This session will bring professional practitioners and academics in the broad areas of heritage and development into conversation to consider how opening up development policy and practice to approaches that engage with issues of the past is meant to engender development in the Global South.
Long Abstract:
Since the 1990s, the importance of culturally informed approaches to international development has been recognised. More recently, this recognition has been articulated as a need to engage with ideas of heritage as an ostensibly past looking practice on which current and future development may be more appropriately built. In addition, in the UK, heritage approaches to development continue to be promoted through government supported research opportunities such as the Global Challenges Research Fund. In parallel, international heritage organisations, most notably UNESCO, have explicitly sought to align heritage practices with developmental agendas, while heritage researchers have continued to identify heritage as being relevant for development. However, rarely do these two sets of agencies and actors come together to explore each other's differing agendas, challenges, and potentials and instead they risk talking past each other from their different intellectual positions. In response, this session will bring in to conversation papers from professionals and academics in the broad areas of heritage and development studies and practice that seek to engender international development in the Global South through engagement with the past as heritage. Topics may include, but are not restricted to, histories of development, the role of history, archaeology and anthropology in informing development policy and practice, the politics of the past in development initiatives, heritage tourism as an economic driver of development, and the role of museums in development. Of specific interest is the way in which the call for 'heritage for development' is particularly pronounced in post-conflict or conflict transformation contexts.
This introductory paper will outline issues for the employment of ostensibly past looking research as heritage in development today. With a focus on the perceived role of heritage in post-conflict development, the paper will outline some of the contradictions in uncritical approaches.
Paper long abstract:
Since the 1990s, the importance of culturally informed approaches to international development has been recognised. More recently, this recognition has been articulated as a need to engage with ideas of heritage as an ostensibly past looking practice on which current and future development may be more appropriately built. In addition, in the UK, heritage approaches to development continue to be promoted through government supported research opportunities such as the Global Challenges Research Fund. In parallel, international heritage organisations, most notably UNESCO, have explicitly sought to align heritage practices with developmental agendas, while heritage researchers have continued to identify heritage as being relevant for development. However, rarely do these two sets of agencies and actors come together to explore each other's differing agendas, challenges, and potentials and instead they risk talking past each other from their different intellectual positions. In response, this introductory paper will outline some of these issues and with a focus on the role of heritage in post-conflict development will provide examples of some of the contradictions inherent in uncritical approaches.
This paper addresses shifting contexts of policy and practice in the relations between sustainable development and World Heritage.
Paper long abstract:
At the 2015 Bonn Meeting of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee (40 COM 5C), a new policy was adopted to recognise that a "sustainable development perspective" should be integrated into the processes of the World Heritage Convention. This followed in the wake of the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals by the United Nations, the successor of the Millennium Development Goals in 2000. Far from being dismissed as institutional rhetoric, this emergent policy opens up new challenges and possibilities for World Heritage Sites and marks a major philosophical shift from seeing World Heritage as an end in itself, rooted in notions of Eurocentric intrinsic value, towards a more pragmatic view of World Heritage designation as a means to an end. It also attempts to link the work of UNESCO with the wider policy frames of the UN.
Drawing upon work conducted as part of an AHRC Global Challenges Grant, this paper examines how this 'new' meta-level discourse of UNESCO World Heritage policy filters down to member states and site level that opens up larger questions relating to the value of the UNESCO designatory process. Though in no way conclusive, we raise issues regarding communication, translation and governance that span across the developing and developed world. Within formalised frameworks of site management, our findings indicate the inevitable gap between policy and praxis but at the same time, outside of such frameworks, there exist examples of creative approaches to addressing development issues and lessons that can be exchanged between these two worlds.
This is a case study of an on-going GCRF funded project to make the maritime cultural landscape in Kenya more visible. The paper explores how GCRF policy on the humanities creates new value out of visibility, bringing heritage-as-development into closer alignment with the UK's foreign aid policy.
Paper long abstract:
This paper discusses the 'global challenges' facing stakeholders within a small maritime heritage project in Kilifi County, Kenya. Funded through a Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) network, MUCH to Discover in Mida Creek uses the 'rich maritime cultural landscape of Mida Creek as a newly visible resource' to create pathways to community resilience and sustainable development. The project is led by the maritime archaeology unit at the National Museums of Kenya (NMK) and is partnered with a Community-Based Organisation (CBO) to promote maritime heritage through educational activities. Significantly, the project also involves UK-based archaeologists and digital creative industry professionals. This on-going project adds important new perspectives on how GCRF funding shapes the temporalities and values of development-focused heritage projects. The Mida Creek project exemplifies heritage-as-development and leads paradoxically to a critical dialogue about the decolonization of cultural heritage and archaeological professions, while simultaneously leading to a strengthened UK off-shore control over humanities scholarship through the architecture of GCRF funding. Contrasting with a prevailing conceptualization of heritage as 'past-looking' and development as 'future-looking' (Basu and Modest 2015), the Mida Creek project draws attention to visibility as a value, linked in the new technical emphasis on digital humanities or web presence in the heritage professions. This paper argues that this visibility is how the humanities can continue to argue - on the basis of evidence - that they can return value to the UK while participating in capacity-building activities in the host country.
The heritage for development discourse has created a belief in the 'power of culture for development', impacting on museum development across the African continent. This paper explores why the museum is viewed as a vehicle for economic, social and cultural benefits and proposes alternative concepts.
Paper long abstract:
In the last ten years many community-based museums have been established in Uganda and Kenya and there are many more planned by national authorities and civic society organisations. While this growth coincides with a global increase and diversification in museums, it is the impact of the heritage for development discourse promoted by organisations such as UNESCO and ICOM that has led to unrealistic expectations of museums that often remain unfulfilled. Despite a lack of evidence that the recently established museums are able to live up to the promises of economic, social and cultural development, they remain the go-to solution for policymakers and development practitioners who want to integrate culture in their projects. The current assumptions about the museum as panacea for numerous challenges from conflict resolution to language preservation are overwrought and the construction of museums as a secondary activity to larger development programmes is often unsustainable considering the continued financial support museums need to function. The museum is conceptualised as a vehicle for development in the current discourse, but this severely limits the roles that museums can play in the narration and visibility of local heritage. Examples from grass-roots museums will introduce alternative possibilities to the promise of the museum. This paper explores not just the problematic expectations of museums currently held by the heritage field in Africa and beyond, but also suggests that alternative concepts of museum-making could make them more relevant and beneficial to the audiences they are intended to serve.
Notions of cultural heritage intertwine with 'development' in the social space of Alternative Rites of Passage, an invented ritual popular in anti-FGM/C campaigns in East Africa. Since 'culture' is rarely defined by the organisers, the ritual often involves a confusing mish-mash of messages.
Paper long abstract:
FGM/C (female genital mutilation/cutting) has cultural heritage connotations that are unacceptable to development actors, such as international donors and agencies that fund and implement efforts to eradicate the practice. Its proponents assert that FGM/C constitutes a cultural tradition that ought to be upheld, and that efforts to stop it demonstrate imperialistic, 'western-driven' disrespect for the heritage of practising communities. Its opponents oppose harmful cultural practices, while expressing guarded respect for culture. However, development actors have had to embrace some elements of 'tradition' when designing alternatives to FGM/C, such as the ritual of Alternative Rites of Passage (ARP) which is increasingly popular in East Africa. ARP involves marking the passage from girlhood to womanhood in ways that mimic cultural tradition, but without the physical cut. Beloved by donors, governments and agencies, because it appears to offer a quick fix to a major development and human rights issue (in fact, there is little evidence that it does), ARP can be read as an invented tradition and cultural performance that involves intensive social engineering carried out in the name of development and progress. 'Culture' is rarely defined, by the NGOs or communities involved, and consequently the ritual often involves a mish-mash of notions of culture and past-ness - which can impart very mixed and confusing messages to the girls concerned, and their families. This paper will discuss what happens when 'development' meets 'culture' in the melting pot of extreme gender violence.
The paper uses Habermas' structure-agency theory to explore the effectiveness of Shona-Karanga traditional game and play song and concepts in promoting health and well-being in resource constrained settings in Zimbabwe.
Paper long abstract:
Zimbabwe is a landlocked country in Southern Africa. Formerly christened "The Jewel of Southern Africa", the country has for the past two decades been on global news headlines because of hyper-inflation resulting from the rule of former President Robert Mugabe who implemented a controversial land reform programme that severely crippled the country's agricultural sector. Due to the attendant economic doldrums, coupled with a political quandary precipitated by the cataclysmic, and allegedly despotic rule of former President Robert Mugabe, the country's once vibrant health delivery system totally collapsed. Health facilities suffered a major blow as health personnel left in search of "greener pastures" as their remuneration got severely eroded and working conditions became dire, with no critical supplies in health facilities including drugs and equipment. Zimbabwe situation continues to pose challenges to the country's public health delivery system. Premised on Habermas' theory of structure-agency, this proposed study will use qualitative interviews to elicit the views of members belonging to a WhatsApp group "South Group Inc." regarding efforts to improve health delivery in the Mberengwa South Constituency. The group comprises volunteers in Zimbabwe and the diaspora using traditional game and play song "Dudu-mudiri Kacheee" to mobilise resources to improve health delivery in this resource constrained setting. Our aim is to critically examine the nuances of a traditional song and indigenous concepts in driving development and promoting health and well-being. Data will be collected through analysing WhatsApp chats and conducting in-depth interviews with group administrators. Findings will be analysed using thematic analysis.
Adopting a postcolonial perspective, this article approaches Brazilian South-South cooperation narratives in Africa as part of a politics of identity that helps redefine Brazil's place in the modern world.
Paper long abstract:
The article discusses how South-South Cooperation (SSC) operates as a site of knowledge and power through which a developmentalist Brazilian identity is reproduced and subalternity can be constantly renegotiated. Through a brief analysis of the narratives on the Brazilian involvement in Angola, it emphasizes how the production of the state self is also permeated by several ambivalences that update colonial tropes and bring new forms of subjugation. If, on the one hand, the movement undertaken in the article permits discussing the very ambiguity of the postcolonial condition - mainly by exposing the tensions and indeterminacies that permeate Brazil's engagements in the global arena - on the other hand, it opens up new theoretical avenues for analyzing Brazilian foreign policy. The article seeks to understand Brazilian SSC through the perspective of a situated post-colonialism, which considers the ambivalence of the Brazilian colonial experience in its attempts to reconcile antagonisms, producing the hybrid interrelation of 'two Brazils': one belonging to the past (to backwardness), and another destined to the future (to progress). In order to discuss how narratives of SSC with Africa contribute to the (re)production of a specific representation of the Brazilian self, this study analyzes some governmental discourses and practices related to the engagement of Brazil in Angola. By exploring South-South cooperation as a specific locus of power and knowledge, this article aims to emphasize the tensions and ambivalences that have permeated Brazil's engagement in the field of development over the last decade.
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