In recent years the dominant discussion around Iraq’s cultural heritage has focused on ISIS’s deliberate destruction of ancient sites, yet since the start of the protests in Baghdad in October 2019, the use of Iraq’s ancient archaeological sites and artifacts in protest art requires us to revisit initial assessments. Immediately following ISIS’ destruction of cultural heritage sites in Iraq and Syria, archaeologists and others offered a wide range of explanations about the destruction. In much of this literature ISIS’ destructive acts were identified as performances of strength for both internal and external audiences at local and international levels. In other scholarly works the destruction was interpreted as a rejection of the West, the nation-state, secular nationalism, or a rebuttal against colonialism. Additional academic approaches portrayed the destruction as a performative act in the jihadi initiation process or a reenactment linking to earlier iconoclasm. Each of these attempts at an explanation provides a helpful perspective on the destruction, but the complexities of the symbolic use of Iraq’s ancient heritage are now, in retrospect, effectively viewed through the lens of the 2019 protest art in, and inspired by, Tahrir square. Iraq’s ancient heritage is incorporated into protest art as pan-Iraqi and non-sectarian symbols matching the 2019 protest movement’s written messaging and use of the national flag. As symbols of Iraq’s pluralism and diversity in both modern and ancient times, Iraq’s ancient heritage is highlighted in this protest art for the same reason that ISIS sought to destroy it. This paper details examples of ancient heritage in Iraq’s protest art juxtaposed with the convolutions of ISIS’s destruction to illustrate the connection to ancient sites and artifacts in Iraq and resilience in the face of heritage erasure.

In Morocco, tbourida arose from a male cavalry charge that is now a folkloric sport and spectacle. Today, only a handful of women compete in a crowd of thousands of men. Women’s participation engages with gendered forms of cultural heritage and sporting activity that remained exclusive to men until the early 2000s. Examining traditional equestrian tbourida in particular is an interesting focal point for understanding cultural change and practice within Moroccan Islam. On the tbourida field and within the practices, costuming, and actions of the sport, riders balance warding off the evil eye (or bad luck caused by the jealousy of others), avoid djinns (spirits that can inhabit themselves or their horses), and increasing or attracting baraka (religious charisma, blessings, or good luck). Often certain behaviours or items offer protection against the evil eye and djinns together, while certain rituals for baraka are also put in place to protect against the evil eye. Older, typically male riders continue these habits and adhere more strictly to certain practices, while the younger generation focuses solely on protecting themselves against the evil eye. Utilizing ethnographic research from three years of fieldwork, I will discuss how riders avoid the evil eye and djinn, and how riders attract or receive baraka. The goal of this presentation is to demonstrate Moroccan Islam not as timeless, but how women riders adapt and utilize these practices to negotiate and earn legitimacy on the tbourida field.

This paper addresses the construction of nationalist historical narratives in post-Ottoman nation states, a process that was integral to the process of nation building in states that emerged from the Ottoman Empire. Studies of the formation of these narratives in Greece have primarily focused on the period immediately following Greek Independence from the Ottoman Empire in the early nineteenth century. This paper, however, investigates the formation of these narratives following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey in 1922. Specifically this paper – which forms part of a broader dissertation project on the formation of the Benaki Museum in Athens from 1900 – 1940 – does so through an investigation of the Museum’s collection of Ottoman-period Greek folk costumes. This paper demonstrates that the Benaki collection (and the manner in which it was exhibited and disseminated) created a revisionist image of the Ottoman period in Greece, and was part of a broader process that allowed the Ottoman period to be integrated within Greek nationalist historiography. As the paper demonstrates, in the late nineteenth century – when the Greek people formed a significant fraction of the Ottoman Empire’s population – these same costumes had been instrumentalized by the Ottoman government to project an image of the Ottoman state as a harmonious multiethnic entity. (The Greek costumes had been exhibited, most famously, alongside the costumes of other Ottoman peoples, in the Ottoman pavilion in the 1873 Worlds Exposition in Vienna and further disseminated in the Costumes Populaires de la Turquie photographic album.) The paper thus undertakes a thorough comparative study of the Ottoman framing of these costumes (both in exhibitions and publications) and the Benaki Museum’s own framing (evinced in archival guidebooks, photographs, and publications). In doing so, the paper argues that the Benaki Museum undercut the political message underling the Ottoman displays, portraying instead Ottoman-Greeks as part of a single nation, whose existence the museum anachronistically telescoped back into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In demonstrating that the Greek cultural elite was keenly aware of Ottoman precedents, this paper also subverts a basic assumption that underlies most scholarship on modern Greece: that Greek cultural trends found their origin in Europe.

One of the most impressive aspects of Qatar’s new national museum, which opened in April 2019, are the floor-to-ceiling films that were specially commissioned to fill the curved walls of various galleries and to complement the artifacts displayed within. One of these films, a 9-minute piece found in the “Life in Al Barr (Desert)” gallery, depicts a day in the life of a family in the northern desert of Qatar. Part of the “People of Qatar” narrative, this gallery focuses on the desert’s “distinctive way of life” from the 1950s (wall inscription, authors’ visit, May 2, 2019). Yet nowhere in this gallery—or elsewhere in the museum—is the word “Bedouin” used, nor is there any indication that the new film is based on a 16-minute film created by a 1959 Danish anthropological expedition (Bang 1962; Ferdinand 1993; Nielsen 2009). We argue in this paper that these omissions are deliberate and a part of a specific nation-building narrative: a unified message of national identity and heritage in which all Qataris traversed between the desert and the sea on a seasonal basis (Al-Hammadi 2018; Mitchell and Curtis 2018). For a country that does not have a large number of tangible historical artifacts (Commins 2012), the hundreds of photographs and film from the 1959 Danish expedition are crucial pieces of evidence of Qatar’s desert-dwelling past. These pieces of evidence, however, stand in sharp contrast to the top-down narrative of a unified national heritage. In this research, we explore how the new national museum displays and represents these old media objects in ways that support its heritage narrative. We have two major findings. First, we explain how many of the extant photographs and clips of the original film footage can be found on the walls and in the digital interactives of the gallery, structured as modules that focus on a particular ritual, skill, or tool. This strategy highlights preferred evidence and removes problematic scenes that contradict a sense of unity. Second, we demonstrate how the original 1962 film has been reimagined by a new director and curatorial team: the new film retains elements of the original but uses new visuals to promote the unity narrative that combines desert and sea lifestyles. Together, our findings contribute to the ongoing conversation about the relationship between new narratives, old media, museums, and nation-building in the Gulf (Erskine-Loftus, Hightower, and Al-Mulla 2016; Exell and Wakefield 2016).

In 1982, only three years after the 1979 Iranian Revolution, a committee, overseen by the president and the Friday Imam of the time, was searching for a suitable location for the building of a new Musalla in Tehran. The Musalla complex would extend beyond the functions of a mosque, with the ability to host gatherings of thousands of people, be easily accessible from different parts of the city, and be able to serve for various religious, political, social, and cultural activities. As the result of years of assessment, the committee decided to build the Musalla on the Abbas-Abad lands in the center of northern Tehran, the site of the unfinished project of Shahestan Pahlavi, which started in 1975 and was halted by the street protests that lead to the 1979 Revolution. Today, the Musalla complex stands on two million square meters plot of land, with fourteen minarets and seven domes, and although open to use since 2013, it is still under construction. With its references to ancient Persian architecture, the Iran-Iraq war, and its gigantic scale, the Musalla is a monument of the Iranian state aiming at impressing both the Iranian and the global audience. based on the architectural design and the agencies behind the new planning of the Musalla, and contextualizing it within the Abbas-Abad lands, I will delve into the question of monumental cultural-leisure architecture as the signifier of an emerging state as well as the symptom of a traumatic history. This paper argues that the Islamic Republic saw this prime site in the capital as a clean slate, devoid of the blood of the revolution and war, and a space of imagination on which the state could leave its legacy, and create a new kind of urban spectacle, visually bold and spatially expansive.

A popular dance genre rooted in Turkey’s eastern Black Sea region, horon, was choreographed by Cavit ?entürk in the late 1960s to represent the country in international folk dance and music festivals. In comparison to this moment of the dance’s re-construction, my paper examines how horon was collected and codified, and conceived as a national folk genre, for the first time by leading ethnomusicologist Mahmut Rag?p Gazimihal in the early twentieth century. By using Gazimihal’s field notes and notations produced during his trip to the Black Sea in the summer of 1929 and analyzing ?entürk’s choreography, I discuss continuities and discrepancies in the institutionalization of folk dance and music heritage in Turkey. In his field notes, Gazimihal claims that the Black Sea expedition was the first attempt of Turkish ethnomusicologists to collect folk dance as an object of knowledge. State agents and associations helped him gather materials from the cities, villages, and prisons, and invited locals to perform for the researcher. At the same time, in participating Gazimihal’s research, the participants were also actively shaping what would be considered Turkish dance and music. The technologies of the time such as passenger ship lines and cameras facilitated the collection and recording, whereas, time limitations and accidents of fortune defined the scope of the collected material, which is currently disappeared. This paper asks: How were these research processes organized? What were the political, social, and economic infrastructures both enabled and constrained the researchers? What kind of knowledge categories were produced to examine folk genres? How do we trace absence in the archive? Through these questions, the paper aims to critically reconstruct these historical moments on the study of folk dance and music in Turkey and suggests how ethnographic research is used to create categories of authenticity and belonging to the Turkish nation.