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- Convenors:
-
Gisela Welz
(Goethe University Frankfurt)
Claske Vos (University of Amsterdam)
- Stream:
- Heritage
- Location:
- D4
Short Abstract:
Heritage has always been an important element in the symbolic repertoire of European integration. Today, it is also becoming a European product. This panel looks at how heritage policies are increasingly standardized across Europe, both within and beyond the European Union.
Long Abstract:
Heritage has always been an important element in the symbolic repertoire of European integration. Today, a number of EU-funded programmes for heritage management as well as networks of knowledge transfer, some of them also under the auspices of other transnational organisations such as UNESCO and the Council of Europe, have contributed to the emergence of a Europe-wide 'patrimonial field' (M. Tauschek). This panel will explore how "heritage regimes" - understood as a range of material-semiotic practices -provide important inroads for the Europeanization of social life, institutions, and individual agency. These processes can be observed particularly well in countries that recently joined the European Union or are aspiring to membership. The streamlining of individual country's policies with European templates does not even primarily happen through the implementation of legal regulations and state-implemented controls, but often rather informally, by introducing standards, funding pilot projects and presenting so-called best practice models to be emulated and reproduced locally.
Case studies from European countries as well as comparative perspectives are invited. Research on the implementation of Europeanized heritage policies in states that acceded to the EU in or after 2004 or have been awarded the status of accession candidates are particularly welcome. Proceeding from the assumption that while increasingly similar heritage management practices and discourses can be observed throughout Europe, the meaning of 'heritage' clearly differs from country to country, and therefore the local effects of the policies can be expected to be quite diverse.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Claske Vos (University of Amsterdam)
Paper short abstract:
This paper illustrates how cultural heritage policy is increasingly employed as a means to facilitate EU integration processes in Southeast Europe. By focusing on heritage programmes funded by IPA it provides new insights in the Europeanisation of heritage in relation to enlargement.
Paper long abstract:
This paper discusses how cultural heritage policy is employed as a means to facilitate EU integration processes in applicant countries in Southeast Europe. While recent studies about the adaptation of legal and administrative procedures to the requirements of EU membership have expanded our understanding of European integration processes, relatively little work has been done on the role of cultural heritage programmes in this particular field. Several programmes have been funded in applicant countries by the Instrument for Pre-Accession (IPA) of the European Commission as alternative to the more coercive strategies of the EU to stimulate European integration. However, while the EU aims to use these programmes to facilitate European integration, it is uncertain whether these nationally and regionally based programmes will lead to such outcome. This research will provide more understanding in how the European Commission aims to use cultural heritage programmes as contribution to EU enlargement. The main questions that this paper aims to answer are: why does the European Commission invest in locally and nationally bounded cultural heritage programmes as a means to bring about grand European integration processes such as regional development and transnational cooperation? What is the Commission's vision on how this should work and what does that tell us about the way in which the EU aims to employ cultural heritage policy as facilitator of EU enlargement? New insights will be provided in the Europeanisation of heritage in relation to the wider field of enlargement.
Milan Popadić (Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade)
Paper short abstract:
In the Serbian language, between the words "modern" and "European" an equality sign can be put. Both words suggests "progress," "civility", "contemporariness" ... In this regard, European values are understood as the values of modern civilization and local heritage is often used as a token of these values.
Paper long abstract:
By presenting local and national heritage as part of the European tradition, Serbia is included in the projects of symbolical European integration. However, traces of this identification should not be sought only in the official, diplomatic or bureaucratic level.
In this context, the paper will analyze a contemporary commercial advertisement produced for the Serbian market. This is a commercial that promotes the manufacturer of potato chips. The hero of advertisement is a modern young man who enjoys industrially produced chips, but made according the recipe of his grandparents. Name of advertisements is: "Grandpa's breed - Grandma's gold", which applies to the both, the young man and the chips.
The advertisement repeats frequent recipe used also in bureaucratic communication: through individual, local and national, to common, European and contemporary. But the catch is in - a potato. Potatoes became a customary food in Serbia not before the mid-nineteenth century. In this sense, it is a very "young" tradition and it is specifically linked to European influence. Thus, on the one hand, the advertisement clearly illustrates the use of the mechanism of transition from traditional to modern. But on the other hand, clearly indicates the common heritage of European modern age, to which Serbia also belongs.
Pauliina Latvala-Harvilahti (University of Turku)
Paper short abstract:
The background study for the ratification of the Council of Europe's Faro convention was carried out in Finland in 2014. The purpose of the paper is to ponder what kind of perspectives the convention brings to the research on cultural heritage and heritage communities.
Paper long abstract:
The background study for the ratification of the Faro convention was carried out in Finland in 2014. The purpose of the paper is to ponder what kind of perspectives the convention brings to the research on cultural heritage and heritage communities. I will present the current phase of preparing the ratification process of the Faro convention from the perspective of comparing national and international heritage politics.
The Faro convention highlights heritage communities and quality of life. It also links the concept of the "common heritage of Europe" to human rights and the fundamental freedoms.
I will present "Case Finland", how the project in Finland was implemented. It was decided to explore the implications of the ratification. This was done in an interactive process and wide public discussion. Crowdsourcing was used in order to accumulate ideas, knowledge and experience. An open web consultation, workshops in different parts of the country and active use of social media were used as instruments to gather ideas and views of various interest groups and individual citizens.
Anja Früh (University of Fribourg)
Paper short abstract:
Museums produce cultural heritages that sustainably contribute to their institutional transformation and local variations of Europeanization. I focus practices of reorganization and re-classification of two national ethnographic museums in France and Germany in the wake of the EU enlargement.
Paper long abstract:
Museums do not only preserve cultural heritage, but they also produce it. To show this, I have examined practices of institutional reorganization and re-classification in the musealization- processes of the Musée des Civilisations de l'Europe et de la Méditerranée (Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations, MuCEM) in Marseille and the Museum Europäischer Kulturen (Museum of European Cultures, MEK) in Berlin. Specifically, the present contribution traces how these two museums produce a cultural heritage that sustainably contributes to the Europeanization of both institutions after having been aligned since the late 19th until the late 20th centuries to national (linguistic) boundaries.
The analysis reveals similarities between the European political interests of Germany and France in the wake of EU enlargement. The MEK in Berlin, thereby, created a new profile as a cultural-political player in the German-Polish relations. The opening of the MuCEM in Marseille was made possible through the promotion of the then President Nicolas Sarkozy - as part of his Mediterranean policy. The expansion and redefinition of the agricultural history collection exhibited in the "Galerie de la Méditerranée" at the museum's opening in 2013 gives one example for the above mentioned musealization practices.
In both cases, heritage works as an important mode for the actualization and legitimation in the reorganization- processes of these national ethnographic museums.
Josip Lah (Institute for Anthropological Research)
Paper short abstract:
The paper analyzes representation of cultural heritage in the promotion of Croatia as a tourist destination. Websites of Croatian tourist boards are analyzed using multimodal discourse analysis in order to examine the role that cultural heritage plays in the process of discursive nation building.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing upon the theories of representation and discursive construction of identity, in this paper we will analyze official websites of local Croatian tourist boards, as well as the national tourist board as the primary creator of the promotional strategy of Croatian tourism. The aim is to analyze "politics of representation" in the tourist discourse of Croatia as identity-making practice.
Methods of critical discourse analysis and multimodal analysis will be used to critically examine visual and textual data, revealing implicit political and ideological levels of signification. The focus of the analysis will be placed on cultural heritage and its role in the process of identification and nation building. Heritage is seen as a result of ideologically motivated selection and/or invention of (national) tradition and the subsequent process of heritagization. The specific ideological goal of this process is a strengthened sense of common national past, making the "imagined community" a discursive and symbolical reality.
It will be shown that Croatian heritage discourse reflects the myth of the superiority of European culture and ideologically positions the nation at the intersection of the Mediterranean and the Central European cultural spheres, as opposed to the Balkans and the historical legacy of the Yugoslav era, which have served as the cultural "Other" in the process of ideological nation-building since the 1990s. Results also indicate a very limited view of heritage, best described as "authorized heritage discourse", dominant in modern European tradition, which naturalizes old, monumental, higher-class material heritage as a prestigious and prototypical form of heritage.
Linde Egberts (VU University Amsterdam)
Paper short abstract:
Local and European narratives of identity are constructed parallel and influence each other mutually in European Capitals of Culture (ECoCs). This paper explores the role of heritage in the formation of local and European identity narratives by studying multiple ECoCs, candidates and European policy.
Paper long abstract:
The ECoC programme is often seen as the flagship of European cultural policy and it is subject to growing academic attention in recent years. "Culture" has been studied as the engine of regional and urban regeneration. However, the interaction between local and European identity narratives and the practices in which these are constructed have been left underexplored.
The European Commission hardly fills in the content of what this European dimension is made of. But it offers the framework of calls, procedures and criteria for cities to fill in this European dimension locally. And by reacting to these calls, local identity narratives are created in terms of Europeanness. Simultaneously, these claims on what is European in the local add layers to what can be conceived as a European identity narrative.
Heritage plays an important role in these local and European narratives of identity, as ECoCs often draw on their past to build a connection between local identity and the European dimension. For instance, in 2010, the Ruhr region in Germany highlighted its role on the foreground in the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community and emphasized its 150-years history of immigration. The past thus serves as a source for the legitimation of a so-called "capitalization" of the city and therewith it nourishing the layeredness of the European identity narrative locally. Analysing recent European capitals of culture offers insight in the processes that lie at the core of today's European identity narratives.
Stefan Groth (Centre for Global Cooperation Research)
Paper short abstract:
The paper revisits debates on multiculturalism and asks for their influence on heritage practices and policies in Europe. It analyzes the discourse on heritage in Germany with regard to its connections to debates on European multiculturalism and their representation in policy and public discourse.
Paper long abstract:
Debates on heritage draw from notions of recognition to make sense of competing claims to culture as property, right, and symbolic power. Issues of entitlement, sovereignty, identity, appreciation, responsibility and equality factor in these debates for or against rights and attributions in the sphere of heritage. Both scholarly and public debates on cultural heritage are in-implicit or explicit-reference to a debate cluster on recognition and multiculturalism in Europe starting in the 1990s and reaching into the 2000s. Albeit held under different circumstances, recourse to this cluster appears to continue and strengthen, especially with regard to the interplay between national and European notions of cultural heritage and the role it plays for the relation between nation states and imaginaries of regional identity.
My contribution revisits this debate on multiculturalism and asks for its influence on heritage practices and policies in Europe. Taking Germany as an example, it analyzes strains of discourse on cultural heritage with regard to their conceptual connections to debates on European multiculturalism and their representation in policy and public discourse. Focussing on the interplay between national and European notions of culture and integration and on their materialization in policy and discourse, it will shed light on how the configurations of debates on multiculturalism and heritage need to be re-evaluated regarding their compatibility and reach. The aim of my contribution is to strengthen the insights on the interplay between national and regional notions of cultural heritage in Germany and Europe by reconceptualizing the connections between the two debates.
Nikola Krstovic (Open air museum Old Village Sirogojno)
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores the concepts which (European) open air museums explore in transition from promoters of national idea to promoters of everyday life phenomena in which diverse minority voices demand to be included.
Paper long abstract:
Being specific 4D platforms for experiencing the past, open air museums across the Europe were usually considered as copy-pasted simulacra of idealized and romanticized national rural pasts. Times, societies and values changed during last thirty years challenging the missions and philosophies of open air museums. Focusing on a daily life (instead of houses and objects) and moving towards recent (social) histories and contemporary collecting the interpretative possibilities of endless contemporary issues were opened. Furthermore, the social phenomena rarely or never explored started to be visible like diverse minority topics, immigration, gender issues, poverty, ecology… Following the case studies of Colonial Williamsburg and its "Slave market" living-history concept, Dutch Arnhem and its "Chinese restaurant" or "Moluccan barack", Danish Den Gamle By and its controversial "Homeless" project, Serbian Old Village with "Love affairs" exhibition or Norwegian Maihaugen with "Building of 25-years social change" concepts we can trace the role of those museums in raising of wider social awareness about locally or universally important issues. Additionally, trough shift of focus from great collective narratives to small, human-scale and private stories and memories those numerous "unheard voices" had the opportunity to send "powerful messages". And the question of owning the power(s) or right(s) to tell the stories of `unheard voices` became crucial in many aspects of museology. The aftermaths were museums more opened to influences regarding its contents and messages and institutions more fluid in its operations and researches.
Jadran Kale (University of Zadar, Croatia)
Paper short abstract:
Interpretation of Intangible Cultural Heritage as a derivation from a distant normative stock is questioned here, defining room for genuine and formative European concept. Exactly because of this genesis, Intangible Cultural Heritage is a perspective category for practice and further refinement.
Paper long abstract:
Vital new category of Intangible Cultural Heritage is usually interpreted as distinctively non-European concept, forged under decisive lead of distant North-East Asian legislation. True, certain regulative fundamentals were certain there even before invasive Euro-American influences from mid-19th century on. Still, without formative power of European concepts adopted in Japan during Meiji modernization new heritage category could not emerge in earnest.
Interest in the European part of ICH-genesis is twofold. Firstly, it could be refreshing to compare it with contemporary anthropologization of the sister sciences, be it nominal or substantial. Secondly, exotic appearance of ICH unpopular regulations in the most advanced Western industrial countries seems fit for re-examination due to its historic modernization character. Together with nation-state imaginaries, market forces are the most important factor for its functioning, just as had happened during the initial formation of ICH.
At the national level, global trends will be compared with legislation and practice of ICH in Croatia since first inscriptions from 2003. At the same time country had steered towards EU-candidacy, being its last member for the time being. National inventorying of ICH, together with numerous other presentational practices, echoed tangible European rhythms denoting what belong to heritage and what does not.
In conclusion, ICH can be affirmed as a perspective heritage category in Europe and worldwide. It is rooted in the same modernization initiatives which gave birth to the ethnology itself. Today, creative communities upon which new heritage category is been practiced matured with new and apt capacities.
António Medeiros (ISCTE University Institute of Lisbon, CEI-IUL)
Paper short abstract:
I take the arguments of Anna L. Tsing on “global connection” and James Fernandez’s reflections on “inheritance/heritage” as main resources to think about disappointmentsin transnational cooperation, Sephardic heritage politics in Istanbul and in a deserted hamlet of Portugal, and EU monnies.
Paper long abstract:
Today, despite the absence of a significant Jewish population in Portugal, "Sephardic heritage " politics are quite intense in the interior of the country, due to the popularization of a discourse on heritage in the last couple of decades and a variety of recent "European" resources. On the other hand, the politics of Sephardic heritage are quite a bit more discrete in Turkey, where a 16.000 strong community of - more or less fluent - Ladino speakers lives today. Recently, I missed the opportunity to launch a research project with Turkish colleagues, focusing on a comparison of the afore-mentioned politics. My efforts to build a team were, in someway, "lost in translation", a failure mainly traceable to the diversity of backgrounds among the team members, the non-EU status of Turkey, and current political tensions in Turkey and the way they critically impinge on minorities' sense of safety. I'll take the arguments of Anna L. Tsing on "global connection" and "friction", and also some of James Fernandez' inspiring ruminations on the changing status of the representations of inheritance/heritage in rural Iberian contexts, as my main references. I reflect both on my own disappointments with transnational cooperation concerning the expressions of heritage politics related to the Sephardic legacy in Istanbul, as well as in an almost deserted hamlet in the interior of Portugal.