Zainab Bahrani talk

Hamilakis• Homo Sacer

• Those who do not need to be considered: – though he has biological life, it has no political

significance

• This gets us to a new meaning of heritage:

• a way of defining who we are in the face of decisions about who will be protected or even survive

NY Times Video

Negative Heritage and Instant Representation

• “a conflictual site that becomes the repository of negative memory in the collective imaginary” (558)

• The attack was not real until it was spoken about, taped, recorded, categorized and abstracted

Bamiyan Buddhas, Afghanistan

The statues represented the immense architectural skill of the Indian civilization as well as the promotion of such arts before being

destroyed by Islamic forces. (Wikipedia)

Destruction of Bamiyan Buddhas, Afghanistan, 2001

Colin Refrew

“the time is ripe for an international convention to make the destruction of cultural artefacts a crime against humanity” (p. 564)

Lynn Meskell

“it is dangerous to place commensurate value on people and things and to couch these acts in a language reserved for genocide, since they do not inhabit the same order of existence” (p. 564)

Heritage and Conservation

Zuni Ahayu:da (war God)

Past Mastering

• How to decide what to remember and to memorialize? how to master the past?

• How can we define or apprehend an arbitrary moment in time that transforms the product of the past into an object of heritage?

• Especially difficult in negative heritage• Turn is usually made when economic benefits

weigh in as positive• Tourism as the ultimate past mastering (567)

Past Mastering

• UNESCO World Heritage Convention 1972– Considering that the existing international conventions,

recommendations and resolutions concerning cultural and natural property demonstrate the importance, for all the peoples of the world, of safeguarding this unique and irreplaceable property, to whatever people it may belong,

– Considering that parts of the cultural or natural heritage are of outstanding interest and therefore need to be preserved as part of the world heritage of mankind as a whole …

Past Mastering

• Burra Charter, Australia 1999 • Co-existence of cultural values

– Co-existence of cultural values should be recognised, respected and encouraged, especially in cases where they conflict. For some places, conflicting cultural values may affect policy development and management decisions. In this article, the term cultural values refers to those beliefs which are important to a cultural group, including but not limited to political, religious, spiritual and moral beliefs. This is broader than values associated with cultural significance.

Carman, Against Cultural Property

• Non-propertied basis for assessing heritage– Gift (p. 42) // Value vs. Treatment (p. 60)

– Community Archaeology (pp 86-93)

– Living monument (p.113)

What is multiculturalism?

How do we practice multiculturalism?

Subsistence digging

“a western notion that venerates material culture as heritage is somewhat foreign to people who experience heritage as something inalienable, performed in daily practices like speaking Yupik, hunting, eating walrus meat, or drum-dancing (without tourists), in a place where people recognize their elders—rather than objects in a museum—as the real cultural treasures” (Hollowell p. 124)

Levels of (multicultural) conflict for heritage professionals

• The (multicultural) conflict with antiquities dealers and museums who value material heritage as commodity

• A (multicultural) conflict with national and cultural interpretations of material heritage as in the Elgin Marbles, Zuni Ahayu:da, or Yupik subsistence diggers

• A multicultural conflict over the capacity for heritage and culture to be expressed at all

• Both if it can be and if it should

Unthinkable• “The unthinkable is that which one

cannot conceive within the range of possible alternatives, that which perverts all answers because it defies the terms under which the questions were phrased. In that sense, the Haitian Revolution was unthinkable in its time: it challenges the very framework within which proponents and opponents had examined race, colonialism, and slavery in the Americas.” (Trouillot, pp. 81-82)

Can the subaltern speak?

• In the process of coming know, we silence alternatives, forming a cannon of knowledge, which overdetermines our reality

• Our cannon is dominated by Western rationality, which forces non-western action and explanation to be translated to be known, effectively silencing non-western (subaltern) voices

• Santal rebellion – Anthropologizing: turning the supernatural world

into somebody’s belief (and thus not true)

• A deeper mutliculturalism: – recognizes not just diversity but difference– Not just minority histories, but subaltern pasts– Culture without texts – witnesses on their own terms

Can the present be non-contemporaneous with itself?