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- Convenor:
-
Tim Winter
Send message to Convenor
- Location:
- Sala 1.06, Edifício I&D, Piso 1
- Start time:
- 15 July, 2015 at
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
- Session slots:
- 3
Short Abstract:
The panel explores how historically fashioned networks of expert knowledge shaped global heritage conservation in the 19th-20th centuries. It aims to understand expert knowledge flows between countries in contexts of colonialism-decolonisation, the Cold War, heritage diplomacy and so forth.
Long Abstract:
This panel explores how historically and politically fashioned networks of expert knowledge have come to shape international heritage conservation in the modern era.
An important but under-researched theme of the story of internationalism and globalization over the course of the 19th-20th centuries has been the history of institutions associated with conservation and the governance of culture and nature. Indeed, the fields of international relations and diplomacy studies have paid little attention to the material and physical world as a constituent of international cooperation, engagement and knowledge transfer.
Papers are welcome that reframe the history of modern heritage conservation in ways that foreground the internationalization of expert knowledge under conditions of European colonialism, decolonisation and the shifting hierarchies of 'East-West' relations. The aim of the panel is to understand how and why certain flows of expert knowledge transfer have formed between countries and regions on the back of empire, African nationalism, Cold War relations, conflict recovery, science diplomacy, and so forth. Critical attention will be given to how networks of heritage diplomacy formed around the world since World War II, and the ways in which various state-based and inter-governmental agencies have maintained the ongoing dance between nationalism and internationalism.
In exploring such themes, the panel aims to offer an account of international heritage conservation that moves beyond the discursive, normative accounts of organizations such as UNESCO, which have prevailed to date.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
This paper examines archaeology as a historically constituted form of expertise in Nasserist Egypt. The paper grounds top-down political accounts of the era in a bottom-up examination of field practice, suggesting the importance of materiality to understanding the making of post-war political life.
Paper long abstract:
What happens when practices of knowledge production become central to plans that not only set out the future of a state and its people, but that also involve a complex array of other institutions and actors? How do practitioners negotiate these contexts and rearrange their own work to deal with them? Such questions could be asked of many different disciplines that operated in the years after the Second World War, especially as their practitioners became involved in the implementation of modernisation policies that circulated around the globe. In the context of Egypt under Nasser, and taking into account the other contemporary political arenas within which modernisation policies took shape, this paper investigates these questions in relation to archaeological fieldwork.
Since Britain had declared Egypt's (nominal) independence in 1922, archaeological work in Egypt had been a contentious space: one within which the army of foreign practitioners who surveyed and excavated in the country felt squeezed by a growing number of Egyptian archaeologists. Yet national imperative was tempered by moves to international collaboration. Especially after the Free Officers' coup of 1952 and Nasser's rise to power, this collaborative work started to become more prominent, constituting archaeological fieldwork in Egypt as a form of expertise that could help to modernise this particular decolonising nation-state, and helping to cement the long-running role of certain institutions as centres where that expertise might emanate from. This paper explains how, grounding the top-down political narratives under discussion in the bottom-up experience of the archaeological field.
Paper short abstract:
Based on a unique research material from UNESCO’s earliest days, this paper will argue that the work of the officially neutral Secretariat can be deneutralized and situated with other sources than the official ones we normally use in studies of the history of institutions.
Paper long abstract:
Cultural diplomacy depends on situated persons just as much as institutional structures, but in the official archives of bureaucratic institutions the personal has been neutralized and erased. Based on a unique research material from UNESCO's earliest days, this paper will argue that the important work of the officially neutral and invisible servants of the Secretariat can be deneutralized and situated with other sources than the official ones we normally use in studies of the history of institutions. Olov R. T. Janse (1892-1985), a Swedish born archaeologist who had worked in Europe, French Indochina and for US intelligence services, worked six months as an executive member of staff at the UNESCO Secretariat, from November 1946 to May 1947. The 81 letters he sent home to his wife Ronny in Washington, D.C. abound with details and information about his work and life, in and around the UNESCO Secretariat. They outline connections with pre-Second World War cosmopolitan networks and colonial structures, against a background of harsh human reality in post-war Paris. Containing information that has been actively erased in the official archives of a strictly bureaucratic organization like UNESCO, they offer an outstanding opportunity to situate UNESCO's foundation at the point of intersection between pre-war nostalgia and post-war dreams of a peaceful future.
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores the role of the American Civil War’s memory in shaping early twentieth-century Anglo-American relations. It argues that to overcome past animosities, Britons and Americans had to construct a new heritage of the Civil War together. The paper shows how this was ultimately achieved.
Paper long abstract:
Recent studies have shown that in the late nineteenth century, Anglo-American relations were on the safe road of rapprochement after being shaken during the American Civil War. However, scholars' focus on diplomacy and official networks has generated a partial picture of a complex and hardly unidirectional process of Anglo-American nearing.
This paper begins by showing that on a cultural level, the memory of Anglo-American relations during the war continued to undermine efforts to draw the countries closer together. Therefore, for transatlantic rapprochement to occur, those who advocated it needed to use cultural networks, exchange Civil War knowledge and offer Britons and Americans a new, conciliatory heritage of the conflict.
The paper then unearths this endeavour and shows how people on both sides of the Atlantic tried to re-shape the memory of the war in order to promote transatlantic nearing. Since the memory of the war penetrated all spheres of British and American lives - from politics to military thought to academe to popular culture - those who tried to promote rapprochement had to engage with accepted representations of the war in these spheres and by challenging them to advance a new heritage of the conflict. The paper illustrates how this was done in popular culture and politics.
The paper concludes by showing that by the early 1920s the heritage of the Civil War had been successfully altered. From a source of Anglo-American discord, the conflict achieved its place in British and American memory as a point of triumph for common Anglo-American values.
Paper short abstract:
The paper seeks to better understand the ascendancy of science based knowledge practices in international heritage conservation through a focus on the 1950s; a moment where rapid geopolitical change and re-configuration created important foundations for the remaining decades of the twentieth century.
Paper long abstract:
The 1950s was extraordinarily formative to our contemporary modes of international cooperation for conservation and heritage governance. The search for peace after World War II, the rapid proliferation of nation-states via decolonisation, together with the newly emergent polarities of the Cold War, created a highly complex network of institutions and programmes dedicated to both conserving the cultural past, and using it as a mechanism for peace and inter-national, inter-regional dialogue.
It is now widely asserted that within this period the internationalisation of conservation and heritage governance involved the consolidation of science based knowledge practices. Wallerstein, for example, has accounted for the hegemony of science as an essential prerequisite for the ongoing functioning of the modern world-system in the aftermath of European empire. For Escobar, scientific knowledge provided the platform for tying international cooperation to ideals of social progress and development. Such broad-based explanations have, however, swept under the carpet the details, paradoxes, and unexpected contradictions of this critical period. This paper seeks to excavate more closely the ways in which experts in archaeology, epigraphy, architectural conservation and chemistry came to be entangled in complex, and often surprising, geographies of international aid via institutions that formed around a fast-paced geopolitics and its itinerant strands of diplomacy.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores a complex methodological approach to trace and analyse international knowledge networks of ‘heritage conservation and development’ in the context of postcolonial historic cities of the Mediterranean region.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores a methodological approach to trace and analyse international knowledge networks of 'heritage conservation and socio-economic development' that emerged from the 1990s within the narrative of sustainable development. It focuses on historic cities of the (southern) Mediterranean: a postcolonial sea, a place of knowledge circulation and epistemological fractures between East and West. The aim is to understand how expert knowledge flows, and institutional alliances between diverse organisations, influence the transformation of historic cities through normative policy narratives.
The Medina of Tunis offers a unique insight into four decades of urban conservation, its underpinning rationales and expert knowledge practices, besides processes of knowledge circulation within an international network (ASM Tunis, AKAA, EU, UNESCO and World Bank).
I will present the interpretivist, multi-sited, research methodology developed for my PhD to interrogate how heritage diplomacy networks materialise through the work of knowledge actors, and the physical transformations they oversee. Key questions include: how can scholars research histories of individual institutions that are part of the network and, at the same time, focus on specific exchanges occurring across knowledge sites? How do we go about understanding knowledge transfer(s) across 'international' and 'local' expertise in a way that recognises different directions of transmission and appropriation?
The argument is that to understand flows of expert knowledge within these networks we need complex methodologies - combining historical, discursive and ethnographic approaches - to illustrate multiple interpretations of policy categories (eg public space) coexisting within the network and negotiation processes involved in shaping hegemonic ones.
Paper short abstract:
This essay explores how literary prizes and film festivals are central to the market of cultural exchange and determine what enters the canons of World Literature and Cinema.
Paper long abstract:
This essay explores the ways the international literary and cinematic spaces are formed and maintained through methods of circulation and production and through a chorus of critical voices that seek to curate and select literary and cinematic texts worthy of inclusion under the World Literature or World Cinema rubrics. More specifically it will examine the role international literary prizes like the Nobel Prize in Literature, the International Man Booker Prize, etc. have in selecting which texts travel where. Further, this essay will explore the role film festivals - industries in their own right - play in determining the travel trajectories of films, their capacity to be accessed internationally through the availability or absence of subtitles, DVD zoning practices, etc. For example, research on the space Eastern European literature and film is given in international centers of cultural capital shows that literary and cinematic circulation from this region reflects the dialogic and representational character of the cultural exchange. The Eastern European stories that circulate and garner critical attention in cultural capitals, mirror the paranoia of the Cold War, and engage in the kinds of representations that could garner an audience in important cultural centers. Literary prizes and film festivals are central to the market of cultural exchange and determine what enters the canons of World Literature and Cinema, what stories have voices beyond their borders, and the ways in which these narratives change through processes of translation and through critical works.
Paper short abstract:
The paper investigates the myth of the French-colonial technique of anastylosis to re-assemble the temples of Angkor. Imported from the Dutch East Indies within a diplomatic exchange network in 1930, its on-site application was however different and had dramatic effects in post-colonial Cambodia.
Paper long abstract:
The paper investigates the background of a long-standing myth about the French-colonial restoration of Angkor/Cambodia. Under the term of 'anastylosis', the technique of an entire dismantling and re-assembling of stone temples was supposedly imported in the 1930s by the Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient from the Archaeological Service of the Dutch East Indies, bypassing not only the metropolitan centres of both colonies back home in Europe, but also the big colonial rival of British India. As an additional result of a dense flow of scientific knowledge exchange from around 1900 onwards to investigate stylistic influences between the ancient temples of Java and Angkor, the technique of anastylosis was however completely modified and resulted in rather questionable practices. Continuing far into post-colonial times of the young nation-state of Cambodia, the ever growing hubris of French architects to restore whole Angkor to a picture-perfect and high-tech archaeological reserve came to a brutal and sudden stop in 1972 when the area fell into chaos of civil war and Khmer Rouge terror. Handing over the temple of Angkor Wat as a diplomatic gift in the name of mutual heritage conservation, the Vietnamese occupiers of Cambodia after 1979 commissioned - irony of history - the Archaeological Survey of (postcolonial) India to complete the French-colonial project: again with dramatic results which are still visible today when Angkor had become since 1992 a universal icon within UNESCO's World Heritage agenda.
Paper short abstract:
This paper approaches in situ archaeological conservation as a form of expert knowledge, also using Foucault’s notion of ‘archaeology’ to examine the traces of the past in the present to provide more historically nuanced accounts of the international networks which shape heritage expertise and practice.
Paper long abstract:
This paper approaches in situ archaeological conservation as a form of expert knowledge, while also using Foucault's notion of 'archaeology' as a means of examining the traces of the past in the present to provide a more historical and ethnographic account of the international networks and transnational flows which shape heritage expertise and practice.
The 1990s saw the development of international charters which focus on in situ conservation as the key determinant of authenticity in archaeological sites conservation, however this period also saw the proliferation of local forms of heritage, embedded within complex local/global political economies. I take as my case study heritage conservation in the postcolonial context, looking at examples of conservation knowledge networks in the Pacific Rim region. Conventional accounts of the development of international heritage management standards tend to explain the growing use of conservation in situ around the globe as evidence of the maturing of non-European nations into more 'modern', more culturally sophisticated, international citizens. This history is also often understood as driven by the gradual uptake of international heritage doctrine as these nations come to value their heritage. While international heritage doctrine, such as the ICOMOS Charter for the Protection and Management of the Archaeological Heritage, undoubtedly has a significant impact, seeing it as an external driver for this kind of heritage-making in the settler world reinforces a Eurocentric framework for the measurement of cultural and economic sophistication, and does little to reveal the more interesting histories of national and transnational cultural politics in which these processes are entangled.
Paper short abstract:
The paper looks at the origins of the international network of experts in heritage conservation in Europe after World War II. It investigates in particular the background of two events preceding the creation of the International Council on Monuments and Sites and the adoption of the Venice Charter.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the origins of the international network of experts in heritage conservation in Europe in the aftermath of World War II.
With regard to the founding of ICOMOS as the first nongovernmental network of individual heritage professionals, two preceding events are particularly interesting: the 1st International Conference of Architects and Technicians of Historic Monuments, 1957 in Paris, France, and their 2nd International Conference in 1964 in Venice, Italy - attended each by several hundred participants and complemented by a major exhibition of conservation works from numerous countries. Their significance as junctions of expert knowledge flows and international relations cannot be underestimated, considering also that the Paris meeting took place only six months after the UNESCO General Conference's decision to create an intergovernmental centre for the study of restoration and conservation, ICCROM. The Venice conference is largely recognised at least as the background for the Charter, the one in Paris however appears significantly lesser known albeit it was the first of its kind after the Second World War and the immediate precursor to the meeting in 1964. Both events lasted a week and had the same key actors in early international heritage conservation among their organisers and lecturers, yet their programme and actual content seem oddly ignored today.
Analysing source documents, the paper illuminates the complex historical-political context of how global heritage conservation was shaped in the modern era. It offers insights into the network of individual protagonists, their affiliations with national/international bodies, and key questions of their exchange.