David Lowenthal

The heritage crusade and the spoils of history

Heritage, while it often constitutes and defines the most positive aspects of culture, is a malleable body of historical text subject to interpretation and easily twisted into myth. When it is appealed to on a national or ethnic level in reactions against racial, religious, or economic oppression, the result is often highly-charged political contention or conflict. The extraordinary theme of this unique book is how the rise of a manifold, crusade-like obsession with tradition and inheritance--both physical and cultural--can lead to either good or evil. In a balanced account of the pros and cons of the rhetoric and spoils of heritage--on the one hand cultural identity and unity, on the other, potential holy war--David Lowenthal discusses the myriad uses and abuses of historical appropriation and offers a rare and accessible account of a concept at once familiar and fraught with complexity.

Natural and cultural heritage

We receive communal legacies from two sources—the natural environment and the creations of human beings. To be sure, these inheritances everywhere commingle; no aspect of nature is unimpacted by human agency, no artefact devoid of environmental impress. Yet we have traditionally dealt quite differently with these two kinds of legacy. Though management of both heritages has many features in common, and both realms often share similar, if not the same, leaders and spokesmen, relations between the two are marked less by cooperative amity than by envy and rivalry. This essay discusses the reasons for our dissimilar approaches to nature and culture, and shows how they bear on the campaigns to protect and preserve each. In some important ways, the history, politics, and rhetoric of conservation and destruction are shown to have converged, in others to have diverged, over the last half century.

Classical antiquities as national and global heritage

The current campaign to return to Athens the Parthenon sculptures that have been in the British Museum since the early 19th century highlights the profoundly dual nature of Greek architectural and sculptural heritage, as emblems of both Greek and global attachment. Classical relics in particular have become symbols of Greek attachment to the homeland; underscoring links between past and present, they confirm and celebrate Greek national identity. Other elements of Greek heritage – language, literature, religion, folklore – likewise lend strength to this identity, but material remnants of past glories, notably temples and sculptures from the times of Phidias and Praxiteles, assume an increasingly important symbolic role (Cook 1984; Hitchens 1987).

Living with and looking at landscape

Abstract Landscape is experienced in countless ways by all human beings, both individually and as members of communities, nations and humanity as a whole. Concern for rural locales as the loci of social, economic and domestic existence has, in recent centuries, often been seen in accord, but more usually in conflict, with attachment to the scenic qualities of landscape couched in aesthetic terms. Celebrated in art and in history, landscapes connote stability and security, but living with them is regarded as a virtue, looking at them condemned as shallow scenic appreciation. The stress between these two sets of values is exacerbated by the decline of rural economies throughout the developed world, the abandonment of agricultural landscapes and the loss of traditional countryside ties. Shifting landscape attachments reflect the timing, extent and current pace of rural depopulation. Whether despite or owing to their increasing remoteness from everyday life, landscapes are heavily freighted with moral and symbolic worth as ecological paradigms and as rightful common inheritances, while spurned as scenically frivolous.

ISLANDS, LOVERS, AND OTHERS

Geography, experience, and imagination are all crucial to how we take measure of islands. Prime foci of legend and invention, islands have haunted humanity since the dawn of history. Why are they so intensely loved and loathed, desired and rejected, minutely scrutinized yet often perilously misjudged? On islands we feel alternately landed and adrift, magnified and reduced, fulfilled and voided, at home and in exile. These and other polarities are reviewed here with examples from Caribbean, Atlantic, Mediterranean, antipodean, and imaginary islands fancied by the creator.

Why Sanctions Seldom Work: Reflections on Cultural Property Internationalism

Heritage piety departs ever farther from reality. High-minded admonitions broaden the gulf between what happens to cultural property and what virtuous stewards feel should happen. Ever more of our patrimony gets looted, destroyed, mutilated, shorn of context, hidden from scrutiny, inadequately stored, poorly conserved, eBayed. Merryman cites three causes: the animus of UNESCO and archaeology against marketing cultural property, the sanguine view that trafficking abuse can be quashed by state fiat and moral suasion, and excessive constraint against heritage export by blanket diktats from source nations (and tribes and ethnic groups). These evils endure because heritage stewards commonly subscribe to four underlying sacrosanct fictions. (1) The heritage of all humanity deserves to be preserved in toto. (2) Cultural heritage matters above all for the information it can yield. (3) Collecting is reprehensible; it must be circumscribed if not outlawed. (4) Nations and tribes are enduring entities with sacred rights to time-honored legacies. I show why these views are mistaken yet remain embedded in heritage philosophy and protocol. In particular, although heritage is piously declared the legacy of all mankind, chauvinist sentiment continues to impede internationalism, partly because it buttresses the credentials of those in charge, who are forced into moral postures that promise unachievable stewardship. National and local self-esteem are holy writ for UNESCO and other cultural property agencies. Equating heritage with identity justifies every groups claim to the bones, the belongings, the riddles, and the refuse of every forebear back into the mists of time. All that stands in the way of everyones reunion with all their ancestors and ancestral things is its utter impossibility. Heritage professionals once seen as selfless are now targets of suspicion, often thought backward looking, deluded, self-seeking, or hypocritical. Small wonder that militant reformers who seek to suppress illicit cultural property dealings by treaties, court decisions, government fiats, and the moral artillery of shame and guilt are viewed with an increasingly cynical eye.

‘European Identity’: An Emerging Concept

The idea of European identity has grown in significance and specificity over two millennia. Earlier, the advance was largely generated by opposition to outsiders, in terms of culture and religion. Those who thought in European terms were long a tiny minority of rulers, clerics, financiers, men of learning and the arts. Only in the late eighteenth century did bourgeois participation broaden consciousness of European community, linked in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to social and political progress. In the past half century European identity has gained official sanction as a diplomatic and legislative set of entities. Efforts to underpin existing and to spur new mutuality at the folk-level lag, owing to a host of persisting problems — linguistic diversity, disparities of resources, unforgotten grievances, doubts about the scope of territorial expansion, and a felt imbalance between administrative goals and popular allegiances.

Origins of Anthropocene awareness

Validating the Anthropocene as a new epoch and dating its start preoccupies many contributors to this journal. Awareness of anthropogenic change, rather than change itself, is my concern here. When, how and to whom did major human impacts became apparent? Some supposed Earth-reshaping effects have been actual, others illusory or exaggerated, still others conjectural or prospective. Attributions of causative human agency stem not only from empirical observation and historical accounts, but also from deeply embedded notions of religious purpose and moral propriety. I sketch the history of impact awareness and the utility of Anthropocene precedents. I then discuss the pioneering insights of George Perkins Marsh (1801–1882), the first to combine observations of ongoing terrestrial transformations with historically based analyses of cumulative impacts. In conclusion, I stress the relevance of Marsh’s awareness of deforestation, soil erosion, desertification, flooding, biotic impoverishment, and prospective systemic changes for an Earth at risk from less immediately visible but even graver, longer-lasting, more globalized and more intractable anthropogenic damage.

Population Contrasts in the Guianas

HOW do different men and nations act in similar environments? For answers to this question, which is central to both geography and history, the Guianas offer notable opportunities. Here, as perhaps nowhere else in the world, European powers placed settlements side by side under like circumstances. Yet today man and land in each of the three European Guianas are highly distinctive. The purpose of this paper is to show what some of the differences are, and why and how they came about. Comparison of these contiguous British, Dutch, and French territories, instructive in itself, may also perhaps throw light on the nature and development of colonial settlement, culture, and society in general.

George Perkins Marsh and the American Geographical Tradition

A MERICAN geographers have often been taken to task-and they are their own severest critics for their neglect of historical processes. If true, this reproof is well merited; for the life of every person in this country is encompassed by change from cradle to grave. Nowhere else in the world have four centuries of civilization more thoroughly transformed the lineaments of the landscape. Is there one aspect of our geography, beyond the broadest configurations of peaks and plains and the most general conditions of climate, that bears the slightest resemblance to that of preColumbian America? Not the cultural environment alone, but the natural as well to make a distinction that has almost ceased to be recognizable-has undergone transformation. The forests we fell, the soils we work, the slopes we build upon, the streams we dam, even the air we breathe, are so rapidly modified that each generation witnesses a new metamorphosis. Myopia, rather than laziness, prevented American geographers of the past from paying more than cursory attention to this phenomenon. Too busy conquering new worlds, too engrossed in mapping an area larger than Europe and thitherto less well known than the face of the moon, too absorbed in studying the spectacular landforms of a second hemisphere and speculating on the processes that had produced them, our early geographers had little time to spare for what appeared to them to be relatively trivial or even obvious occurrences. Besides, the sense of history is stunted when events crowd one another so hurriedly; we must readjust to new circumstances without taking time to inquire into their antecedents. As soon as we begin to examine our world, it ceases to be contemporary; another demands to be lived in before its predecessor can be described. Again, the significance of any movement other than their own is likely to be lost upon those wanderers-and they are still the majority of us who are so tenuously attached to any locality that they have never acquired the sense of home, so foot-loose that they conceive of cities in generic rather than specific terms, and so peripatetic that they regard rural landscapes as prototypes of economic endeavor rather than real entities.