Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
László Mód
(University of Szeged)
Tatiana Bajuk Sencar (ZRC SAZU)
Send message to Convenors
- Stream:
- Heritage
- Location:
- Aula 22
- Sessions:
- Monday 15 April, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
The panel is devoted to the research of heritage management and practices in border areas. We invite fellow researchers to compare and discuss case-studies from different European borderlands.
Long Abstract:
During the 20th century, the borderlands of Europe had been exposed to dramatic political, economic and social changes that have determined everyday life of local communities in countless ways. Border regimes have varied widely, ranging from the virtually impenetrable Iron Curtain that separated East from West to the open borders of the Schengen Area within the European Union. The beginning of the 21st century brought with it the formation of a significantly expanded European Union, which has almost 40 internal land borders that are home to virtually one third of its population.
Borders between formerly divided regions in Europe have become more open than ever before. Marginal communities along these frontiers have adapted to these new circumstances in different ways. Forgotten borderlands are often considered idyllic landscapes with rich cultural history and high level of biodiversity. Even borders themselves have been recast as sites of heritage, providing opportunities for cross-border initiatives and cooperation. We invite panel papers that focus on the mutually constitutive relationship between border changes and heritage processes from diverse perspective and at different scales, from the local to the transnational. We wish to discuss how border regions provide excellent opportunities for studying the relationship between the natural and cultural heritage, production, promotion, management and preservation of heritage, the role of nationalism and the use of history in the construction of heritage or cross-border heritagization projects.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 15 April, 2019, -Paper short abstract:
The rock of Märket in the Baltic Sea, being crisscrossed with regional and international borders, offers a lucid case of heritage management and contested ownership of the past. Tourists come here to jump across the borders, but in which territory they land is an issue of interpretation.
Paper long abstract:
In borderlands, where territories chafe on one another, friction can occur. On a tiny rock in the Baltic Sea, located between the Swedish coast and the Finnish landscape of Åland, heritage practices and bordering processes are in full speed. The rock of Märket is crisscrossed with borders due to long demarcation processes, and the Finnish/Swedish state border here coincides with the border of the autonomous and demilitarised province of Åland, making half the rock simultaneously Finnish and Ålandic. Since Märket is also a site of border heritagisation, its ownership and related revenues from tourism are contested issues, revealing conflicts between the majority of the Finnish state and the minority of Åland. The shared-ness of the border, rather than the divided-ness of the rock between the well-defined states, makes the site a touchy issue. Being a demarcated minority, Åland depends on its borders for both financial and cultural reasons, but whose proprietary counts more in a dually owned border? As a part of an ethnological dissertation project tracking the changes of demarcation and perceptions of the maritime borders around the province of Åland, Märket has arisen as a hot spot of heritage conflict and management. Ethnological fieldwork consisting of participant observation, interviews and archive material shows how this border is a site of competition over ownership and representations of the past. The border dividing the rock of Märket becomes a lucid example of concurrently very local and transnational borderland heritage practices, bringing tension and different interpretations to the fore.
Paper short abstract:
During socialism, an area between Yugoslavia and Hungary was depopulated and rewilded. After socialism, it has been heritagized to preserve biodiversity. I explore that biodiversity is partly an outcome of ecological management of the Iron Curtain, which today represents burden to farmers.
Paper long abstract:
This paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork in villages along the Slovenian-Hungarian border, in the area of Goričko in Slovenia. During socialism, respective sides of the border were depopulated and rewilded. Because of preserved biodiversity, however, the post-socialist Slovenia turned Goričko into a regional park. Besides, it has become part of the European Green Belt initiative, whose aim is to preserve natural heritage along the former Iron Curtain. Today, part of biodiversity in this area are big wild animals (red deer, roe deer, wild boar), which cause trouble to local farmers. The latter regularly complain that the presence of animals on cultivated lands for them represents a burden. I will focus on farmers' narratives on wild animals, particularly on their perception that the number of these animals has enlarged after the fall of the Iron Curtain. As they explain, the previous, guarded border had protected farmlands from animals, whereas the contemporary, permissive border turned their fields into feeders. At the same time, I will focus on local narratives and historical data on ecological management of the Iron Curtain, part of which was afforestation of the borderlands in Hungary. This specific ecology of the border had presumably led to wildlife procreation in the borderlands, which today represent both heritage and burden.
Paper short abstract:
rading between neighboring countries Estonia, Finland and Sweden had a long history when it ended by the World War II. The market had structures containing heritages of both barter and money trade. Mutual friendship trading also contained dependencies to leading trade-houses. What of today?
Paper long abstract:
A long tradition of barter trade exists between the peasants of Estonia and Finland over the Gulf of Finland. The trade was mutually beneficial as the parts could switch-trade their surplus means, exporting mainly salted herring from Finland and receiving grain products, mainly rye from Estonia.
The trade heritage had many variants in customs and the involved trading partners. In the eastern parts of the gulf, peasants traded directly with each other crossing the gulf in boats. In the western parts of the Gulf of Finland, peasants and fishermen mainly traveled to Tallin and sold or traded their salted herring to grain from local merchants, who in turn got it from peasants and manors in the Estonian inland. This resulted in complex networks and dependencies between merchants an peasants which also were incorporated in the cultural heritage of the Sepra-trade. In the first decades of the 20th century the trade become much more diverse incorporating exporting of wood, firewood, potatoes, apples and also whole new concepts as fish canning industries, sometimes including the cost line down to the Polish coast and to Sweden in west.
The First World War struck hard on this trading tradition and by the Second World War it had almost vanished. After the 1990ies the trading contacts were once again celebrated in a symbolical way as old marketplaces were revived and still living tradesmen met again. The trading between the countries is now massive, including tourism, working migration, mutual industries and a planned tunnel.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the influence of the European Union in the management of natural and cultural heritage along the Slovenian-Hungarian border.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the influence of the European Union in the management of natural and cultural heritage along the Slovenian-Hungarian border in an expanded EU. National borders, which are historically considered as peripheral, less developed regions, are defined as a strategic interest of the EU as a multinational body, whose structure hinges on the free movement of personal and goods across borders. Currently, the EU contains 40 internal land borders that together comprise almost 40% of its territory and virtually one-third of its population.
EU projects serve as a lens for examining the changing post-socialist regime of the Hungarian-Slovenian border and the top-down role of the EU in the heritage management of the border's interconnected protected areas (Goričko Nature Park and Őrség National Park). The analysis centers on the role of the EU PHARE projects as a financial and developmental mechanism of the countries' EU accession process, examining the ways in which the border was imagined and addressed by different PHARE programs (primarily multi-country and cross-border).
Paper short abstract:
The paper address the issue of heritage in Czech borderland regions which were repopulated after WWII. Based on analysis of villages' representations created for national competition Village of the Year, we ask how heritage is negotiated in relation to displacement and repopulation.
Paper long abstract:
Each year since 1995 Ministry of Regional Development of the Czech Republic announce national competition Village of the Year and each year around 200 villages from all over the Bohemia and Moravia choose to participate. Competing villages employ various strategies to create a representation which conforms to deterritorialized and reterritorialized "pop-rurality", in which local heritage practices are supposed to be shared by all villagers.
However, many of competing villages are located in the borderlands from which German-speaking population was displaced after the WWII and which was then repopulated by new inhabitants, where heritage might be highly contested ground.
In our paper, based on analysis of representations created by borderland villages for the Competition, we will address the issue of heritage in such borderland regions. We are asking the question of how heritage in promoted, managed and preserved in the context of representation of the village for the Competition in the region with discontinuity of inhabiting population. How is the heritage understood in relation to displacement and repopulation? What kind of heritage is represented and by what means? And what heritage practices are employed in this context?
Paper short abstract:
The paper presents a microhistorical case of heritage politics on the Eastern borders of Europe, 1920-1945. The focus is on the political and symbolic appropriation of vernacular culture, and the making of collaborative representations of oral tradition and politically relevant heritages.
Paper long abstract:
The paper presents a microhistorical case of heritage politics in Karelia, the borderland between Finland and the Soviet Union, 1920-1945. The focus is on the political and symbolic appropriation of vernacular culture, and the making of collaborative representations of oral tradition and politically relevant heritages. The oral poetry used in the composition of the Finnish national epic Kalevala (1848) was collected in these fragile borderlands and the Finnish and Soviet regimes sought to involve the local communities to their ideological projects by manipulating and circulating tradition in new contexts. In Finland the Nationalist movements celebrated Karelia as the origin of Finnishness, whereas the Soviet tradition policy struggled to combine the construction of a Pan-Soviet cultural identity to local ethnic characteristics. On both sides of the border vernacular oral traditions were used to legitimize the regimes by varying interpretations of the notions of authenticity, heritage, and national identity. The political and symbolic dilemma of borderland heritage(s) materializes in the life story of a Karelian ritual specialist who collaborated with Finnish nationalists in turning his cultural competence into a representation of ancient national wisdom, was recruited as a double agent, and faced eventually Stalinist terror.
Paper short abstract:
The Őrség National Reserve was founded on the borderland of Hungary in the socialist period. The role of the region was reinterpreted in two different ways (modernisation and environmental protection). The aim of the paper is analysing the different conceptions, and the process of heritage making.
Paper long abstract:
The Őrség National Reserve was founded on the borderland of southwestern Hungary. In the 20th century the fragmented settlement patterns made the infrastructural improvements and the establishment of the institutional network more difficult, and especially in the socialist period the villages of the area - those were under strict border surveillance until late sixties - have been left out the nationwide concept of community development which conserved an unfavorable situation in the region. The role of the region was reinterpreted again in the 1970s. Following socialist modernization, the party and state apparatus in the county and the township was of the opinion that industrial development and the expansion of the farming of cooperatives should be considered the solutions. The other conception was characterised by the human ecological change of views, which spread all over the socialist countries in the seventies. The Őrség Natural Reserve was established under the aegis of the Hungarian Office of Environmental Protection. The protection covered natural floras, the fauna, the natural waters, the landscape and the traditions. This process can be analysed as a heritage making practice which involved several other actors. An intensive interest shown by ethnographers was followed, from the late 50s on, by the attention of the National Office of Historical Monuments, which was supposed to protect folk monuments, the various concepts of county and township offices and tourism. The objective of the paper is analysing the different conceptions, presenting what conflicts there were between the principal figures of the local economic-political life.
Paper short abstract:
The paper focuses on the role of the administrations of the Trilateral park Raab-Goričko-Örseg, especially of Goričko Nature Park, in the heritagization of the Slovenian-Hungarian-Austrian borderlands that is based mostly on the nature protection and biodiversity.
Paper long abstract:
The borderlands of today's Slovenia had been exposed to changing border regimes that have
determined not only the everyday life of local communities but also cross-border cooperation
in many different ways. Often marginalized communities far from the states' centres - both on the Slovenian and Hungarian side of the border - have adapted to these new circumstances in different ways. Well preserved landscape with high level of biodiversity has provided opportunities for various cross-border initiatives and cooperation. One of them, the Trilateral park Raab-Goričko-Örseg as a part of European Green Belt Initiative is cooperation structure connecting natural parks in the borders of Slovenia, Hungary and Austria. Despite the very slow progress of a more institutionalised cooperation - park still does not function as an
entity - the Park authorities are the main partners involved in cross-border projects that join together formerly separated peripheral areas.
This cooperation will be examined as a practice model because of the initiatives launched in
the frame of sustainable development activities that were consistent with the natural capacity
of the cross-border landscape. How these opportunities to mutually exploit the territorial
capital are being exercised? How the implementations of different joint projects affect
people's lives? Does the cooperation inside the frame of the Trilateral park lead to a transborder
region? The aim of the paper is therefore to investigate the role of the administrations of the
three parks, especially of Goričko Nature Park, in the heritagization of the borderlands based
on the nature protection.
Paper short abstract:
The paper will focus on the special relation between festivals, tourism and cultural heritage in the western Hungarian borderland which is nowadays a popular destination for tourists.
Paper long abstract:
The western borderland of Hungary was one of the most forgotten and remoted areas during the socialist time. The authorities has strictly controlled the local communities which tried to adapt to the new circumstances in different ways. After the fall of the Iron Curtain and the permeability of state borders, the situation has changed radically. The forgotten and remoted borderland was discovered by urban families who bought houses of the locals and converted them to summer cottages. As a result the area became a popular destination for tourists who are trying to explore the rich cultural history and high level of biodiversity. The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork which was done in the villages of the western borderland. The main focus of the presentation is to reveal the special relations between tourism, festivals and heritagization. My analysis is mainly based on the local pumpkin festival which attracts thousands of visitors annualy.
Paper short abstract:
Two southern villages of Spain and Portugal share a relevant Islamic heritage and took it as a common resource for regional projects and claims. National borders are defied and/or reinvented by different agents that cooperate in this process, to pursue their own political and/or religious claims.
Paper long abstract:
Mértola and Almonaster la Real, two villages respectively located in the South of Portugal and Spain, each one on its side of the border, share an important Islamic past and heritage. Taking advantage of it, both villages decided to engage on development projects grounded on its promotion, display and commodization. In 1990, Almonaster la Real hold its first Islamic festival, organizing academic and leisure activities to attract tourism to the village and surrounding areas. Later on, and inspired by its neighbour, Mértola developed a similar idea. These projects and twined festivalization of a common past and its display, built and enacted alternative maps that blurred the national borders, while sustaining southern islamophilia. Meanwhile, past and present also merge, specially through the participation of the members of a Muslim Spanish community, who since early participate in the organization of both events, performing their Andalusian Islamic religiosity to visitors. In this paper we will try to analyse how current narratives try to break an historical border through the enactment of a time and space where/ and when it didn't exist, and how different participants and agents cooperating in this process, use the arena to legitimize their own political and/or religious claims.