Reimagining Heritage in the Middle East and North Africa: Whose Voices Count?
Panel III-12, sponsored byOrganized under the auspices of the Coalition for Religious Equality and Inclusive Development, 2021 Annual Meeting
On Tuesday, November 30 at 2:00 pm
Panel Description
Heritage provides material and emotional anchor points that enable communities and their leaders to shape identities. As a result, the construction and destruction of heritage has been an ongoing feature in contests to control peoples and territories (Bevan 2016 [2006]: 210). However, in the last decade the deliberate destruction of heritage in the Middle East and North Africa has become an area of increasing critical attention. From the targeted destruction wrought by Daesh to Trump’s threats against Iranian cultural sites, the ability and role of the international community in preserving cultural sites and practices has been called into question. While a majority of commentary has focused on the universal value of heritage and the significance of its loss at an international level, this panel highlights the necessity of refocusing attention on those who have most directly been impacted by this destruction. In doing so, it emphasises the centrality of understanding the meanings of heritage in communities’ narratives of identity, agency, and what it tells us about how they are experiencing shifting dynamics of power at multiple levels.
With case studies from Egypt, Iraq, Syria and Turkey, the panel explores what it means to decolonise understandings of and approaches to heritage in the Middle East and North Africa. As such, it investigates the implications of foregrounding people’s narratives with regards to the values, meanings and responses embedded within heritage and how the tangible is intimately intertwined with the intangible. By interpreting heritage as being embroiled in practices, this panel questions how individual and community relationships are formed through and to cultural sites. This has important implications for how heritage is identified, preserved and rehabilitated. With rebuilding already underway in Iraq and Syria, this panel asks how places are prioritised and communities engaged in reconstruction initiatives and the impacts and implications this has on physical and existential displacements, emigration, and potentialities for peace. Consequently, it investigates how commitments to the safeguarding of intangible heritage can be incorporated into the reconstruction of tangible sites and the significance this has in the continuation and preservation of communities – especially those which have been in decline in the Middle East and North Africa.
Since 2013 and the rise of Daesh, the destruction of heritage has become a central concern amidst the conflicts and mass humanitarian atrocities in Iraq and Syria. To date, international attention and scholarship has predominantly concentrated on the destruction of tangible archaeological sites. Drawing on participant observation and oral histories produced with minority communities in Iraq and Syria, as well as refugees in Jordan, this paper explores the impacts and implications of heritage destruction and displacement on intangible cultural and religious practices. As such, it undertakes to document and understand the spatial and social legacy of the multiple layers of rupture and alienation resulting from the targeting of culture as an act of war. Placing voices of interlocutors at the centre of analysis, it highlights the importance of memory, nostalgia and intangible heritage in attempting to stave off what Gaston Gordillo has referred to as ‘oblivion’ (2014: 207). Through a focus on physical and existential displacements, it posits heritage as a future oriented strategy that enhances theorisations of reflective and restorative nostalgia (Boym 2001) and discusses the possibilities of equipping youth for the challenges of the 21st century through preserving and engaging heritage. In this way, this paper emphasises how heritage practices, objects and places are formed through activities in the present that work to cultivate narratives that situate identities and establish belonging. Consequently, it highlights potentialities of heritage in building and resourcing different kinds of futures.
The rapid advance of the ‘Islamic State’ (IS) across Syria and Iraq from 2013 onwards had devastating consequences for the myriad peoples of the region and their key heritage sites. However, despite the large volume of literature on heritage in conflict, there remains few empirical studies documenting how people who have experienced persecution and displacement due to conflict value and engage with their heritage: how they perceive and interpret its destruction; the complex relationship between heritage destruction and displacement; and the extent to which its reconstruction can play a role in their return, in fostering social cohesion, and in building a more peaceful future. This paper seeks to address this lacuna by documenting the results of 16 in-depth semi-structured interviews with Syrian and Iraqi Christians, many of whom were eyewitnesses to heritage destruction and were forcibly displaced by the IS. It documents their remarkable resilience in the face of the IS persecution, their return to key Christian towns and villages, and the community-led reconstruction of their heritage sites. The paper concludes that further research is needed to catalogue the complex ways that displaced people experience heritage destruction and the role that heritage reconstruction can play in fostering their return.
There is a growing body of scholarship advocating for a paradigmatic shift towards democratizing heritage studies in its conceptions and praxis. This paper explores the opportunities and constraints of pluralizing whose voices assume saliency in conceiving and interpreting intangible heritage. Informed by Timothy Mitchell’s theorization of the “rule of the experts” (2002), this paper explores three intersecting power hierarchies informing some of the practices of whose voices are privileged as authoritative in the conception and transmission of intangible heritage: gerontocracy, patriarchy and elitism. The paper draws on empirical findings from an initiative undertaken with Coptic youth in urban and remote rural communities in several governorates of Upper Egypt using qualitative and quantitative methods as well as action research incorporating participatory approaches. The paper interrogates the possibilities that participatory development methods hold for enabling the kind of epistemological shifts required to engage with youth not only as transmitters but mediators of heritage. The paper traces the journey of Coptic youth as they engage in gathering, analyzing, interpreting, preserving and disseminating heritage captured through written, audio-visual and photographic means. Tensions inevitably arise between those who on the one hand, who perceive the value of young people engaging with heritage being in their role as faithful transmitters from one generation to the next, and those on the other hand, who see youth’s agency in more dynamic terms. The latter conceives of youth as mediators of not only what heritage is at risk of disappearing and is worth preserving and sharing, but also as agents of transformation, challenging heritage practices that entrench hierarchical and oppressive power relations.
How do states use cultural heritage policy as a mechanism for colonization and domination of ethno-religious minority populations and as instruments of exclusivist nationalism? Does the decolonization of cultural heritage policy offer mechanisms for the sustainability of at-risk communities and for building pluralized forms of nationalism characterized by multi-vocality? This paper seeks to answer those questions by using a case study of Turkey’s cultural heritage policies applied to the Greek and Armenian communities of Turkey. I will focus on the meticulous construction of state cultural heritage policy since the establishment of the Republic of Turkey, identifying the institutional drivers, objectives, and consequences of state policy towards the tangible and intangible cultural heritage of the Greek and Armenian communities, in order to illustrate the impacts on agency, interpretation, vocality, and sustainability of those communities. Two particular aspects of Turkey’s cultural heritage policy will be explored for their effects on imagine national community: first, the state’s commercialization, commodification, and monetization of Greek and Armenian cultural heritage, and second, the state’s focus on religious sites as targets of cultural heritage domination over Turkey’s ethno-religious minorities. By situating Turkey within the broader Middle East context of cultural heritage experiences, the paper aims to offer a comparative example that emphasizes the cultural heritage domination mechanisms that are operative outside of the context of active war, in order to identify the social and political spaces and mechanisms by which ethno-religious minorities can de-colonize heritage policy. The comparative perspective offers suggestive conclusions for how transformations of cultural heritage policy are crucial across the Middle East for conflict prevention and conflict resolution and durable peacebuilding, as well as for creating possibilities for survival and remembrance by ethno-religious minorities and for generating inclusive national identity formation.
