Reading Now: Weiss, Lindsay Moira (2013). Intellectual property rights and sovereign claims; water, diamonds and rights in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. Settler Colonial Studies, Vol 3. No. 2, 157-171.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2013.781928

Willem J.H. Willems
Faculty of Archaeology
Leiden University
P.O. Box 9515
2300 RA Leiden
The Netherlands
w.j.h.willems@arch.leidenuniv.nl

published in: ANALECTA PRAEHISTORICA LEIDENSIA 43/44:1-8

Abstract: Preservation in situ has developed into a central dogma of
western archaeological heritage management. This paper
examines assumptions underlying that dogma and the way
in which it works out in practice, both in western and
non-western contexts. Bureaucratization and commercialization
are seen as important drives behind its rise as
a dominating concept in heritage policy. While surely useful
and important in some situations, preservation in situ is too
problematic in several ways to be acceptable as an ethical
principle with broad validity.

Download pdf here: APL43-44_Willems

Heritage Transactions: Emergent Frictions, Fantasies and Possibilities in New Heritage Networks    
Carolyn Nakamura (Leiden University)
Lindsay Weiss (Stanford University)

The domain of heritage has shifted from its historically familiar perch of territorial patrimony and multicultural recognition to its late liberal enactment.  History itself has become a sort of currency in a transaction that is no longer a well understood one occurring between the state and its citizens, but within a wild fluorescence of less decipherable public private partnerships.  In this context, both the recognition of the citizen, and the implicit purpose of history itself has come unmoored from its traditional parameters. Ostensibly, heritage is now summoned according to a more cosmopolitan set of ideals and principles. Crucially, this discursive refashioning of heritage is emerging more haphazardly and globally than in previous iterations of heritage in the 19th and early 20th century; it is now a marked as a deterritorialized project brimming with mimetic interplay between corporate entities and sovereign bodies.  Today, if you wish to capture the discourse of heritage, you will find it parsed out unevenly within the glossy brochures that accompany the mineral extraction of TNCs, the application dossiers of UNESCO’s World Heritage List, and the private consultancy reports that strategically plan tourism development.

As they valorize particular histories, heritage narratives have increasingly come to hinge on the priorities and anxieties that revolve around the practical enactment of privately funded initiatives, corporate social responsibility partnerships and humanitarian interventions (Elyachar 2005; Fassin 2012; Meskell 2010). If this shift in thinking about historical meaning enables new historical logics, new ethical-historical subjects, and ultimately new normativities for thinking about what history ought to deliver–how does this transform the modes by which those who are locally rooted (either through poverty or through ties to the land) negotiate these reconfigurations?

As an anthropological object, heritage operates much like Levi-Strauss’ floating signifier; its remarkably supple character has allowed public history to emerge as a global narrative with substantial moral force, promising the capacity to facilitate collective healing and national reconciliation.  Even when there is cause to be mindful of potential injury when the concrete political, economic and social delivery falls short due to heritage’s inflationary discursive quality (Meskell 2009; Weiss 2007), it is important to ask whether or not heritage itself ought to be construed as the culprit, or whether such shortcomings are merely the passive echoes of a broader retraction or reorientation of traditional state delivery.

Within this context, we want to consider more closely how to understand what is at stake when heritage becomes swept up within a deterritorialized (and some might argue anti-political) space of humanitarian intervention, development, and corporate social responsibility. We suggest that it becomes significant to consider the normative vocabularies of these sorts of projects as they consolidate various arms of NGO, governmental and corporate interests (Shamir 2004, Banjeree 2008), and how the consolidation of such projects, in turn, subtly tips the points of moral and ethical significance which are located in heritage discourse.  If we construe the networks mobilized around CSR as participating in a broader logic of neoliberal governmentality–how can we understand the possibilities for heritage’s subjects to negotiate just such transformations.

The concept and value of heritage has undergone distinct shifts and reconfigurations with its transference from the state to an extra-national array of partnerships between public, private and voluntary projects of development and social sustainability. While not necessarily new, these shifts have rendered more visible certain liberal economic logics that have become normative in heritage practice. First, the safeguarding of culture and nature no longer stands in deep opposition to economic growth, as heritage programs have increasingly adopted the future-oriented logic and language of development and socioeconomic rights (cf Appadurai 2004). Heritage has thus become a player (and pawn) in the discursive, material project of development, which in part – as James Ferguson (1990) and others have demonstrated – is constituted by processes of capital accumulation. Second and following from the first, nature and culture in this context are increasingly rendered in market terms as commodities with certain kinds of exchange value (cf Shamir). Finally, an expanded heritage field has communicated the neoliberal values of responsibility and autonomy to many local and impoverished communities, often resulting in the transformation of political forms of empowerment and freedom into economic ones, thus drawing heritage into the capacities approach.  These developments engender a significant shift in the ways in which communities seek to define themselves, engage with the landscape and the past, and imagine the future.

In order to understand the consequences of these developments, it is necessary to examine the broader context in which these shifts are taking place, namely, “the global economic and political process that involves an overall restructuring of the public good and private interest” (Kamat 2004). Waquant (2012: 71) has argued that the institutional core of neoliberalism does not, in fact, hollow out the state, but expands the reach of governmentality. Specifically, it fosters an articulation of state, market and citizenship that “harnesses the first to impose the stamp of the second on the third”. This neoliberal core underwrites CSR as an emergent cooperation between certain global (UN), governmental (nation-state), and local (NGO) institutions, and effectively dissolves substantive differences between the public and private spheres (Kamat 2004). In this field, CSR has come to adopt the terminology of the state, citing ‘new governance’ and ‘corporate citizenship’. Critics of this development find most troubling the voluntary and unregulated nature of social responsibility. As Shamir (2004: 677) notes, “The single and most distinctive common denominator of all corporate-oriented and corporate-inspired notions of ‘social responsibility’ is the voluntary, nonenforceability, and self-regulatory meaning of the term. The principle of self-regulation has become the corporation’s most crucial frontline in the struggle over meaning and an essential ideological locus for disseminating the neo-liberal logic of altruistic social participation that is to be governed by good will alone.”

This somewhat anarchic notion of goodwill, or ‘moral good’ presents a productive entry point into thinking through the possibilities and limitations of community recognition, participation and empowerment afforded by CSR- and humanitarian inflected heritage. Heritage has always been implicitly related to the speculative philosophy of history, producing its narratives according to overarching schema of intelligibility and ultimately derived from a contemporary sense of the moral end-point of historical material.  It is timely to think about the work performed by this implicit notion of a moral good upon the arc of historical events, particularly as this notion of a moral good traverses the shift from a patrimonial conceptualization of history’s innate relationship to the rise of the state to a deterritorialized set of corporate and voluntary sector economic imperatives.  Even within the variegated cosmopolitan/humanitarian political milieu, Corporate Social Responsibility and other relatively short term rights interventions promote an increasingly transient and transactional understanding of the ‘moral good’ of heritage.  What is particularly diagnostic of our current engagement with heritage is how such projects rhetorically emulate the same universalist values and priorities of cosmopolitan enactments–such as those which led to the founding covenants of and declarations of UNESCO–even as they collectively constitute a far more precarious cosmopolitan edifice–with dispersed and constantly shifting sites of engagement. The rhetorical signature of CSR heritage, therefore, offsets the immediate terms of its own sort of business–frequently extractive, urgent, transitory, and ultimately less entangled in the burdensome outcomes of biopolitical or governmental projects or the debris left in their wake (Stoler).

Heritage is proffered as a sort of historical palliative for the comparatively short-term community engagement of the corporation, the corporation’s inability to provide long-term employment, and its explicitly extractive agenda. Does this engender new and commonsensical notions about what to expect from a celebratory engagement with history?  Pragmatically, a corporation is limited to a cultural heritage that is cheerful and which promises fast-tracking upstream development, and far less beholden to permanence, consultative diligence, or any form of legislative heritage.

To provide an example of just such a dynamic, in South Africa, it is instructive to think about the heritage of the De Beers company and Anglo-American.  Over the late 19th century, De Beers was responsible for decades of imposed segregation and criminalization of african labor, and when the last diamonds from Kimberley were exported, De Beers rapidly left the community with enormous unemployment, crumbling infrastructure, and reputedly millions of rand in unpaid municipal taxes.  Interestingly, they have chosen to leave in their wake a heritage route pitched as ‘the positive legacy of diamonds,’ glossing the abruptness of their departure and final set of community retrenchments with a tourist trail deftly circumventing the abject poverty of the unemployed laborers living in the center of the sprawling local township. The route is expertly cast within the history-less terms of nature, stringing together a set of wildlife reserves filled with the charismatic mammals that tacitly impute the expiating logic of terra nullius.  Such an example reveals the injury performed by the erasure of difficult histories but, critically, in the process it also manages to weaken the sense of heritage’s debenture to history, opening up the possibilities for future radical disconnects between actual history and what is named as such within CSR inflected heritage projects. Such critical slippages are ultimately enabled by the voluntarism which characterizes the private sector, and also serve to obscure previous iterations of cosmopolitan intervention.  The weakening of the ligatures that bind moral (inalienable) to material rights – that is, the political forms of empowerment and freedom that have legal and political-historical ties – is ironically the work performed by privatized heritage, even as the rhetorical appeal of such projects gestures to these very same rights. While international and state agencies are still somewhat guided by moral obligations to provide for the public good, corporations are guided by best practices that ultimately answer to shareholders and increasing profits rather than the complex obligations entailed by equal citizenship and capacitating concrete forms of protections for the freedom to participate in cultural life. In the corporate sphere, the moral good is not simply added-value that is ‘good for business’. Rather crucially, its philanthropic ideology of voluntary and unregulated ‘responsibility’ enables the circumvention or corporate manipulation of legally binding norms. Furthermore, privatized processes of redistribution continue to recognize and engage with only very particular kinds of stakeholders (Kapelus 2002), and negotiate offsets or programs that are increasingly rendered in terms of the material correlates of neoliberal development:  that is, economic growth, education and capacity building (Shamir 2004). Rather than actually supporting diverse histories and cultural values, CSR heritage works may instead be most effective at spreading liberal economic values.

Take for instance the Cultural Heritage Guide released by multinational mining corporation Rio Tinto in 2011.  In engagements with local indigenous communities, heritage, among other kinds of offsets, has emerged as a bargaining point to negotiate access to land and resources.  One could argue that in these cases the ‘goal’ of CSR-inflected heritage becomes primarily about ‘greenwashing,’ environmental offsets or simply the market-value of history in the present, rather than about people or historical wrongs. Even as these companies take actions that support the autonomy and freedom of aboriginal communities, to be sure this is a neoliberal version of freedom – economic freedom, entrepreneurial possibility, education, rather than a democratic vision of freedom, either via citizenship, or one’s volk in a multicultural perspective. But as Hilgers (2012: 86) reminds us, “even if such discourses often lead to failure or abuse, we must not minimize the significance of the legitimacy that they confer on those who appropriate them, even if only for private ends.”

While the promiscuous sense of the moral good of history has become loosened from the traditional grip of the state’s legislation, or the INGO’s authorizing discourse, it also marks a new sensibility by which the moral good of history can materialize in new immanent fashions and in unexpected local appropriations.  If heritage has become deterritorialized, it has also recast an entitlement to history (with its associated disappointment at moments of mis- or non-recognition) within the terms of entrepreneurial history and autonomy  (Coombe, Silby). As Rosemary Coombe (n.d. 2012: 5) argues: “New programs of government provide the opportunities to assert new kinds of right; given its emphasis upon autonomy and responsibility, neoliberalism, for example, functions through new forms of empowerment and freedom. These spaces of autonomy, however, may also enable older forms of attachment and obligation to assume a new legitimacy when linked to universalizing discourses of morality.”

In the end, there is no ideal moment of interpretive closure on the moral good of heritage; heritage is always simultaneously the font of history’s manipulations as well as the space of historical immanence, wherein actors continually reinscribe and assert their particular complaints and revisions of citizenship, identity, and an entrepreneurial orientation towards the past in ways that are never ultimately driven by either the state or the corporation.  Yet it is important to be attentive to the discursive shifts that cascade from these new terrains of configuring heritage, as our assumptions about goodwill and the historical good are irreparably reshaped in the process.

Cited Works

Appadurai, Arjun 2004 The capacity to Aspire. In Culture and Public Action. V. Rao and M. Walton eds. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Pp. 59-84.

Banjeree, Subhabrata Bobby 2008 Corporate Social Responsibility: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Critical Sociology 34(1) 51-79.

Coombe, R. J. n.d. Intellectual properties, human rights and heritage: The work of ‘culture’ in an age of informational capital. [Stanford Archaeology Center, December 9, 2011]

Elyachar, Julia 2005  Markets of dispossession : NGOs, economic development, and the state in Cairo. Durham: Duke University Press.

Fassin, Didier 2012  Humanitarian reason : a moral history of the present. Berkeley; London: University of California Press.

Ferguson, James 1990  The Anti-Politics Machine: ‘Development,’ Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Cambridge University Press.

Hilgers, Mathieu 2012 The Historicity of the Neoliberal State. Social Anthropology 20((1): 80-94.

Kalb, Don. 2012. Thinking about neoliberalism as if the crisis was actually happening. Social Anthropology 20 (3):318-330.

Kapelus, Paul 2002  Mining, Corporate Social Responsibility and the “Community”: The case of Rio Tinto, Richards Bay Minerals and the Mbonambi. Journal of Business Ethics, 39, 275-296

Kamat, Sangeeta 2004 The privatization of public interest: theorizing NGO discourse in a neoliberal era. Review of International Political Economy 11(1): 155-176.

Logan, William S 2007  Closing Pandora’s Box: Human Rights Conundrums in Cultural Heritage Protection. In Cultural Heritage and Human Rights. H. Silverman and D.F. Ruggles, eds. Pp. 33-52: Springer New York.

Meskell, Lynn 2009  The Nature of Culture in Kruger National Park. In Cosmopolitan Archaeologies. L. Meskell, ed. Durham: Duke University Press. Pp. 89-112.

Roy, Ananya 2012. Ethical Subjects: Market Rule in an Age of Poverty. Public Culture 24 (1):105-8.

Shamir, Ronen 2004. The De-Radicalization of Corporate Social Responsibility. Critical Sociology 30(4): 669-689.

Silbey, S. S. 1992  Making a place for cultural analyses of law: [Commentary]. Law & Social Inquiry, 17(1), 39-48.

Wacquant, Loïc 2012  Three steps to a historical anthropology of actually existing neoliberalism. Social Anthropology 20 (1):66-79.

Weiss, Lindsay Moira 2007  Heritage-making and political identity. Journal of Social Archaeology 7(3):413-431.

Citation for this entry:  Nakamura, Carolyn and Weiss, Lindsay, “Heritage Transactions: Emergent Frictions, Fantasies and Possibilities in New Heritage Networks.” Weblog entry. Leiden-Stanford Heritage Network. January 16, 2013 (www.networkedheritage.org).

Lindsay Weiss spoke with Alfredo González-Ruibal, from the Institute of Heritage Sciences (Incipit) at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) on the topic of inequality and heritage.

Q1. On the nature of the relationship between heritage practitioners and local communities (2:31).

Q2. On the neo-liberal emphasis on consensus within heritage discourses (4:12).

Q3. When consensus is not possible (2:41).

Q4. On the role of archaeology and the meaning of ‘archaeological activism’ (4:03).

Alfredo González-Ruibal is an archaeologist with the Institute of Heritage Sciences (Incipit) of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). Although he has worked (and still works) on late prehistoric archaeology in Europe and Africa, his main research focuses on the archaeology of the recent past. In particular, he is interested in the darker side of modernity: wars, mass migration, failed development projects, colonialism, predatory capitalism and totalitarianism. He has conducted fieldwork related to these topics in Spain, Ethiopia, Brazil and, more recently, Equatorial Guinea. His research on the recent past is guided by four main concerns: politics, the poetics of knowledge, materiality and time.

International Conference

The Conservation of Historic Urban Landscapes and Sustainable Development
March 7-8, 2013
Stanford Archaeology Center – Building 500, 488 Escondido Mall

The CICC (research centre on Comparative Civilizations and Cultural Identities) and the Stanford Archaeology Centre have been awarded the France-Stanford Grant for their collaborative project on “The Conservation of Historic Cities and Sustainable Development”

Please go to this link for details and CFP.

Deadline: December 10, 2012

Regina F. Bendix, Aditya Eggert, Arnika Peselmann, eds. (2012): Heritage Regimes and the State. Göttingen Studies on Cultural Property, Vol. 6. Göttingen: Göttingen University Press 2012.413 Pages, Softcover, 36,00 EUR, ISBN 978-3-86395-075-0.

Organizers: Lindsay M Weiss (Stanford University) and Carolyn Nakamura (Leiden University)
Chair: Chiara De Cesari (University of Amsterdam)
Discussants: Peter J Pels (Leiden University) and Paulla A Ebron (Stanford University and Stanford University)

1:45 PM
Afro-Descendants, Cultural Heritage and Political Rights In Colombia – Maria Fernanda Escallon (Stanford University)

2:00 PM
Neoliberal Logics and Indigenous Claim-Making In Heritage – Melissa F Baird (Stanford University)

2:15 PM
History, Heritage and Violence In Ahmedabad – Yogesh R Chandrani (Columbia University)

2:30 PM
Capturing Compensation In Pluripatrimonial Landscape – Lisa C Breglia (George Mason University)

2:45 PM
Heritage Transactions: Emergent Frictions, Fantasies and Possibilities In New Heritage Networks – Carolyn Nakamura (Leiden University) and Lindsay M Weiss (Stanford University)

3:00 PM
Discussant – Peter J Pels (Leiden University)

3:15 PM
Discussant – Paulla A Ebron (Stanford University)

The Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography (SSAG)
28 November 2012
10:15-12:30
Nordenskiöld, Geovetenskapens hus, Stockholm University, Stockholm

Professor Dieter Soyez, Geography Department at the University of Cologne, has been awarded by SSAG Johan August Wahlberg’s medal in gold. Through a research symposium we will honour Professor Soyez. The program for the symposium comprises lectures by the awardee and two invited guests.

The theme of the symposium; ‘Transnational Heritage’‘

The past is a foreign country’ is the appropriate and metaphorically illuminating title of a seminal book written by the geographer David Lowenthal (1985). This idea can be taken further with the incontrovertible but rarely discussed observation: And our pasts are in foreign countries as well as their pasts in ours, statements especially true for Europe and its heritage, be it located in Europe or elsewhere on this planet.

Most heritage approaches, however, are markedly national with regard to both selection criteria, implicit or outspoken legitimization patterns and scopes of interpretation. More often than not, this also implies that even obvious implications of transboundary interaction or ‘foreignness’ go unmentioned, are hidden or even concealed, sometimes deliberately ‘written out’ of history, indeed. This is especially true for objects or sites that can be linked to or are mirroring, ‘dark’ periods of history, which are subject to implicit or explicit politics of forgetting. Famous World Cultural Heritage sites are no exception.

At first sight this would appear to confirm the general finding in many heritage contexts that apparently one nation’s heritage cannot be another nation’s heritage. However, this situation contrasts starkly with other heritage fields – and heritage tourism, for that matter – where ‘mutual’ or ‘shared’ heritage is not only thriving but also highly appreciated as an important and economically advantageous transnational asset.

Against this backdrop, the main objective of the Stockholm Symposium on Geographies of Heritage Transnationalisation is to present and critically discuss current relevant conceptual approaches and illustrative case studies informing us about barriers, pitfalls and potentials in the seemingly ever growing ‘heritage industry’ (as Hewison, 1987, put it) worldwide. Hence, the thrust of this seminar joins the recently intensified international discussion on ‘Critical heritage studies’, addressing clearly under-researched issues of more traditional approaches (a milestone of this re-orientation was set with the inaugural conference of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies at the University of Gothenburg, in June 2012).

G.J.Ashworth – ‘Why and how was heritage nationalised and what can we do about it?’
Professor, Department of Planning, Faculty of Spatial
Sciences, University of Groningen, Netherlands

Dietrich Soyez – ‘Transnationalizing dark industrial heritage’
Professor emeritus, Department of Geography, Cologne University, Germany

Maggi W.H. Leung -‘Fates of European heritage in post-colonial contexts: Political economy of memory and forgetting in Hong Kong’
Associate Professor, Department of Human Geography and Planning,
Utrecht University, Netherlands

Open to the public. No registration for attendance is required. For inquires please contact Brita Hermelin

Download program and abstracts here.

by Rachel Ama-Asaa Engmann in African Arts, Summer 2012, Volume  45, No. 2, Pages 46-57. (doi:10.1162/afar.2012.45.2.46)