Engaging with the future of ‘critical heritage studies’: looking back in order to look forward

This article engages with the Association for Critical Heritage Studies Manifesto which argues that heritage studies is in need of a complete renovation. We do so by looking back to two earlier moments. The first when museum studies also called for a renovation, drawing on those experiences as potentially instructive for the immediate future of heritage studies. The second a debate within cultural studies on the value of engagement with the world outside of academia to achieve the discipline’s political aims. Thus, while agreeing with the questions posed by the Manifesto, we argue that rather than casting the terms of the debate in a way that positions the professional field as needing renovation from without, we might do better by fostering a more ‘organic’ sense of intellectual work, one that values engagement and collaboration rather than critique for its own sake. Our conclusion points to the importance of the teaching of heritage studies as a potential site for such a practice as well as more collaborative models of research practice.     

New compositional data on ancient mortars from Hagia Sophia (Istanbul,Turkey)

This study shows the results of a multidisciplinary collaboration between the University of Calabria (Italy) and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), about the compositional characterization of some mortars taken from Hagia Sophia in Istanbul (Turkey), one of the most important buildings in antiquity. Twenty samples of joint mortars were analysed by micro-chemical analyses (SEM-EDS), X-ray powder diffraction (XRPD), optical microscopy (OM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The compositional study allowed us to define, with more detail, the construction phases of the fifth, sixth and tenth century. The petrographic analysis in thin section by optical microscopy showed four typologies of sands, used as aggregate, with specific compositional features. SEM-EDS analyses and TEM observations of the binder around the ceramic fragments of the aggregate showed the presence of different morphologies of single C-S-H compounds.     

The Burning of Sampati Kuer: Sati and the Politics of Imperialism,Nationalism and Revivalism in 1920s India

Sati, the immolation of a Hindu widow on her husband's funeral pyre, is a rare, but highly controversial practice. It has inspired a surfeit of scholarly studies in the last twenty years, most of which concentrate on one of two main historical sati ‘episodes’: that of early‐colonial Bengal, culminating with the British prohibition of 1829, and that of late twentieth‐century Rajasthan, epitomised by the immolation of Roop Kanwar in 1987. Comparatively little detailed historical analysis exists on sati cases between these two events, however, a lacuna this paper seeks to address by exploring British and Indian discourses on sati as they existed in late‐colonial India. The paper argues that sati remained a site of ideological and actual confrontation in the early twentieth century, with important implications for ongoing debates about Hindu religion, identity and nation. It focuses on the intersection between various colonial debates and contemporaneous Indian social and political concerns during the controversy surrounding the immolation of Sampati Kuer in Barh, Bihar, in 1927, emphasising resonances with postcolonial interpretations of sati and the dissonance of early nineteenth‐century tropes when reproduced in the Patna High Court in 1928. Thus, while Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid have suggested that ‘ad hoc’ attempts to piece together a ‘modern’ narrative of widow immolation began in the 1950s, this paper will suggest that various contemporary discursive formations on sati can be observed in late‐colonial India, when discussions of sati became entwined with Indian nationalism and Hindu identity politics and evoked the first organised female response to sati from an emergent women's movement that saw it as an ideological, as well as physical, violation of women.     

Sadists and Sissies: Anti‐pornography Campaigns in Cold War America

Examination of anti‐obscenity campaigns in the post‐war years suggests that the ideals of masculinity mandated by cold war politics troubled Americans in ways more complex than historians have recognised. Psychiatrists, politicians and clubwomen focused on the graphic depiction of an aggressive, even violent, male heterosexuality in comic books and erotica to suggest that American men had become too hard and undomesticated, unable to sustain the institution so central to the American way of life – the family. Framed as a defence of beleaguered mothers and their children against male sadists, these campaigns expressed the impossibility of reconciling the conflicting demands on gender and family ideologies required by the domestic and foreign policies of the cold war.     

‘I Just Like to Kill Things’: Women,Men and the Gender of Sport Hunting in the United States, 1940–1973

This paper examines women's place in sportsmen's magazines and their role in the creation of sport hunting's image in the post‐war United States. It argues that sport‐hunting women were not challenging post‐war constructions of femininity or domesticity. Nevertheless, sportsmen attacked women's attempts to construe hunting as heterosocial recreation, fearing that they would undermine hunting's cultural significance. Instead, the dominant, male‐authored discourse connected authentic hunting to a new post‐war formulation of masculinity that revolved around militarism and the emotional bonds between men developed through battlefield experiences. This analysis takes seriously both men's and women's interpretations of a cultural practice historically associated with one sex, in order to reveal how gender identities are constructed and contested.