Museums, Heritage and International Development

Paul Basu, Wayne Modest, Paul Basu, Wayne Modest

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135085209
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Ciencias sociales
• Categoría: Estudios de desarrollo global

While many claims are made regarding the power of cultural heritage as a driver and enabler of sustainable development, the relationship between museums, heritage and development has received little academic scrutiny. This book stages a critical conversation between the interdisciplinary fields of museum studies, heritage studies and development studies to explore this under-researched sphere of development intervention. In an agenda-setting introduction, the editors explore the seemingly oppositional temporalities and values represented by these "past-making" and "future-making" projects, arguing that these provide a framework for mutual critique. Contributors to the volume bring insights from a wide range of academic and practitioner perspectives on a series of international case studies, which each raise challenging questions that reach beyond merely cultural concerns and fully engage with both the legacies of colonial power inequalities and the shifting geopolitical dynamics of contemporary international relations. Cultural heritage embodies different values and can be instrumentalized to serve different economic, social and political objectives within development contexts, but the past is also intrinsic to the present and is foundational to people's aspirations for the future. Museums, Heritage and International Development explores the problematics as well as potentials, the politics as well as possibilities, in this fascinating nexus.

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Museums, Heritage and International Development

A Critical Conversation

Paul Basu and Wayne Modest

The impetus for this book came from a symposium that we organized at the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam in September 2011. The symposium was the first in a series that we envisaged under the rubric of ‘Critical Conversations in Culture and Development’. While many claims have been made concerning the importance of culture in international development interventions, we were conscious that there was very little in the way of critical reflection or evaluation of these claims. We were also conscious of the lack of understanding that often exists between the worlds of academic critique, policy making and development practice. Our objective, therefore, was to create a forum in which to bring together different stakeholders and inter-locutors in an attempt to foster constructive dialogue and interchange. The challenges of bridging academic critique and theorization, on the one hand, and policy development and implementation, on the other, are well known, and it would be naïve of us to imagine that the meeting brought about any significant breakthrough. We remain committed, however, to the idea that there is a need for such critical conversations: a need to explore, reflexively and dialogically, the relationships not only between different actors and their various perspectives but, even more so, the very concepts of culture and development.

Within the wider debate on culture and development (see, e.g., Altbach and Hassan 1996; Schech and Haggis 2000; Rao and Walton 2004; Radcliffe 2006), our interest in this volume is to continue a conversation between the more specific fields of museums, cultural heritage and international development. It is not widely known quite how extensive this engagement is, with organizations such as the Prince Claus Fund, Aga Khan Development Network, J. Paul Getty Trust, Ford Foundation, World Monuments Fund, British Museum, Tropenmuseum, Smithsonian Institution, West Africa Museums Programme and many others, as well as international agencies such as the World Bank and UNESCO, funding and implementing signifi-cant museum- and heritage-related development projects. Regardless of our personal convictions concerning the social value of museums and heritage, it is important to state at the outset that we do not take the position of heritage advocates here. We do not see museums or heritage initiatives as some kind of panacea, nor do we understand heritage as a necessarily positive phenomenon. Heritage, as we know, can take deeply conservative forms and may be a divisive force that contributes to intolerance and conflict (Bevan 2006; Silverman 2011). Understood as the active presence of the past in the present, however, heritage is a simple fact: an inheritance that has the power to shape individuals’ and societies’ current predispositions and their visions of the future—for good or ill. Thus, our interest here is to explore the problematics as well as the potentials, the politics as well as the possibilities, in the relationship between heritage and development. The purview of our conversation extends to include museums as public institutions that are often engaged in valorizing the past for present communities and that are often called upon to implement development-oriented heritage programmes.

Museum studies, heritage studies and development studies are already highly interdisciplinary spheres of scholarship. Our conversation takes place, therefore, in what might be characterized as an inter-interdisciplinary space. In the wake of the UN World Decade for Cultural Development (1988– 1997) there was a spate of interest among development scholars, including economists, in cultural dynamics (e.g., World Bank 2001a; Verhelst and Tyndale 2002; Rao and Walton 2004). While aspects of this cultural turn have become incorporated into mainstream development discourse, the degree to which this has transformed development practice is debatable, and the lack of continued reflection on these issues has been disappointing. There has, on the other hand, been a more sustained shift in museum and heritage studies toward issues relevant to international development. There is, for example, a significant museological literature discussing the capacity of museums to engage communities across social, cultural and political boundaries (e.g., Karp et al. 1992; Clifford 1997; Kreps 2003; Karp et al. 2006; Golding and Modest 2013), to promote social inclusion and transformation (e.g., Sandell 2007; Janes and Conaty 2005; Silverman 2009; Sandell and Nightingale 2012) and to participate in the empowerment of marginalized populations (e.g., Peers and Brown 2003; Healy and Witcomb 2006; Stanley 2007; Sleeper-Smith 2009). Similarly, within contemporary cultural heritage studies, there is a burgeoning literature on the role of heritage in postconflict contexts, in sustainable tourism development and in human rights activism (e.g., Silverman and Ruggles 2007; Williams 2007; Winter 2007; Timothy and Nyaupane 2009; Langfield et al. 2010; Giblin 2013). Our ambition in this volume is to bring these disparate fields of study together for the first time.

Heritage and Development: Paired Opposites?

The idea of a conversation or dialogue suggests interlocution between distinct or opposing perspectives: between academic critique and professional practice, for example, or between the concepts of heritage and development themselves. Culture, and especially traditional culture, has often been perceived as being in opposition to development and understood as a barrier to progress. Thus, discussing the intellectual heritage of development, Emma Crewe and Elizabeth Harrison observe,

While rational motivation is assumed to direct people towards maximizing gain, there is a prevalent view that ‘traditional culture’ relies on something far less reasonable. The idea of traditions holding people back has a persistence across the development industry. ‘Developers’ talk and write about the traditional way of life, the traditional relationship between husband and wife, traditional skills, the traditional three-stone fire, and traditional farming practices. This traditionalism is partly attributed to economic or ecological conditions, but is often conceived of as being linked to a psychological or cultural disposition that is in some sense backward and prevents people from embracing modernity.

(1998: 43)

While we do not define cultural heritage narrowly in terms of traditionalism, it is nevertheless apparent that heritage and development are often framed in this manner as paired opposites: communities or societies may be either open to processes of change and modernization or else they are enthralled by inherited cultural practices and attitudes that prevent them from developing and that keep them mired, somehow, in the past. ‘Culture’, notes Arjun Appadurai, ‘is opposed to development, as tradition is opposed to newness, and habit to calculation. It is hardly surprising that nine out of ten treaties on development treat culture as a worry or a drag on the forward momentum of planned economic change’ (2004: 60).

This kind of binary logic has, of course, been thoroughly critiqued, not least in the development studies literature. Simple dichotomies that oppose ‘developers and developing, donors and beneficiaries, rich and poor, rural and urban, Third World and First World, indigenous and Western’, while still fundamental to much development thinking, are now acknowledged to be oversimplifications that obscure the complexities and nuances of social reality (Crewe and Harrison 1998: 4). While this critique has led many to reject such dualisms outright and has encouraged a turn to more nuanced ethnographic analyses of development practices and encounters (e.g., Mosse 2005, 2011; Fechter 2012; E. Harrison 2013), others have rendered these dis-cursive formations as ethnographic objects in their own right. Drawing upon John Law’s (1994) insight that ‘dualisms are not immutable givens within the world, but achievements brought about through forms of ordering that entail particular social practices’, Thomas Yarrow argues that, rather than abandoning them completely, ‘attention should focus on their discursive possibilities and practical effects within the world, whether positive or negative’ (2008: 429; see also Jeffries 2010). Rather than merely exposing these discursive forms as artifice, Yarrow maintains that there is a need to examine the role that these oppositions perform and the meanings and uses that they acquire in different contexts (2008: 428).

Mindful of the dangers of reifying such dualisms as false objects, we follow Yarrow in this introductory essay and refrain from abandoning the antithetical logic of heritage and development. Rather, we think through this particular oppositional pairing to explore the work that it performs. Our expectation, then, in staging a conversation between what appear to be oppositional temporalities, values and practices is not that the differences between heritage and development will dissolve or be exposed as illusory, but that they may have a mutually destabilizing effect on each other, which may yet be productive.

Development Temporalities, Heritage Temporalities

Discursively, cultural heritage and development would seem to occupy quite distinct temporalities. Indeed, by focusing explicitly on cultural heritage rather than culture per se, we wish to foreground these apparently oppositional temporal dynamics in our discussion. The very word development connotes a future orientation, synonymous with concepts of advancement, change, evolution and progress; heritage, conversely, suggests an orientation toward the past, to what has gone before, invoking notions of tradition, nostalgia, preservation and perhaps obsolescence.

Despite the profound critiques of James Ferguson (1990), Arturo Escobar (1994) and other so-called postdevelopment theorists (Rahnema and Bawtree 1997), the evolutionary worldview from which modern development thinking emerged continues to undergird much contemporary development policy and practice. There remains an idea that the world is divided into advanced, progressive, developed states, and those that are somehow backward, undeveloped and in need of assistance in order to catch up. As Maia Green and colleagues have recently argued, development interventions ‘depend on particular notions of time and progress that assume universal trajectories in which certain people and places are left behind and have to be brought into a future modernity’ (2012: 1643). With its ‘technologies of project management, strategic planning, and budgetary frameworks’, development may thus be understood as an instrument of ‘future-making’ (Green et al. 2012: 1644). At the same time, Uma Kothari argues that, in its failure to acknowledge its own colonial heritage, the development industry has tended to reproduce, or at best merely rework, ‘relationships, perceptions and attitudes of empire’ (2011: 65). Thus, new forms of inequality overlay historical inequalities, and the development industry, through its normative frameworks, policies and practices, all too often prescribes the futures that its ‘beneficiaries’ should aspire to, ‘ignoring the steps and strategies that people use to imagine and realize their own futures’ (Kothari 2011: 68–69).

Continuities with the ‘attitudes of empire’ may also be found in the allochronism, or ‘denial of coevalness’ (Fabian 1983) inherent in the ideology of international development. Whereas terms such as ‘undeveloped’, ‘traditional’ and ‘backward’ have replaced the colonial nomenclature of the ‘primitive’, ‘savage’ and ‘aboriginal’, the tendency to equate spatial or cultural distance with temporal distance is common to both colonial and development thinking. Whether ‘aid beneficiaries’ or ‘colonial subjects’, both are relegated to an earlier state that the metropolitan civilizations of Western Europe and North America—still the major aid donors—perceive themselves to have long superseded. While nineteenth-century social evolutionist ideologies regarded native peoples of the colonial periphery as evolutionary relicts, throwbacks from a prehistoric age, the development industry has adopted its own evolutionary schemas along which the global poor have yet to progress. Thus, W. W. Rostow’s (1960) classic formulation of the ‘five stages of economic growth’ plots the steps through which a ‘traditional society’ must progress and mature in order to achieve an ‘age of high mass consumption’, while Inglehart and Welzel (2005), for example, explore the correlations between economic, cultural and political change as societies progress along what they term the ‘human development sequence’. As Kothari notes, such temporal imaginings are mapped onto contemporary spatialities, too, creating the spatiotemporal dislocations between First and Third Worlds, incarcerating whole populations in categories of relative backwardness and excluding them from the global future as determined and represented by the neoliberal West (2011: 68; Appadurai 1988).

As we will come to explore, the agents of modernization and development, in both colonial and postcolonial eras, have had an ambivalent relationship to their own transformative projects. Historically, a corollary of the colonialist’s civilizing mission, which sought to deliver primitive peoples from their savage state, was a nostalgia for the very lifeways that it would make extinct. Here, then, we find the emergence of a discourse of endangerment, which was key to the expansion, in the mid-nineteenth century, of anthropology as a discipline charged with the task of salvaging the last vestiges of ‘savage life and savage culture’ before it ‘disappeared for ever from the earth before the onward march of so-called civilisation’ (Thomas 1906: vi). For Northcote Thomas and other anthropologists of the era, the ‘subject races’ of empire were ‘a living memorial of the past’ whose archaic way of life was destined for extinction, ‘never to be recovered’ (1906: vi). The likes of Thomas argued that, if these traditional societies were to be sacrificed in the name of progress, then it was incumbent upon the imperial powers to collect, document and record what survived of them before it was too late (1906: vi). Thus began the frenzy of collecting, not only of objects but also of languages, customs, laws, practices, performances and all manner of anthropometric data, which would go on to fill countless museum stores and displays, reports and publications, and which characterized the late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century anthropological project (Gruber 1970; Stocking 1986).

A related discourse of endangerment was articulated in relation to the damage being wrought by colonial development on both the natural and built environment in other colonial contexts. This led to the passing of laws designed to protect and preserve cultural and natural heritage in many overseas territories even prior to the introduction of equivalent legislation at home (see Basu and Damodaran 2015). In 1900, for example, anticipating the passage of India’s 1904 Ancient Monuments Preservation Act, Viceroy Lord Curzon acknowledged that, in its pursuit of its imperial ambitions, Britain had presided over ‘an era of vandalism’ in India that had seen many of the subcontinent’s architectural treasures damaged or destroyed (Curzon 1901: 196–198). It was, he argued, the responsibility of an enlightened government to protect such antiquities. In contrast to ethnological salvage, the emphasis here was not on documenting a fast-vanishing primitive way of life so much as saving the monumental remains of past civilizations, to which the new imperial powers perceived themselves as worthy inheritors.

If development may be construed as an instrument of future-making, heritage, of course, could be regarded as an instrument of ‘past-making’. While conventionally identified with the vestiges of the past itself—the monuments and relics protected by antiquities legislation, or the primitive technologies assembled in so many ethnological collections—like development, heritage is also an industry, and an ideology. And, as with development, heritage is both a product of Western modernity and a constituent part of that modernity (R. Harrison 2013). As we have already seen in the context of salvage ethnography and architectural preservation, a valorization of the past typically emerges when that past is perceived to be endangered, not least through the v...

Índice

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• 1 Museums, Heritage and International Development: A Critical Conversation
• 2 UNESCO, Museums and ‘Development’
• 3 Complicating Culture for Development: Negotiating ‘Dysfunctional Heritage’ in Sierra Leone
• 4 Art for Life: Intangible Cultural Heritage and Livelihood Development in India
• 5 US Cultural Diplomacy, Cultural Heritage Preservation and Development at the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul
• 6 Reconstructing Afghan Identity: Nation-Building, International Relations and the Safeguarding of Afghanistan’s Buddhist Heritage
• 7 Has It Been Worth It? Personal Reflections on Museum Development in Ghana
• 8 Development Challenges and Shared Heritage-Making Processes in Southwest Ghana
• 9 Museum Kapuas Raya: The In-Between Museum
• 10 ‘Only Foreigners Can Do It’? Technical Assistance, Advocacy and Brokerage at Aksum, Ethiopia
• 11 Health Education and Participatory Exhibition Development in Malawi
• 12 Hintang and the Double-Bind Promise of Development
• 13 Cultural Heritage, Humanitarianism and Development: Critical Links
• 14 Reconceptualizing Heritage in China: Museums, Development and the Shifting Dynamics of Power
• 15 Postconflict Heritage in Asia: Shifting Geographies of Aid
• 16 Visualizing Development: The Tropenmuseum and International Development Aid
• Contributors
• Index