Making Sense of Law and Disorder

This article tells the story of a cross‐cultural encounter on a beach at King George’s Sound in the south west of Australia in 1826, when Major Edmund Lockyer arrived to establish a British military garrison. The account we have of those early encounters come from the pen of Lockyer, and by taking a close reading of his journal this article attempts to reveal the meanings and context of Aboriginal actions. It also analyses how the Aborigines and the British made sense and subsequently responded to the encounter. Whilst this story is not given iconic status in Australian historiography, it is valuable in opening up a porthole into this contact zone at the moment when precarious relationships were being formed.     

Trajectories of Culture in West Mexico

Explaining culture change requires a multi-dimensional approach, and so does explaining cultural continuity. I combine several approaches to explain why the account given of a Mexican town's history changed between 1879 and 1992. I also identify and explain what did not change during the period, as well as during the subsequent period of fieldwork itself, 1992–2005. Rather than treat cultural continuity as the result of inertia, I follow Urban ([2001], Metaculture: How Culture Moves Through the World, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN) in looking for what motivates the transmission of culture as well as what pathways it takes, although I prefer to stress human agency in writing of the trajectories along which people propel culture, in this case a town's history. One approach which I draw, for explaining the trajectories of culture, is Malinowski's seminal study of Trobriand myths (1926), but I combine it with the more recent approaches that link versions of history to the interests of social groups; highlight the density of ties between person, people and place; pay attention to the genre of narratives being transmitted, and to the skewing of culture towards central places; and finally, consider shifts not just in the figure of particular narratives but in the grounds that underlie them, such as the criterion of truth against which narratives are measured.     

Civilized Colonizers and Barbaric Colonized: Reclaiming Naga Identity by Demythologizing Colonial Portraits

In this paper, I address a prominent colonial representation known as “headhunting”, because this term has been in use almost synonymously with Nagas and continues to exert negative psychological ramifications on contemporary Nagas. Due to a lack of work revising the exaggerated representation, the colonial portrayal is being sustained by the frequent and continued use of terms such as “former headhunters” and “once headhunters”. Therefore, this work is in part to represent the Nagas not as “barbaric headhunters” but as “normal” human beings both in the past as well as in the present. To do so, first, I will outline traditional Naga warfare, the context in which decapitation occurred. Second, I will examine the subject as it is being presented in the literature of Euro-Americans. Finally, the paper will end with the argument that the term “headhunting” was simply an invention of the colonizers and briefly note the ramifications of colonial stereotypes on contemporary Nagas.     

侗年文化探析与开发利用

侗年是国家级非物质文化遗产名录,其传说众多,内容丰富,内涵厚重,仪式多姿,特色鲜明,并具有历史沿袭的悠久性、文化性格的复合性、文化形式的多彩性、活动时间的延长性、活动区域的宽广性等特征。本文从田野调查入手,以时代的视角与理念,对侗年的诸多文化现象进行了系统梳理与阐释剖析,并结合湘黔桂鄂侗族地区经济社会的发展提出了对侗年文化资源进行整合、传承、保护和开发利用的对策及举措。     

A Risk Assessment for Cultural Heritage in Southern Iraq: Framing Drivers,Threats and Actions Affecting Archaeological Sites

ABSTRACT

This paper proposes a classification of the risks threatening archaeological sites in southern Iraq and suggests some possible remediation to better preserve them. This has been possible thanks to a research methodology that combines remote sensing and ground control on a sample of 558 sites documented by the Iraqi-Italian QADIS survey project. A three-tier typological framework has been created illustrating the risks jeopardising the cultural heritage of the region. This research showed that the most impacting risks are the ones caused by agricultural activity, despite current narratives which mainly focus on looting and violent destruction. To get at the root of the problem, current laws protecting cultural heritage in Iraq are analysed, as well as how the cultural authorities are organised on the ground. Improving the organisation of the SBAH, engaging the local communities towards the issue of sites’ protection and introducing preventive archaeology are among the solutions proposed.     

The role of the museum in interpretation: The problem of context

The key questions in interpreting objects in museums are: What are they doing there? and Where did they come from? National and local importance are not mutually exclusive: the critical difference is between intrinsic value, and value through context or association. Context is an integral part of interpretation. Experts can visualise an original location or environment; ordinary museum visitors need the context of people, or place, or familiar activities, to be able to relate to unfamiliar objects. Is seeing a good replica as good as seeing the original?     

The Conservation of English Cultural Built Heritage: A Force for Social Inclusion?

Debates about the socially inclusionary potential of heritage have to date focused principally on heritage sites and museums. Relatively little attention has been paid to the wider Cultural Built Heritage (CBH) that surrounds us in our everyday lives. This paper starts with a brief theoretical exploration of the social role of heritage and the key policy background. Then, based on an understanding of policy and action in England, this paper sets out a framework for considering how this wider CBH might contribute to social inclusion. A fundamental binary divide is made between the role of CBH as historic places and opportunity spaces in which regeneration may occur. However, in neither case is action necessarily socially inclusive. The paper concludes that a greater clarity of objectives and definitions is necessary if CBH is to meet its potential to be socially inclusionary.     

The rise of cultural landscapes

The new interest in cultural landscapes is forcing a reappraisal of concepts of countryside heritage. First the traditional split between cultural and natural values is challenged. Second, modern landscape studies emphasise the subjectivity of landscape assessment, and this is subverting the former tendency to aspire to objectivity in evaluation. The acceptance of ‘associative’ value in landscape is an indicator of this. Modern landscape studies also emphasise the interrelationships between processes and aspects of value, and this is encouraging specialists to communicate across disciplinary frontiers. The desire by ecologists in the mid‐1980s to have cultural landscapes inscribed on the World Heritage list caused a re‐assessment of the World Heritage Criteria, and an initiative by ICOMOS brought this process to a conclusion in 1992. However the reappraisal of concepts of countryside value imply that there are many other philosophical and practical matters still to be resolved.     

Community,Connection and Conservation: Intangible Cultural Values in Natural Heritage—the Case of Shirakami‐sanchi World Heritage Area

Intangible cultural heritage, according to a UNESCO definition, is ‘the practices, representations, expressions as well as the knowledge and skills that communities, groups and in some cases individuals recognise as part of their cultural heritage’. Using a case study of Shirakami‐sanchi World Heritage Area, this paper illustrates how the local community's conservation commitment was formed through their long‐term everyday interactions with nature. Such connectivity is vital to maintaining the authentic integrity of a place that does not exclude humans. An examination of the formation of the community's conservation commitment for Shirakami reveals that it is the community's spiritual connection and place‐based identity that have supported conservation, leading to the World Heritage nomination, and it is argued that the recognition of such intangible cultural heritage is vital in conservation. The challenge, then, is how to communicate such spiritual heritage today. Forms of community involvement are discussed in an attempt to answer this question.     

Pacifying War Heritage: Patterns of Cosmopolitan Nationalism at a Danish Battlefield Site

Former battlefields are often held to be important nodes in national iconographies. This article offers an analysis of a Danish battlefield site which has historically been taken to epitomise fervently ethnic national qualities. The article traces significant shifts in the ways its relevance has been and currently is being imagined and expressed. The heritage and commemorative practices conducted here are analysed as an ongoing symbolic struggle between ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ conceptions of nation. It is argued that a third mode of identification, termed ‘cosmopolitan nationalism’, seems to be on the rise here. In such an understanding, the war site becomes ‘pacified’, i.e. symbolically associated with qualities of peace‐keeping and humanitarianism. Importantly, however, such agendas do not simply erase the site’s national significance but are analysed, rather, as re‐imbuing the site with a new strand of Danishness—now taken to entail cosmopolitan and reconciliatory values.