This book investigates the role of cultural heritage as a constitutive dimension of different civilizing missions from the colonial era to the present. It includes case studies of the Habsburg Empire and German colonialism in Africa, Asian case studies of (post)colonial India and the Dutch East Indies/Indonesia, China and French Indochina, and a special discussion on 20th-century Cambodia and the temples of Angkor. The themes examined range from architectural and intellectual history to historic preservation and restoration. Taken together, they offer an overview of historical processes spanning two centuries of institutional practices, wherein the concept of cultural heritage was appropriated both by political regimes and for UNESCO World Heritage agendas.
The contributions in Civilizing Missions in the Twentieth Century discuss how top-down interventions to “improve” societies were justified in terms such as nation building, social engineering, humanitarianism, modernization or the spread of democracy.
The texts presented in this book trace the rise of culture as a major concern for development, international diplomacy, sustainability and national politics over the past two decades. As a major participant in anthropological field research, advocate for cultural freedom and decision-maker in international programs on culture, the author gives a firsthand account of the trade-offs, the contradictions and the management of consensus in these fields. She argues that the constitutive, functional and instrumental aspects of cultural narratives call for a more in-depth understanding of knowledge, leading to cultural and social sustainability in the framework of a "new worlding". Many of the texts gathered here were presented at the United Nations General Assembly and other high-level international meetings. Most of the texts are unpublished; some were first published in Spanish and are now available in English for the first time.
In recent years much scholarly attention has been focused on the encounter of cultures during the early modern period, and the global implications that such encounters held. As a result of this work, scholars have now begun to re-evaluate many aspects of early culture contact, not least with respect to Christian missionary activities. Prominent amongst the missionaries were members of the Society of Jesus. Emerging as a dynamic new religious order in the wake of the Reformation, the Jesuits were deeply committed to promoting religious and cultural reforms both within Europe and in non-Christian lands. Yet whilst scholars have revealed much about the Jesuits' innovative educational endeavours, and their numerous missions to the Americas, Asia and the Sub-Continent, less attention has been paid to the nature of the Jesuits' global civilizing mission as a key feature of their institutional character. Nor has sufficient work been done to fully explain the relationship between the Jesuits' efforts to evangelize and civilize those areas within the Catholic fold and those without. Taking as its focus the city of Naples, this study illuminates how the Jesuits' work in a Catholic European setting reflected their broader global civilizing mission. Despite its Catholic heritage, Naples was popularly perceived as a place of spiritual and social disorder, thus providing an irresistible challenge to religious reformers, such as the Jesuits, who sought to 'civilize' the city. Drawing in considerable numbers of the order, Naples proved to be a training ground for the Jesuits that shaped the order's missionary praxis and influenced the thinking of many who would later travel further afield. By gaining a fuller understanding of this process, it is possible to better understand what drove the Jesuits to craft and perpetuate a cultural map that continues to resonate down to our own times. This book is published in conjunction with the Jesuit Historical Institute series 'Bibliotheca Instituti Historici Societatis Iesu'.
A Theory of Cultural Heritage provides a structured and comprehensive picture of the concept of cultural heritage (CH) and its theoretical and practical derivatives. Arguing that the expanded notion of CH brings with it a number of unresolved conceptual tensions, Muñoz-Viñas summarizes the strong and weak points of the current discourse. Gathering together a range of existing views on cultural heritage and its practices, the book provides a dynamic overview of the theoretical underpinnings behind the notion and also considers how these could evolve in the future. By analyzing the conflicting meanings of the term ‘cultural heritage’ and establishing a more nuanced ontological taxonomy, this book challenges some well-established views and outlines a framework that will allow the reader to better grasp the theoretical and practical complexities of this fascinating notion. A Theory of Cultural Heritage is a thought-provoking and valuable contribution to the existing literature, written in an engaging, clear style that will make it accessible to academics, students and heritage professionals alike.
Best known for its World Heritage program committed to "the identification, protection and preservation of cultural and natural heritage around the world considered to be of outstanding value to humanity," the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was founded in 1945 as an intergovernmental agency aimed at fostering peace, humanitarianism, and intercultural understanding. Its mission was inspired by leading European intellectuals such as Henri Bergson, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, H. G. Wells, and Aldous and Julian Huxley. Often critiqued for its inherent Eurocentrism, UNESCO and its World Heritage program today remain embedded within modernist principles of "progress" and "development" and subscribe to the liberal principles of diplomacy and mutual tolerance. However, its mission to prevent conflict, destruction, and intolerance, while noble and much needed, increasingly falls short, as recent battles over the World Heritage sites of Preah Vihear, Chersonesos, Jerusalem, Palmyra, Aleppo, and Sana'a, among others, have underlined. A Future in Ruins is the story of UNESCO's efforts to save the world's heritage and, in doing so, forge an international community dedicated to peaceful co-existence and conservation. It traces how archaeology and internationalism were united in Western initiatives after the political upheavals of the First and Second World Wars. This formed the backdrop for the emergent hopes of a better world that were to captivate the "minds of men." UNESCO's leaders were also confronted with challenges and conflicts about their own mission. Would the organization aspire to intellectual pursuits that contributed to the dream of peace or instead be relegated to an advisory and technical agency? An eye-opening and long overdue account of a celebrated yet poorly understood agency, A Future in Ruins calls on us all to understand how and why the past comes to matter in the present, who shapes it, and who wins or loses as a consequence.
This book makes a unique and timely contribution to world/global historical studies and related fields. It places essential world historical frameworks by top scholars in the field today in clear, direct relation to and conversation with one other, offering them opportunity to enrich, elucidate and, at times, challenge one another. It thereby aims to: (1) offer world historians opportunity to critically reflect upon and refine their essential interpretational frameworks, (2) facilitate more effective and nuanced teaching and learning in and beyond the classroom, (3) provide accessible world historical contexts for specialized areas of historical as well as other fields of research in the humanities, social sciences and sciences, and (4) promote comparative historiographical critique which (a) helps identify continuing research questions for the field of world history in particular, as well as (b) further global peace and dialogue in relation to varying views of our ever-increasingly interconnected, interdependent, multicultural, and globalized world and its shared though diverse and sometimes contested history.
This book unravels the formation of the modern concept of cultural heritage by charting its colonial, postcolonial-nationalist and global trajectories. By bringing to light many unresearched dimensions of the twelfth-century Cambodian temple of Angkor Wat during its modern history, the study argues for a conceptual, connected history that unfolded within the transcultural interstices of European and Asian projects. With more than 1,400 black-and-white and colour illustrations of historic photographs, architectural plans and samples of public media, the monograph discusses the multiple lives of Angkor Wat over a 150-year-long period from the 1860s to the 2010s. Volume 1 (Angkor in France) reconceptualises the Orientalist, French-colonial ‘discovery’ of the temple in the nineteenth century and brings to light the manifold strategies at play in its physical representations as plaster cast substitutes in museums and as hybrid pavilions in universal and colonial exhibitions in Marseille and Paris from 1867 to 1937. Volume 2 (Angkor in Cambodia) covers, for the first time in this depth, the various on-site restoration efforts inside the ‘Archaeological Park of Angkor’ from 1907 until 1970, and the temple’s gradual canonisation as a symbol of national identity during Cambodia’s troublesome decolonisation (1953–89), from independence to Khmer Rouge terror and Vietnamese occupation, and, finally, as a global icon of UNESCO World Heritage since 1992 until today. Congratulations to our author Michael Falser who received the prestigious 2021 ICAS Book Prize in the "Ground Breaking Subject Matter" category.
The human cost in any conflict is of course the first care in terms of the reduction, if not the elimination of damage. However, the destruction of archaeology and heritage as a consequence of civil and international wars is also of major concern, and the irreversible loss of monuments and sites through conflict has been increasingly discussed and documented in recent years. Post-Conflict Archaeology and Cultural Heritage draws together a series of papers from archaeological and heritage professionals seeking positive, pragmatic and practical ways to deal with conflict-damaged sites. For instance, by showing that conflict-damaged cultural heritage and archaeological sites are a valuable resource rather than an inevitable casualty of war, and suggesting that archaeologists use their skills and knowledge to bring communities together, giving them ownership of, and identification with, their cultural heritage. The book is a mixture of the discussion of problems, suggested planning solutions and case studies for both archaeologists and heritage managers. It will be of interest to heritage professionals, archaeologists and anyone working with post-conflict communities, as well as anthropology, archaeology, and heritage academics and their students at a range of levels.
How did a kremlin, a fortified monastery or a wooden church in Russia become part of the heritage of the entire world? Corinne Geering traces the development of international cooperation in conservation since the 1960s, highlighting the role of experts and sites from the Soviet Union and later the Russian Federation in UNESCO and ICOMOS. Despite the ideological divide, the notion of world heritage gained momentum in the decades following World War II. Divergent interests at the local, national and international levels had to be negotiated when shaping the Soviet and Russian cultural heritage displayed to the world. The socialist discourse of world heritage was re-evaluated during perestroika and re-integrated as UNESCO World Heritage in a new state and international order in the 1990s.
