Denis Byrne

Western hegemony in archaeological heritage management

(1991). Western hegemony in archaeological heritage management. History and Anthropology: Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 269-276.

Nervous Landscapes: Race and Space in Australia

The experience of being on the receiving end of racial segregation has been fundamental to the way generations of Aboriginal people in NSW view the landscape. Racial segregation was and is a spatial system with a plenitude of dividing lines, but the lines were unmarked more than marked, the conventions unvoiced more than spoken. Historically, in the Australian case, it was a system that covered its own tracks and left few marks apart from those it left on the lives of its victims. The colonial, cadastral mapping of land was instrumental in racial separation. In theory, the colonized were gridlocked by the cadastra but there were always ways through it and ways of subverting it.

Buddhist stupa and Thai social practice

Abstract This paper explores the place of the stupa in Thai Buddhism, particularly the way that stupa tend to be elaborated and enlarged over time by encasing the older fabric in a new shell. The discussion is framed as a critique of current conservation practice which, privileging ‘original’ fabric, cuts across Thai local religious practice.

The Ethos of Return: Erasure and Reinstatement of Aboriginal Visibility in the Australian Historical Landscape

Aboriginal efforts to secure the repatriation and reburial of their ancestors’ remains represent an undoing of the colonial project of collection. It is but one element of an ethos of “return” that challenges white-settler society’s turning of a blind eye to the continued presence of Aboriginal people in the post-1788 landscape. Archaeologists in Australia, along with heritage professionals generally, have for the most part not deployed their skills and knowledge in the interests of revealing the historical coexistence and entanglement of settler and Aboriginal cultures. Rather, archaeologists have practiced a form of segregation that finds no room for Aboriginal people and their story in the historical landscape as archaeology constructs it. The case is put for archaeologists themselves to embrace an ethos of return that reverses this erasure.

Love & loss in the 1960s

Roland Barthes observed that though there is a ‘lovers discourse’ shared by all those who are in love, it is a discourse ignored or disparaged by ‘surrounding languages’. Concerned that the discourse of heritage may participate in this closure against the ‘in love’ experience, I begin to explore ways the field of heritage studies might start speaking this language. Specifically, I ponder the ways that a young Chinese woman in the film Days of being wild, following the breakup of a love affair, becomes locked in a landscape of lost love that is populated with objects sticky with affect, objects which although they transmit painful affects nevertheless bind her by a dynamic that Lauren Berlant terms ‘cruel optimism’. I then turn to imagine the way a Balinese house compound gateway might, in a similar way, have become impregnated with affects relating to victims of the 1965–1966 killings in Bali and how, for those left behind, it might assume the ability to ‘presence’ a lost one. Archaeology and heritage studies have great potential to foster empathy with the experience of past others, but this calls for a sophisticated understanding of how objects become imbued with affect and how they transmit it.

Archaeological heritage and cultural intimacy: An interview with Michael Herzfeld

In his work in Greece, Italy, and Thailand, Michael Herzfeld, Professor at Harvard University’s Department of Anthropology, has involved himself with communities of people who find themselves caught up in the politics of the past. For some of these people, the antiquity of their well-loved surroundings has been something of a curse, attracting as it does the interest of wealthy would-be residents to their neighbourhoods, a situation which Herzfeld (2009a) has studied in the Monti district of Rome. In other places, such as at Pom Mahakan in Bangkok (Herzfeld, 2006, 2010), the existence of monumental remains in a community’s midst has attracted the interest of government departments intent on developing their neighbourhoods as heritage precincts. Among the other categories of displaced and marginalized people in the world we now have that of heritage refugees. Herzfeld’s work is of particular relevance to archaeologists and heritage practitioners because of the fine-grained pictures his ethnography draws of life inside such communities as they struggle to assert their own integrity and also because of his interest in how local actors are able to redeploy discourses of heritage and nationalism in their own defence. As revealed in the following interview, his work has also led him to take a critical view of the category of intangible heritage as it has been articulated by UNESCO in recent years. Much of the interview references the situation in Thailand, which is Herzfeld’s most recent field area as well as being a focus of Byrne’s study of heritage and

Fishing the Georges River: Cultural Diversity and Urban Environments

Fishing is the most popular recreation in Australia but there are many different ways in which Australians have fished. Here are just a few extracts from interviews with people who live near and use the Georges River, a large tidal river in Sydney’s suburban south-west.1 They suggest the diverse skills and knowledge on the river, but also the currents of emotion, fear and politics which swirl around everyday fishing: Mahmoud lives in Bankstown but his family came from Syria: …we use a traditional Syrian or Lebanese rod where there’s no reels. It’s about a metre long and it’s telescopic … so it comes out to some six metres and then from the end tip, a fishing line is just tied to the top and then you put a sinker, a float and then another line down with the hook.

Partnerships in the Heritage of the Displaced

Denis Byrne manages the Research Section of the Cultural Heritage Division in the Department of Environment and Conservation, Cultural Heritage Division in New South Wales, Australia. His interests include the contemporary religious/spiritual context of heritage sites in Asia and Australia, the history and heritage of racial segregation in Australia, and the push towards greater acknowledgement of the social value of heritage places.

Heritage corridors: transnational flows and the built environment of migration

ABSTRACT In settler nations such as Australia, which have high migrant intakes, a category of cultural heritage practice has emerged that focuses on the material record of immigration. Currently, a nation-bounded approach tends to be taken to the recording and interpretation of this heritage, an approach that largely ignores the transnational social fields to which the immigrants who created the heritage places and buildings belonged. I propose the concept ‘heritage corridor’ to aid in conceptualising the transnational connectivity between migrant heritage sites in Australia and overseas locales as well as the bi-directional flow of ideas and capital that is often materially evident in the built environments, both rural and urban, encompassed by such a corridor. Focusing on Chinese overseas migration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I describe how transnational remittances were instrumental in the building of houses, temples, schools, shops, roads and bridges in Guangdong Province, many of which are now regarded as heritage items. As an example of how the field of heritage studies may productively dialogue with migration studies, new thinking on material agency is drawn upon to account for the way remittance-built houses become entangled in the lives and aspirations of those at opposite poles of a heritage corridor.

The nation, the élite and the Southeast Asian antiquities trade: With special reference to Thailand

Abstract The dealings that the Thai nation state has had with archaeological sites and antiquities appear to fit at least as well within the framework of antiquarian collecting as within that of modern archaeology. It is argued that this reflects the potential that sites and antiquities have to function as cultural capital. Citing Pierre Bourdieu, it is proposed that there is a commonality of interests between the state and the many private collectors among the Thai elite and that this derives partly from the emphasis that is placed on the display or performative potential of sites and antiquities. An appreciation of how antiquities function as cultural capital is surely a prerequisite for any successful effort to counter the looting of sites and the illegal trade in antiquities. ‘There is an economy of cultural goods, but it has a specific logic.’[1]