Int. J. Middle East Stud. 40 (2008), 291–314. Printed in the United States of America DOI: 10.1017/S0020743808080550 Lucia Volk WHEN MEMORY REPEATS ITSELF : THE POLITICS OF HERITAGE IN POST CIVIL WAR LEBANON It is a site suited, like few others, to contemplate the past and the interlinking of the fates of human beings. Hugo Winckler, Das Vorgebirge am Nahr el-Kelb (The Promontory of Nahr al-Kalb) (1909) Now Lebanon will have a unified memory of its past. Instead of always reflecting over a fragmented past based on the Civil War, Lebanese can now go further back and realize a far deeper and common history that unites them all. Tarek Mitri, Lebanon’s minister of culture, speaking about the heritage site of Nahr al-Kalb (2005) On 4 August 2005 the Lebanese English-language paper the Daily Star reported that Lebanon’s ancient inscriptions at Nahr al-Kalb had been accepted into the United Na- tions Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO’s) collection of “worldwide rare documents” through its Memory of the World Programme. 1 UNESCO established the Memory of the World Programme in 1992, after realizing that its World Heritage Programme, which seeks to protect historic landscapes and architectural land- marks, did not safeguard a category of less visible, yet equally important, documents of the past: texts. 2 The Memory of the World Programme made the preservation of “doc- umentary heritage [which] reflects the diversity of languages, peoples and cultures” its goal, hoping that its work would help prevent “collective amnesia.” 3 An eight-member Lebanese national committee made up of cultural and political elites affiliated with Lebanon’s Ministry of Culture and Lebanese University, the country’s largest public university, submitted a unanimous proposal to UNESCO’s International Advisory Com- mittee (IAC) to include Nahr al-Kalb in its collection of “documentary heritage.” The IAC reviewed and accepted the proposal in June 2005, placing the inscriptions along the river of Nahr al-Kalb in the company of 156 other universally memorable texts from around the world. 4 By establishing and publishing its lists of world heritage sites, both architectural and textual, UNESCO “convert[s] selected aspects of localized descent heritage into a Lucia Volk is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, Calif.; e-mail: lvolk@sfsu.edu. © 2008 Cambridge University Press 0020-7438/08 $15.00