7/25/2014 Anthropology News http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2014/03/31/the-definitional-problem-of-patrimony-and-the-futures-of-cultural-heritage/ 1/2 CULTURAL HERITAGE The Definitional Problem of Patrimony and the Futures of Cultural Heritage Michael A Di Giovine Sarah E Cowie “Heritage can mean whatever you want.” Thus spoke the late Lord Martin Charteris, then-chairman of the British National Heritage Memorial Fund. While his statement has been criticized for its apparent flippancy and capriciousness, it also reveals what can be called a definitional problem in heritage research and practice. All definitions of cultural heritage are based in some way on the notion of an ongoing link between past, present and future generations cultivated through the preservation and transmission of either tangible or intangible forms, but as the field of scholars and practitioners utilizing heritage in discourse and practice expands, there is a palpable lack of consensus on the meaning, value, and ethical treatment of cultural heritage. While it is an anthropological truism that culture is learned—and thus inherited, elaborated upon and passed down—this definitional problem goes beyond mere semantics. Operational definitions organize thought and practice, and make their way into legal instruments that have real material impacts for communities large and small, public and private, global and local. They also determine who is allowed a voice in heritage debates. Indeed, cultural heritage today is a burgeoning industry that attracts academics, development experts, and local community members alike for its powerful ability to draw disparate groups together, generate funding for preservation, and inspire meaningful action with global impacts. It also is a touchstone for adverse and contentious social, economic, and political activities, including looting, destruction of cultural property, marginalization of ethnic groups, museumification, intellectual property disputes, bioprospecting, and even warfare. Anthropologists, archaeologists, and scholars of “critical heritage studies” (http://criticalheritagestudies.org/) see this as a particular problem, since heritage includes a notion of ownership-through-descent, marking an “in” group and an “out” group that is integral to the formation of group identity in multicultural and global milieux. Although there is historical evidence that peoples from antiquity to the Renaissance cultivated some notion of a shared cultural heritage that should be preserved for posterity, the term as it is generally used today entered the lexicon proper during the age of imperialism. The term appeared in 1830s France as patrimoine and as “heritage” in the UK’s 1882 Ancient Monuments Act, a product of distinctively fin-de-siècle fears of societal decadence and transience at the hands of modernization and industrialization; however, it also was necessitated by the imperial imperative to order an increasingly expanding world into enlarging national boundaries. Originating from a word denoting an object of value passed down in a will (“patrimony”), this usage indicated a shift from a small-scale, kinship-oriented definition of family inheritance (héritage) to a broader notion of inheritance based on political imaginaries of belonging. Heritage was (and continues to be) defined in a distinctively artifactual sense, and, owing to its political nature, is often conceived unproblematically as a form of singular ownership. The conservation movements in the 1960s and 1970s led to the internationalization of cultural and natural heritage as a universal good or resource that transcends the place and peoples in which it was originally created. The most prominent is UNESCO’s 1972 World Heritage Convention, which, as Di Giovine argues in The Heritage-scape: UNESCO, World Heritage, and Tourism (2009), was a broad peacemaking endeavor that called upon nation-states to voluntarily offer up what they saw as their cultural resources as “the common heritage of humanity, for whose protection it is the duty of the international community as a whole to cooperate” (UNESCO 1972). This is a shift from a kinship-based definition of heritage predicated on ascribed ownership to one of achieved (or acquired) ownership founded on preservationist duty. Critics of the convention pointed out that the majority of those sites deemed to be “of universal value” conformed to Western conceptions of aesthetics, history, and elitist culture, leaving out many diverse communities whose valued cultural products could not easily fall into such categories. UNESCO somewhat reconceptualized the term in 1994 in its Global Strategy to target a wider diversity of material cultural forms such as industrial heritage and cultural landscapes, and then again in 2003 when it passed its Intangible Heritage Convention. The latter signaled a move away from heritage as tangible, material objects sedimented in sites (however de-territorialized they are in theory) to intangible traditions, values, performances, and cultural practices that underlie the creation of a group’s sociocultural fabric. Today the Intangible Heritage List includes elements as disparate as the Mediterranean Diet and the French Gastronomic Meal, religious rituals, Vietnamese gong music, theatrical performances, and Azeri horse-riding games. Put another way, intangible heritage indicates a shift from a fixed cultural product valued (and evaluated) for its authenticity and permanence, to cultural producers and their creative processes, which are fluid, negotiated, appropriated, and reinvented. There have been several other challenges to the paternalistic conception of heritage as a duty. Perhaps the most salient for US anthropologists and archaeologists has been the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). Challenging the longstanding, elitist duty to preserve a material artifact, it concretized in a legal instrument the idea of heritage as cultural property. Cultural property implies that such patrimony is integral for a group’s identity and autonomy as cultural beings; it can take different forms and be used, and valued, differently by cultures other than our own. Descendant communities have the autonomy or right to utilize their material culture in culturally appropriate ways, even if their practices conflict with our Western, “expert” duties to preserve it for posterity (and especially for science). Thus, it is often difficult to balance development and scholarly research with preservation and respectful communication with descendant communities. As a result, best practices are changing for archaeologists who work on ancestral homelands of American Indian communities, even if some practices are not legally mandated. Conversations with community members therefore are becoming increasingly