Shatha Abu-Khafajah

Meaning‐making and cultural heritage in Jordan: the local community, the contexts and the archaeological sites in Khreibt al‐Suq

This is an ethnographic study based on a fieldwork carried out in Khriebt al‐Suq, in Jordan, in the time between 1 June and 14 September 2004. In this paper, the meaning of archaeological sites is investigated as a ‘structure of understanding and attachments’ (Marris 1986, p. 4), through which individuals interpret the time and the place of the past. The paper suggests that values and meanings that individuals ascribe to material of the past derive their importance from being a reflection of people’s contexts. Throughout the process in which meanings are created and ascribed to archaeological sites, the remains of the past are transformed into such reflections. Archaeological sites in this process are transformed into cultural heritage: something relevant to local communities’ contemporary contexts and cultures. The credibility of cultural heritage is thus derived from its being a ‘reflection’ of these contexts. It is through this ‘reflection’ that people are able to identify themselves with the past and its material.

Meaning-Making Process of Cultural Heritage in Jordan: The Local Communities, the Contexts, and the Archaeological Sites in the Citadel of Amman

In this paper, the meaning of the cultural heritage in the citadel of Amman is investigated, by understanding the relationships through which individuals, as well as local communities, interpret the time and place of the past. It is suggested that values and meanings individuals ascribe to the past derive importance from being a reflection of individuals’ contexts. What is meaningful in one context might be meaningless in another. Throughout the process in which meanings are ascribed to archaeological sites, the archaeological remains are transformed into entities that reflect the context of the local communities. Through this process, archaeological sites are transformed from being merely material of the past into cultural heritage having relevance to local communities’ contemporary contexts and cultures.

Hands-On Heritage! Establishing Soft Authority over Heritage through Architectural Experiment: A Case Study from Jordan

This study identifies ‘heritage as practice’ as an alternative to ‘authorized’ heritage engagement. Heritage, in this sense, is perceived as a source of inspiration and creativity rather than just an asset to be preserved. ‘Heritage as practice’ is informed by the conventional identification and evaluation of heritage, coupled with the architectural and artistic instincts, capacities, creativity, and commitment found in the field of architecture, to interpret heritage. We label the work produced out of this practice as ‘creative material’ that is subjected to further re-creation when it is used as a platform for community engagement. We examine the mechanisms of these engagements through an academic experiment in which architecture students were asked to analyze the representations of the local heritage site of Umm el-Jimal, Jordan. We argue that shifting from ‘authorized’ engagement to informed ‘instinctual’ one gives the students a soft authority over heritage. However, it is the capacity to creatively engage with and about heritage, and use this to continuously and creatively interpret heritage, that makes this authority valid and just.

Urban heritage 'space' under neoliberal development: a tale of a Jordanian plaza.

What happens when urban heritage spaces within developing countries, such as Jordan, are subject to touristic development funded by international bodies, such as the World Bank? This question is explored theoretically and practically by considering a popular local plaza in the secondary Jordanian city of Jerash that has been subject to three tourism development projects funded by the World Bank. The study, which incorporates and critiques the discourse of neoliberalism within urban heritage development studies, seeks to analyse the World Bank projects and, more specifically, how they have defined, approached and produced outcomes in the Jerash plaza and its context. In so doing, the study triangulates the analysis with accounts by local respondents that identify major drawbacks in the World Bank approach, particularly its emphasis on conventional ‘readings’ of urban space that highlight universal values and histories, while neglecting and marginalising local values and understandings. The triangulation offers attentive ‘readings’ of the plaza as a place understood and experienced by a people. The challenge is to break with the neoliberal paradigm that dominates urban heritage development programmes (and their associated West–East dualisms and top-down approaches) by presenting local sociocultural and economic contexts as assets to enrich development projects, rather than obstacles to be ‘fixed’ and ‘fitted’ for tourism.

THE “JORDANIAN” ROMAN COMPLEX: Reinventing Urban Landscape to Accommodate Globalization

The central urban landscape of Amman, including the archaeological sites of the Roman Theatre, Odeon and Forum, has played an essential cultural, political, social, and economic role in local identity and memory since the establishment of the Emirate of Transjordan in 1921. This research is an ethnographic study of this urban landscape. It combines local peoples responses to recent governmental interventions to develop the downtown area around the Roman Complex. We document how the Roman Complex “grew” as a feature of a modern Jordanian landscape, not just a reminder of the Roman imperial past. The study investigates conflicting perspectives that have arisen between local community members and recent development projects. In these projects local peoples memories, feelings, knowledge, and activities related to the Roman Complex are sacrificed in order to present an image of Amman that can be perceived globally.

Colonnaded streets within the Roman cityscape: a “spatial” perspective

AbstractStudies tackling the Roman legacy of colonial cities and Arabian provinces are still grappling with these cities from an urban planning perspective and/or building typologies. They do not provide a ‘spatial’ analysis that allows reading the Roman cities through the features that structured its urban language; one of which is the colonnaded streets. The study adopts a holistic approach to confront the ambiguities about possible origins, uses and meanings of the Roman colonnaded streets when traced in the Roman East as well as other Western cities. Besides its utilitarian and cultural value, the colonnaded streets are nalyzed according to two interrelated interpretations: astrological interpretation to represent an empire of astral divinity and performative interpretation to represent an empire of imperial power. The colonnaded streets is transformed from a ‘line on site’ into a ‘line of sight’ that testifies to the social norms of the Roman people but also to their ideologies, beliefs, and aspirations.

Streets of memory: landscape, tolerance and national identity in Istanbul

Despite globalisation, urban spaces such as streets continue to influence people’s identities, and studies that explore the representative power of urban spaces, and representation of these spaces in different media, are increasing in geographic, architectural and anthropological fields. In these studies, urban spaces are arenas where ‘casual interaction, including reaction, conversation, and entertainment’ take place (Moughtin 1992, p. 131), and where cultural processes of social interaction and expression happen (Smithson and Smithson 1967, p. 15). Streets, therefore, exhibit socio-spatial processes through which diverse people imagine, express and sustain their identities. This role is also carried out by memory. In Archibald’s (2004, p. 20) words: ‘memory is a dynamic process of using the past to define and redefine who we are, what we believe, what we like and dislike, and the values we hold dear.’ This book explores the cultural politics of belonging and exclusion practices in Kuzguncuk’s streets, and their role in the construction of national identity in Istanbul. In this book, streets and memory interweave with each other to create identities. Identities compete and struggle to emphasise their differences and, therefore, produce a disputed urban space. They also blend to produce a homogenous place; an urban space with a distinctive identity such as Kuzguncuk. Mills’ attraction to the streets of Kuzguncuk is generated by its relatively recent past as one of Istanbul’s most diverse and tolerant neighbourhoods. The different ethnic and religious minority groups of Greek, Armenian and Jewish people that once lived with Muslim Turks in Kuzguncuk peacefully shaped and reshaped its landscape. Their existence enriched its streets with practices that transformed them from general urban spaces to specific cultural places. Their absence was strongly reflected on Kuzguncuk’s landscape and social life. Mills explores memories of tolerance and violence, told and marginalised, as an essential part of the process in which people interact with the streets, and shape their own identities as well as the streets’ qualities. Memory, in this book, is what gives a street its ‘soul’. Mills could have benefited from the research of Meacham and Leiman in this regard, as they distinguish between ‘retrospective remembering’ – the recollection of past events – and ‘prospective remembering’– the recruitment of events from the past to serve future plans (1982, p. 327). Basically, memories told in this book are of ‘prospective remembering’: they have agendas other than reminiscing that unfold as the book proceeds. The minorities’ absence from Kuzguncuk that followed the riots of 1955 and the state-authored nationalism that produced the categories of Turk and minority, as International Journal of Heritage Studies Vol. 17, No. 4, July 2011, 393–395