The Politics and Practices of Cultural Heritage in the Middle East

Positioning the Material Past in Contemporary Societies

Irene Maffi, Irene Maffi, Rami Daher

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781848855359
• eBook ISBN: 9781786725066
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

During the nineteenth century, cultural heritage became a dominant feature of the political ideology of the European states and of their colonies. It became a new form of legitimization for the rising nation-state, cementing its inextricable link with that nation's politics and practices. The set of concepts and practices defining cultural heritage were exported to, and imposed over, the colonized populations in North Africa and the Near East. The legacy of the colonial period has proven very significant in the domain of cultural heritage which has become a crucial cultural arena in many Arab states. As in the majorities of post-colonial states, in the Arab world, the inherited paradigm of cultural heritage has been subject to various forms of adaption and re-elaboration that have made it a lively and complex space of negotiations between various actors. Thus, in The Politics of Cultural Heritage in the Middle East, Irene Maffi and Rami Daher draw together expert scholars to unravel these complex processes that are involved in the definition, production and consumption of heritage and its material culture in the Middle East, and the dynamics of the key actors involved.
The variety of the cases analysed that cover the region from Morocco to Lebanon, as well as the multiplicity of the actors concerned such as the state (post-colonial or colonial), international organizations, municipal councils, local communities, families and even exceptional personalities, highlights and explores the complex processes where very local and specific dynamics intertwine with transnational economic, political and cultural fluxes. In its examination of the workings of cultural heritage in the Middle East, this book is an important resource for students and scholars of Middle East Studies, Cultural History, History of Art and Architecture, and for stakeholders involved in the field of cultural heritage.

PART I

HISTORICAL PREMISES

1

HERITAGE AS CULTUR AL CAPITAL IN THE LATE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

Wendy M.K. Shaw

It is one thing to consider how the past is situated as heritage in the present, and quite another to project our contemporary understandings of heritage onto another culture and era. And yet, present notions of heritage are rooted in ideas of history as they have developed through many layers of preservation of those objects and places which have been perceived to have meaning for each present and which have actively enabled them to survive. Thus modern states that emerged from a past in the Ottoman Empire may share a history, but they only share heritage to the extent that they identify that past as part of an inheritance to be passed to the future, both during the Ottoman era and during subsequent eras of individual national development. How was this process related to, and differentiated from, their relationship with the West, and how was the production of heritage adapted to the Ottoman cultural environment? After a brief outline of the concept of heritage as understood in the contemporary West, this chapter will consider the development of an analogous drive towards preservation as reflected in Ottoman publications of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Although the word ‘heritage’, closely related to the verb ‘to inherit’, has been in use in English since the thirteenth century, ‘heritage’ as a noun conveying the connotations with which we associate it today – characterised by or pertaining to the preservation or exploitation of local and national features of historical, cultural, or scenic interest, especially as tourist attractions – only began to be used in the early 1970s. Indeed, there is a profound difference between an inheritance and a heritage, even though we can receive both from the past and can pass both on to the future. When we receive an inheritance in the usual sense of land, goods or money, we know what to do with it: we either use it as is, or convert it into something that has more value for us. In this sense, an inheritance is fungible in terms of the values of its times. In the case of inheritance, moreover, there is no expectation that we will necessarily pass it on; nobody likes a squandered inheritance, but what is money for if not to be enjoyed? In contrast, heritage is conceived as an inheritance which is supposed to maintain and even gain value under our stewardship. And yet, in the process heritage is not to be converted into something other than what it is – it must maintain its form in order to maintain its essence. But at the same time its meaning must change in order for its form to retain value, and thereby a relationship, with the present. Thus heritage must, on the one hand, be converted into something that is perceived as having current value, either one of use or one of meaning, and yet it must also stay the same. After all, that heritage is not an inheritance in itself, but a vehicle for an inheritance of which we are not owners, but stewards. And yet if that vehicle is not touched at all, if it is left in the bank vault of time, it loses value entirely; unlike land or money, an unused heritage is liable to decay. And yet unlike living beings subject to decay, an unused heritage can also be revived, pumped with new value even after its stewardship has been abandoned, even for countless generations, and revitalised with meanings, if not forms, entirely divorced from their original function. In this sense, heritage is like a ‘tessera’, a coin whose faces have been wiped away by use over time, and yet which can be given new meanings by each hand that holds it. It is also like a tessera in its other sense, of a stone in a mosaic, bearing no meaning in itself but only as part of a much larger, complex image. Seen in this light, heritage becomes an object (whether tangible or intangible) which retains its substance over time but whose value is subject to the flux of the values of its inheritors.

While heritage pertains to the past, it is an inherently modern concept. Before the development of modern notions of the historic, surviving objects acquired value not for what they represented of the past, but for what they represented in the present. Thus Roman antiquities interpreted by Winkelmann could become signs of German identity via a literary Greek heritage, and the Laokoon in the eyes of Lessing could be an opportunity less for the understanding of the ancient world than for understanding the roles of art and literature in all times.

With its rapid and accelerating pace of change, the modern era has been uniquely concerned with preserving rather than recycling elements of the past, remembering previous meanings in order to revalue them within the modern world. The Musée des monuments français, established soon after the French Revolution, is perhaps the best example of this sudden leap towards preservationism. Another example is the development of scientific archaeology during the nineteenth century; when that discipline first emerged, existing interest in classicism and in the Bible often gave intrinsic meaning to the process of designating heritage through the recovery of the material culture of the past. These interests fed both the growing ideologies of nationalism and those justifying imperialism. While these discourses remain at the root of many valuations of archaeological artifacts today, they have been overlaid with discourses of globalism, and enhanced by the financial exigencies of tourism, cited by Unesco as the third largest industry in the world today. Thus heritage is a central economic value in today’s world; but what else is it? Who is the inheritor of heritage, and what kind of values do they use in order to relate the present to the past?

In order to understand the notion of heritage in the Ottoman Empire and in the states that emerged from it, one must look not only at the relationship between the works and their inheritors as that relationship developed over time, but also at the process of translation of the heritage concept itself as it became part of notions of national identity during the modern era. In the late nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, architectural preservation and archaeology were the loci through which heritage first emerged into public discourse. How were these given value, and to what extent was this value disseminated among the purported inheritors of the past?

The relationship between the archaeological legacy and the present in the Ottoman Empire can only be understood in relation to the set of values which informed European archaeology, much of which took place in the empire. In Europe, the various forms of archaeology that developed in the nineteenth century emerged from deep-seated associations with the past, which both preceded and informed the developing sense of national identities. During this period, heritage entered public stewardship, along with the growth of the notion of the citizen as the bearer of a history not only of dynasties, but also of a shared national spirit. This spirit was not simply the bearer of a local inheritance, but one which bore the traces of a dual heritage: a secular heritage, derived from the Renaissance, which allowed Germany to trace its roots to Greece while France and England traced theirs to Rome; and a religious heritage, which allowed the Christian West also to trace its heritage to the Near East. As improved technologies of travel, increasing foreign power within Ottoman territories, and the independence or colonial domination of former territories enabled access to the physical sites of both legacies, heritage which had long been a literary commodity gained a physical dimension through the recovery of archaeological artifacts. The massive project of unearthing the material past of the classical age and transporting it to Europe made the notion of a heritage in previously exotic Ottoman lands all the more palpable. Rather than being seen as a formidable empire to the east, the Ottomans became usurpers of lands that held the heritage of the West. In this sense, the recovery of archaeological heritage was not simply a process of making the classical era tangible, but a means of legitimising the notion of a natural right to colonial territories that had once been under Ottoman rule. The motivation for incorporating these artifacts into European culture was intrinsic, in that even before their excavation, their meanings were deeply inscribed into the European sense of self through the prevalence of the Classics as the cornerstone of secular education. By the late nineteenth century, a second, and equally heartfelt motivation for archaeology emerged in resistance to the rise of Darwinian thought, which had begun to threaten literal understandings of the Bible. By the 1870s, organisations like the British Palestine Exploration Fund and the Palestine Exploration Society of New York had taken on the mission of excavating Palestine in the hope of proving the literal truth of the Bible. During the same era, the same technological and political changes which made the Ottoman hinterland more accessible to archaeologists also made possible the long-difficult pilgrimage to Jerusalem, which had become the imaginary model for spiritual exercises and local pilgrimages in Europe during earlier eras. As in the case of classical archaeology, deep-seated, intrinsic notions of collective identity informed the practice of Biblical archaeology, which in turn also informed much of Mesopotamian and Egyptian archaeological interest. Thus archaeological heritage was the material illustration for bodies of literature that were already deeply etched into the collective identities which were being harnessed under the rubric of the nation state in many parts of Europe.

This was not the case in the Ottoman Empire, where archaeology and the museological display of archaeological artifacts emerged not within an intrinsic cultural discourse, but in response to European archaeological practice. Much as archaeology in Ottoman territories naturalised various European claims over Eastern lands, archaeology on Ottoman land was perceived by many as an incursion on imperial territories. Thus the collection of antiquities in the empire was informed not by meta-narratives such as classical studies and aesthetics, but by meta-narratives of territorial control. This can most easily be seen in the organisation of displays in the museum as it developed from its home in the former Church of Hagia Irene into first the Tiled Pavilion, and, after 1881, its permanent home in the purpose-built Imperial Museum, today the Istanbul Archaeology Museum. As early as 1868, when the French scholar Paul Dumont catalogued the collections housed in the former church, the poorly documented antiquities were labelled only in terms of their provenance. Likewise, the 1908 catalogue by Gustave Mendel emphasised the process of acquisition of objects, and thus the role of officials who had showed their loyalty to the sultan by hindering the illegal activities of foreign archaeologists and by sending artifacts to the museum. Often displayed according to their site of discovery rather than by the civilisational or developmental models developed in European museums, works in the Imperial Museum stood in a syntagmatic relationship to Ottoman territory rather than to Ottoman patrimony.

The effort to form the past into a legacy for the present began in the 1870s, and was marked simultaneously by increasing legal protection for patrimony and by a small but growing discourse, in both books and magazines, on patrimony. Increasingly restrictive laws concerning the excavation, acquisition and export of antiquities were passed in 1874, 1884 and 1906. A Commission for Antiquities (Asar-ı Atika Encümeni), was established in 1917, strengthening governmental backing for preservationism. While such official efforts show a top-down interest in heritage preservation, they evidence little indication of an incipient perception, among the public during the same era, of antiquities as heritage.

Yet during that same era, a new literature began to appear concerning the artistic patrimony of the Ottoman Empire and the notion of arts in general. In 1873, a set of volumes concerning Ottoman costume and architecture were prepared simultaneously in French, German and Turkish for the Vienna World Exposition, Les Costumes Populaires de la Turquie en 1873 and L’Architecture Ottomane (Usul-u Mimari-ye Osmani). While one of the volumes used studio photographs to document the living ethnographic cultures of the present, the other constructed the first systematic analysis of Ottoman architectural elements, using the catalogue to design a narrative of architectural innovation, classicism, decline and rebirth in line with current historiographies of the Ottoman state. The work emphasised the production of a canon, both a formal one of architectural orders and decorative patterns, and a historical survey, beginning with the architecture of Bursa and reaching its apogee with the architect Sinan. Despite the historical focus of the book, its overt programme was to advertise the success of neo-Ottoman architecture as a revivalist style, as well as to provide a catalogue which broke down the elements of that architecture so that they could be used in modern architectural movements. In looking at the book and its structure, it is important to remember that while it reflected the mentality of the very few foreign-educated Ottomans involved in its preparation, its concerns and structure reflected contemporary European modes of understanding architecture.

It was not until the early 1890s that the next wave of books concerning the arts appeared. Published in 1889, Mahmud Esad’s History of Art introduced the public to a linear world art-history, identifying nations by styles and describing patterns of influence over time. While his description of European practices clearly references an Ottoman audience, his subject is simply art, with no concern for patrimony. On the contrary, in this work art serves as a means of introducing a final chapter on the innovations of the nineteenth century, ranging from museums and philosophy to steam engines, electricity and modern agricu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• List of Illustrations
• List of Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• Note on Transliteration
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I. Historical premises
• Part II. Case Studies: local actors and international fluxes in the heritage domain
• Conclusion: The destiny of a Western paradigm in the Arab World