2 of 3: Interpreters and the Big Story
Carrying Interpretation Across the Divide
Have you ever told someone that you work as an interpreter and they replied, “Oh yeah, which language?”
In the first article (May/June 2003), “The Most Important Story in History: And Interpreters Positioned to Tell It,” I argue that our field should take on an explicit conservationist angle since conservation runs deeply through our veins and because the biggest stories those of our worldview threaten the very resources we interpret. In this article, I discuss the interpretive community, at least in the US, and how it requires a revolution to enjoy a greater role in society.
In 1952 science historian Thomas Kuhn wrote his classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which interpreted how science evolved through paradigm change.
And paradigms change often through revolutions that destroy pre-revolution theories and practices. Kuhn tells that when scientists perceive an anomaly in their observations that the current paradigm cannot explain, they try to solve it within existing beliefs. When the problem persists and becomes widely recognized, a crisis ensues and often times a young or new entrant to the field comes up with a whole new way of explaining the anomaly, overthrowing the old paradigm. For example, with Copernicus's help, the Earth began to revolve around the Sun, no longer the reverse.
I will now apply Kuhn's theory to interpretation. By examining our field's components, we see what exists and what might change in revolution. Many fields have gone through paradigm change, such as public health and its "effectiveness revolution." Interpretation has not yet felt the thrill and disorientation of revolution. It still rests on its founder's writings.
Fundamental Beliefs
- Interpreters are distinct from environmental educators and PR experts
- Interpreters need only understand a handful of meanings from other cultures, rather than the overall belief structure.
- Interpretation is important to park management.
Seminal Theorists
Almost exclusively Freeman Tilden. To a much smaller degree, Mills and Muir
Practical Theorists
Sam Ham and the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point team
Science Text
Kuhn says that textbooks document paradigm rules, instruments, and theories. Our field too has a text, albeit very new. Personal Interpretation by Merriman and Brochu unites the most commonly accepted knowledge and practices into just one tome.
Rules
- 6 principles of Tilden
- 15 principles of Cable and Beck
- 4 qualities of Ham
- Use themes and stories.
- Do not impose your own viewpoint, do not advocate, use multiple viewpoints.
- Be accurate, balanced, fair, and objective.
- Always start with the resource.
Language
Specialties develop jargon to describe increasingly specialized phenomena: connections to resources, tangibles and intangibles, interpreganda, heritage interpretation, provoke, non-personal interpretation; "preservation" (a term discarded by conservationists)
Values
- Nobility of frontline interpretation (not academic research)
- Interpreting other perspectives
- Non-activist
- Universal concepts
- Seeing the big picture
Problems
A paradigm defines problems for the field to solve. Some problems include:
- How to better link people and resources and meanings
- How to raise professional standards
- How to measure interpretation's impact on protected areas and society
- How to make interpretation more known and relevant to society-at-large
Models/Metaphors/Symbols
Every paradigm uses these to illustrate its theories.
- "Through interpretation, understanding; through understanding, appreciation; through appreciation, protection." National Park Service.
- "Give people curiosity. It is enough to open minds; do not overload them. Put there just a spark. If there is some good inflammable stuff, it will catch fire." Anatole France
- (KA + KR) X AT = IO (knowledge of audience + knowledge of resources) X Appropriate Technology = Interpretive Opportunity
This is the anomaly that I see: common sense argues that the interpretation field should enjoy a strong, explicit conservationist orientation. After all, most members work in protected areas and with protected resources. Its seminal thinkers are conservationists.
Yet interpretation avoids conservation, despite the good work of numerous practitioners to link conservation and interpretation (Ham, Sutherland, Meganck, Krumpe, Barborak). The field uses a language different from that of the conservation field and it only cursorily discusses conservation in its major writings. The National Park Service's Interpretive Development Program Module 101 barely connects interpretation and protection beyond a stewardship ethic, mentioning one benefit: "Empowers the public to influence policy to fulfill the National Park Service mission."
I offer one incomplete explanation for this non-conservation bias.
- Tilden wrote his book for NPS and focused almost exclusively on parks as does our field today, despite interpretation's applicability to a wider swath of society.
- Interpretation emphasizes above all meanings and appreciation, just like Tilden did.
- Many values have been ripped from a journalism textbook: objectivity, balance, fairness, accuracy, clear writing. Tilden was a journalist.
- Tilden still dominates all other authors as father of interpretation. While Muir and Mills get mentioned, they are rarely cited, though Mills is resurging.
- There is almost no conservation discourse. Tilden does write: "Not the least of the fruits of adequate interpretation is the certainty that it leads directly toward the very preservation of the treasure itself… Indeed such a result may be the most important end of our interpretation, for what we cannot protect we are destined to lose." Excepting this, Tilden avoided protection issues in Interpreting Our Heritage. And why not? He wrote during the 1950s which was the heyday of the American dream, big cars, good economy, and blissful exploitation of natural resources. The Viet Nam war had not yet started and Silent Spring had not yet been written.
- Tilden also was unaware of systems theory (developed in the late 1960s) and how paradigms (part of a system) consist of deeply embedded beliefs that together form a story or worldview. Each and every culture has a story that explains its people's creation, significance, and destiny. This set of beliefs directs how they relate to resources. Similarly, interpreters today use meanings from other cultures, but choosing disparate meanings, symbols, and beliefs misses the "big picture" a high value of interpretation.
In the last 20 years many authors have written about big stories such as in Ishmael, Limits to Growth, The Universe Is a Green Dragon, and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. By integrating deep stories into our professional lives, interpretation will shake with a paradigm change carrying it across the divide to conservation in the short-term and sustainability of natural and cultural resources in the long.
I do not diminish Tilden's consolidation of our field, but John Muir and his protégé, Enos Mills, together invented nature guiding and interpretation as well as being foremost American conservationists. If the combination worked for them then, it can work for us now in times of much greater resource threats. Thus, the question for article #3: If our field were in crisis, what might lie beyond the paradigm change?
The third article envisions a field with the global vision.
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