Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-wq484 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-25T12:25:31.863Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Heritage in (the) Ruins

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 October 2017

Nathalie Peutz
Nathalie Peutz*
Affiliation:
Department of Arab Crossroads Studies, New York University Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; e-mail: npeutz@nyu.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

First-time European and American visitors to the United Arab Emirates, where I live, are often surprised by the prevalence of heritage villages, festivals, and sports in hypermodern Abu Dhabi and Dubai. “Heritage” in the Arab Gulf, as elsewhere in the Middle East, is a central and growing industry, attracting the attention of scholars as well as investors and tourists. At the same time, much of the region's—and the world's—invaluable cultural heritage has been and continues to be obliterated by insurgents and governments alike. Spectacular assaults on historical sites, cultural institutions, and symbols of cultural-religious diversity in Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Mali, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Yemen demonstrate that the “new wars” of the 21st century are being fought on the terrain of cultural heritage as much as they are over other precious resources. And yet, the interconnections between this heritage construction and destruction remain underexplored. In much of the scholarship produced in the burgeoning field of critical heritage studies, the duplexity of these processes is ignored. Instead, most edited volumes and “global” analyses of the field look to the Middle East and other Muslim-majority nations only in so far as they present case studies of heritage destruction—the bombing of the Bamyan Buddhas in Afghanistan and the looting of the National Museum of Iraq being iconic examples.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 49 , Special Issue 4: Forced Displacement and Refugees , November 2017 , pp. 721 - 728
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

NOTES

1 UNESCO, “Cultural Heritage Must Be Saved from New ‘21st Century Wars,’” accessed 30 June 2017, http://www.unesco-hist.org/en-us/news/408.html.

2 See, for example, the recently published thirty-seven-chapter survey, A Companion to Heritage Studies, eds. William Logan, Maíréad Nic Craith, and Ulrich Kokel (Malden, Mass.: Wiley Blackwell, 2016).

3 Robertson, Iain J. M., ed., Heritage from Below (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2012)Google Scholar.

4 Brusius, Mirjam, “Towards a History of Preservation Practices: Archaeology, Heritage, and the History of Science,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 47 (2015): 574–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Colla, Elliot, Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Reid, Donald Malcolm, Whose Pharoahs?: Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

6 Shaw, Wendy M. K., Possessors and Possessed: Museums, Archaeology, and the Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2003), 89–91 Google Scholar; Braae, Christel, “The Early Museums and the Formations of their Publics,” in Middle Eastern Cities 1900–1950: Public Places and Public Spheres in Transformation, ed. Chr, Hans. Nielsen, Korsholm and Skovgaard-Peterson, Jacob (Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 2001), 123 Google Scholar.

7 Davis, Eric, “The Museum and the Politics of Control in Modern Iraq,” in Commemorations: The Politics of Identity, ed. Gillis, John R. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Bernhardsson, Magnus T., Reclaiming a Plundered Past: Archaeology and Nationalism in Modern Iraq (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

8 Tamari, Salim, “Lepers, Lunatics and Saints: The Nativist Ethnography of Tawfiq Canaan and his Jerusalem Circle,” Jerusalem Quarterly 20 (2004): 24–43 Google Scholar.

9 van Harmersveld, Ineke, ed., Cultural Policies in Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Syria and Tunisia: An Introduction (Amsterdam: Boekman Foundation, 2010)Google Scholar.

10 Pieprzak, Katarzyna, Imagined Museums: Art and Modernity in Postcolonial Morocco (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Mitchell, Timothy, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Porter, Geoff D., “Unwitting Actors: The Preservation of Fez's Cultural Heritage,” Radical History Review 86 (2003): 123–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Rjoob, Ahmed A., “The Impact of Israeli Occupation on the Conservation of Cultural Heritage Sites in the Occupied Palestinian Territories: The Case of ‘Salvage Excavation,’” Conservation and Management of Archaeological Sites 11 (2009): 214–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Al-Radi, Selma, “In the Aftermath of Civil War: Cultural Heritage in Lebanon,” The Getty Conservation Institute Newsletter 11 (1996)Google Scholar, accessed 30 June 2017, http://www.getty.edu/conservation/publications_resources/newsletters/11_1/news2_1.html.

13 Nadia Wardeh, “The Problematic of Turāth in Contemporary Arab Thought: A Study of Adonis and Ḥasan Ḥanafī” (PhD diss., McGill University, 2008); this paragraph draws also on Boullatta, Issa, Trends and Issues in Contemporary Arab Thought (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1990)Google Scholar; and Salvatore, Armando, “The Rational Authentication of Turāth in Contemporary Arab Thought: Muhammad al-Jābirī and Ḥasan Ḥanafī,” Muslim World 85 (1995): 191–214 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Deeb, Lara, An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shiʿi Lebanon (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

15 Van Harmersveld, ed., Cultural Policies; Hassan, Fekri, de Trafford, Aloisia, and Youssef, Mohsen, eds., Cultural Heritage and Development in the Arab World (Alexandria, Egypt: Bibliotheca Alexandrina, 2008)Google Scholar; Samuels, Kathryn Lafrenz, “Trajectories of Development: International Heritage Management of Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa,” Archaeologies: The Journal of the World Archaeological Congress 5 (2009): 68–91 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Hazbun, Waleed, Beaches, Ruins, Resorts: The Politics of Tourism in the Arab World (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 133–88Google Scholar; Maffi, Irene, “The Emergence of Cultural Heritage in Jordan: The Itinerary of a Colonial Intervention,” Journal of Social Archaeology 9 (2009): 5–34 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shryock, Andrew, “The New Jordanian Hospitality: House, Host and Guest in the Culture of Public Display,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 46 (2004): 35–62 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 This expansion of heritage and museums in the Arabian Peninsula has generated a corresponding growth in heritage and museum studies and related scholarship. For overviews, see Exell, Karen and Rico, Trinidad, eds., Cultural Heritage in the Arabian Peninsula: Debates, Discourses and Practices (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2014)Google Scholar; and Exell, Karen, Modernity and the Museum in the Arabian Peninsula (New York: Routledge, 2016)Google Scholar.

18 ConstitutionNet, “Yemen: Draft Constitution of 2015,” accessed 30 June 2017, http://www.constitutionnet.org/vl/item/yemen-draft-constitution-2015.

19 Carman, John and Sørenson, Marie Louise Stig, “Heritage Studies: An Outline,” in Heritage Studies: Methods and Approaches, ed. Sørenson, Marie Louise Stig and Carman, John (New York: Routledge, 2009)Google Scholar; Harrison, Rodney, Heritage: Critical Approaches (New York: Routledge, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Meskell, Lynn, The Nature of Heritage: The New South Africa (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012)Google Scholar; Smith, Laurajane, Uses of Heritage (New York: Routledge, 2006)Google Scholar.

20 Nathalie Peutz, “Socotra's Musealization of the Present and Recycling of the Past” (paper presented at the Museums in Arabia Conference, Doha, Qatar, 15 June 2014).