Urban heritage ‘space’ under neoliberal development: a tale of a Jordanian plaza

What happens when urban heritage spaces within developing countries, such as Jordan, are subject to touristic development funded by international bodies, such as the World Bank? This question is explored theoretically and practically by considering a popular local plaza in the secondary Jordanian city of Jerash that has been subject to three tourism development projects funded by the World Bank. The study, which incorporates and critiques the discourse of neoliberalism within urban heritage development studies, seeks to analyse the World Bank projects and, more specifically, how they have defined, approached and produced outcomes in the Jerash plaza and its context. In so doing, the study triangulates the analysis with accounts by local respondents that identify major drawbacks in the World Bank approach, particularly its emphasis on conventional ‘readings’ of urban space that highlight universal values and histories, while neglecting and marginalising local values and understandings. The triangulation offers attentive ‘readings’ of the plaza as a place understood and experienced by a people. The challenge is to break with the neoliberal paradigm that dominates urban heritage development programmes (and their associated West–East dualisms and top-down approaches) by presenting local sociocultural and economic contexts as assets to enrich development projects, rather than obstacles to be ‘fixed’ and ‘fitted’ for tourism.     

Digitisation,digital interaction and social media: embedded barriers to democratic heritage

Abstract

The democratisation of heritage through digital access is a well-documented aspiration. It has included innovative ways to manage interpretation, express heritage values, and create experiences through the ‘decoding’ of heritage. This decoding of heritage becomes democratised, more polyvocal than didactic exhibitions, and less dependent on experts. However, the decision of what ‘heritage’ is and what is commissioned for digitisation (the encoding) is not necessarily a part of this democratisation. This paper will consider how digitisation reinforces the Authorised Heritage Discourse through the lens of Stephen Lukes’ three (increasingly subtle) dimensions of power: conflict resolution, control of expression and shaping of preferences. All three dimensions have an impact on how public values are represented in heritage contexts, but the introduction of digitisation requires more resources, expertise and training within established professional discourse. Social media may have a positive impact on the first two dimensions, but can reinforce hegemony. Alternatives are subject to epistemic populism. The role of digitisation and social media in the democratisation of heritage needs to be better understood. Questions regarding the nature and process of digital interaction, in terms of whose heritage is accessible, affect the very issues of democratisation digitisation appears to promote.     

The Efficacies of Heritage: Syndromes,Magics, and Possessional Acts

In this paper I present critical insights into the efficacies of heritage. I take the phenomenon of the Jerusalem Syndrome (JS) as my point of departure and recast it as Heritage Syndrome (HS). I do this to better understand how such efficacies are experienced and materialized in ritual possessional acts. As a framework, the JS reveals the power and potency that reside in experiences of collapse. Such disembedding events activate subsequent ritual dramas (whether malign/benign or successful/failed) of world-making, redemption, repair, and renewal. Heritage quests as ritual ‘sacred dramas’ and ‘practical magics’ are I argue, similarly experienced in the collapse of known categories: imagined/real, extraordinary/mundane, possessing/being possessed, and crucially what heritage is versus what heritage does. Writ large, heritage efficacies are bound-up in the breakdown and blurring of boundaries — and thus the non-distinction — between heritage in the conventional sense and other dynamics such as magic, prophecy, and well-being/ill-being. These reveal alternative pathways, potentialities, and patterns of behaviour that demonstrate that dominant, elite, rationalized approaches to heritage banalize heritage efficacies and can thus be termed a failed project. I argue that conceiving of heritage as a syndrome — and critically as a movement away from medical pathologization and towards a recasting of heritages as diverse constellations of cultural-spiritual-magical-emotional experiences and engagements — better reflects the deeply felt complex and transformative practices at play. These heritage rites distinguished at points by those who wish their lives were more dramatic and those who wish their lives were less traumatic better describe how the vast majority of global actors engage with heritage, notably at popular, grass-roots level and in contexts of extremis, yet its significance goes largely unrecognized and unvalued.     

Heritage in Palestine: Colonial Legacy in Postcolonial Discourse

This essay addresses the need to look into ‘postcolonial’/‘post-Oslo’ Palestine heritage discourses and practices to uncover commonalities and divergences. These practices and discourses, I claim, tell a story about hidden codes of subjectivity while revealing the setbacks of postcolonial heritage discourses in a ‘postcolonial era’. I show that the Palestinian ‘postcolonial’ heritage polices and preservation practices echo colonial discourses in terms of approach, legal framework and end results. My premise is built on a long engagement with governmental and non-governmental heritage organisations as well as the literature on the topic that shows heritage discourses and practices implicated within the specific narrative that they are destined to (re) produce. I claim that postcolonial approaches to the material culture, consciously and unconsciously, reproduce the colonial situation and while the impetus towards preservation itself is a symptom of postmodernity, it is still carried out in a modernist spirit. Throughout my analysis, I show that what spills out from the heritage discourses, as well as the unintended consequences of heritage practices are worth considering in any analytical approach of heritage discourses.     

Archaeological Ethnography,Heritage Management,and Community Archaeology: A Pragmatic Approach from Crete

This article examines the introduction of archaeological ethnography as an approach to establish positioned research and bring context-specific and reflexive considerations into community archaeology projects. It considers recent critiques of heritage management in archaeology and the role of archaeologists as experts in it, contending that smaller and less prominent sites exist in different contexts and pose different problems than large-scale projects usually addressed in the literature. We describe how the ‘Three Peak Sanctuaries of Central Crete’ project, investigating prehistoric Minoan ritual sites, involves communities and stakeholders and what demands the latter pose on experts in the field. Archaeological work is always already implicated in local development projects which create and reproduce power hierarchies. It is therefore important that archaeologists maintain their critical distance from official heritage discourses, as they are materialized in development programmes, while at the same time engaging with local expectations and power struggles; they also have to critically address and position their own assumptions. We use examples from our community archaeology project to propose that these goals can be reached through archaeological ethnographic fieldwork that should precede any archaeological project to inform its methodological decisions, engage stakeholders, and collaboratively shape heritage management strategies.     

Authenticity and heritage conservation: seeking common complexities beyond the ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ dichotomy

ABSTRACT

This article challenges the claimed gulf between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ concepts and approaches to heritage conservation through an analysis of the common complexities surrounding authenticity. The past few decades have witnessed an important critique of ‘Eurocentric’ notions of heritage conservation, drawing on ‘non-Western’, particularly Asian, contexts. Authenticity has been a core principle and defining element in this development. Endorsed by a series of charters and documents, a relativistic approach emphasising the cultural specificity of authenticity has been introduced alongside the European-originated materialist approach in international policy and conservation philosophy. However, the promotion of Asian difference has also contributed to an increasingly entrenched and unproductive dichotomy between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ approaches to heritage. This article reveals common complexities surrounding authenticity in two countries crosscutting this dualism – China and Scotland. Drawing on a number of ethnographic projects, our analysis identifies themes that characterise the experience of authenticity across different cultural contexts. It contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the evolving relationships between heritage conservation and contemporary societies with important implications for global heritage discourses and collaborative ventures crosscutting ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ contexts.     

Archaeology, Development and Conflict: A Case Study from the African Continent

Apart from wars, other contexts of social conflict have recently become a setting in which archaeologists are faced with acute, sometimes armed, violence. On the African continent, a region often overlooked in discussions of “archaeology in conflict”, rapid economic development has led to several such scenes. The paper discusses a particularly poignant example from the Middle Nile valley in Sudan, where large dam projects have been met with various levels of opposition by affected populations. Local communities opposing the construction of further planned dams on the Nile are increasingly stressing ‘cultural survival’ and fear of ‘developmental genocide’ as two of their major motivations for fighting these projects. Assuming a close link between the developer and archaeological salvage missions, affected people have started to use the expulsion of salvage teams from their territory as a strategy of resistance—posing an ethical dilemma for the archaeologists who struggle to find a position in the increasingly violent controversies accompanying these contested development projects.     

Sustainable Development Frontiers: Is ‘Sustainable’ Cocoa Delivering Development and Reducing Deforestation?

Forest frontiers are important areas for sustainable development as they combine the need to halt deforestation with the challenges of rural poverty. In the region of San Martín, Peru, the ‘Production, Protection and Inclusion’ model combines narratives of conservation, economic development and social inclusion in what can be defined as a ‘sustainable development frontier’. This article asks how such sustainable development frontiers change social, economic and ecological outcomes in the localities where they are found. The authors examine the reality of sustainable cocoa production linked to conservation and development goals, as promoted by government bodies, international agencies, cooperatives and chocolate brands in Peru, and show how, paradoxically, sustainability goals intensify production and attract smallholders into forest frontier areas. In doing so, the boom in demand for sustainable commodities has inadvertently created conditions encouraging further colonization of forested areas leading to a continuing rise in deforestation, ecological degradation and economic instability. Narratives of sustainable development can thus reinforce commodity intensification, as they obscure alternative approaches and reproduce traditional frontier dynamics.     

World Heritage listing and changes of political values: a case study in West Lake Cultural Landscape in Hongzhou,China

World Heritage themes and frameworks, as well as the criteria for assessing the ‘outstanding universal values’ (OUV) of World Heritage sites, have been extensively criticised for being Eurocentric. Asia is a region of extraordinary levels of cultural, religious and ethnic diversity, which often comes into conflict with UNESCO understandings of heritage. Due to the influence of UNESCO, and the persuasiveness of the heritage discourses it authorises, Asian nations tend to utilise assessments and management ideologies that derive from a European viewpoint. This paper explores the changes in the political role of heritage during the process of World Heritage listing of a Chinese cultural heritage site, West Lake Cultural Landscape of Hangzhou. The study is based on three and a half months of fieldwork in Beijing, Shanghai and Hangzhou. Firstly, I examine how the government officials and experts formulated the nomination dossier, and explore their purposes in seeking World Heritage listing and their understanding of heritage. In addition, tensions between governments’ understanding of the values of the site and those of UNESCO and ICOMOS will be mapped. Secondly, I examine how the Chinese government used the World Heritage ‘brand’ and policies to construct national and local narratives during and after the World Heritage listing. In this paper, I argue that both national and local governments are quite cynical about the listing process, in that they not only recognise they are playing a game, but that the game is ‘played’ under Eurocentric rules and terms. They know some Chinese values do not fit into UNESCO’s conception of ‘outstanding universal value’ (OUV), and they have ‘edited out’ those Chinese values, which could not be explained to Western experts, and utilised the discourses of international policy and expertise. Ultimately, these values and ‘rules’ frame the management of the sites to some extent, as the Chinese government must not, in order to maintain the WH listing, deviate too much from the rules of the game.     

Heritage destruction and cultural rights: insights from Bagan in Myanmar

Recently, the UN Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights has stated that the intentional destruction of cultural heritage is a violation of cultural rights. The Rapporteur examines a timely issue but bases her statement on narrow understandings ‘heritage’ as irreplaceable and ‘destruction’ as ideologically motivated and aggressive. This reinforces hegemonic ideas about heritage and what constitutes its destruction. In this article, I discuss the case of Bagan in Myanmar to illustrate the limitations of the Rapporteur’s statement. In Bagan, whether and how ‘heritage’ should be protected has been the topic of controversy. By implication what is – or is not – considered intentional destruction is contested. Ambiguity about the meaning of cultural rights, the dissonant nature of heritage, the subjectivity of destruction, and complex multi-layered motivations behind ‘destructive’ practices make overarching statement about the destruction of cultural heritage and cultural rights violations too bold and call for more nuance and contextualised research.     

A cultural justice approach to popular music heritage in deindustrialising cities

ABSTRACT

Deindustrialisation contributes to significant transformations for local communities, including rising unemployment, poverty and urban decay. Following the ‘creative city’ phenomenon in cultural policy, deindustrialising cities across the globe have increasingly turned to arts, culture and heritage as strategies for economic diversification and urban renewal. This article considers the potential role that popular music heritage might play in revitalising cities grappling with industrial decline. Specifically, we outline how a ‘cultural justice approach’ can be used within critical heritage studies to assess the benefits and drawbacks of such heritage initiatives. Reflecting on examples from three deindustrialising cities – Wollongong, Australia; Detroit, USA; and Birmingham, UK – we analyse how popular music heritage can produce cultural justice outcomes in three key ways: practices of collection, preservation and archiving; curation, storytelling and heritage interpretation; and mobilising communities for collective action.     

‘Assisting you to become a local’: NGOs and constructed foreign spouses in Eastern Taiwan

As social and cultural contexts change and globalization spreads, the number of transnational-marriage migrants mainly from Southeast Asia has increased in Taiwan. Using institutional ethnography, this article investigates the roles of local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and projects aimed at helping foreign spouses to adapt to their new life. I mainly elaborate that NGOs emerge as important actors in assisting and empowering transnational spouses to ‘become locals’. In empowerment projects, foreign spouses are given a voice to elaborate themselves. However, this article elaborates that these projects are a scheme of education to shape each such migrant into a proper ‘Taiwanese wife/mother/daughter-in-law’. Also, these projects particularly promote ‘exoticism’ of migrants and become key sources of how local people understand the images of ‘foreign spouses’. As a result, though NGOs play positive roles in empowering foreign spouses, we need to be aware that NGOs’ efforts may ironically become a mechanism to strengthen transnational spouses’ gender roles and cultural stereotypes.     

Expertise and the making of World Heritage policy

This paper contributes to two emergent areas of scholarship: first, the role of expertise within the domain of cultural heritage practice; and second, international heritage institutions and their processes of governance. It does so by exploring expertise within the context of World Heritage Committee meetings. These forums of international heritage policy formulation have undergone significant changes in recent years, with larger geopolitical forces increasingly shaping process and decisions. This paper foregrounds the idea of these annual meetings as ‘locales’ in order to explore the inflows of expertise that help constitute authoritative decision-making, how expert knowledge is crafted for and by bureaucratic structure, and how the interplay between technical knowledge and politics via an ‘aesthetics of expertise’ bears upon future directions. In offering such an analysis, the paper seeks to add nuance and conceptual depth to our understanding of international conservation policy and the regulatory, governmental practices of organisations such as UNESCO.     

Emplacement and the politics of heritage in low-income neighbourhoods of Marseille

Recent scholarship addressing efforts to celebrate heritage in low-income neighbourhoods and housing estates has stressed the importance of attending to the continuity of place-based social relationships as a key factor in residents’ understandings of heritage, and, drawing on Smith’s conception of an ‘authorised heritage discourse’, the ways these understandings differ from hegemonic and generalised expert discourse emphasising the deficiencies of the material environment. In this article, I examine a new object of state intervention in France, ‘the heritage of popular neighbourhoods’, and describe points of convergence and conflict between local heritage work in Marseille and the recent discursive framework established to employ heritage as a tool in reorganising French state policy towards urban peripheral neighbourhoods (the politique de la ville). Drawing on ethnographic research (2007–2014), this article identifies emplacement as a key feature in residents’ performances of neighbourhood heritage, a feature often absent or poorly elaborated in heritage work promoted by French urbanist policy in the past. I describe the ways emplacement has been expressed aesthetically in arts projects, trace the range of social networks and relationships enacted, and describe the political implications of these performances as a tool for promoting solidarity across time and space in Marseille.     

The Untold Heritage Value and Significance of Replicas

This article focuses on the fraught questions surrounding replicas and their use in heritage contexts, drawing on an in-depth qualitative study of a historic replica, the 1970 concrete St John’s Cross, Iona. We examine how replicas ‘work’ and unravel the part that social relations, place, and materiality play in the production and negotiation of their authenticity. The research shows that replicas are important objects in their own right, acquiring value, authenticity, and aura. The ‘life’ of a replica generates networks of relationships between people, places, and things, including the original historic object. While the underlying human stories of creativity, skill, and craftsmanship are rendered invisible when replicas are treated as mere surrogates, we argue that these ‘life-stories’ should be incorporated into future conservation, management and interpretation. The article spells out practical advice and guidance for heritage professionals who find themselves dealing with replicas.     

Rethinking the global heritage discourse – overcoming ‘East’ and ‘West’?

This article illustrates how Japan’s involvement in international heritage discourse, in particular since the Nara Conference in 1994, played an important role in the development of a global understanding of heritage and what it constitutes. It explores the way the Ise Shrine came to be represented as an iconic example of an ‘Eastern approach’ to heritage to become central in the paradigm shift within global heritage discourse towards acknowledging cultural diversity. In this article, however, I argue that the presentation and understanding of the Ise Shrine has perpetuated a number of misconceptions about an Eastern approach to heritage conservation. In particular, its presentation and interpretation as a cultural site devoid of its distinct religious and political significance, limits what can be learned from it. This article argues that without full recognition of the religious beliefs intimately embedded in the traditional social structures, practices and attitudes related to heritage sites, recognition of cultural diversity would remain limited.     

Unchanging boundaries: the reconstruction of Skopje and the politics of heritage

This study discusses the politics of urban planning and heritage in the city of Skopje, Macedonia. I compare three phases of urban reconstruction under three political systems: the inter-war Kingdom of Serbs Croats and Slovenes, the communist regime and present-day ‘democracy’. I show that the ambiguous marginalisation of Ottoman heritage has been a continuous practice, despite today’s reading of communist planning as ‘open’. Through a discussion of Yugoslav politics towards religious and national ‘minorities’, I show that Ottoman heritage has been preserved only insofar as it fits within the state’s definition of power. I specifically detail how the construction of ‘European’, ‘secular’ public space has worked as a tool through which state/nation building established new hierarchies of power. I show how this is reflected most clearly in the specific politics of heritage by discussing the creation, regulation and management of ‘?ar?ija’, the ‘old Turkish’ neighbourhood of Skopje.     

Crafting heritage: artisans and the making of Indigenous heritage in contemporary Taiwan

Since the 1990s, Indigenous groups in Taiwan have been increasingly engaged in retrieving and reviving cultural practices that are considered ‘traditional’ and markers of Indigenous identities. This article takes such recent and ongoing revival of cultural practices and connected material culture amongst Taiwanese Indigenous groups as the departure point to argue that the idea of a ‘contemporary Indigenous heritage’ is constructed (notably by Indigenous artists and artisans) through the conflation of ‘tradition’, ‘value’, ‘authenticity’ and ‘indigeneity’, as well as creativity and innovation. In the article, I endeavour to explain this process. To this end, I identify and illustrate a set of strategies and discourses through which Indigenous artists and artisans in Taiwan construct their work as both ‘Indigenous’ and ‘heritage’. I suggest that such strategies and discourses revolve around the following: (i) materiality, (ii) visual display and performance, (iii) Indigenous cultural research and (iv) knowledge transmission. Building on the Taiwanese case study, this article furthers scholarly enquiries into the making of heritage by generating an enhanced understanding of the role of artists and artisans in the creation, renewal, authentication and transmission of ‘Indigenous heritage’.     

Heritage as future-making: aspiration and common destiny in Sierra Leone

This paper engages with an arising interest in heritage as a ‘future-making’ project, arguing that in a context such as Sierra Leone heritage work may be better understood as a reflection of aspirations for a ‘common destiny’, than the articulation of common pasts. It questions the centrality with which modern anxiety continues to frame heritage temporalities, drawing on anthropological engagements with contexts of development and social transformation to propose a non-linear model for mapping the relationship between the past and the present. Drawing on a recent surge in heritage work in Sierra Leone, I suggest that heritage has efficacy beyond the provision of emotional security in a context of rapid change, indeed that it may be implicated in the process of instituting and shaping change itself.     

Buddhist buildings in England: the construction of ‘under-represented’ faith heritage in a multicultural and post-Christian setting

Until recently the ‘heritage industry’ in England overlooked buildings of minority faith traditions. Little has been written about this ‘under-represented’ heritage. Drawing on data from the first national survey of Buddhist buildings in England, we examine the ways in which Buddhist heritage is beginning to be incorporated into the state-funded ‘heritage industry’ as well as how Buddhist communities in England construct heritage through these buildings. First, we draw upon spatial theory in the study of religion to examine three dimensions of minority faith buildings in England and what this tells us about the communities involved: ‘location’ (i.e. the geographical location of the buildings); ‘space’ (i.e. what the buildings are used for and their relationship to local, national and transnational scales); and ‘place’ (i.e. what types of buildings are selected by different communities and why). We then turn to theories of memory that have become popular within the study of religion as well as heritage studies. Religion understood as ‘a chain of memory’ plays an important role in heritage construction via faith buildings, and an analysis of faith buildings, their spatial dimensions and role in ‘memorywork’, helps us think through the dynamics of modern religious belief in a multicultural and post-Christian setting.