This volume addresses the problem of how Caribbean nations deal with the challenges of protecting their cultural heritages or patrimonies within the context of pressing economic development concerns.
What happens when UNESCO heritage conventions are ratified by a state? How do UNESCO’s global efforts interact with preexisting local, regional and state efforts to conserve or promote culture? What new institutions emerge to address the mandate? The contributors to this volume focus on the work of translation and interpretation that ensues once heritage conventions are ratified and implemented. With seventeen case studies from Europe, Africa, the Caribbean and China, the volume provides comparative evidence for the divergent heritage regimes generated in states that differ in history and political organization. The cases illustrate how UNESCO’s aspiration to honor and celebrate cultural diversity diversifies itself. The very effort to adopt a global heritage regime forces myriad adaptations to particular state and interstate modalities of building and managing heritage.
“From such well-known and long-vexed sites as the Athenian Acropolis to more contemporary locales like the Space Age Modernist capital city of Brasília, the conflicting and not always neatly resolvable forces that bear upon preservation are addressed as clearly and thoughtfully as the general reader could hope for.”—New York Review of Books “...an astonishing feat of research, compilation and synthesis.”—Context The book delivers the first major survey concerning the conservation of cultural heritage in both Europe and the Americas. Architectural Conservation in Europe and the Americas serves as a convenient resource for professionals, students, and anyone interested in the field. Following the acclaimed Time Honored, this book presents contemporary practice on a country-by-country and region-by-region basis, facilitating comparative analysis of similarities and differences. The book stresses solutions in architectural heritage protection and the contexts in which they were developed.
Conservation is a core value for most archaeological societies. It is highlighted in their codes of ethics, statements of mission, and governance. In recognition of this, the World Archaeological Congress, with the Getty Conservation Institute and a consortium of other conservation organizations, brought together scholars working throughout the globe to discuss vital issues that affect archaeological heritage today. This volume presents the proceedings of the Conservation Theme at the Congress, held in Washington, D.C., June 22–26, 2003. Among the topics discussed are: Innovative Approaches to Policy and Management of Archaeological Sites; Finding Common Ground: The Role of Stakeholders in Decision Making; Archaeology and Tourism: A Viable Partnership?; Preserving the Cultural Heritage of Iraq and Afghanistan; Archaeology and Conservation in China Today; and Managing Archaeological Sites and Rock Art Sites in Southern Africa. These proceedings should do much to promote and strengthen the relationship between the disciplines of conservation and archaeology.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, drastic social and political changes, technological innovations, and exposure to non-Western cultures affected Germany's built environment in profound ways. The economic challenges of Germany's colonial project forced architects designing for the colonies to abandon a centuries-long, highly ornamental architectural style in favor of structural technologies and building materials that catered to the local contexts of its remote colonies, such as prefabricated systems. As German architects gathered information about the regions under their influence in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific—during expeditions, at international exhibitions, and from colonial entrepreneurs and officials—they published their findings in books and articles and organized lectures and exhibits that stimulated progressive architectural thinking and shaped the emerging modern language of architecture within Germany itself. Offering in-depth interpretations across the fields of architectural history and postcolonial studies, Itohan Osayimwese considers the effects of colonialism, travel, and globalization on the development of modern architecture in Germany from the 1850s until the 1930s. Since architectural developments in nineteenth-century Germany are typically understood as crucial to the evolution of architecture worldwide in the twentieth century, this book globalizes the history of modern architecture at its founding moment.
In the short span of some 50 years, starting with the founding of Santo Domingo at the end of the 15th century, the Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors established most of the cities that today are the cornerstone of urban Latin America. The monuments, buildings and plazas that make up this vast heritage continue to define the region's cultural identity and constitute a valuable asset for socioeconomic development. This book explores ways to bring private investors, developers and urban residents into the preservation process, which is beyond the scope of government alone. It describes the different approaches being used to involve these various stakeholders, including successful if not coordinated interventions by public and private interests in Cartagena, Colombia ; operation of a mixed-capital corporation in Quito, Ecuador; and a government-promoted private investment program in Recife, Brazil. The experiences of these three historic Latin American cities provide significant clues about conditions that attract investment, and show why sustained private involvement is the key to furthering heritage preservation in the region. (Adapté du résumé de l'éditeur).
Through an innovative approach that combines years of ethnographic research with British imperial archival sources, this book reveals how cultural heritage has been negotiated by colonial, independent state, and community actors in Belize from the late nineteenth century to the present. Alicia McGill explores the heritage of two African-descendant Kriol communities as seen in the contexts of archaeology and formal education. McGill demonstrates that in both spheres, Belizean institutions have constructed and used heritage places and ideologies to manage difference, govern subjects and citizens, and reinforce development agendas. In the communities studied here, ancient Maya cities and legacies have been prized while Kriol histories have been marginalized, and racial and ethnic inequalities have endured. Yet McGill shows that at the same time, Belizean teachers and children resist, maintaining their Kriol identity through storytelling, subsistence practices, and other engagements with ecological resources. They also creatively identify connections between themselves and the ancient cultures that once lived in their regions. Exploring heritage as a social construct, McGill provides examples of the many ways people construct values, meanings, and customs related to it. Negotiating Heritage through Education and Archaeology is a richly informed study that emphasizes the importance of community-based engagement in public history and heritage studies. A volume in the series Cultural Heritage Studies, edited by Paul A. Shackel
Winner of the 2016 Antoinette Forrester Downing Award presented by the Society of Architectural Historians. In many cities across the world, particularly in Europe, old buildings form a prominent part of the built environment, and we often take it for granted that their contribution is intrinsically positive. How has that widely-shared belief come about, and is its continued general acceptance inevitable? Certainly, ancient structures have long been treated with care and reverence in many societies, including classical Rome and Greece. But only in modern Europe and America, in the last two centuries, has this care been elaborated and energised into a forceful, dynamic ideology: a ‘Conservation Movement’, infused with a sense of historical destiny and loss, that paradoxically shared many of the characteristics of Enlightenment modernity. The close inter-relationship between conservation and modern civilisation was most dramatically heightened in periods of war or social upheaval, beginning with the French Revolution, and rising to a tragic climax in the 20th-century age of totalitarian extremism; more recently the troubled relationship of ‘heritage’ and global commercialism has become dominant. Miles Glendinning’s new book authoritatively presents, for the first time, the entire history of this architectural Conservation Movement, and traces its dramatic fluctuations in ideas and popularity, ending by questioning whether its recent international ascendancy can last indefinitely.