New perspectives on instrumentalism: an empirical study of cultural diplomacy

Museums are increasingly recognised as having a role to play within international relations, to facilitate cultural exchange, assert national identity and foster mutual understanding. Whilst international work is perceived to be politically motivated and diplomatically advantageous, it can be highly beneficial to cultural institutions. In this paper, ‘cultural diplomacy' is shown to be a strategy used by museums to enable organisational development and economic growth. This paper demonstrates how national museums adopted a political rhetoric and used strategic lobbying to formulate a new cultural policy, which expanded the scale and scope of their international work. By defining the parameters and principles of this policy, the institutions wield power, thus challenging the conventional perceptions of policy-making and contradicting commentators who accuse museums of political subservience. Throwing the notion of instrumentalism into disarray, this paper calls for a theoretical and conceptual rethinking, to revamp understanding and bring it in line with practice.     

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.     

Maritime Archaeology and Maritime Heritage Protection in the Disputed Territory of Northern Cyprus

Between 1967 and 1974, the island of Cyprus was a centre of maritime archaeology in the eastern Mediterranean. Individuals such as Michael and Susan Katzev, George Bass, Jeremy Green and Richard Steffy were living on and visiting the island, and testing and developing methods still common in the discipline. The hostilities on Cyprus in the summer of 1974 and the implementation of international regulations limiting archaeological work in the northern portion of the island, however, had repercussions still evident today. This article summarizes past maritime archaeological work along the northern coastline, addresses the regulations limiting archaeological activity in the region and discusses a new training program licensed by the Nautical Archaeology Society aiding in the protection of the island’s maritime heritage representing approximately 10,000 years of activity.

Disseminating the policy narrative of ‘Heritage under threat’ in China

ABSTRACT

Originating from within the UNESCO, narratives on ‘heritage under threat’ tell the story of how and why intangible cultural heritage (ICH) practices are valuable, why are they disappearing, and how they can be protected from destruction. Focusing on PR China, this paper conducts a frame analysis to identify narratives on ‘heritage under threat’ as employed by the UNESCO, the Chinese party-state, and academics. The study argues that while policy narratives in any country undergo a process of congruence-building, circulation, and implementation, these processes take distinctive forms in authoritarian countries due to the states’ discursive and political monopoly: While non-state actors are involved, the state primarily steers the appropriation process. Nevertheless, once established, the policy narrative transforms across time and space, enabling local actors to use it to pursue their own interests.     

Heritage transactions at the Festival of Pacific Arts

The Festival of Pacific Arts, hosted by a different Pacific Island state once every four years, is a prime site for the reproduction of the global discourse on heritage. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted at the festival, this paper focuses on how the concept of heritage is employed at the festival as both an instrument of statecraft and a tool for the assertion of grass-roots political and economic agency. We conclude that heritage in the context of the festival is a form of cultural practice involving relationships of power and inequality, expressed in transactions of ownership and value transformations that have become over determined by economic logic and the concept of property.     

Defining 'underwater cultural heritage'

The newly adopted United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization's Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage provides the first universal protection regime for this value archaeological resource. A central difficulty in concluding this Convention was defining underwater cultural heritage. This article considers the development of the definition agreed upon and analyses its utility in providing for a pragmatic and effective protection regime.     

Heritage formation and cultural governance: the production of Bopiliao Historic District,Taipei

Heritage preservation is a field of social action filled with controversies, whose outcomes are not only determined by the power relation among social actors, but are also a product of structural tendencies. This article attempts to explain why the Bopiliao movement in Taipei changed from protesting land acquisition to making demands for preservation, and points out the emergence of a new regime of cultural governance as the structural condition that led to the partial success of the preservation movement. The author then argues that the concept of the regime of cultural governance can provide a middle-range theory for heritage production.     

Realising Australia's international education as public diplomacy

Australia's international education serves as public diplomacy, essentially engaging and influencing public audiences in ways that progress Australian foreign policy priorities and national interests. The multidimensional and increasingly globalised nature of international education presents enormous opportunity for vital exchange and interactions between and with students, academics and communities via onshore and offshore modes of delivery. Positive experiences of student mobility and the development of intellectual, commercial and social relationships can build upon a nation's reputation, and enhance the ability of that nation to participate in and influence regional or global outcomes. This is ultimately the essence of soft power. While Australia has made significant commercial gains through international education, it has fallen short of realising the soft power potential inherent in the volume and depth of interactions, relationships and achievements resulting from it, particularly in the Asian region, where Australia's international education sector continues to be most active. This article argues that there is a soft power benefit in recognising international education as public diplomacy, though acknowledges that challenges exist in connecting the soft power aspirations to reality. Findings suggest that there is room for more coherent public diplomacy leadership and inter-agency coordination, improved evaluation and expanded dialogue both within the sector and the broader community.     

Contemporary cultural diplomacy in South Korea: explicit and implicit approaches

This paper argues that in the case of Korea, cultural diplomacy (CD) has been explicitly implemented in a top-down and unilateral approach by government to enhance national prestige abroad, underpinned by the institutional legacy of a ‘developmental state’ model of governance. Yet, an implicit approach has also emerged, associated with capacity building of the domestic cultural industries through promoting ‘international cultural exchange’. Whilst the top-down unilateral approach has persisted, a disarray of policy rhetoric and institutional fragmentation surrounding CD, as well as the blurring of cultural industries development policy with the CD agenda has led to gradual convergence of both explicit and implicit approaches.     

国际法对文化遗产旅游利用认识的演进

文化遗产保护的国际法是文化遗产保护和利用的基本依据.本文通过梳理近百年来国际法中关于旅游利用方面的内容,揭示了国际法对旅游利用的认识与态度的变化趋势.本文认为,国际法对文化遗产旅游利用的认识与态度的重要转变主要体现在3个方面,即：从对环境影响的关注到对经济社会文化影响的关注;从对遗产的原真性与完整性保护需要的关注到对社区发展与游客精神体验需要的关注;从对待旅游利用被动、消极的态度到主动、积极的态度.我国当前的文化遗产旅游利用实践远未与国际法接轨,遗产保护与旅游利用的立法尚处于缺失阶段,因此须完善文化遗产保护与利用的相关立法以引导和规范文化遗产旅游利用的实践.     

Living with instrumentalism: the academic commitment to cultural diplomacy

Despite the influence of cultural policy studies and other theoretical approaches ‘after critique’, the dominant paradigm across much of the humanities remains anti-governmental especially when ‘culture’ is the other term in the equation. This paper argues instead for a positive relationship between humanities academics/intellectuals and the governmental agendas of cultural diplomacy, and for ways of accommodating critical perspectives on both the concept of ‘the national interest’ and the instrumentalisation of culture. It examines the policy objectives of the Australian government’s main cultural diplomacy agencies together with practical examples from its bilateral bodies, in particular the Australia-China Council and its program of support for Australian Studies in China.     

物质文化遗产的非物质性与非物质文化遗产的物质性认同

文化遗产是人类创造的文明结晶,物质文化遗产包含着精神内涵,非物质文化遗产必然依托于物质载体。文化遗产兼具物质性和非物质性两种因素:物质文化遗产与非物质文化遗产相互依存、互相作用。认清两种文化遗产之间的区别和联系,对于文化遗产的保护具有理论指导作用。     

UNESCO World Heritage Site of Lenggong Valley,Malaysia: A Review of its Contemporary Heritage Management

This article reviews contemporary heritage management through a systematically coded content analysis at one of Malaysia’s UNESCO World Heritage Sites: the Archaeological Heritage of the Lenggong Valley (AHLV). It evaluates the competency of the preliminary Conservation Management Plan (CMP) of AHLV by looking at the accuracy of five distinctive dimensions of the CMP in conveying the information about the sites and management objectives: the legislation related to the heritage conservation and management; the action and implementation of the management strategies; the level of stakeholder’s participation; and, finally, how the CMP integrates local values and ideas into management planning. The results show that contemporary heritage management planning at Lenggong Valley tends to prioritize the conservation of the archaeological values of the sites over other values (i.e. social, historical, and aesthetic values), and that planning has largely been in the hands of governmental agencies with limited involvement from local communities in the decision-making process.     

Makarios cultural diplomacy legacy in the republic of Cyprus

ABSTRACT

The article explores the cultural diplomacy initiatives undertaken by the Republic of Cyprus (RoC) during Makarios presidency (1960–1977) in order to strengthen the state acknowledgement and visibility in the international scenery and promote a nation brand focused mainly on the Hellenocentric aspect of the Greek-Cypriots’ cultural identity. Cyprus, a recently independent state (1960), shaped its cultural diplomacy practices according to the political developments; on the escalation of bi-communal conflicts internally and the international insecurity provoked by the Cold War rhetoric. This paper aims to map certain state cultural initiatives in an attempt to make connections between the internal identity-building process and the external projection of cultural identity and gain a better understanding about how a small-sized state can pursue and project a nation brand abroad by practicing the diplomacy of culture.     

Bending the body for China: the uses of acrobatics in Sino-US diplomacy during the Cold War

This paper examines how acrobatics was imbued with multiple meanings through the practices of nation-state building and international diplomacy. More specifically, the author discusses why the Chinese government chose acrobatics to facilitate the Sino-US rapprochement and the implications of this cultural diplomacy for the governments as well as the acrobats. Drawing on oral history interviews and archival data, this study demonstrates how the relationship between acrobatics and the ideas of ‘Chinese revolution’ was established, strengthened, disrupted, and finally re-modified to facilitate China’s relations with the West. This historical investigation advances the literature on performing arts and politics by exposing the political logics in the North-South exchange. As important, the analysis of acrobats’ engagement with Cold War politics evades state-centric narratives and contributes to an understanding of international diplomacy from a bottom-up perspective.     

Becoming a conservation ‘good power’: Norway’s early World Heritage history

Abstract

States stand at the core of the World Heritage Convention and their multifaceted interstate relations have been a central subject in contemporary World Heritage research. Less research has been directed towards intrastate relations, that is relations between organisation-agencies and individual agents within a State Party. Spurring from the 40th anniversary of Norway’s ratification of the World Heritage Convention, this paper utilises archival records to explore the intrastate relations and transactional authority at play within the State Party of Norway. Inspired by recent research in international relations and political science, it analyses Norway’s ratification process (1972–1977) through its early years as an observer (1978–1983) to its first committee tenure (1983–1989). Currently known as one of the spokespersons for scientific advice, returning to the 1980s provides an opportunity to reflect on how Norway laid the foundations for becoming a conservation ‘good power’ through its actions and responses to other states’ lobbying efforts.     

Cultural Heritage and Ecosystem Services: A Literature Review

During the last decade, we have witnessed an increased interest in Ecosystem Services (ES), including the so-called ‘cultural ecosystem services’ and its subcategory of ‘cultural heritage’. In this article, a review of academic literature of ES and cultural heritage is carried out. ES has primarily been developed by scholars from the ecological and economic disciplines, and in this article, we discuss how this impacts the way in which cultural heritage is used and conceptualised in ES literature. Based on the conceptual review, we initiate a discussion of what the implications for cultural heritage management could be if the heritage sector adopts the rationales in the ES framework.