Nurturing UNESCO’s ‘aged’ infants in India: lessons in heritage policy

This paper illustrates the major challenges faced by globally recognised classical art forms through the examination of Kutiyattam, a centuries old renowned theatre form of India, Kutiyattam was declared by the UNESCO in 2001 as an intangible heritage of humankind. During the mid-twentieth century, Kutiyattam performers came out of their traditional performing space in Hindu temples, encouraged by the proactive support of the State. In the wake of the UNESCO recognition for the theatre form, State support measures underwent further strengthening. However, in spite of this, India’s Kutiyattam institutions are confronted with a serious economic crisis that threatens their very existence. Based on detailed field studies and stakeholder consultations, the paper analyses the policy roots of the crisis and explores the options for transforming the Kutiyattam institutions into sustainable enterprises. We argue that the lessons offered by this study have implications for similarly situated art forms in India and elsewhere.     

Hiriira Spatiotemporalities: Mapping Oromo Women’s Liberation in Post-Imperial Berlin

In September 2020, Oromo women marched through the streets of Berlin, Germany, demanding recognition for their struggle. This protest march, called a Hiriira in the Oromo language, offers a case study into the entanglements between settler colonial Ethiopia, Germany’s post-empire, and the forces of oppression which link them. This paper uses the spatiotemporal reckonings generated from the Hiriira perspective to understand violence and elucidate the practices of resistance that have emerged despite it. These contrasting ways of viewing space and time are expressed through the tension between imperial spatialising, a way of knowing the world that is imperial and oppressive in nature, and geography guraacha, a Black and Blackened way of knowing space with a particularly Oromo perspective. The result is a type of mapping, tracing the Hiriira route across Berlin while describing the histories that shadow these streets, and the pathways towards liberation that Oromo women are organising.     

Making digital heritage about people’s life stories

Abstract

Actively creating new digital heritage content about people’s life histories is part of the democratisation of heritage engagement with the public. The approach of documenting unofficial histories is supported by a growing literature. Unofficial stories contribute new perspectives on the heritage identity of a region. The case study of the ‘Local People’ exhibition, curated by the author in 2013 in the North West of Ireland, is used to discuss the methodology of a digital curatorial process, www.localpeopleireland.com. This article argues that gathering and presenting unofficial histories of individuals' life experiences, can disrupt official narratives of The Troubles and challenge a regional identity based on conflict and division. The making of digital history is analysed as a curatorial process, rather than the ease of use of technology. The methods used included: filmed interviews, new portrait photography and the digitisation of family photograph albums. A virtual exhibition was produced and new digital historical sources were created that transform intangible heritage by crystallising people’s voices and images into ‘tangible’ digital objects. ‘Local People’ utilised Facebook https://www.facebook.com/localpeopleproject/?fref=ts and Vimeo https://vimeo.com/album/2518991. It is argued that the digital space provides a ‘virtual contact zone’ in which diverse, unofficial and personal narratives can be presented together.     

Scaling heritage. The construction of scales in the submission process of alpinism to UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage list

ABSTRACT

For the last two decades, the polysemous notion of ‘scale’ has drawn an increasing amount of attention among scholars studying heritage policies and practices, often with regard to UNESCO conventions. Significantly, in many of these works, terms such as ‘global’, ‘national’ and ‘local’ are connected to categories of ‘scale’ or ‘level’ that are taken for granted by the scholars who use them to guide their analysis. This paper, in contrast, promotes a different, constructivist understanding of the notion of scale. From our perspective, there is an added value to be found in focusing—without using any preconceived or external conception of scale—on the ways in which stakeholders conceive of and use scale throughout the processes of heritage making. Using the case of alpinism and the creation of its file for submission to the Intangible Cultural Heritage list, we show that the interest of this approach lies in its comprehensive ability to highlight how people define, elaborate and use scale in order to qualify their practices or to achieve specific goals.     

Aesthetic cosmopolitan,national and local popular music heritage in Melbourne’s music laneways

There are currently few examples of popular music being officially celebrated as heritage in Australia. Interest in this area is growing, however, and this paper examines how Melbourne, the capital of the state of Victoria, has recently named three laneways after rock artists, namely, AC/DC Lane, Amphlett Lane and Rowland S. Howard Lane. Using interview and observational data collected at the laneways, we demonstrate that these spaces respectively reflect aesthetic cosmopolitan heritage (AC/DC Lane), national heritage (Amphlett Lane), and sub-national heritage (Rowland S. Howard Lane). The number of visitors to these laneways varies greatly across the sites, and reflects the national and international success of the artist commemorated. The laneways’ success as commemorative sites is also related to intersections of globally circulating ideas about what constitutes ‘rock’, what urban spaces should look or feel like, and how heritage is expected to be enacted (especially for tourists). Within this field, there are specifics relating to the Australian music industry that appear to find clear reflection in the sites chosen and their level of success as memorial spaces.     

Socialist architecture as today’s dissonant heritage: administrative buildings of collective farms in Estonia

The heritage studies of the socialist built legacy of the former Soviet Socialist Republics have mainly concentrated on the buildings and monuments representing the political ideology of the socialist era due to their evidently controversial character, while the more mundane and ordinary legacy has seldom been the focus. The administrative buildings of collective farms represent a particular socialist architecture of the 1960s–1980s in Estonian rural areas and small towns. These prosaic buildings, which used to play important role in the Soviet-time rural life, have become a dissonant heritage today, although their controversial nature lies in the complicated contemporary environment they fell into after the collapse of the socialist regime, rather than in the fact that they were constructed for ideological purposes. This paper examines the dissonant processes and the present contexts that affect the re-use and preservation of the administrative buildings of collective farms, as well as the acceptance of them as a meaningful part of Estonian history that should not be ignored or forgotten.     

Plotting Jane Austen: heritage sites as fictional worlds in the literary tourist’s imagination

Fans seeking engagement with Jane Austen and her fictional creations seek out heritage locations linked both temporally and geographically to her life and works. This article adopts a multidisciplinary framework that triangulates fan studies, literary criticism, and heritage studies to analyse three Austen-linked fan spaces: Chawton Cottage (Austen’s former home and now a museum), Lyme Park (‘Pemberley’ in B.B.C.’s 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice), and two Austen-themed literary walks. I argue that the fan’s desire for connection is by no means an organic or natural quality of the heritage site itself. Rather, creating connections between the revered object (Austen) and the physical spaces that purport to contain her necessitates imaginative work on the part of the literary tourist. That such performative work is necessary in both the ‘real’ (Chawton) and ‘fictional’ (Lyme Park) locations demonstrates the problematic nature of previous critical emphases on the authenticity – or lack thereof – of such spaces. The significance of the fan’s pilgrimage to Austen-linked heritage sites lies not in the author to be ‘found’ there but in how the tourist actively constructs ‘their’ Jane by inscribing her presence – and those of her characters – onto these spaces.     

Incompatibility,Incommensurability, and Rationality in Value Pluralism: Isaiah Berlin’s Case

Isaiah Berlin’s idea of value pluralism has been extensively discussed in recent decades. However, there is still much controversy about the actual meaning and implication of the terms “incompatibility” and “incommensurability” when applied to values. This article analyses the Berlinian concept of value pluralism from a theoretical point of view and argues that, following Berlin’s work, incompatibility should be defined as the impossibility of two ends being combined at a maximum level―though it is possible to find compromises between them when not pursued to their maximum―whereas incommensurability refers to the existence of more than one valid, rational solution to a conflict of ends. After commenting on the arguments advanced by other scholars, the presence of a certain idea of rationality in Berlin’s notion of value pluralism is advanced. Finally, it is demonstrated that incompatibility and incommensurability provide Berlin’s pluralism with its characteristic tragic feature which differentiates it from monism.     

The German question in Jakarta Indonesia in West Germany’s foreign policy, 1955–65

This article explores a hitherto unexamined chapter of German Cold War politics: West Germany’s relations with Indonesia between 1955 and 1965. Indonesia was a peculiar case, as in the late 1950s and early 1960s, President Sukarno turned his country into a radical champion of ‘anti-imperialism’. This included actions directed against the Netherlands, Britain, Malaysia, and the United States. As part of a comprehensive strategy to isolate East Germany in the ‘Third World’, West German diplomacy nevertheless tried to maintain solid relations with Sukarno’s increasingly unpredictable Indonesia, even if that meant undermining the position of Western allies.     

Negotiating Nuclear Control: The Zangger Committee and the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group in the 1970s

ABSTRACT

In the 1970s, the Zangger Committee and the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group published guidelines on nuclear trade that drew a line between peaceful and dangerous nuclear technology, defining what was sensitive enough to require safeguarding and what was not. Given the ambivalence of nuclear technology, how was that line drawn? Historically, the understanding of whether a nuclear item is benign, sensitive, or especially sensitive has changed in response to the shifting balance between political, commercial and non-proliferation interests. The 1970s, however, merit special attention; they saw an unprecedented codification of nuclear sensitivity in the form of the published trigger lists that are still used today. In the absence of clear technical criteria, what interests and perceptions determined the sensitivity of specific nuclear items by the nuclear suppliers in the 1970s? Archival sources provide a unique insight into how the trigger lists and guidelines were negotiated and with what aims and considerations. This paper finds that nuclear sensitivity was driven by commercial interests in ensuring a level, and open commercial playing field, political interests in securing co-operation and practical interests in implementation and reputation, all of which outweighed technical considerations of how nuclear technology exports might assist a nuclear weapons programme.     

Negotiating Human Rights in Icíar Bollaín’s También la lluvia

This essay examines the interpretations of 16th-century and present-day human rights found within Icíar Bollaín’s 2010 film También la lluvia. I argue, firstly, that central to the film is the question as to whether human rights can foster justice and contest the cruelty of (neo)colonialism or if, conversely, they are designed and/or doomed to reinforce colonizing relationships and, secondly, that an interpretation of the film’s ambiguous response might contribute to recent criticism regarding the imperializing tendencies and emancipatory potential of human rights culture. By exploring the film’s self-reflexive and critical considerations of the violence human rights have caused as well as its treatment of spaces in which these rights bring about adaptations, inversions, and transformations of colonizing relationships, I propose that the film can be understood to reimagine human rights culture. In order to interpret the film’s representation of human rights, my article identifies and analyzes the processes of negotiation by which the relationship between rights and colonialism is revealed to be an unstable and malleable one, continually subject to change and in need of criticism that takes its adaptive character into account.     

Ambiguous heritage and the place of tourism: Bangkok’s Rattanakosin

ABSTRACT

Bangkok’s ancient city, Rattanakosin, is a major tourism focus displaying palaces, temples, exotic street life and frenetic waterfront. However, this ‘first-level’ heritage landscape makes little sense dissociated from that of an underlying ‘second level,’ comprising surviving remnants and lost memories of a vast array of other palaces whose occupants sustained the ancient Siamese state and accounted for a present culture of royal-elite-military hegemony. The first five Chakri kings had an immense multiplicity of sons who could serve as defenders of both realm and dynasty, later as royal ministers and administrators and as commercial collaborators. Multiple daughters were useful in buying loyalty of an often restive nobility. Royal fecundity, however, posed a real-estate challenge as sons had to be housed appropriately, calling for an extraordinary profusion of both large and small palaces. While most have now been swept away for other development, the remnants constitute a suppressed and uninterpreted cultural landscape that also intersects with multiple sites of both dark and hedonistic tourism. These intersections of first and second levels of heritage, then with both dark and hedonistic levels of heritage-identity, yield ambiguity, demanding interpretation.     

Intangible cultural heritage and the better angels of folklore’s nature

Abstract

Folklore research in the United States typically is completed either through academic departments or in organisations designed to create public presentations of traditional expressive culture. These two approaches are termed ‘academic folklore’ and ‘public folklore’. The intellectual history of both approaches has recently been critiqued. One result of this deconstruction is an ambivalence over the historical legacy of key concepts in the study of folklore. Assessing elements of the critical study of folklore’s history – in both academe and the public sector – suggests opportunities for reconstituting the study of traditional culture to establish a more socially responsive approach that is relevant to ways that heritage professionals assess folklore as intangible culture heritage.     

‘Let’s find out’: the historian laureate and participatory heritage discovery

ABSTRACT

Developing modes of engagement in the construction of public heritage knowledge emphasize participatory media and active collaboration with citizens. The City of Edmonton created the first historian laureate position in Canada in 2010, and related programs are still rare. This article considers the interaction of narrative content with social and technological contexts of production, viewing the role of the historian laureate as amateur historian and professional storyteller. The historian laureate operates primarily in accessible contexts of leisure, mediated in part through digital technologies, and can respond relatively directly to community interests as a heritage coordinator rather than expert. Rather than representing oppositional or disruptive power to official heritage discourses, the project enables the production of ‘small heritages’ through a series of story episodes. These stories focus on events, people, places and artifacts that typically fall outside the meta-narratives and monuments of a city’s heritage landscape. The historian laureate, embodying or articulating local experience in ways amenable to leisure activity, demonstrates capacities to produce largely indeterminate, diverse and porous ideas of place and histories as part of a bottom-up social generation of knowledge.     

The inherent malleability of heritage: creating China’s beautiful villages

The Beautiful Villages policy is a major policy initiative to secure the socio-economic and environmental development of China. Tracking the development of this policy at a local level reveals the intricacies of policy-making, the extent of local autonomy, and the ways in which rural development is delivered. Contained within this is an examination of the evolving role of heritage within a policy framework that primarily focuses on the natural environment. This article traces the ways in which heritage became a component of this policy in one village in Zhejiang Province. It examines how the value of heritage was gradually realised by government officials and villagers, and how the concept of ecology was broadened to include built heritage, which ensures that funds can be accessed to stimulate rural development. In so doing the article investigates the concept of adaptive governance advanced by Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth Perry in the context of the inherent malleability of heritage as both a concept and a process. Focusing on the ways in which institutions recognise and then mobilise heritage to secure instrumental goals enables us to examine the inherent malleability of heritage and how this is aligned to meet specific policy goals in China, as it is around the world.