̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Dacia Viejo-Rose

Investigating the politics of the past in the present

mjg209 — Thu, 05 Oct 2017 10:00:22 +0000

Heritage is a word that conjures up images of national treasures and the preservation of ancient traditions. All that is changing. In a world in which the forces of globalisation and fragmentation appear to be pulling communities in opposite directions heritage has found itself at the centre of many of today’s big political and philosophical questions.

“Heritage is now a word that is heard everywhere, a symptom perhaps of a crisis of identity in a globalised world,” says Dr Dacia Viejo Rose, Lecturer in Heritage and the Politics of the Past. “There is a buzz around heritage today as people start to think about it in new ways, linking it with political, economic and environmental issues.”

Some of those debates include the contentious issue of memorials and memorialisation - witness the debate around the confederate statues in the US or decolonisation in the UK and South Africa - forced migration, trafficking of artefacts and sustainable development.

A new research centre launches at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge this autumn which aims to bring a unique, interdisciplinary perspective to the subject. Grounded in Archaeology, the Cambridge Heritage Research Centre seeks to link disciplines as diverse as Classics, Criminology, Education, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Land Economy, and to bring in policymakers and practitioners to discuss and influence some of the big issues of the day and how we understand the role of heritage plays in them.

Professor Marie-Louise Stig Sørensen, co-director of the new centre, says its establishment is a response to a changing world: "Heritage refers to the use of the past and due to the globalisation and mediasation of our lives these centrally important dimensions of how societies form themselves and manage change are changing very fast - we need to understand these processes of heritage making and their effects better."

Unlike other research bodies in Europe which are looking at sustainable heritage issues or taking a critical approach to heritage, the Cambridge centre’s focus will be broader and will not follow any particular theoretical framework. “We will explore the nature of heritage and the process of meaning making which always happens in the present,” says co-director Dr Viejo Rose. There are many researchers at the university who are already working on areas linked to what the research centre will investigate, but they may not use the word heritage to describe it or may use it in different ways. ̽��ֱ��centre will bring them together.

Subjects such as Land Economy cover sustainable development and the commercialisation of heritage through tourism. Dr Viejo Rose says: “Often heritage is brought in as if it was magic fairy dust, creating jobs and attracting tourists, but it can fuel tensions over ownership of the heritage and its commercialisation.” Criminology covers the looting and illicit trade of cultural objects, criminal networks and the trafficking both of culture, ideas and people.

̽��ֱ��centre will also seek to look at the overlap between protection of heritage and nature conservation and at migration issues. “It is in part about roots, and but increasingly also about routes,” says Dr Viejo Rose, “about how heritage moves, what gets left behind, what is taken on journeys, what hybrid forms are created in different places.”

She has recently collaborated on a research study with Syrian tour guides in Berlin museums through the project “Multaka: Museums as Meeting Point”. ̽��ֱ��guides were asked for their views on the Arch of Palmyra. “They felt a sense of loss about the destruction, but what they grieved for most acutely was not the Arch, but rather the tradition of routine gatherings with neighbours, friends and family that was at the heart of Syrian community. Organisations like UNESCO often focus on the extraordinary aspects of heritage, whereas significant expressions of heritage are often to be found in the ordinary. Protection and reparation measures need to find a balance between the two,” she says.

̽��ֱ��centre is holding three pre-launch events on rebuilding Syria at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas from 21st October in a bid to encourage as broad a range of people as possible to think about some of the issues around heritage.

̽��ֱ��events, “Restoring truth to ruins?”, include a three-week exhibition at the Central Library, a workshop with art installations, virtual reality headsets with scans of heritage sites in Syria before and after the war and 3D printed artefacts and a panel discussion with artists and academics.

̽��ֱ��theme of this year's Festival is truth and so these events will explore what truth means in terms of heritage and whose truth is being reflected in reparation projects - issues which are at the heart of discussions around reconstruction, reproduction and authenticity.

All three events look to address questions such as whether you can ever fully restore a heritage site that has been lost and what you gain and lose in the process of restoration as well as why certain artefacts acquire meaning and become important.

" ̽��ֱ��aim is to get people of all ages to think about what reconstruction might involve," says Sarah Nankivell who was a research assistant on the exhibition and is now working for the Forensic Architecture group at Goldsmith's. She adds: "We want people to ask, for example, what impact the process of reconstruction or reinterpretation might have on both the original and its replica and whether that changes the meaning or increases/decreases the value of either. Heritage has been a deliberate target of war over history, but now we have the technology to look at preservation in new ways which brings new questions. Heritage often says more about the people who are living now than those who lived in the past. It reflects the values of the present and what people want to bring from the past into the present."

A new heritage research centre will investigate the changing face of heritage studies, now at the centre of many of today's big debates.

Heritage is now a word that is heard everywhere, a symptom perhaps of a crisis of identity in a globalised world.

Dacia Viejo Rose

C Shane Byrd

Restoring Syria's ruins

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Do Memorials Matter?

bjb42 — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 16:48:54 +0000

As Armistice Day approaches, it is an appropriate time to consider how we choose to remember the past and what influence memorialisation can have on the way a society moves forward from trauma and loss. When memorials become part of our surrounding landscapes and anniversaries are included in annual routines, it is easily assumed that memorials are unchanging. So what roles can memorials play, how do they remain relevant and therefore important?

Over the last four years, research for the CRIC project has focused on the wide ranging forms of memorial activities, how each is linked with distinct intentions and claims. Our case studies in Spain, Germany, France and Denmark have identified the influential role of memorials and commemorations even decades after the events they were constructed to remember. We have learned that memorials evolve over time to suit new social and political needs.

So do memorials matter? Well yes, but not always in the ways we assume.

A main question is the role of memorials in post-conflict reconciliation: do memorials foster reconciliation or do they prolong divisions and resentment? ̽��ֱ��answer that has emerged from our case studies is that memorials are not primarily about reconciliation although, after time they can be used for that purpose. Two examples from the CRIC project show us what this means.

First, we turn to the First World War and to the battle of Verdun in France, a battle which lasted 10 months and saw a total of more than 300,000 battlefield deaths with casualties comparably shared out between the French and German camps. ̽��ֱ��long drawn out deadliness of this battle, in which the front line barely moved, became synonymous with the horror of modern warfare and so presented a significant memorial challenge once the war ended in 1918. A landscape shredded by blasts, trenches and barbed wire, still heaving with unexploded shells and the unrecovered bodies of soldiers, was seen by war veterans as the only possible memorial to the suffering. Yet, even after the first year of the war the terrain had begun to come to life as flowering plants and animals moved in. And so at the site of the Douaumont fort a memorial site was built with a cemetery and ossuary.

In the immediate post-war years this memorial site was one that expressed national grief over the destruction of the war and mourning over the thousands of lives lost. ̽��ֱ��motor for its construction was sorrow rather than an attempt to reach out to Germany even if there was recognition on the part of veterans that both French and German ‘common men’ had suffered at the hands of the politicians and officers that waged the war.

It was on 22 September 1984, 70 years after the start of the war that the memory of Verdun and the memorial site of Douaumont became firmly associated with a reconciliatory symbolism when French President Francois Mitterrand and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl stood in front of the ossuary and a coffin draped with both the French and German flags, and having listened to the German anthem, held hands as the Marseillaise played. For 70 years Verdun had been a landmark in the French historical landscape as a symbol of heroism, martyrdom, sacrifice, until that memorial gesture in 1984 converted it into a symbol of European reconciliation. As we approach the year 2014, the centennial anniversary of the war at which very few living witnesses of the battles will be present, the last poilu died in 2008, it remains to be seen what new symbolism will be attached to Verdun and it memorial spaces.

Second we look at the city of Dresden, the capital of Saxony replete with baroque and rococo architecture, which on 13 February 1945 suffered such a severe aerial bombing campaign by the Allied forces that a fire storm resulted wiping out the city centre and thousands of its inhabitants. When the Second World War ended Dresden found itself on the eastern side of a new barrier as the Iron Curtain was drawn along the front lines of the Cold War. As the horrors of Nazi extermination campaigns came to light and with the Nuremburg trials assigning culpability for Nazi crimes against humanity, there was very little space left for mourning over the death and destruction experienced by Germans. How could the destruction of Dresden be memorialised within a framework of German guilt?

It is this question that the city and its citizens have been struggling with and the struggle has gradually become an open conflict as on every February 13^th various extremes political groups clash in Dresden. In between the two extremes, in greater numbers but not shouting as loudly, there is a large peace movement which invites a delegation from Coventry to take part in the commemorations and uses the occasion to form a human chain around the old part of the city that was rebuilt. ̽��ֱ��peace movement has become more visible and more vocal since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

What these two brief stories of memorialisation show is that memorials are far more complicated than any granite monument might suggest. They are processes involving a constellation of meanings, symbols, emotions, memories and narratives. Memorials are not inherently about reconciliation but they can come to be used to communicate reconciliatory messages.

Yes, memorials matter, but it is our use of them that make them matter, for better or worse.

CRIC will be presenting their research at a session at the Festival of Ideas called Do memorials matter? at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research from 2-5.30pm on 22 October.

For the Festival of Ideas, Dr Dacia Viejo-Rose, a researcher on the CRIC research project, will discuss the unexpected impact and diverse use of memorials in societies recovering from war. Directed from the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, the CRIC project is investigating the reconstruction of cultural heritage after conflict in different areas of Europe.

Memorials are far more complicated than any granite monument might suggest.

Dacia Viejo-Rose

Gordon T. Lawson.

Verdun Memorial.

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