No abstract
This paper seeks to address, from the critical perspectives of cultural heritage discourse, the issues at stake in critically apprehending the archive as both a technology of disinheritance and one of potential inclusion and re-inheritance. The first section draws on the work of Jacques Derrida, Edward Said and other critics whose work has sought to address the marginalizing capacity of dominant European/North American archival and cultural-museological institutions. The remainder of the paper grounds these conceptualethical issues in the context of Palestinian cultural politics and memory-work. This critical framework is used not only to draw out the absences and silences in archives and cultural institutions, and the epistemological and 'real' violences at play in what Derrida characterises as 'archive trauma', but responds to Said's call to 're-read' the colonial archive 'contrapuntally' in order to create an 'othering' of dominant archival discourse. What is needed to provoke such an 'othering' is a commitment to rethink the archive in terms of alternative understandings of 'hospitality', 'memory-work' and what Derrida has referred to as 'heritage dignity'. This strategy is capable of apprehending in greater depth the moral-ethical 'debts' and 'duties' and the operational 'responses' and 'responsibilities' towards 'inclusion' and towards full recognition of those constituencies which have been disenfranchised or exiled outside the realms of dominant cultural-institutional discourse.
Our joint research addresses the complex role of heritage in selected Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan. Informed by the ‘We Refugee’ theses of Arendt (1943) and Agamben (1995) we see these ‘heritage ethnographies’ as a means to explore the paradoxes confronted by refugees as subject to both a ‘bio-political rites of passage’ that consigns them to ‘spaces of exception’ as ‘homo sacre’ and ‘bare life’ and as simultaneously obligated to the imperative of being the ‘vanguard of their people’. Our interest is in the ‘lived experiences’ of refugee communities vis-à-vis their perspectives and reflections on heritage which we argue characterise a potent ‘popular heritage rites’. We see these ‘heritage rites’ as activated heritage forms and powerful ritual acts of communion, magical thinking and wish-fulfilment that create new ‘factness’ and ‘realities’ on the ground. Thus articulated through objects (domestic-personal mementoes and souvenirs) connecting people to the Palestinian ‘lost homeland’ as cosmic centre/axis mundi, or via public art/ murals and as sensoriums synonymous with the preparation and ingestion of traditional food. We explore how not only traditional performances of dabke dancing but new media of rap and film-making form a fundamental part of this complex context. The Palestinian refugee voices cited in this paper see the ‘thobe’ - embroidered Palestinian dress - as best encompassing their understanding of heritage, similarly ‘we/us’, as heritage critics and contemporary archaeologists, should embrace a paradigm shift that re-situates heritage within a theory of subjectivity and recognise the efficacy of popular heritage rites to ‘clothe’ ‘bare life’ and thus to empower persons not just in the future but in the present, and thereby take on the complexities and paradoxes that being human means especially in conditions of extremis.
In this paper I present critical insights into the efficacies of heritage. I take the phenomenon of the Jerusalem Syndrome (JS) as my point of departure and recast it as Heritage Syndrome (HS). I do this to better understand how such efficacies are experienced and materialized in ritual possessional acts. As a framework, the JS reveals the power and potency that reside in experiences of collapse. Such disembedding events activate subsequent ritual dramas (whether malign/benign or successful/failed) of world-making, redemption, repair, and renewal. Heritage quests as ritual 'sacred dramas' and 'practical magics' are I argue, similarly experienced in the collapse of known categories: imagined/real, extraordinary/mundane, possessing/being possessed, and crucially what heritage is versus what heritage does. Writ large, heritage efficacies are bound-up in the breakdown and blurring of boundaries-and thus the non-distinction-between heritage in the conventional sense and other dynamics such as magic, prophecy, and well-being/ill-being. These reveal alternative pathways, potentialities, and patterns of behaviour that demonstrate that dominant, elite, rationalized approaches to heritage banalize heritage efficacies and can thus be termed a failed project. I argue that conceiving of heritage as a syndrome-and critically as a movement away from medical pathologization and towards a recasting of heritages as diverse constellations of cultural-spiritual magical-emotional experiences and engagements-better reflects the deeply felt complex and transformative practices at play. These heritage rites distinguished at points by those who wish their lives were more dramatic and those who wish their lives were less traumatic better describe how the vast majority of global actors engage with heritage, notably at popular, grassroots level and in contexts of extremis, yet its significance goes largely unrecognized and unvalued.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.