“Shifting Boundaries/Contested Spaces: Heritage and Area Studies,” Keynote Lecture, Program Director's Meeting, U.S. Department of Education Title VIA Program in Undergraduate International Studies and Foreign Language, New Orleans, March 29, 2002.

ß Heritage as “universal” and “international”—1950s-70s

o “unity of m an”— the Hague Convention 1954

o “com m on heritage of m ankind”—UNES CO 1972

ß Heritage as “national”—1980s

o Focus on spatial-tem poral jurisdictions

o M etropolitan centers over rem ote places

o Practical since nations are signatories

ß Heritage as “local” or “regional”—1990s

o Decentralization— transnational possibilities

(Mundo Ma ya)

o “all cultures are equal and w orthy of preserving:

o “a quilt of local cultures”

ß What are the intellectual and ethical dimensions of these

shifts in policy?

ß Heritage: good or bad?

“Heritage brings manifold benefits: it links us withancestors and offspring, bonds neighbors and patriots,certifies identity, roots us in time honored ways. Butheritage is also oppressive, defeatist, decadent. . . .miring us in the obsolete . . . breeding xenophobic hate . .. debasing the ‘true’ past for greedy or chauvinistic ends .. . [and] exalting rooted faith over critical reason . . . .”(Lowenthal, pp. ix-x)

ß What are the origins of “heritage”?

o Rom an law s of inheritance— heritage/patrim ony

o A will or covenant

o Conveyance of property to heir with stipulation that

it be preserved

ß Historical Expansion of the Concept

o Early Mod ern—R egional Canons

o Late XVIII—P ublic Patrim ony

o Late XIX—“Invention of Tradition”

ß Hobsbawm on identity as socially constituted

performances

o The Invention of Tradition

o The Invention of Identity— heritage at the center of

struggles to establish and maintain identity

ß Nature of property rights in

o Conquest and Expansion

o Colonial Regim es,

o Post-Colonial Go vernm ents

ß Distinction between heritage as

o Stipulative—P resent to Future— Top-

Dow n—P rim acy to Donor

o Recuperative—Pa st to Present—B ottom-

Up—Pr im acy to Recipient

ß Stipulative Conveyances

o O wnership:

Individual—P ublic—N ational—C omm unity

o Nature of Property:

Tangible—Intangible—R epresentation

ß What are the fields of value that operate when societies

make decisions about what is cultural heritage and

worthy of preservation?

Use Value Age Value Aesthetic Value

Scientific Value Religious Value Social Value

Moral Value

ß Value and Symbolic Capital

o Sym bolic capital can be converted to

social, cultural, and econom ic capital

o Consum ption , comm odification, and m arket forces

o Result in flow s of non-renewable assets from poor

to rich

ß Recuperative Claims

o Property can be reclaim ed by heirs

o W ho has a right to those claims ?

o W hat is the nature of the claim ?

o How does one determine own ership?

ß Individual and Tangible Claims

ß Communal and Intangible Claims

o G erm an Rom antic notion of Kultur describedshared values and systems of m eaning thatexpressed the “spirit” of a specific people

ß Intangibleß G roup-centered values

o Alternatives to property-based claim s, especiallyw here property was dism antled by colonial or otherpolitical regim es

o The power of the dispossessed and excluded

ß Recuperation as Reactivation

“Heritage has multiple lives.”

ß Primary issues for heritage studies are

o W ho own s the past?

o W ho can claim it?

o How does one prove assertion of ownership?

ß Genealogies and History

o Condition 1—Pa st objects in continuous useAnthropological perspectives stress “continuities”

o Condition 2—R esurrected pasts and possessionsHistorical perspectives— history as a “series ofbounded phases”

ß Erwin Panofsky: Renaissance and

Renascences

ß Hills and valleys—la ligne des hauteurs

ß Historical discontinuities and recuperation

ß Disjunctions of form and meaning

ß Hegemonic narratives of nations and empires

o National narratives are legitima ted by ancestralachievem ents—s uccessor civilizations

o Nations collect the patrim onies of others to definetheir political institutions and national character(Western Civilization)

o Might is right and the spoils of war (Elgin M arbles)

o Colonial regim es claim ed the “other” as theirproperty, which they are free to appropriate,transform , or destroy

ß Ownership

o Authenticity and Affinity— wh at is the connection of

past to present?

o Authority—w ho controls past

ß Heritage in the post-colonial and post-imperial era

o Ethnic, group, and com m unal identities

o New nations

o New rights for dispossessed claima nts

o Alienation from heritage

ß New Nations

o Dism antling colonialism and other hegem onic“pow er blocks”— a problem as old as history itself.

o Property rights historically depended on spatiallocation in sovereign territory

o Shifting boundaries create contested spaces

o 200 countries today wh ose borders continue toshift

o W hat happens when a sovereign country controlsterritory with patrim ony that a new nation claim s?

ß Subaltern rights

o W hat are the property rights of m inority, victimized,dispossessed, and silenced com m unities?

o Legal concerns about social justice, morality, andethics reshape heritage discourses

o Shift of locus of concerns from hegem on tosubaltern

o Assertion of group-centered sym bolic authorityresisted property-based definitions

SPECIAL ISSUES FOR DISCUSSION

ß What is the importance of cultural memory in our lives?

What does it mean? What would it be to live without

memory? How does memory function differently in places

of great heterogeneity and rapid global change?

ß How do symbols provide a society or a group with a

vision of how to achieve a sustainable symbolic

landscape that includes past and present artifacts and

values, while projecting its own vision into the future for

new generations?

ß Contested cultural patrimonies—different groups assert

rival claims on a site, monument, or tradition and invoke

their own community’s beliefs and values as superior

ß Sites, Monuments, and Museums as signs of national

identity

o Appropriation of the m onume nts of the periphery

o Transference to the center or capital (Napoleon,

Diáz, Soviets)

o National heritage vs. folk heritage

o Transform objects into essence of nations

o Invest them with historical m eaning

o The power of representation (Prado Mu seum )

ß Silenced and erased histories and heritage

o “Pow er of place”

o “Story scapes”

ß Traveling heritages—how are functions and meanings

transformed as they move across space, as in the case of

diasporic cultures and intercultures?

ß Monuments of conscience/monuments of admonition

o How not to glorify sites judged im m oral?

o Sites of slave trade and genocide, concentration

cam ps

ß Restitution—special issues for First Peoples and Fourth

World Nations (UN, 1975)

ß Commodification—

How can heritage be protected from multinationalcorporations who would transform traditional ways of lifein order to appropriate products newly fashionable in thefirst world, whether for tourism, cosmetics, or scientificends? Intellectual property rights were established toprotect individual inventions and inventors, not thecollective folklore and ecological knowledge of localcommunities.

ß The Darwinian paradigm

o The processes of discard, destruction, and

forgetting are inevitable

o and, they are essential in creating space for the

new

ß The Hindu paradigm

o Brahma the Creator

o Shiva the Destroyer

o Vishnu the Preserver

ß The Western paradigm—burden of preservation as guiltabout loss

o Mo re is destroyed than is or can be preserved

o So wh at should our posture be as we witness actsof destruction of non-renewable assets?

o Heritage’s sym bolic capital gives it specialstatus—B uddhas in Bom iyan Afghanistan

ß W ar

ß Intolerance (e.g. m issionaries)

ß Neglect

ß Developm ent

ß M arkets

ß Is preservation a Western concept, value, and practice?

o Differences in values

o Sacrificial cultures

ß We need a new conceptual vocabulary and attitudes to

approach the concept of heritage

o Stew ardship not ow nership

o Host states

o Shared inheritances

o Heritage education (Peña)

ß Are older concepts of heritage and preservation adequate

to describe emergent notions of cultural heritage and

community today?

ß We must see the problem through new lenses—heritageas something new and artificial, not merely recovered

“Heritage is not lost and found, stolen and reclaimed.Despite a discourse of conservation, preservation,restoration, reclamation, recovery, re-creation,recuperation, revitalization, and regeneration, heritageproduces something new in the present that has recourseto the past. Such language suggests that heritage isthere prior to its identification, evaluation, conservation,and celebration.”

Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett

ß Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett asks:

o Heritage is the transvaluation of the obsolete, them istaken, the outmoded, the dead, and the defunct.

o Heritage is created through a process of exhibition(as know ledge, as performa nce, as m useumdisplay).

o Exhibition endow s heritage thus conceived with asecond life.

o This process reveals the political econom y ofdisplay in m useum s and in cultural tourism m oregenerally.

o Consider the Queensland Government CulturalStatement: "The Business of Culture" is predicatedon "what makes Queensland culture distinctive--our social history and heritage, our Indigenouscultures and natural environment, our qualityproducts, regions and many diverse cultures—andpromote this to the world."

o Or Destination New Zealand's proposition: "whileour cultural heritage can be presented as'entertainment' in the hubs, it can be experiencedas 'lifestyle' in the regions."

o This formulation elides several notions of culture—

ß culture as lived practice;

ß culture as heritage;

ß and the culture industry.

o It also raises several questions.

ß How does a way of life become "heritage"?

ß How does heritage become an industry?

ß And, what happens to the life world in the

process?

ß To paraphrase Mark Slobin, perhaps we must look for

“small heritages living in big systems,” or Homi Bhabha,

perhaps we must look at the “borderline work of heritage”

that demands “an encounter with ‘newness’ that is not

part of the continuum of past and present.”

“Diversity is desirable; we rightly admire what isdistinctive in our legacy. But to savor and sustaindiversity calls for comparative insight. To prize what isunique in our own heritage we must see how it is like, aswell as unlike, that of others. Insularity sours bothsameness and difference. . . . Every legacy is distinctive,to be sure. But realizing our heritage problems are notunique makes them more bearable, even soluble, if wesee how time or effort resolved them elsewhere.”(Lowenthal, pp. 248-49)

Workshopsß Breakout groups will explore different models of value

and judgment in different world cultures. They willexplore questions of how different cultures in the pastand present have conceived of inheritance and heritage,looking not only for similarities and differences, but alsoshared beliefs, practices, and solutions.

ß Participants will examine particular “indigenous”systems of values that survive in or have taken root incities they know well, demonstrating how these multiplesystems of value come into play when decisions aremade about the creation, destruction, or preservation ofcultural objects or traditions, especially those that elicitclaims of ownership from multiple groups.

ß Participants will address questions about changing cultural attitudes aboutidentity and inheritance in demographically mobile, spatially complex, andculturally transformative cities, where conditions demand that we adjust ourstrategic thinking about what heritage means and what new ideas aboutpreservation can be imagined.