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- Convenors:
-
Cyril Isnart
(CNRS)
Eszter György (Eötvös Loránd University)
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Heritage
- Sessions:
- Thursday 24 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
Studies on cultural heritage mainly focus on the elite and normative discourses inflicted by hegemonic institutions on people's culture. This panel intends to reverse and complexify the question: how does the heritage agency of minoritized groups work and what is the role of material dimensions?
Long Abstract:
The now well established and multidisciplinary tradition of critical heritage studies stands on a shared and acknowledged statement: cultural heritage can be considered a discursive tool of domination inflected by political, administration and government elites on the people they are supposed to serve. The academic literature provides hundreds of cases-studies showing that museums, natural parks, libraries or archives tend to forget cultural diversity and cancel different conceptions of what culture is out of the Western heritage frame. Other works demonstrate the creative and exponential endeavours of political and cultural institutions to include - or not - alterity, otherness and diversity in their daily life - especially in post-colonial configurations.
However, how minoritized groups themselves develop their heritage agency are underrepresented in the literature and material dimensions rarely enter the field of investigation. Reversing the classical views of heritage studies and crossing discursive and material dimensions can help ask new questions: Which kinds of objects (vs. discourses) are defended by minorities leaders (vs. negotiated by heritage professionals)? How do they contest the visual and material (vs. narrative) supremacy of dominant heritage? What are the practical devices (vs. discursive strategies) they use in order demonstrate their will of recognition? Can we assess the role of tangible and intangible objects in heritage manoeuvres of minoritized people (vs. examining how heritage actors work with minorities)?
This panel welcomes case-studies from different disciplines, analysed from the perspective of the minoritized groups in Europe and aboard, which question, in sum, the heritage life of minorities objects.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 24 June, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
The paper presents grassroot collecting practices and the Slovenian minority museum in the Province of Udine in Italy. It highlights different approaches to heritage-making as represented by collections of objects on one side and more discursive multimedia story-telling on the other.
Paper long abstract:
The vernacular Slovene speaking inhabitants of the Provinces of Udine were only legally recognised as a linguistic minority by the Italian government in 2001. The pressure of assimilation since the Slavia Veneta was annexed to the Kingdom of Italy in 1866 accompanied by intensive emigration and a lack of education and media in the Slovene language led to assimilation, diglossia, incompetence in standard Slovene and fear or inconvenience in speaking the vernacular Slovene dialect in public.
Compared to the undesirability of the vernacular Slovene in public, there were some other, less contentious practices of expressing cultural differences. For example, collecting objects of past everyday life, agricultural and craft tools and ritual objects resulted in 19 grassroots collection and local museums. Some of them were later recognised and endorsed by municipalities, local associations and minority organisations, institutionalised, and promoted in the framework of the recent European cross-border project initiatives. In 2013, they were joined by the museum SMO in San Pietro al Natisone, managed by the Institute of the Slovene Culture. In contrast to collections of objects, the multimedia SMO museum is designed as a "cultural landscape" and "narrative" museum of the territory "from the Julian Alps to the Adriatic Sea", offering "interactive itineraries and multimedia paintings".
The paper will reflect on the differences between grassroot collecting practices and the narrative (re)presentation of the history of the territory, and highlight different approaches to heritage-making as represented by collections of objects on one side and multimedia story-telling experience on the other.
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyzes the relevance of the agency of nonhumans, things, and words in the heritagization of the Jesuit-Guarani Mission in São Miguel, in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, as intangible heritage culture of the Guarani people.
Paper long abstract:
Heritage is a political arena that has been appropriated by indigenous peoples to assert their identity and rights in the face of internal colonialism and coloniality. An example of this is the recent institutional classification of the Jesuit-Guarani Mission in São Miguel, in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, as intangible heritage culture of the Guarani people. Less discussed is how heritage is also a cosmopolitical arena that brings to the fore the agency of nonhumans and things. The Mbya-Guarani are texoaxy (imperfect beings) that follow the signs of the gods (Nhanderu Kuery) to live a good life and to reach aguyje (perfection, immortality), without going through death, even though this is almost impossible nowadays. Therefore, the way of life of the Mbya-Guarani is focused on the perfection of their bodies, understood as a bundle of affects, that can be transformed through the agency of other Guarani (especially elders), nonhumans (the gods, but also spirits, animals and plants) and things, including words. In this context, words can nurture children to become adults and touch the heart, i.e., the perspective embedded in the body, of the jurua (nonindigenous people). In conclusion, I revisit the heritagization process of the Jesuit-Guarani Mission in São Miguel to explain its cosmopolitical importance for the Guarani as a way to touch the hearts of the jurua, and as a site to live in and to visit because of its agency in the aguyje of their body.
Paper short abstract:
By exploring a museum exhibition “Ingrians – The Forgotten Finns”, the paper analyzes entanglements of objects, their histories, and narratives connected to them. It examines negotiations between minority and majority categories and issues related to heritagization of minoritized groups in general.
Paper long abstract:
Ingrian Finns are a Finnish-speaking historical minority of Russia and the Soviet Union. During Soviet terror in the early twentieth century, they went through forced collectivizations of farms, deportations, imprisonments, and executions. Simultaneously with the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the beginning of the 1990s, migration of Ingrian Finns to Finland started. History of Ingrian Finns is entangled with the history of Finland in many ways, and these entanglements give rise to various tensions as well as negotiations of belonging, entitlement, and representation of the past. This presentation analyzes the multimedia museum exhibition “Ingrians – The Forgotten Finns” created by Lea Pakkanen, Santeri Pakkanen, and Meeri Koutaniemi held at the National Museum of Finland in 2020. The exhibition showcased various material objects, photographs, narratives, and other media, reflecting its authors’ personal experiences as Ingrian Finns and allegedly collective experiences of Ingrian Finns as a group. The aim of this presentation is to discuss contemporary memory culture surrounding Ingrian Finns’ history by exploring entanglements of material objects and their histories as well various narratives connected to them. By exploring the exhibition, the presentation wishes to discuss negotiations between minority and majority categories and issues related to heritagization of minoritized groups in general.
Paper short abstract:
Inter-religious relationship between Muslim majority and Jewish minority in Yemen were mediated by means of creating amulets, combining material and textual aspects. Using both ethnographic and textual methods, this lecture will examine the question of how magical objects mark religious boundaries.
Paper long abstract:
Inter-religious relationship between Muslim majority and Jewish minority in Yemen were mediated by practices of magical healing or magical protection, by means of creating amulets or by summoning of demons and angels, performed by Jews and Muslims alike. The making of amulets combined material and textual aspects. Jewish craftsmen created the silver necklace containing the amulet, while its content was based on interpretation of amulets guide-books manuscripts. These manuscripts offer a complex matrix of Muslim and Jewish sources, and contain a bewildering mosaic of languages, Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic. Composing and using such books required an act of translation, interpretation and mediation of knowledge by Jewish-Yemeni scholars. By utilizing both ethnographic and textual methods, this lecture will examine the question of how magical objects mark religious boundaries, and what are the cultural expressions that cross these boundaries.
Paper short abstract:
This paper deals with the destiny of written stones as material remains of Judaism in Portugal. Hebraic medieval inscriptions have been turned into a heritage asset, opening the way of a specific and unusual recognition of the Jewish heritage of Portugal, ground on letters from the past.
Paper long abstract:
Apart from a Medieval synagogue and a series of supposed worship places spread around the country, Hebraic written stones are the main material testimonies of Jewish past that have survived until today in Portugal. As it occurs for other heritage objects, Hebraic medieval epigraphic stones have been turned into a heritage asset, opening the way of an unusual and specific recognition of the Jewish past of Portugal.
After the forced conversion to Catholicism, the exodus of Portuguese and Spanish Jews and concealment of their properties at the end of the 15th c., few testimonies were discovered and kept by lettered people and the Jewish community during the 20th c. A group of archaeologists and erudite historians, Jewish and non-Jewish, produced a series of publications and tempted to settle an epigraphic museum in the Medieval synagogue of Tomar. The group dedicated their efforts to the study and conservation of the writings, books and written stones.
How did letters, as material remains, lead to the cultural renewal of a religious minority past? Does this attention to letters make the Jewish past heritage-making in Portugal specific and unusual? What are the consequences on the heritage-making process itself? And what does it show of the special history of Portuguese Jews?
The investigation combines archive study and ethnographic interviews to better understand the late destiny of the material remains of Jewish religious culture in Portugal.