Abstract: Our focal point is the cultural heritage policy. The following piece of writing examines the relations between heritage and politics, the special importance of inheritances, the types of political acts and discourses related to heritage. Politics are about power and heritage is a political phenomenon by nature, ever since history has been told from the point of view of the winners of war and of the powerful. The identity of a heritage artefact can be constantly in a state of changing, in the midst of all sorts of political, cultural and economic fights, fightingh above the meaning of the past.
The ruling classes supervise carefully the content and the form of historical recreation; they legitimise themselves by projecting their present sociocultural values onto the past. This is especially obvious in developing countries.
The acknowledgement, preservation, sustainment, appliance, operation, presentation and interpretation of cultural, natural, and intangible heritages demands countless political decisions. To what extent can political notions have a say in determining what is heritage and what is not, and how can these viewpoints match the arguments of archeology? What sort of questions, associated with heritage, could arise in connection with different societies and the processes of heredity? (Allen 2010: 154-197)?
Who has the ownership, whose heritage is it, who has authority to dispose and maintain responsibility over the object of heritage? What institutions of civil society, policy and public law, how and in what ways, under whose authority, regarding what notions, observing what laws, with what kind of budget can they assure that a certain memory, that is a cultural object of social recollection, becomes the nutrient of a collective identity? How can the notion of cultural authenticity be matched with the consequences of economic utilization? What sort of conflicts can arise between the personal, familial, local, regional, national and international spheres?
From this cluster of problems, in this paper the focus is on the hypothesis that any sort of heritage is a sort of a construction, which by the nature of its function, is the outcome of political conception. Societies, social groups and the regaining government in a subjective way interpret the past in terms of their own ideological goals. The methods by which the object of heritage is defined come under strong influence. These effects, even though not directly pertaining to heritage, create new historical, social and cultural opportunities but at the same time, they can modify or terminate old ones.
Even the concept of heritage can be defined from numerous different aspects. On the basis of the criteria of aesthetics, historical significance, through economic and social courses and effects. Different kinds of heritages are operating at the same time. Case studies about heritage models from Europe, the Middle East, India and other ambivalent and concurrent models, touch upon the intention, goals and tools of political and governmental powers and various resolving exercises, in the treatment of heritages. (Smith-Robinson 2009)
Certain ideologies are maintained and represented by historical and cultural buildings, museums, art relics, memorials, commemorative sites, tourist places and other public places. The representation of heritage legitimizes the present social and political values and structures. Therefore, heritage is a representation of values, consequently it can be used for manipulating, for excluding and for rewriting the past. Every legitimate heritage selects from a vast selection of pasts. Eventually, it is up to the power holder which heritage shall survive.
(Timothy – Boyd 2003:258) Power, exclusion tendencies, supervision and local attendance, - all create heritage-management structures, especially so in developing countries. The direct way of social utilization of heritages is tourism, that is increasingly searching for cultural goods and in this way heritage policies get greater weight.
Furthermore, the tourism point of view is not politically neutral either.
The models of social heritage constructions
Heritage has been used both in theory and in practice to homogenize society for decades, to reinforce statehood, sense of territorial belonging, ethnic characteristics and the unique unifying factor of cultural identity. To this end anthropological facts seem to be overtly manipulatable, since cultural heritage and its operation is not defined by scientific evidence but by public value that is interwoven with faith and tradition.
Thus heritage and its material representation becomes the basis of collective identity equations, and by incorporating it into the personal identity construction of individuals it establishes their sense of belonging to the statehood, peoples and culture. The unity of identity and heritage, this way, provides internal stability and external solidity. (Dolff-Bonekamper 2009). Since society constructs both heritage and identity, identity-constructions and heritage identity-constructions exist in terms of social changes as interdependent entities, and these two interwoven structures become myths in time. By this time, external critical objections are seen as attacks and internal ones as treachery.
These kinds of territorial and cultural metaphors established the basis of the huge narrative of European states. Since a unified Europe demands other spatial and social parameters besides nations, a different connotation of art relics and artistic works arises as well. Such opportunities for interpretation and mobility appear that were not conceivable beforehand. (Council of Europe 2005). The 1954 Hague Convention claims, that damage to cultural property, whichever society possess it, signifies the damage of cultural heritage for the whole of humanity, since peoples everywhere contribute to the culture of the world. (A kulturális javak fegyveres összeütközés esetén való védelme 1954-1957).
The UNESCO treaty (World Heritage Treaty 1972) later reinforced the western definition of values and rights.
The possession and sustainment of the past is flooded with the apparently unsolvable problems of territorial heritages even today, it can erode social, political and religious reservations in connection with central cultural questions. „ The success of World Heritage apparently depends on to what extent enlightenment will be universal in the world” (Meskell 2002:568)
The spatial and social framework of heritage construction
Since politics and administration organize themselves into territorial unities in every state, it is logical to conclude that the definition of relic-value follows the same model. Definition-hierarchies suggest a certain spatial ranking from local, regional and national levels to – ever since the foundation of the UNESCO world heritage list - academic levels. A heritage that requires the budget of a central state to be renovated has to carry international significance, or at least it has to proclaim it successfully. In this way it seems that all-time territorial unities equal ethnocultural unities.
However, history shows that nothing was more unstable in the past than territorial borderlines. The spatial location of a heritage and the current administration borderlines may differ. Consequently the spatial location of a heritage-construction has to be seen as a variable. The social framework of a heritage-construction varies from time to time, due to the latitude, depth and radius of action of migration movements. When defining architectural heritages and museum artifacts as heritages, the changing local, legal, material, formal and semantic status has to be positioned separately. The spatial and social context of older architectural heritages might have gone through sweeping changes as well, it might have lost its material and meaning and obtained new ones.
The changing territorial and statehood location of the site, its topographical stability, its legal and cultural possession and usage, the institutional defining-authority, antagonisms, that is the semantic meaning it signified in the later heritage construction, all these influence the status of a heritage. Local, regional and international identity-constructions and relationships, the history of interpretations, all play an important role, since contemporary interpretation extended these, even with their contradictions. Attaining a perfectly frameworked heritage-status is impossible.
The collection comprises items that had a different location previously. The items, being excluded from their former usage and connotation context, gain a new framework of valuation and reference in the collection. Their multiple spatial and cultural location is defined by their local, legal, formal, material and semantic status. These
partially strikingly different connotation references that previously interlocked with other identity-constructions and identity-connections can become significant sources of conflict.
A group of Australian aboriginals for instance resent exhibiting skeletons (due to the magic of the elders’
spirits) and they find it harmful regarding them as cultural items. But some archeologists argue that handing the skeletons back to them would result in their total destruction. Naturally within contemporary western societies, culture and faith often conflict to credit aesthetic and historical value to an item, action or location. In these cases caesura or other religious change can cause –with more or less public consent- the destruction or dismemberment of the items. (Harrison 2010:167).
Heritage can be an innocent by-stander as well, as in the case of the temples of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, which were damaged a great deal in the course of the country’s civil wars, in the 70s and 80s. Besides these damages, the greatest loss was that due to the war financial resources, with which these heritages could have been saved, depleted to zero. No effort was made to sustain them for twenty years, since wars were busy with the ongoing battle. The main parts of the building were claimed back by nature. Angkor Wat was the discovery of Henri Mouhot. The French archeological expeditions started at the time of the collision, when for the first time Louis Deaport wished to found a collective museum in Paris for the art treasures.
The statues which were taken in 1878 were even put out at the World Exhibition in Paris. In the 20th century, the archeologists of École Française d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO 2013) in the group of Service de conservation des monuments du groupe d'Angkor undertook the main excavating task, cleaning, preserving and renovating, with anastylosis methods. By the end of the civil war, from 1991, Japan, the UNESCO with the collaboration of vast international, state and private organizations, the stimulus of tourism was initiated through the education of local citizens and investment in the infrastructure. (World Geographic Magazine: Angkor, 2013).
Cultural ownership and the right of interpretation
The professional characteristics of the European model of social value construction give key role to the the curators and the historic preservationists, in which case they take responsibility for the semantic connotation, significance and interpretation of object of art and buildings. They assess the cultural interest in the object of heritage, so that it can be constructed into a representable heritage-construction. The fate of the heritage is not in their hands.
Numerous demands for restitution show the sharpness of national cultural heritage policy. Its main problem is that the origins of artifacts from museums and collections can rarely be dated back to the commercial relationship of two equal parties. Who has the right of interpretation, and who else should have it? Besides the local ownership status and the legal ownership demands, there are scientific and cultural issues as well.
According to certain views, it would be more practical to share the right of interpretation, rather than to share the item itself, since this way it would be possible to share the item with people who don’t belong to the culture that the item originated from. (Dolff-Bonekamper 2009).
The nation, as an option of interpretation
Heritages of sociocultural phenomena such as superstitions, folk music and folk lifestyle often give bases to the identity of a nation. The concept of nation, as a society integrated by symbolic values, the mother country, as the aim and wish of a sense of belonging, as well as the concept of a national heritage that includes symbolic goods, culture and its institutions – the notion of culture and the reservation of the historical heritage of the European museum – all appeared at the time of the French revolution. To stop the vandalism toward the eradication of past embodied by power symbols and art treasures, Talleyrand, Abbé Grégoire and Cambon operated with a concept of culture that declared the historical continuity of the country, the approval of freedom and art and the role of art relics in the education of the nation.
A tool for this was the collection and preservation of symbolic objectivities. The context of the symbols of tyranny, inequality and superstition had to be switched to a concept of culture that is free from direct content and the historic functions of the past. The decree to preserve every historical heritage and to prohibit the destruction of artistic and historical heritages was made during the Jacobin terror and it is in effect even today.
The term ’art relic’ referred to buildings, tombs, statues, glass-windows-, technical inventions, everything that
could serve as documentation for the history of the nation. This meant that art, literature and science, that had only belonged to a personal, familial sphere before, is now incorporated into an authority zone of a more complicated institution system. This fulfilled the function of depriving them of context, profaned and neutralised them. Paradoxically, the musealization of the loot initiated this process, via which the (art)works, deprived of their original function, were made into human rights, unbounded imagination and creativeness and a public domain for all the individuals of a nation.
Besides the mere matching of civil values, there was a need for such metaphors for the construction of the historic concept of nation in modern 19th century, such as lineage, the memory of a heroic past and the preservation of historic heritage. Thus the nation, while creating itself also created its own heritage. The institutions of monumental heritage relevant to the national consciousness solidified in the 19th century. Mottos such as, „learn to protect”, embracing the notion of national romanticism, chiselled with political motifs, intended to legitimate nation-states. (Husz 2007:17-18). Nation-states need national heritages. Since they reinforce and promote national consciousness, but at the same time neutralize the heritages of other potentially competing regions or other social-cultural groups. This method is often applied in newly liberated countries, where leaders, through special events, unify and govern the country, developing patriotism, generating hatred and disdain toward other peoples and previously dominant groups.
Wars usually bring about strong patriotic emotions, that is the reason why many countries accentuate the importance of wartime heritages, such as war sites, national cemeteries, tombs of unknown soldiers, - they trigger the feeling of a collective patriotism. (Irimiás 2013). The monuments of a national past do not tell us about what happened, but rather about how we have to remember those events and celebrate them. The ’spirit of nation’ is not equivalent to the heritage of the nation, although the two concepts share some important traits.
As Laurajane Smith said:„Nation and racial discourses coalesced and naturalized a link between concepts of identity, history, and territory to establish a doctrine of ’blood and soil. It is within this context of the developing narrative of nationalism and of a universalizing modernity that a new, more signposted concern for what we now identity as ’heritage’ emerged. (Smith 2006:18)”.
When defining heritages such as buildings and objects of art, the national framework expresses a clearly described political demand, serves strategies for legitimising nation-states, and follows the current power structures and financial authorities. Those heritage goods, which do not fit into the national idea, disturb the calculated cultural homogeneity. In the same way critical-analytical deconstructions can be seen as attacks against the national identity and they can expect obstruction. Within the European Union, the aim of heritage-policy is the moulding of an identity above the level of nations, the finding of a shared heritage that assists Member states, but at the same time emphasizes the diversity of European cultures and multiculturalism.
The religious framework, political violence and
the paradoxes of the universal value of heritage doctrine
The strongest impact of the idea of world heritage on global conceptions is the „universal value of heritage”. If something turns into a universal value of heritage, then it means that the importance of that item, place or exercise surpasses local boundaries and its preservation will become the „shared aim” for humanity. Its impact and a global political decision makes it of universally important. In the process of decision-making, the notion of the preservation of cultural diversity and the notion of the preservation of the world’s „shared value” can conflict with each other, that is the accentuation of folk culture and social references and the correlation of given items, keeps pace and moves with the notion of the heritage of humanity.
Heritage can even get into international and political conflict. The methods of the list of world heritage, the conception of preserving heritage or the official heritage-discourses can collide with alternative heritage conceptions and can play an important role in national history, local religious and cultural practises. The system of world heritage can become a Universalist trend in local heritage and the diversity of cultural practice. Minding that, world organizations are taking measures to protect the diversity of cultures, especially from those nation states that are making strongly homogenizing efforts.
In the history of religions, the contradiction that some of them prohibit portraying people and some do not, is common practice. In the course of the history of humanity the fact that „iconoclasms” have occurred several
times are the consequences of this contradiction and impatience. The destruction of Bamiyan Buddha by Taliban people in Afghanistan triggered one of the most dynamic, emblematic interference into heritage by national politics. (Bamiyan Buddha 2013). The Buddha statues were destroyed in the Bamiyan valley in Afghanistan in 2001. Rodney Harrison, in connection with the destruction of the big and little Buddha statues in the Afghanistan Bamiyan valley, examines what happens when heritage gets involved in an international political conflict, investigates the methods and ideas of the list of world heritage, that is the official heritage discourses collide with the alternative conceptions of heritage and play an important part in national history.
The Bamiyan valley is located in Middle-East-Afghanistan, approximately 230 km away, northwest from Kabul. The place is at a traffic conjunction, going east takes us to China, to south to India, and to west to Persia, the place was first conquered in the third century, when the Buddhist culture dominated in Middle- Asia, and soon – from the 4th century to the 8th – it became the most prominent monastic center of Buddhism. The two monumental figures, the Big and Little Buddha, were carved into the Bamiyan limestone rocks at that time. The 55 and 38 meter tall monumental figures are striking reminders of the Buddhist history of the valley, they were the hugest Buddha sculptures in the world.
The Bumiyan valley was an important early station for Buddhist saints, who were buried there. It is probable that the monumental Buddha statues were carved into the rock between the 3th and the 6th century. Historical
The Bumiyan valley was an important early station for Buddhist saints, who were buried there. It is probable that the monumental Buddha statues were carved into the rock between the 3th and the 6th century. Historical