Cultural Diversity, Heritage and Human Rights

Intersections in Theory and Practice

Michele Langfield, William Logan, Mairead Nic Craith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415563666
• eBook ISBN: 9781135190699
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

This theoretically innovative anthology investigates the problematic linkages between conserving cultural heritage, maintaining cultural diversity, defining and establishing cultural citizenship, and enforcing human rights.

It is the first publication to address the notions of cultural diversity, cultural heritage and human rights in one volume. Heritage provides the basis of humanity's rich cultural diversity. While there is a considerable literature dealing separately with cultural diversity, cultural heritage and human rights, this book is distinctive and has contemporary relevance in focusing on the intersection between the three concepts. Cultural Diversity, Heritage and Human Rights establishes a fresh approach that will interest students and practitioners alike and on which future work in the heritage field might proceed.

Part I
Setting agendas

Chapter 1
Intersecting concepts and practices

William Logan, Michele Langfield and Máiréad Nic Craith

This volume in the Key Issues in Cultural Heritage series investigates the linkages between conserving cultural heritage, maintaining cultural diversity and enforcing human rights. The three concepts of cultural diversity, heritage and human rights have been researched widely over the past 60 years since the United Nations Organization (1945) and the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO 1946) were formed and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was adopted (1948). In the scholarly world, however, the concepts have tended to be studied separately, with the various disciplines focusing more on one concept than the others, whereas, in fact, the concepts developed alongside each other and are inextricably linked. Recognition of these linkages influences the way in which the purpose of heritage conservation is seen and heritage protection work is carried out.

These linkages are enshrined today in much of the agenda and discourse of the UN and its associated global bodies, such as UNESCO, as well as in some nation states and local governments and their agencies. The linkages appear to be well understood in the international committees and secretariats of the global heritage bodies. In 2008 the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), for instance, ranked human rights issues associated with heritage, both natural and cultural, as one of seven ‘new and complex global pressures’ impacting negatively on conservation outcomes (ICOMOS 2008: 5). But the linkages remain poorly understood by the heritage conservation profession in many countries, where too often heritage work is seen as merely technical. It is essential for those engaged in heritage conservation projects to understand the broader economic, political and social context of their work and to recognize that official heritage interventions can have many motives, be used to achieve political aims, and, at their worst, can undermine rather than strengthen community identity, cultural diversity and human rights.

Setting agendas

Globalization is a buzz word of our time and, driven by electronic information technologies and reflected in global movements of capital, resources and workers, its impact on the heritage field is proving to be enormous. Indeed, another volume in the Key Issues in Cultural Heritage series – Heritage and Globalization (Labadi and Long, in press) has been devoted to this specifically. But the trend towards uniting all parts of the globe and all of the world’s people into a single economic system has a long history going back at least to the great explorations of the fifteenth century and including the subsequent formation of colonial empires. In the mid-twentieth century, during the last stage of the Second World War, another significant chapter in the history of globalization flowed from a series of meetings held in the Bretton Woods in the United States. At these meetings representatives of nations fighting on the Allied side of the war strove to find ways to prevent another such global catastrophe and to facilitate post-war recovery and development. Out of these meetings grew the United Nations and the ‘specialized agencies’ associated with but independent of it, such as the World Health Organization, Food and Agricultural Organization, UNICEF and International Labour Organization, as well as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and, in the heritage field, UNESCO.

Many commentators see these organizations as key agencies of both economic and cultural globalization. Their various resolutions and charters seek to enforce on the member states a common set of principles governing political, economic, social and cultural attitudes and behaviour. The formation of these organizations reflected the spirit of goodwill and optimism that infused twentieth-century modernism (Logan 2002). The goals reflected the key interlocking elements in the modernist outlook – universalism, utopianism and belief in humanity’s steady progress towards better things, usually defined in terms of the material conditions of life. It was an optimistic and idealistic outlook that led architects, planners, economists, sociologists, development workers and others to cut away from tradition and to embrace new ‘modern’ ideas and practices that could be applied around the world regardless of differences in local cultures. This immediately set up an ongoing global/national tension within the efforts to achieve one of the chief purposes of the United Nations Organization, which was to encourage cooperation between nation states in solving international economic, social, cultural and humanitarian problems.

Development of the cultural aspects was relatively slow on the whole but, although the UN does not play a direct role in cultural heritage conservation, some of its activities have come to have an effect on heritage, especially through the promotion of cultural diversity and human rights. The concept and discourse of human rights has been described as a unique product of modernity, a new invention of modern times, with so-called ‘first generation’ human rights – civil and political rights – emerging in the Age of Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in ‘response to the might of the modern state in which immense power of coercion and violence had been concentrated’ (Chen 2006: 487, 506). It was only after the Holocaust, according to Geoffrey Robertson (1999: xiv), that individual agents of the state were deemed to be answerable before the law for ‘crimes against humanity’, which led to new attempts to create universal standards such as the UN’s 1948 UDHR. However, when Article 22 of the UDHR insists that ‘[e]veryone . . . is entitled to the realization, through national efforts and international co-operation . . ., of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality’, the emphasis on individual rather than group or community rights is clear, and the tension between collective and individual rights continues to haunt theory and practice today, a point returned to later in this chapter and in the case study chapters that follow.

Indeed, ‘second generation’ human rights – that is social and economic rights, especially directed towards the group – did not emerge until later, in the 1960s, in response to the new forms of social and economic inequality produced by capitalism and industrialization (Chen 2006: 506) and in the context of the Cold War and decolonization (Yusuf 2005). The UN’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights 1966 (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights 1966 are increasingly recognized to have relevance to the management of cultural heritage. While not specifically mentioning cultural heritage, Article 15 of the latter instrument affirms that States party to the Covenant ‘recognize the right of everyone . . . to take part in cultural life’. In the same year, 1966, UNESCO’s General Conference went further, adopting a Declaration on the Principles of International Cultural Cooperation that asserted more clearly the link between human rights, human dignity and culture: ‘Each culture has a dignity and value which must be respected and preserved’, ‘Every people has the right and duty to develop its culture’ and ‘In their rich variety and diversity, . . . all cultures form part of the common heritage belonging to all mankind.’

It was during the immediate post-Second World War years and in the optimistic, modernist spirit that UNESCO and the other global organizations specifically focused on cultural heritage – the International Council on Museums (ICOM), the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM) and ICOMOS – were established. While official programmes of heritage protection had been around since at least the fifth century AD (Jokilehto 1999: 6), the distinctive new chapter that the twentieth century brought to cultural heritage protection was the establishment of a globalized effort over and above although still very much dependent on the work of nation states (Logan 2002). This led to a new cultural heritage bureaucracy at the international level, the development of new sets of standards for the world to follow, and a new set of places deemed to be of world heritage significance.

UNESCO was founded in 1946 with its headquarters in Paris, the result of a French recommendation at the first UN conference in 1945 that the governments should meet at another conference to draw up the statute of an international organization focusing on cultural cooperation (Valderrama 1995: 21). UNESCO’s Constitution makes clear the organization’s ambitions and clearly connects the trilogy of concepts which this volume is exploring. Adopted in London in November 1945, it starts with the key sentence ‘That since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed.’ These words have remained even though the Constitution has been amended at least 17 times. They reflect the Second World War context but hold a greater socio-psychological truth: that when meeting peoples with cultures strange to us, we react too easily with hostility, rather than seeking to understand, accommodate, negotiate and compromise. Cultural diversity is, therefore, often the cause of conflict – or at least the excuse for it. International normative statements insist, however, that humans have the right to maintain their diversity, their own or their group’s identity, their cultural heritage. This is a process essentially of intercultural dialogue and understanding, a process that the UNESCO Constitution from 1946 onwards has seen as being fundamental if greater tolerance and, ultimately, peace are to be achieved.

UNESCO’s operations were initially divided into the three sectors signalled in its name, although today the natural sciences and the social and human sciences are dealt with in separate sectors and a fifth sector has been added to focus on communications and information technology. The remit of the Culture Sector has grown over 60 years and especially since the World Conference on Cultural Policies, Mexico City, 1982 when the notion of ‘culture’ was broadened from a narrow, high art definition to be seen in its widest sense, as the whole complex of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features that characterize a society and social group. It includes not only the arts and letters, but also modes of life, the fundamental rights of the human being, value systems, traditions and beliefs (Mexico Declaration on Cultural Policies 1982).

It was this shift that ultimately made possible the expansion of UNESCO’s heritage conservation activities from the tangible – heritage places under the World Heritage Convention 1972 and heritage artefacts through its work relating to collections management, libraries, archives and museums – to intangible cultural heritage (practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills, such as language, oral history, song, dance, music, as well as intellectual property) under the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Heritage. Again, another volume in this Key Issues series focuses specifically on intangible heritage, its emergence as a global concern and the efforts to safeguard it (see Smith and Akagawa 2009).

It was during the 1990s that the diversity theme, and especially the protection of diversity, began to emerge as a major focus of UNESCO activities, in large part due to fears that globalization was threatening the survival of the world’s cultural diversity (Logan 2007a: 36). The UN’s ‘Decade for Cultural Development’ (1988–1997), which had cultural diversity as a key theme, ended with the World Commission on Culture and Development presenting its final report under the title Our Creative Diversity (UN 1995). By 2000, the UNESCO Director-General, Koïchiro Matsuura, had put in place a scheme called ‘Proclamation of Master Pieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity’, which was to be the advance guard of the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Heritage. The intention was to recognize and protect embodied cultural heritage in societies where perhaps the built heritage was less significant. The push to protect intangible as well as tangible heritage can be seen, therefore, as a further step in recognizing cultural diversity, and the 2003 Intangible CH Convention and the 2005 International Convention on the Protection of the Diversity of Cultural Contents and Artistic Expressions seek to engage states in binding legal instruments representing a commitment to cultural diversity.

In October 2000, UNESCO’s Executive Board invited the Director-General to prepare a declaration aimed at ‘promoting cultural diversity in the context of globalization’. The resulting instrument was the Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, adopted by UNESCO’s General Conference in 2001. The UNESCO web site refers to it as the founding act of a new ethic for the twenty-first century, providing the international community, for the first time, with a ‘wide-ranging standard-setting instrument to underpin its conviction that respect for cultural diversity and intercultural dialogue is one of the surest guarantees of development and peace’. This was followed by the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development in September 2002, which adopted a Declaration that recognizes cultural diversity as a collective force that must be promoted to ensure sustainable development.

Meanwhile, indeed since the 1960s, human rights have come to include specifically the maintenance of one’s culture within the concept of ‘cultural rights’. Even though many human rights scholars have argued that cultural rights are a particularly neglected category of human rights (O’Keefe 1999: 187; Logan 2007a, 2008), the position taken in the ICCPR of 1966 is now well accepted in international discourse and the programmes of global organizations; that is,

In those States in which ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities exist persons belonging to such minorities shall not be denied the right, in community with other members of their group, to enjoy their own culture, to profess their own religion, or to use their own language.

It was this agenda set by the ICCPR that UNESCO sought to extend with its own normative statements, notably the 2001 Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, which declares in Article 5 that:

Cultural rights are an integral part of human rights, which are universal, indivisible and interdependent. The flourishing of creative diversity requires the full implementation of cultural rights. . . . All persons have therefore the right to express themselves and to create and disseminate their work in the language of their choice, and particularly in their mother tongue; all persons are entitled to quality education and training that fully respect their cultural identity; and all persons have the right to participate in the cultural life of their choice and conduct their own cultural practices, subject to respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.

Gaps, inconsistencies and lack of commitment

In this volume, Hilary Charlesworth outlines the linkage between human rights and one of the UNESCO programmes that receives relatively little attention in the heritage literature – the Memory of the World Programme. She argues that, while the areas of cultural heritage and human rights have developed in quite separate ways and with different emphases and purposes, there is room for much more engagement and dialogue between these two fields. Indeed, they have much to learn from each other. She also suggests that human rights should itself be understood as heritage.

Looking at the extensive UNESCO’s flagship programme, World Heritage, on the other hand, it is also true that human rights has not assumed as great a presence as it might have done; indeed, it is perhaps even surprising that human rights features so little as a key universal value and reason for the inscription of historic sites. Certainly Robben Island is inscribed for its link with Nelson Mandela, leader of the South African democracy movement, and the fight against apartheid. But where are sites reminding the world of the democratic and/or independence struggles of racial and ethnic groups elsewhere? Some groups, like the Kurds, are split between several states and exist as ethnic minorities in each, whereas together they have more people than the majority of states in the UN. Denied statehood, their culture is under challenge in often hostile ‘host states’. Gorée in Senegal is inscribed for its link to the infamous New World slave trade that ended in the nineteenth century, but what about sites to commemorate the end of colonialism? Auschwitz-Birkenau and Hiroshima’s Genbaku Dome are symbols of technological warfare and provide moral lessons to us all, but what about other genocides and massacres?

Much of the difficulty lies in the nature of UNESCO as an inter-governmental organization. How can difficult sites become listed if this is likely to offend or be opposed by a Member State? Olwen Beazley (in press) reveals the intense international politics that were played out behind the nomination and inscription of the Genbaku Dome and attempts by the US to derail the process. How would France react to a Vietnamese nomination of the cultural landscape of Dien Bien Phu, the site of one of the greatest battles in history (Stanley Karnow, quoted in Simpson 1994: xi) where not only the French troops were routed but European colonialism in Asia effectively came to an end?

Clearly the implementation of conservation programmes based on the interlocking concepts of cultural diversity, heritage and human rights is far from simple or easy. Part of the problem lies in the contradictions and inconsistencies in the way the concepts themselves are conceived and used. Paradoxically, some attempts to protect cultural diversity represent threats to other human rights. While cultural herit...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Series general co-editors’ foreword
• Part I: Setting agendas
• Part II: National versus local rights
• Part III: Rights in conflict