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- Convenors:
-
Daan Beekers
(University of Edinburgh)
Markus Balkenhol (Meertens Instituut)
Duane Jethro (University of Cape Town)
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- Discussant:
-
Chiara De Cesari
(University of Amsterdam)
- Stream:
- Irresponsibility and Failure
- Sessions:
- Friday 2 April, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Narratives about cultural heritage, conventionally linked with expectations of conviviality and peace, are increasingly marked by identitarian politics. Asking 'what are heritage ethics today', we investigate the moral underpinnings of dominant and subaltern heritage claims under this conjuncture.
Long Abstract:
What are heritage ethics today? Early narratives about cultural heritage, as espoused by UNESCO among others, were driven by ethical concerns such as conviviality, peace and universal value. These concerns have shaped key themes in twentieth century heritage studies, from the great debates about cultural and human rights, tensions between universalist ambition and particularist interests to questions of representation and ownership of cultural property.Heritage as an ethical concern has come under new pressure in the twenty-first century with the rise of nativism and cultural protectionism, manifest as populist politics, Trump's 'America First', Brexit, Islamophobia and colonial nostalgia. Heritage claims are increasingly integral to identitarian politics, exclusionary narratives and nativist claims of belonging. By asking 'what are heritage ethics today', we want to investigate if and how the moral underpinnings of heritage claims, both dominant and subaltern, have changed.To what extent are the ethical undercurrents that flow through discourses and practices of heritage - the responsibility to recognise and care for certain 'pasts', the moral imperative to remember, the emancipating or even redemptive potential ascribed to cultural heritage - shifting under this new conjuncture? How do today's heritage dynamics shape and potentially alter collective notions of rights, morality and entitlement? And does this entail a shift from universalist to particularist 'goods'? This panel seeks contributions that ethnographically illustrate these complexities and contradictions, including cases where heritage claims are considered to have gone 'too far', to be immoral or irresponsible, or those where sometimes problematic heritage claims are neutralised as ethical.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 2 April, 2021, -Eva Ambos (University of Tübingen)
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyzes the tension between the responsibility to care for the past and the power relations that drive heritage politics in Sri Lanka. In order to critically examine its seductive potential or ‘magic’, the paper discusses the alignment of heritage with identity formations in the present.
Paper long abstract:
In Sri Lanka as elsewhere, discussions surrounding the ethics of heritage tap into global discourses on safeguarding endangered heritage. After the end of the civil war in 2009, heritage became moreover linked with reconciliation. Yet at the same time sites, artefacts and practices to be preserved and sponsored by the government are often inscribed as Sinhalese-Buddhist, thereby marginalizing and overwriting the heritage of minorities. By appealing to nationalist sentiments, the past conjured in this process of fusing identity and heritage frequently serves political purposes in the present.
In this paper, I will analyze the entanglement of heritage with nationalism and the resulting tension between the responsibility to care for a certain past and the power relations that drive post-war heritage politics in Sri Lanka. In order to critically examine the ‘magic of heritage’ – its seductive potential to enchant and naturalize a particular idea of nationhood and identity – this paper will center on the question of how a certain practice, artefact or site, imbued with notions of antiquity and tradition, becomes aligned with an identity formation in the present. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Sri Lanka, I will discuss this question by focusing on the example of dance.
Smita Yadav (University of Sussex)
Paper short abstract:
What is "idyllic" and natural" about heritage preservation practices in specific spatial and temporal contexts? How do discourses of heritage preservation regarding an idyllic past contradict the lives of communities who continue to incorporate nature in their lives?
Paper long abstract:
While there is an anthropological space of responsibility to hold the autocratic forest regimes accountable, this involves considerable challenges, such as the conflict between universal and particularist interpretations and claims to heritages. The paper will compare the works of native anthropologists’ claims on native indigenous rights with those from scholars trained in Western anthropological traditions to show how the latter anthropologists’ own assumptions of responsibility to universal heritage ecologies are in direct conflict with ethnographic aspects of Gonds’ own indigenous notions of heritage. Ethnographic accounts reflect the Gonds desire to influence local rather than global politics of heritage movements. The paper shows disjunctures between the discourses of universal heritage preservation movements and the local and regional level nativist struggles of rights and identities. Here, native refers to indigenous people, the Gonds, one of India’s largest indigenous population. Their cultural heritage and preservation has been paralysed by autocratic forest conservation efforts coupled with a weak welfare state. As an ethical consequence, the Gonds are slowly losing their lands, and, therefore their indigenous identity. Their indigenous knowledge of conservation and forest management has been replaced by a secular and modern discourse of a joint forest-management system. This is largely due to the Gonds’ illiteracy and the lack of a progressive universal environmental movement to articulate their desires to return to their heritage, which is slowly being destroyed as the Gonds merge with urban India.
Duane Jethro (University of Cape Town)
Paper short abstract:
This paper profiles the negotiation of disciplinary and political stakes that arise in taking responsibility for colonial legacies looking at the Institute for European Ethnology’s (Humboldt University, Berlin) public support for and engagement with the public debate about renaming Mohrenstraße.
Paper long abstract:
This paper analyses what is at stake in taking account of one’s disciplinary position in debates that concern colonial legacies in the city. It focuses on the decision of the Institute for European Ethnology, at the Humboldt University, to issue a public statement announcing its support for the activist driven call for the renaming of the Mohrenstrasse in Berlin. An anachronistic racist term for dark skinned peoples from North Africa, the street name has a fiercely contested legacy linked to the presence of black Africans in Berlin, the royal urban history of the city and the German slave trade in particular. The IfEE has been located on the Mohrenstrasse for more than two decades, but only issued a clear public statement as a unit in 2020, despite periodic internal debate about the name and sustained student concern about it. The shift was distinct in the German academy as a coordinated move to activate the anthropological enterprise beyond ‘objective’ research and analysis for public engagement with matters of race, difference and the colonial past in the very local context. Organising public walks, participating in activist events, arranging for engaged learning spaces and programming teaching around the problematic name of the street, the Institutes’ various public activities around the debate threw into relief the stakes framing distinctions between activism and academia, research and resistance, pedagogy and politics. The paper sketches the important, robust scholarly negotiation of this vexing, yet very mundane, grappling with difficult heritage at the door.
Markus Balkenhol (Meertens Instituut)
Paper short abstract:
What if cultural heritage include racist elements? I argue for an approach that is both ethnographic and relational. Both cultural and human rights are inalienable, but how they relate to one another depends on the specific context in which they are claimed and contested.
Paper long abstract:
In the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage’, the Unesco asserts that ‘deterioration or disappearance of any item of the cultural or natural heritage constitutes a harmful impoverishment of the heritage of all the nations of the world’, and therefore needs to be safeguarded. However, what if such items of cultural heritage include racist elements?
In this presentation I will discuss the contestation of the Dutch Saint Nicholas tradition. The controversy centers around Black Pete, minstrel-like, blackfaced, and buffoonish servant of the Saint. The figure was added to the celebration in the nineteenth century and has since gained enormous popularity across the nation. While critique of the blackface figure has been continuous throughout the twentieth century, an emerging civil rights movement has considerably increased political pressure to abandon the figure, with a majority of people in the Netherlands now accepting change. At the same time, the Saint Nicholas celebration, explicitly including Black Pete, was added to the national inventory of intangible cultural heritage.
What does this conflict between cultural rights and human rights teach us about heritage ethics? In this presentation I will argue for an approach that is both ethnographic and relational. Both cultural and human rights are inalienable, but how they relate to one another depends on the specific context in which they are claimed and contested – a context that needs to be analyzed ethnographically.