FEATURE
A Guide to Being in the World: The Human Need for Interpretation
A kayaker photographing a whale in Glacier Bay National Park & Preserve, 2014. Photo by NPS.
In the spring of 2015, well before my entry into the field of heritage interpretation, my undergraduate thesis advisor summoned me to his office late one evening. Only a few days earlier, with the due date looming in a week’s time, I had finally submitted a full draft of my philosophy honors thesis for his review. I had been in no hurry to submit. My facility with reading and regurgitating entire schools of thought had worked marvelously for plenty of blue book exams and term papers in the past. This, I felt, should be no different.
Accordingly, I had spent the semester parsing and reconstructing the arguments of Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger, and I could practically recite relevant Franz Kafka short stories from memory. Replete with extensive quotations, my paper exposed the differences between these writers’ philosophies of language and aesthetics from within their shared theoretical background. My advisor would surely be pleased with my rigorous accounting of established thought, I persuaded myself as I crossed campus and sailed through his office door.
He was not.
A whale’s head breaking the surface of the water in Glacier Bay National Park & Preserve, 2017. Photo by NPS/S. Behrns.
Disappointment colored his limited praise as he quickly passed beyond my thesis into the great hole that it had constructed. What did the disagreements that I had so painstakingly outlined mean? What did their incompatibilities imply for literature? For language? For people? If he simply wanted to grasp the specifics of the original works, he admonished, he could read those works directly. He then rattled off an abundance of possible approaches—various themes, fundamental questions—I might broach to build meaning out of the selection of quotations and arguments I had chosen. My chagrin soon gave way to an exhilaration before the opportunity I had overlooked, and although panicked by the impending deadline, I left that meeting excited to properly interpret the material anew.
At that time I had no premonition of my future career as an interpretive ranger. Only once I began writing ranger programs several years later did I recognize within the philosophy of my thesis a justification for the virtue, utility, and practice of interpretation that I often find missing in most discussions of the craft.
The common argument for the value of interpretive programming tends to follow these lines: inspired by a deeper understanding of an institution’s resources, visitors will display greater care for those resources and return with additional guests in tow. From this perspective, interpretation functions as a mere business tool. It seeks to drive up visitation and persuade visitors of the value of the institution’s mission, thereby increasing donations and engaging individuals in particular call-to-action projects that benefit the site. Interpretive programs that focus on these blatant and often banal marketing, entertainment, and stewardship angles may stumble in pursuit of such goals because they fail to acknowledge and serve the essential reason why visitors seek out parks and museums to begin with. To explore a park or tour a museum is to assemble meaning in one’s own world, a meaning in a world that is necessarily personal.
It should come as no surprise that interpretation deals in meaning; even the most mercenary of agency directors and novice of tour guides understand that. What gets lost, though, is the origin of meaning, not just for a specific place or topic but in more universal terms, how meaning comes about for anything, anywhere, anytime. Philosophy has offered many explanations for such a mechanism, but the philosophers I studied in my thesis sought to clear centuries of logical cleverness with a simple formulation. They posit that the thinking, living human subject cannot be separated from the surrounding world. Only in the exchange between these two equally necessary components, subject and world, can truth be found. Because of its emphasis on lived existence, this movement became known as Existentialism.
A whale spout in Glacier Bay National Park & Preserve, 2024. Photo by NPS/Sean Tevebaugh.
Within the existentialist framework, things (e.g., rocks, trees, buildings, tools, the human body, the material objects available to an interpretive program) belong to the world, but the opportunity to recognize them as things possessing particular properties and, more importantly, meanings belongs to the subject (e.g., the interpreter, the audience, and more abstractly, consciousness or any other notion of an experiencing entity or “soul”). All the preexisting assumptions, understandings, hopes, dreams, and feelings that a subject entertains moment to moment do not obscure some hidden “true” experience of the world. Rather, those human characteristics enable the subject to discover the world authentically as a world to oneself and, through communication, to others. The thinking subject is therefore said to be “thrown” into a world that provides a material and cultural horizon within which the individual is free to observe, to act, to contemplate, and above all else, to reconsider, to reinterpret what has been given. The tourism industry relies on this exact relationship, although a bit coarsely at times.
To the increasingly urbanized and digitized human individual, locations that provide experiences of natural and historical wonders represent some of the most compelling material and cultural horizons available. The marvel of watching a whale breach in Glacier Bay or meeting the faces of a dozen ancient sculptures at The Met generally lie outside the confines of ordinary life except to the extent that parks, museums, and tourism agencies make them available. Tickets and vacation packages are sold on this tempting promise that one’s world—for the world can only ever be personal to the living subject—can indeed feature such joys. During the visit, that promise of whales and statues becomes duly fulfilled in the encounter with the objects themselves. Mission accomplished, yet a problem remains for the tourist. While the original promise fit within the context of their regular life, what now is to be done with the whale encountered?
Left alone, people will make something of an experience, as they must lest they forget it, and in the face of a novel scene they will often fill in the moment at hand with a sense of thrill or with reflections upon their original expectations. But thrill seldom lasts, and expectations are quickly revealed to be an utterly different type of thing than the object itself. This dead end of meaning is ripe to be replaced, and here the interpreter enjoys an opportunity to guide the process towards other understandings.
A humpback whale breaching in Glacier Bay National Park & Preserve, 2014. Photo by NPS.
Mere facts and mission statements, though, will not suffice. Such information is available to visitors in abundance without the effort of the trip. The visitors came to put themselves before the whale itself, and they now struggle not with the vague ideas that whales “exist” or “should be protected,” but with the fact that their lived experience suddenly includes this particular whale just as much as it does everything that came before the encounter. The whale must be made to fit alongside the meaning of filing one’s taxes, driving to work, and shopping at the grocery store.
Existential philosophy explains this difficulty of meaning while offering a resolution. Because things stand out individually from, and collectively as, a world only ever to a thinking, living, feeling subject, the subject’s presence in the world becomes necessary for the world and its parts to have any meaning at all. Whales are intelligible as whales against the backdrop of everything else only for a subject; the meaning of the whale cannot exist separately. In everyday activities, the subject’s inherently personal mechanisms of feeling, thinking, and projecting which organize this intelligibility into a cohesive sense of an external world blends into the busy familiarity of the scene. Before something unfamiliar, however, the visitor confronts the origin of this meaning-making faculty within themselves, which is to say within their own immediate world.
The opportunity to highlight the necessity of the audience before the meaning of the interpreted object becomes the prime advantage and, arguably, the proper humanistic goal of the craft of interpretation. The interpreter guides the audience not just to some meaning of “whales” independent of the visitor but to a meaning that is necessarily theirs, one that the visitor must participate in just as much as they participate in their regular lives. From this intimate connection follows a certain responsibility towards the meaning of the object, and thus the object itself. The importance of the object, if any and even if agreed upon between people, is first fundamentally “mine” to each subject within each’s own experienced world.
A humpback whale breaching near a vessel in Glacier Bay National Park & Preserve, 2008. Photo by NPS.
Modern Audience-Centered Experience (ACE) methodology in interpretation already teases at this relationship without directly addressing this philosophical arrangement. Visitors arrive in scenes of unfamiliar natural and cultural wonders from diverse backgrounds, and while playing to certain expectations of fun, fact, and education, the program should welcome each member into a more immediate relationship with the objects via intangible themes and reflections upon their own lived experience. A balance between fact and theme remains critical as most visitors are unable to incorporate heavy technical information into their regular lives. On the other hand, a purely thematic experience often disappoints and can directly insult the tourists’ choice and effort to travel to the particular location. To simply reencounter what one already knows or expects frustrates the desire to discover the contents of one’s own world that motivates so many visits to parks and museums.
These techniques prove effective because they engage some of the fundamental mechanisms of meaning for human individuals. Once the interpreter has placed the visitor in that intimate, immediate relationship with the thing in their world, of course it becomes easier to drive them towards a position of care or conservation. But like art, though, interpretation is capable of pursuing something greater than any specific argument. It can announce the ever-present opportunity to confront one's own here and now in that chain of experience we call existence, for on what else could one ever build meaning? Interpretation makes space for the individual because, in that necessarily personal assembly of understanding towards the world, the world contains the individual just as much as it contains everything else.
My undergraduate thesis all those years ago had absolutely quite a bit of me in it. I was excited and proud for the chance to demonstrate a learning outside my primary scientific curriculum, and I chose the topic from honest interest. However, I approached the project within the context of what I had understood philosophy papers to be. In my world, a thesis was simply another routine representation of prior thought. My advisor's reinterpretation of the meaning of the project shook free new possibilities for the paper, and in doing so, for all papers, for my world, and for me.
I cannot remember what exactly my advisor included in his litany of missed opportunities. I only remember the mood, the awakening, and the subsequent panic as I hurriedly rewrote the final third in an impassioned few nights before the deadline. I could look it up, though. I still possess my notes. The final draft sits on my hard drive in a folder titled “Thesis Files,” but I’ve never opened it in the decade since. I don’t need to. Its frantic synthesis of existential phenomenology and literature are no longer the point. Instead, it functions as a monument to the perennial opportunity to build meaning in, with, and from the world around me, which is to say to interpret it with honest care and thought, to know myself, to be human.
Humans will build meaning from any experience, even without a professional guide, and these constructed meanings reach beyond simple curiosity into a profoundly personal and personally profound recognition of the self and world. By mediating an encounter with the unknown or by reframing the familiar, interpretation serves the development of worlds, the people that populate them, and whatever mutual understanding may be built between them. A single visit to a park, a museum, or a historical site—to a faculty office on a cold spring evening—can inspire a lifetime of new possibilities. It can yield a new sense of self, if generosity but guides our path towards honoring the need for meaning in every world.
A humpback whale breaching in the open water. Photo courtesy of the Ocean Research & Conservation Association of Ireland.
