scholarly journals Does the Law Determine What Heritage to Remember?

Author(s):  
Marie-Sophie de Clippele

AbstractCultural heritage can offer tangible and intangible traces of the past. A past that shapes cultural identity, but also a past from which one sometimes wishes to detach oneself and which nevertheless needs to be remembered, even commemorated. These themes of memory, history and oblivion are examined by the philosopher Paul Ricoeur in his work La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (2000). Inspired by these ideas, this paper analyses how they are closely linked to cultural heritage. Heritage serves as a support for memory, even if it can be mishandled, which in turn can affect heritage policies. Memory and heritage can be abused as a result of wounds from the past or for reasons of ideological manipulation or because of a political will to force people to remember. Furthermore, heritage, as a vehicule of memory, contributes to historical knowledge, but can remain marked by a certain form of subjectivism during the heritage and conservation operation, for which heritage professionals (representatives of the public authority or other experts) are responsible. Yet, the responsibility for conserving cultural heritage also implies the need to avoid any loss of heritage, and to fight against oblivion. Nonetheless, this struggle cannot become totalitarian, nor can it deprive the community of a sometimes salutary oblivion to its own identity construction. These theoretical and philosophical concepts shall be examined in the light of legal discourse, and in particular in Belgian legislation regarding cultural heritage. It is clear that the shift from monument to heritage broadens the legal scope and consequently raises the question of who gets to decide what is considered heritage according to the law, and whether there is something such as a collective human right to cultural heritage. Nonetheless, this broadening of the legislation extends the State intervention into cultural heritage, which in turn entails certain risks, as will be analysed with Belgium’s colonial heritage.

2015 ◽  
Vol 97 (900) ◽  
pp. 1253-1275 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christiane Johannot-Gradis

AbstractIn war, individuals are vulnerable not only physically but also in terms of their cultural identity, and the obliteration of cultural heritage often becomes a central issue. This is particularly the case in armed conflicts with an ethnic, cultural or religious character. In some regions, cultural heritage consists more of monuments and objects; it is a “tangible” heritage, mostly protected by the law of armed conflict. Elsewhere, where structures are impermanent, cultural heritage is mainly expressed through orality, gestures, rituals, music and other forms of expression that individuals create using various media and instruments. Such heritage is mainly “intangible”. This essay aims to show that cultural heritage is both tangible and intangible, and that the law which protects such heritage is not limited to the law of armed conflict. Cultural heritage also benefits from the protection of other applicable instruments, such as human rights treaties and the UNESCO cultural heritage conventions.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ngô Quang Sơn ◽  
Trần Văn Toàn

Ra-glai ethnic minorities make up a sizable proportion of the population in Ninh Thuan province in general and Bac Ai district in particular. Ra-glai ethnic minorities have a long-standing culture and have a unique ethnic identity. The tangible and intangible cultural identity of the Ra-glai ethnic minority is both closely associated with religious beliefs and widely popular, has great power to dominate all activities of Ra-glai ethnic minorities. The conservation and promotion of the tangible and intangible cultural heritages of the Ra-glai ethnic group in Bac Ai district, Ninh Thuan province in the process of building a new countryside is now becoming one of the issues authorized by the party committee, local authorities are very interested in implementing.Over the past years, with the investment of the State, the province, the district, the local organizations and individuals, the education to preserve and promote the ethnic cultural identity of the Ra-glai community In Bac Ai district, Ninh Thuan province has achieved some encouraging results. However, in the process of building a new countryside, the culture of the local Ra-glai ethnic minority has been gradually fading.The authors of the paper have deeply studied the current state of conservation education and promotion of the cultural heritage of Ra-glai ethnic minorities in Bac Ai district, Ninh Thuan province, then proposing solutions to building an educational model that conserves and promotes the cultural heritage of Ra-glai ethnic minorities in a sustainable way in the process of building a New Rural in Bac Ai district, Ninh Thuan province in the period of the current.


2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 248-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Kontowski ◽  
Madelaine Leitsberger

European universities responded in different ways to the ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015. Some subscribed to the agenda of higher education (HE) as a universal human right, while others stressed different long-term benefits of offering access to it. Yet, the unprecedented sense of moral urgency that guided immediate declarations of support and subsequent actions has largely remained unaddressed. With the crisis becoming a new reality for many countries, HE has a role to play in the social inclusion of refugees, even in countries that were not attractive destinations for refugees in the past. In this article, we provide an overview of the reasons why HE institutions supported refugees, and present the results of an empirical study of Poland and Austria during the 2015–2016 academic year. We then evaluate those first responses utilizing parts of Ager and Strang’s framework of integration, and discuss issues of institutional readiness, capabilities and the public role of HE stemming from this comparison. Our findings suggest that reasons such as acknowledgement of basic rights, or utilizing social capital are insufficient to explain and understand strong integrative support measures. We propose that refugee support by HE institutions is both better understood and promoted through the language of hospitality.


Focaal ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 2010 (58) ◽  
pp. 81-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Steinmüller

In the past, most farmhouses in central China had an ancestral shrine and a paper scroll with the Chinese letters for "heaven, earth, emperor, ancestors, and teachers" on the wall opposite the main entrance. The ancestral shrine and paper scroll were materializations of the central principles of popular Confucianism. This article deals with their past and present. It describes how in everyday action and in ritual this shrine marked a spatial and moral center. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) the ancestral shrines and paper scrolls were destroyed, and replaced by a poster of Mao Zedong. Although the moral principles of popular Confucianism were dismissed by intellectuals and politicians, Mao Zedong was worshipped in ways reminiscent of popular Confucian ritual. The Mao poster and the paper scroll stand for a continuity of a spatial-moral practice of centering. What has changed however is the public evaluation of such a local practice, and this tension can produce a double embarrassment. Elements of popular Confucianism (which had been forcefully denied in the past) remain somewhat embarrassing for many people in countryside. At the same time urbanites sometimes inversely perceive the Maoist condemnation of popular Confucianism as an awkward survival of peasant narrow-mindedness—all the more so as Confucian traditions are now reinvented and revitalized as cultural heritage.


Author(s):  
Nunuk Febriananingsih

<p>Kebebasan informasi merupakan hak asasi yang fundamental. Pengalaman selama ini menunjukkan bahwa informasi lembaga pemerintah dan non pemerintah dianggap sulit dijangkau masyarakat. Permasalahan yang diangkat dalam tulisan ini adalah bagaimana kesiapan lembaga-lembaga pemerintah dalam mengimplementasikan UU KIP dalam upaya mewujudkan tata pemerintahan yang baik. Dengan menggunakan metode penelitian hukum normatif diketahui bahwa Undang-Undang Nomor 14 Tahun 2008 tentang Keterbukaan Informasi Publik memberi jaminan kepada masyarakat untuk mengakses informasi dari badan publik, meskipun lembaga pemerintah belum siap mengimplementasikan UU KIP. Hal ini terlihat dari belum tersedianya informasi terkait dengan urusan tata kepemerintahan seperti kebijakan publik dan pelayanan publik. Untuk itu Pemerintah perlu segera mengimplementasikan UU KIP sesuai dengan yang diamanatkan oleh PP Nomor 61 Tahun 2010 tentang pelaksanaan UU KIP.</p><p>Freedom of information is a fundamental human right. Past experience shows that information and non-governmental agencies are considered hard to reach communities. Issues raised in this paper is how the readiness of government agencies in implementing the law is in an effort to realize good governance. By using the method of normative legal research note that the Act No. 14 of 2008 concerning Freedom of Information gives assurance to the public to access information from public bodies, although the government agency implementing the law is not yet ready. This is evident from the unavailability of information relating to the affairs of governance such as public policy and public service. For the Government should immediately implement in accordance with the law is mandated by the Government Regulation Number 61 Year 2010 concerning the implementation of the law is.</p>


2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 597
Author(s):  
Ivan Vranić

Along with many different definitions of archaeology, from the inception of the discipline to the present, it may be valid to assert that it is a kind of complex dialogue on heritage with the public of contemporary societies. In this dialogue, archaeologists have directly constructed social memories and modern identities, this being an exceptional responsibility, and have at the same time been susceptible to ethnocentric transfers of modern values and expectations into the images of the past. In this respect, it may well be said that the public is not only the most important consumer of cultural heritage, but also an active participant indirectly influencing the shaping of archaeological interpretations of the past. Thanks to the global trends in the discipline, but also due to the administrative decisions of the Ministry of Culture and Information, archaeology in Serbia is compelled to intensify contacts with the public and to make the results of our work more readily accessible and economically sustainable. The paper aims to offer a short overview of theoretical premises of various models of collaboration of archaeology and the public, to point to the advantages and shortcomings, as well as the consequences of these approaches, thus warning of the many potential problems stemming from the uncritical dissemination of information on the past and heritage to the general public.


2019 ◽  
Vol 101 (910) ◽  
pp. 273-294 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Walasek

AbstractThis article draws on my book Bosnia and the Destruction of Cultural Heritage,1 which incorporates ground-breaking fieldwork in Bosnia-Herzegovina and extensive research, and on my subsequent research and fieldwork in the post-conflict country. In the article, I explore the meaning that restoration and reconstruction of cultural heritage intentionally destroyed during conflict can have, particularly to the forcibly displaced. With the protection of cultural heritage increasingly being treated as an important human right and with the impact that forcible displacement during armed conflict has on cultural identity now in the spotlight, the importance of cultural heritage for those ethnically cleansed in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the 1992–95 war (both those who returned and those who did not) has relevance for considerations of contemporary post-conflict populations.


Author(s):  
Sonia Ferrari ◽  
Monica Gilli

This paper analyses the role played by the new multimedia technologies for the development of the offer of museums. The role of museums is changing: while in the past the goal of mere cataloguing and preservation prevailed, today these institutions are making efforts to increase the number of visitors and attract new segments of demand, as well as qualify their offer. It emerges, for all these reasons, the need to modify the positioning and the offering of cultural attractions, strengthening them in experiential terms. Therefore, in terms of management of cultural heritage it is necessary to focus on the ability to get closer to the public and to create richer and striking experiences for visitors through new technologies. The paper presents some of the most interesting cases of Italian audience-driven museums (Hopper-Greenhill, 1994) focused on innovative ITC support.


Author(s):  
Witte Bruno De

This chapter addresses linguistic heritage as part of cultural heritage. The use of a language not only serves as a means of functional communication but also expresses the speaker’s cultural identity as well as the cultural heritage developed by all previous users of that language. One can say that legal measures that allow for the public use of a particular language, or that impose the use of that language in certain contexts, contribute to the preservation of the cultural heritage of a country. However, UNESCO’s Intangible Heritage Convention includes within its scope the oral traditions and forms of expressions that use language as their tool. In other words, language is protected because, and to the extent that, it gives expression to an element of a community’s intangible cultural heritage other than the language itself. Therefore, international law plays only a limited role in protecting language-as-heritage.


2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 205979911772061
Author(s):  
Hannah Thurston

Like all museums, punishment museums and sites of penal tourism are inherently political and moral institutions, offering cultural memories of a collective past. As environments of narrativity, these are significant spaces in which the public ‘learn’ about the past and how it continues to inform the present. In line with recent studies about ‘dark’ tourist sites, this article argues that the crime/punishment museum and jail cell tour can – and should – be understood as an ethnographic opportunity for narrative analysis. Rather than focus on just the findings of such an analysis, this article seeks to provide a practical guide to data collection and analysis in the context of criminological museum research. Offering illustrative examples from a study of Texan sites of penal tourism, it demonstrates how the history of punishment – as represented in museums – is an important part of cultural identity more broadly, playing a significant role in how we conceptualise (in)justice, morality and the purpose of punishment. In short, this article discusses how we can evoke the ethnographic tradition within museum spaces in order to interrogate how crime and punishment are expressed through narratives, images, objects and symbols.


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