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Accepted Contribution:
Contribution short abstract:
Critical “unwriting” & contributing to policymaking now has the dual task of addressing “difficult heritage” & damaging tourism practices. Juxtaposing UNESCO designations and their lived impacts makes the task more complex when the same policies that are detrimental to living built WHS unwittingly safeguard related living heritage practices.
Contribution long abstract:
How can “unwriting” contribute to heritage research where the policies created to manage a UNESCO designation – one that helped to make a “difficult heritage” hegemonically digestible – have a paradoxical impact on living and built heritage of this same period? Processes of “unwriting” have long been a tool to address “difficult heritage” (MacDonald 2015, 2009) for communities divided by contemporary and historical geopolitical divides. Yet, world heritage designations have increasingly come under fire for “UNESCOcide”, a term coined to emphasise the damaging effects of overtourism on WHS and ICH (D’Eramo, 2014). In Granada, Spain, heritage-tourism policymakers have tended to privilege policies that negatively affect the “living neighbourhood” in the WHS designation, yet the resulting overtourism has also unwittingly protected living heritage practices of the same “difficult heritage” from disappearing. Two types of artisan craftwork – marquetry (or taracea) and Fajalauza ceramics – are widely acknowledged as living Muslim period traces and as forming a complicated part of Andalusian identity. Neither has officially been acknowledged as ICH. Rather, these disappearing artisans’ skills are overshadowed by built heritage in Spain. Policymakers and researchers of particular political orientations still have a vested interest in minimising living representations of continuity with this past. As heritage researchers, detailed attention to scale in concrete research on wider historical transmission practices can reiterate connections between similar ICH already safeguarded elsewhere and declarations impeded by the politics of “difficult heritage”. Unwriting requires imagining dynamic policy frameworks that centre on the needs of producers, rather than political ideals.
Writing living heritage? Uses and misuses of transforming cultural practices into cultural texts [WG: Cultural Heritage and Property]
Session 1