Heritage Interpretation and Politics in Kfar Etzion,Israel

Kfar Etzion is a Kibbutz first established in Palestine in the 1930s. At the end of the British Mandate, in 1948, it became a de facto Israeli military outpost that controlled access to Jerusalem from the south. Kfar Etzion fell to Arab forces in 1948 and the area became Jordanian territory until 1967 when Israeli forces occupied the West Bank. Kfar Etzion was re-established in the same year. Kfar Etzion now interprets its history through a sophisticated multilingual audio-visual presentation offered in a museum built over a former bunker where Jewish defenders were killed. This presentation is analysed to illustrate the ways in which an historical narrative is constructed for interpretive purposes and to show that Bloc and Israeli perspectives are conflated for political purposes. The battle for the Bloc continues through the interpretation of heritage.     

Trafficking in Liquor,Trafficking in Heritage: Beer Branding as Heritage in Post‐apartheid South Africa

A burgeoning literature on post‐apartheid heritage configuration has largely overlooked the use of branding in the creation of heritage discourses in South Africa and the significance of liquor for national identity. This article brings these two concerns together through an examination of two heritage‐scapes—the SAB World of Beer and the SAB Newlands Brewery Heritage Centre—constructed by South African Breweries (SAB) in 1995. It suggests that the commercial construction of heritage as branding provided a vehicle for a powerful corporate capitalist narrative in the post‐apartheid rhetorical contestation over a desired path for the future. It also suggests that dissonance within and between these corporate visitors’ centres mirrored a wider uncertainty over the meaning of national identity in early post‐apartheid South Africa.     

The Scope and Definitions of Heritage: From Tangible to Intangible

Since the adoption of the Venice Charter in 1964, there have been many conservation guidelines in the form of charters, recommendations and resolutions that have been introduced and adopted by international organisations such as UNESCO and ICOMOS. This article focuses on the scope and definition of heritage as promulgated by the various charters across the globe. The term ‘historic monument’ used in the Venice Charter 1964 was reinterpreted by ICOMOS in 1965 ICOMOS. 21–22 June 1965. Report on the Constitutive Assembly 21–22 June, Warsaw, , Poland [Google Scholar] as ‘monument’ and ‘site’; and by UNESCO in 1968 UNESCO. 1968. Recommendation Concerning the Preservation of Cultural Property Endangered by Public or Private Works. 15th Session of the General Conference. 1968, Paris.  [Google Scholar] as ‘cultural property’ to include both movable and immovable. The different terminology between the UNESCO and ICOMOS was reconciled at the World Heritage Convention 1972. At national and regional levels the scope of heritage was broadened to include gardens, landscape and environment, and later reinterpreted and defined quite differently in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and China. Although the scope of heritage, in general, is now agreed internationally to include ‘tangible’ and ‘intangible’ as well as ‘environments’, the finer terminology of ‘heritage’ has not been streamlined or standardised, and thus no uniformity exists between countries.     

Out of this World: Issues of Managing Tourism and Humanity’s Heritage on the Moon

Space tourism has become a reality and is bound to become ever more affordable. It is now time to spend serious thought on how humanity is going to manage the human material culture and heritage sites on the surface of the Moon. After all, the Apollo XI mission is of global human significance inasmuch as it was the first time a human being set foot on another celestial body. Environmental conditions on the Moon are such that what is considered low‐impact visitation on Earth would have devastating consequences for the heritage on the lunar surface. This paper highlights a range of issues, not the least of these being management in an environment without territorial control, neither physically nor legally. The multinational management of Antarctica is proposed as a model for the lunar surface.     

The Changing Face of Heritage at Canada’s National Historic Sites

In order for all citizens to fully belong to a nation or a community, they must have membership in that society’s institutions, systems and social relations on both the formal and everyday levels. Heritage sites are public institutions of formal cultural presentation and informal social encounters where society demonstrates community membership. But in a country such as Canada where global economics and popular culture combine with an unprecedented influx of immigrants, how a community imagines itself and articulates its heritage is changing radically. Canada’s National Historic Sites (NHS) is among the important public institutions devoted to both the presentation of heritage and demonstration of citizen membership. This paper describes how this institution is adapting to changes in imaginings about citizenship, on both the formal and informal level. It looks at how NHS is expanding the involvement of all citizens in the why, what, how and to whom of heritage presentation, evolving its practices to include ethic minorities in its imaginings of Canadianness. Using as an example a new NHS exhibit and designations related to the Underground Railroad and African‐Canadians, the paper considers how historic sites, as formal instruments of the state, can be re‐tuned as informal sites of discourse and negotiation about identity, citizenship and belonging.     

Local and Regional History as Heritage: The Heritage Process and Conceptualising the Purpose and Practice of Local Historians

The expansion and evolution of local history over the last half century has given rise to both celebration and critical self‐reflection. This attention has been stimulated by the continued importance of local history as a popular cultural activity, in parallel with, paradoxically, a relatively recent decline in academic teaching provision in the subject. The reflection on the characteristics and role of local history has yielded searching consideration of its relationship with the pursuit of history more broadly, most especially in the academic discipline. However, little work has approached comprehending local history as being by its very nature also heritage. This paper turns to a series of essays by academic and non‐academic practitioners for a county history society’s journal over a period of 35 years, in order to shed light on the place of local history in evolving understandings of heritage as process.     

Islamic Waqf and Management of Cultural Heritage in Palestine

This paper studies the salient features that characterise the Islamic waqf and the importance of its development through history as a system for management of cultural heritage in Palestine. In an attempt to understand the value of waqf and its developmental role, this paper discusses the significance of waqf development with regard to social and economic growth. The paper concludes that Islamic waqf in Palestine is certainly not an invitation to the authority of the government to dominate the area of benevolent (caring, generous) activities in society but quite the opposite; from its beginning, the establishment of waqf was a clear representation of creating a third sector related to philanthropy (charities) that is kept away from both the profit‐motivated behaviour of individuals and the authority‐dominated action of the government and could be developed and adopted today in our society as a sustainable approach to the management of cultural heritage.     

Selling Conflict Heritage through Tourism in Peacetime Northern Ireland: Transforming Conflict or Exacerbating Difference?

The paramilitary ceasefires in 1994 and the ensuing peace negotiations brought to a close some three decades of ethno‐nationalist violence in Northern Ireland. The conflict, colloquially termed the Troubles, cost almost 3,700 lives, and bequeathed both a tangible and intangible heritage of division and hurt. This paper considers the commodification of physical conflict ‘heritage’ such as military installations, memorials and street murals through an examination of various tourism initiatives. Such initiatives have been employed by a number of agents ranging from local councils and tourist boards to small community groups and ex‐prisoner organisations. While ‘official’ agencies recognise the economic potential of this form of heritage, community‐based groups often view the sites and symbols of the conflict as vehicles through which to propagate political perspectives. Those sold by the latter, in particular, are often supported by government bodies that fund such forms of tourism under the auspices of ‘conflict transformation’, a strategy that is aimed at transforming the nature of the conflict through fostering self‐understanding within disputant communities. I participated in a number of these tours over the course of six months in 2005/2006.     

Protecting World Heritage: Regulating Ownership and Land Use at Angkor Archaeological Park,Cambodia

This paper contemplates whether, and in what ways, proprietary interests in land and land usage are affected by a World Heritage listing, using Angkor Archaeological Park, Cambodia, as the case study. The effect is measured through the identification and synthesis of the national legislative and local regulatory response to the implementation of the World Heritage listing. Such an analysis illustrates that the listing imposes significant restraints on land use and ownership which impact directly on the local resident communities of Angkor. A breakdown of the regulatory response also highlights the limitations inherent in the existing regulatory framework. There is a consideration of the concept of ‘ownership’ in a World Heritage site of ‘outstanding universal value’. In raising these issues, this paper highlights the challenges facing heritage managers in attempting to marry local needs with the demands of international heritage protection in the setting of a post‐conflict Southeast Asian nation.     

Toward a Cultural Landscape Atlas: Representing all the Landscape as Cultural

Many government and non‐statutory registers utilise point datasets to represent cultural heritage places. An effect of this approach is to emphasise that cultural heritage comprises a series of spatially discrete material remains or ‘sites’, suggesting discrete locations which are somehow disconnected from their broader historical and landscape contexts. We advocate an alternative in which spatial representation of heritage is set within a cultural landscape framework, acknowledging that all parts of the landscape have inter‐connected cultural histories, associations and meanings resulting from long‐term and ongoing human–environmental interactions. Results from a collaborative cultural heritage research project undertaken at Culgoa National Park in Australia demonstrate the advantage of this approach. The mapping products produced by the work comprise an interactive electronic DVD Atlas and hard copy maps. Both focus on meeting the management needs of field‐based park staff.