Showing papers on "Cultural heritage published in 2008"

Places of Pain and Shame : Dealing with 'Difficult Heritage'

Abstract: 1. Remembering Places of Pain and Shame 2. Let the Dead be Remembered: Interpretation of the Nanjing Massacre Memorial 3. The Hiroshima "Peace Memorial": Transforming Legacy, Memories and Landscapes 4. Auschwitz-Birkenau: The Challenges of Heritage Management Following the Cold War 5. "Dig a Hole and Bury the Past in It": Reconciliation and the Heritage of Genocide in Cambodia 6. The Myall Creek Memorial: History, Identity and Reconciliation 7. Cowra Japanese War Cemetry 8. A Cave in Taiwan: Comfort Women's Memories and the Local Identity 9. Postcolonial Shame: Heritage and the Forgotten Pain of Civilian Women Internees in Java 10. Difficult Memories: The Independence Struggle as Cultural Heritage in East Timor 11. Port Arthur, Norfolk Island, New Caledonia: Convict Prison Islands in the Antipodes 12. Hoa Lo Museum, Hanoi: Changing Attitudes to a Vietnamese Place of Pain and Shame 13. Places of Pain as Tools for Social Justice in the "New" South Africa: Black Heritage Preservation in the "Rainbow" Nation's Townships 14. Negotiating Places of Pain in Post-Conflict Northern Ireland: Debating the Future of the Maze/Prison/Long Kesh 15. Beauty Springing from the Breast of Pain . "No Less than a Palace: Kew Asylum, its Planned Surrounds, and its Present-Day Residents 17. Between the Hostel and the Detention Centre: Possible Trajectories of Migrant Pain and Shame in Australia

The Ashgate research companion to heritage and identity

Abstract: Contents: Introduction: heritage and identity, Brian Graham and Peter Howard. Part I The Context of Heritage and Identity: The history of heritage, David C. Harvey Heritage, memory and identity, Sara McDowell Personal and public histories: issues in the presentation of the past, Hilda Kean. Part II Markers of Heritage and Identity: 'Natural' landscapes in the representation of national identity, Kenneth R. Olwig Heritage and 'race', Jo Littler 'We are here, yet we are not here': the heritage of excluded groups, Keld Buciek and Kristine Juul The contestation of heritage: the enduring importance of religion, Rana P.B. Singh Heritage from below: class, social protest and resistance, Iain J.M. Robertson Heritage, gender and identity, Laurajane Smith. Part III Practices of Heritage and Identity: The communication of heritage: creating place identities, Peter Groote and Tialda Haartsen Place, naming and the interpretation of cultural landscapes, Derek H. Alderman Commemoration of war, Paul Gough The memorialization of violence and tragedy: human trauma as heritage, G.J. Ashworth Conservation and restoration in built heritage: a Western European perspective, AscensiA^3n HernA!ndez MartA-nez Heritage tourism: conflicting identities in the modern world, Benjamin W. Porter Museums and the representation of identity, Fiona McLean. Part IV The Challenges of a Postmodern and Post-colonial World: Plural and multicultural heritages, John E. Tunbridge Heritage transformation in Central and Eastern Europe, Monika A. Murzyn The heritage of post-colonial societies, Sabine Marschall The contestation of heritage: the colonizer and the colonized in Australia, Roy Jones and Christina Birdsall-Jones The heritage of mundane places, David Atkinson New museologies and the ecomuseum, Peter Davis An exploration of the connections among museums, community and heritage, Elizabeth Crooke European landscapes: heritage, participation and local communities, Werner Krauss Cultural diversity, heritage and human rights, William Logan Index.

Sharing culture or selling out? Developing the commodified persona in the heritage industry

Abstract: Native American professionals in the heritage industry often describe their work as “sharing culture” when they are involved in processes of transforming features of their cultures into alienable products for consumption. Participation in the heritage industry can be a powerful catalyst for local cultural reproduction, but it also poses a danger to those aspects of culture that Natives consciously protect from commodification. Drawing from a case study of a Native American–owned cultural-tourism business in Alaska, I explore the ways that tourism workers respond to this threat through the construction of what I call a “commodified persona.”[cultural commodification, representation, Northwest Coast, tourism]

Community Involvement in Archaeology and Cultural Heritage Management An Assessment from Case Studies in Southern Africa and Elsewhere

Abstract: Community archaeology has conferred an alternative dimension on conventional archaeology and heritage management, empowering previously powerless peoples, particularly the indigenous and local communities that have lost rights to their heritage through colonialism. So important has its impact been that there has been only limited reference in the literature to its problems. Examination of case studies from various parts of the world reveals that problems associated with defining what a community is and who is indigenous, coupled with the existence of multiple communities with multiple interests, have sometimes diminished the utility of the approach. In some cases, archaeologists and heritage managers have been unwilling to give up some of their powers and have continued to view local communities as only passive partners. In others, local communities have considered their views and concerns more important than those of the archaeologists. As a result, the so‐called equal partnerships between archaeologists...

UNESCO’s 2003 Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage: The implications of community involvement in ‘safeguarding’

Abstract: The 2003 Convention on the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICHC), secured a high number of ratifications in a short space of time1 This reflects the concern of the international community to respond urgently to threats to this vulnerable heritage The willingness of so many states to commit themselves to this Convention is noteworthy, particularly in view of the fact that this represents an important departure in terms of the cultural heritage regulation, and is a unique instrument in the cultural heritage field This departure is mainly as a result of the character of its subject matter – one that is primarily without material form and whose expressions and physical manifestations are, in fact, secondary In this sense, it is the mirror image of the previous cultural heritage Conventions where the material heritage (movable cultural property, monuments and sites) was the central subject of protection and any intangible values contingent on these For example, in the 1972 World Heritage Convention, under the 2002 revision of the Operational Guidelines, the ‘associated intangible values’ of cultural properties were recognised as an element in the value for which such properties might be inscribed on the World Heritage List (Luxen 2000; Deacon and Beazley 2007), while the spiritual significance of movable items of cultural property is also recognised in the 1970 Convention2 UNESCO’s 1989 Recommendation on Safeguarding Traditional Culture and Folklore opened the path for the development of this Convention, but was much more limited in its ambitions and did not impose on member states any binding obligations One of the most significant aspects of this Convention, and a focus of thischapter, is the central role it gives to the cultural communities (and groups and, in some cases, individuals) associated with ICH that is unprecedented in this area of international law This is a response to the very specific character of ICH that exists only in its enactment by practitioners and, therefore, whose continued practice depends wholly on the ability and willingness of the culturalgroup and/or community concerned This introduces a clear cultural rights dimension to the safeguarding of ICH that, although present in other areas of cultural heritage protection, is much more explicitly drawn in relation to intangible cultural heritage and is another noteworthy characteristic of this Convention With the introduction of intangible cultural heritage into the picture,cultural heritage preservation has become a much more complex and political question than it was when preservation institutions restricted their interest to monuments and artefacts Since ICH is embedded in the social and cultural lives of the cultural communities, safeguarding when exercised as a public policy will interfere directly in processes taking place in the present and developed by real, human collectives (Arantes 2007) Moreover, inclusion of the idea of ICH within the broader rubric of cultural heritage provides opportunities to democratise the process by which we give value to heritage, giving a larger role to local people especially in the developing world Indeed, the question of assigning value or significance to ICH raises a further one – is it necessary for ICH expressions or practices to be highly valued outside the immediate cultural community in order to be defined officially as heritage? (Deacon et al 2004: 11) The implications of these and other questions run deep and must be addressed The purpose of this chapter, then, is to explore the implications of thisnew approach in cultural heritage treaty-making and, in particular, what it means for the implementation of the Convention itself and national cultural policy-making In order to do this, I attempt to place the 2003 ICHC in the wider context of the evolution in thinking about ‘culture’ in international policy-making over the last quarter century – moving from a high art to a more anthropological conception – and how this has informed both the development of cultural heritage law and human rights thinking I also situate the references to the community (group and individual) of the 2003 ICHC within international law, in particular human rights and environmental law in which these notions are much more often applied However, before taking this discussion further, it is useful to present abrief outline of the main elements of the Convention itself, with a focus on the references in the text to the role of the cultural community (see also Aikawa-Faure this volume)

Understanding the decay of stone-built cultural heritage:

Abstract: The problem of the decay and conservation of stone-built heritage is a complex one, requiring input across many disciplines to identify appropriate remedial steps and management strategies. Over the past few decades, earth scientists have brought a unique perspective to this challenging area, drawing on traditions and knowledge obtained from research into landscape development and the natural environment. This paper reviews the crucial themes that have arisen particularly, although not exclusively, from the work of physical geographers — themes that have sought to correct common misconceptions held by the public, as well as those directly engaged in construction and conservation, regarding the nature, causes and controls of building stone decay. It also looks to the future, suggesting how the behaviour of building stones (and hence the work of stone decay scientists) might alter in response to the looming challenge of climate change.

ICOMOS Charter for the Interpretation and Presentation of Cultural Heritage Sites

Abstract: Significant documents of record recently produced and dealing with cultural property, heritage and related issues will be printed annually in the final issue (No. 4) of each numbered volume. Documents considered for publication may be national, regional, or international instruments and codes. Inquiries or suggestions regarding documentary materials may be addressed to the Chronicles Editor, Kurt Siehr, at ⟨siehr@mpipriv.de⟩ or the Editor, Alexander Bauer, at ⟨alexander.bauer@qc.cuny.edu⟩.

“BUT WHAT IF I SHOULD NEED TO DEFECATE IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD, MADAME?”: Empire, Redemption, and the “Tradition of the Oppressed” in a Brazilian World Heritage Site

Abstract: In this article, I examine systems of care aimed at improving citizens and ruined colonial buildings in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil's Pelourinho World Heritage Site. Such UNESCO-sanctioned trusteeship, or the identification of buildings, bodies, and practices in need of a tutelage that would recuperate them as signs of a common humanity, maintains and exacerbates segmentations of knowledge essential to imperial control. I thus work to reconsider the Pelourinho, and cultural heritage, as imperial formations in light of UNESCO's system of producing world heritage through the specification of “exceptional universal value” in which the exceptional object obfuscates not simply as an emergency, but through its monumentalization as an ostensibly shared property. This attempt to gain a clearer understanding of empires' real effects is catalyzed by a number of residents of the Pelourinho who, in their subjection to decades of state-directed surveillance intended to make them into living human ancestors, have come to reject sentimental attachments to buildings or the purveyors of philanthropy. Yet the ways they do so are revelatory of new approaches to exceptions: Residents reject victimhood as a state of being injured and instead weave accounts of the structures that engender, and continue to reproduce, such violence. I follow in the path of this quite iconoclastic version of “historical reconstruction” as a way to draw out an ambivalently postcolonial Brazil whose own claims to exceptionality may be understood, like those put together by the woman I call Topa, as forced by entwined historical processes, rather than isolated emergencies or remainders beyond the political. My aim is to show how empires can be linked across space and time, without relying on empirical mapping of their constitutive parts and ideological props—recognizing, instead, the specificity of empire's effects.

On Some Challenges and Conditions for the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao to be an Effective Economic Re‐activator

Abstract: The mission of a museum is essentially cultural, however this is not the case for all museums. There are a minority of universally famous museums, like the Tate Liverpool, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the Tate Modern London, the new forthcoming Louvre-Lens (France), the Guggenheim-Hermitage in Vilnius (Lithuania) and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi (United Arab Emirates) whose principal aim is the re-activation (and/or the diversification) of the economy of their territories, in addition to the obvious cultural aim. The effectiveness of a large heritage investment in developing a city depends on at least four variables. First, heritage investments become effective employment creators only to the extent that they become effective tourism magnets. Second, the impact of investments on cultural heritage could be negative if the heritage industry is a big portion of the whole economy. Third, the more the redevelopment zone's markets are integrated, the easier the absorption of price tensions caused by urban revitalization. Fourth, the greater the productivity of the city's economy, the greater the absorption of price tensions. The aim of this essay is to give empirical support to these hypotheses for the case of Bilbao and the Guggenheim Museum.

Heritage between economy and politics: An assessment from the perspective of cultural anthropology

Abstract: In the 1990s, a critical cultural historian could exclaim, with considerable frustration, ‘Suddenly, cultural heritage is everywhere’ (Lowenthal 1996: ix). Since then, scholarship on heritage practices has enjoyed a boom of its own. It is as difficult to categorise the scholarship about it as to comprehend the phenomenon: constitution, use, evaluation, and critique of cultural heritage intertwine in scholarly discourse as much as they do in heritage itself. Thus the 2003 volume Rethinking Heritage, edited by Robert Shaman Peckham, assembles contributions from geography, history and art history, landscape planning and philology. This hybrid composition signals that heritage concerns everyone, from the tourism expert to the philosopher of late modernity. Each grouping of practitioners and experts harbours its own conception of heritage; their expectations seldom harmonise with one another. In his introduction, Peckham tries to simplify the range of meanings as follows:For most people today ‘heritage’ carries two related sets of meanings. On the one hand, it is associated with tourism and with sites of historical interest that have been preserved for the nation. Heritage designates those institutions involved in the celebration, management and maintenance of material objects, landscapes, monuments and buildings that reflect the nation’s past. On the other hand, it is used to describe a set of shared values and collective memories; it betokens inherited customs and a sense of accumulated communal experiences that are construed as a ‘birthright’ and are expressed in distinct languages and through other cultural performances.

Tag-based user modeling for social multi-device adaptive guides

Abstract: This paper aims to demonstrate that the principles of adaptation and user modeling, especially social annotation, can be integrated fruitfully with those of the web 2.0 paradigm and thereby enhance in the domain of cultural heritage. We propose a framework for improving recommender systems through exploiting the users tagging activity. We maintain that web 2.0's participative features can be exploited by adaptive web-based systems in order to enrich and extend the user model, improve social navigation and enrich information from a bottom-up perspective. Thus our approach stresses social annotation as a new and powerful kind of feedback and as a way to infer knowledge about users. The prototype implementation of our framework in the domain of cultural heritage is named iCITY. It is serving to demonstrate the validity of our approach and to highlight the benefits of this approach specifically for cultural heritage. iCITY is an adaptive, social, multi-device recommender guide that provides information about the cultural resources and events promoting the cultural heritage in the city of Torino. Our paper first describes this system and then discusses the results of a set of evaluations that were carried out at different stages of the systems development and aimed at validating the framework and implementation of this specific prototype. In particular, we carried out a heuristic evaluation and two sets of usability tests, aimed at checking the usability of the user interface, specifically of the adaptive behavior of the system. Moreover, we conducted evaluations aimed at investigating the role of tags in the definition of the user model and the impact of tags on the accuracy of recommendations. Our results are encouraging.

The destruction of cultural heritage in Iraq

Abstract: Winner of the 2011 James R. Wiseman Book Award. Discussion of the issues surrounding the destruction of cultural property in times of conflict has become a key issue for debate around the world. This book provides an historical statement as of 1st March 2006 concerning the destruction of the cultural heritage in Iraq. In a series of chapters it outlines the personal stories of a number of individuals who were - and in most cases continue to be - involved. These individuals are involved at all levels, and come from various points along the political spectrum, giving a rounded and balanced perspective so easily lost in single authored reports. It also provides the first views written by Iraqis on the situation of archaeology in Iraq under Saddam and an overview and contextualisation of the issues surrounding the looting, theft and destruction of the archaeological sites, the Iraqi National museum and the libraries in Baghdad since the war was launched in 2003. Beyond this, it examines our attitudes towards the preservation of cultural and heritage resources and, in particular, the growing political awareness of their importance. Although related to a single conflict, taking place at a specific time in history, the relevance of this work goes far beyond these self-imposed boundaries. PETER STONE is Professor of Heritage Studies and Head of School of Arts and Cultures at Newcastle University; JOANNE FARCHAKH BAJJALY is a Lebanese archaeologist and Middle East correspondent for the French magazine Archeologia.

Negotiating Cultural Heritage? Aboriginal-Mining Company Agreements in Australia

Abstract: Mining and other forms of industrial development can result in profound and often irreversible damage to the cultural heritage of indigenous peoples. Fear of such damage regularly results in indigenous opposition to development and, in many cases, to delays in construction of development projects or even to their abandonment. Government legislation has generally proved ineffective in protecting indigenous heritage. An alternative means of achieving protection arises from the growing recognition of indigenous land rights and the opportunity this creates for negotiations with mining companies regarding the terms on which indigenous landowners may support development. To evaluate the potential efficacy of negotiated approaches, this article analyses forty-one agreements between mining companies and Aboriginal peoples in Australia. It argues that negotiated agreements do have the potential to protect indigenous cultural heritage, but only where underlying weaknesses in the bargaining position of indigenous peoples are addressed. This finding has wider implications given that negotiation and agreement making are increasingly being promoted as a means of addressing the structural disadvantages faced by indigenous peoples and of resolving conflicts between them and dominant societies.

New media, cultural heritage and the sense of place: Mapping the conceptual ground

Abstract: If we are to explore the real possibilities and limits of new media as it stands in relation to cultural heritage and the sense of place then it is important to be clear on the conceptual ground on which any such exploration must stand. This essay aims to map out some of the ground that may be relevant here, and to clarify some of the concepts that are at issue. In so doing, it also opens up an examination of the connection between place and heritage, and the possible threats and opportunities that new media seems to offer in regard to this connection.

The Social Production of Heritage through Cross‐media Interaction: Making Place for Place‐making

Abstract: The living relationship between intangible and tangible forms of heritage, as well as natural and cultural heritage, is a situated one, always in place. Information and communications technology (ICT) is opening up new ways of experiencing and thinking about heritage by allowing for cross‐media interaction. By combining different media and technologies, cross‐media interaction supports the social production of heritage and creates ‘infrastructures’ that act as places of cultural production and lasting values at the service of a living heritage practice.

Selling conflict heritage through tourism in peacetime Northern Ireland: transforming conflict or exacerbating difference?

Abstract: 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 ‘con

Be Interested and Beware: Joining Economic Valuation and Heritage Conservation

Abstract: Economic thinking can provide great insight into heritage conservation. The cause of integrating heritage conservation into broader social agendas could be well served by engaging with economic discourse. Written from the perspective of the conservation field, this essay draws out distinctions between economic and conservation discourses, examines why and how economic arguments are made about conservation, and advocates serious engagement of cultural economics by the heritage conservation field. Strategic and epistemological barriers to the inclusion of economic discourse in conservation are surveyed, and several arguments for including economic discourse as a more integral part of conservation practice are weighed. The essay concludes that thoughtful, critical engagement with economics discourse will lead to a dynamic new research agenda and strengthen the conservation field’s hand in policy discussions and decisions.