Expertise and Heritage Ethics in the Middle East

Abstract

By the time I completed fieldwork in Qatar in 2016, the Msheireb project that aimed to redevelop the heart of Doha was nearing completion of its first phase. The way this development project unfolded during this time was indicative of broader negotiations of Qatari cultural brokers with ideas of indigeneity and expertise: the project was rebranded from Dohaland, “The Heart of Doha,” to Msheireb (after the local wadi) in the first half of 2011, while the iconic Al Kahraba Street—the “spine” of the old city and the first street to be electrified in Qatar—was referred to in architectural notations as the “Champs-Élysées” of Doha. The politics of indigeneity of place-making in these negotiations reflected an unresolved unease with the cosmopolitan nature of expertise. This tension was related not necessarily to the ingenious remixing of traditional and modern concepts of cultural and environmental sustainability, but rather to the active erasure of foreign expertise. We see this, for example, in the active rebranding of the I. M. Pei's Museum (in reference to the Chinese American “starchitect” who designed it) in order to take its rightful “local” name, the Museum of Islamic Art. While these efforts would suggest an intention to localize expertise and build local capacity as part of national objectives, I argue in this essay that this mastering in fact obscures local expertise by dissociating it from the cosmopolitan context in which knowledge production is negotiated in Qatar.

Counter-archives as heritage justice: photography, invisible labor and peopled ruins

“…Accompanying this type of visual documentation is Layard’s own account of ‘the Arabs’, nameless local hands who assisted him in preparation for the removal of these statues to Europe (Layard, 1867: 312). This way, an apparent and willing surrender of stewardship is officialized (Rico, 2017b: 742–746). With a legacy built on a variety of static visual documentation strategies, the sphere of human agency in heritage preservation practices is made invisible one way or another.…”

Does intra-disciplinary historic preservation scholarship address the exigent issues of practice? Exploring the character and impact of preservation knowledge production in relation to critical heritage studies, equity, and social justice

“…A significant amount of critical preservation scholarship is concerned with heritage discourse and the development and destruction of rhetoric around built heritage, often incorporating extra-Western perspectives and employing the dualism of conventional experts/orthodox doctrine versus laypeople/situated knowledge. Examples of work in this area include critiques of policy (Koziol, 2007(Koziol, , 2008(Koziol, , 2012 and the negotiation of meanings in the creation of a specific heritage rhetoric in Western and non-Western contexts (Asif & Rico, 2017;Lafrenz-Samuels & Rico, 2015;Rico, 2015Rico, , 2017aRico, , 2017b. More specifically, Trinidad Rico (Exell & Rico, 2013Rico, 2008Rico, , 2017cRico, , 2017d, explores power structures in the control of heritage meanings through a colonial lens in the Arabian Peninsula including the fear of Islamic heritage by dominant global cultural groups (Rico, 2014a(Rico, , 2014b, and the colonialism that is inherent in defining and planning for "heritage at risk" (Rico, 2014c(Rico, , 2016a.…”