Handbook of Heritage in Asia: Introduction

1 Heritage in Asia Converging forces, conflicting values Tim Winter and Patrick Daly Some say it looks like an old Chinese official’s cap. Some say it’s a kind of ancient Chinese cooking vessel. Some even say it’s a grain barn. No matter what they think the image is, they all think it is very Chinese. That’s what I wanted. (He Jingtang, Chief Architect, China National Pavilion, Shanghai Expo, quoted in Yuan 2010) In 2010 the city of Shanghai hosted the largest, most spectacular and most expensive World’s Fair ever. The Shanghai Expo attracted a staggering 70 million visitors, ensuring China and the host city remained in the global spotlight for the six-month duration of the event. Costing around US $45 billion, and with its theme of Better City, Better Life, the Expo was held in a country experiencing a level of urban growth unparalleled in history. With more than half of the world’s population now living in cities, many of which face uncertain futures, this mega event confronted the multitude of challenges now converging on the all-pervasive notion of ‘sustainability’. To this end, 190 countries, more than fifty non-governmental organisations, and a variety of multi-national institutions involved in urban governance addressed such issues. The history of World’s Fairs tells us much about the major events and changes that have shaped the world over the last one hundred and fifty or so years. Ever since they began in 1851 with The Great Exhibition in London, World’s Fairs have stood as important markers of history, charting the rise and fall of empires, and on-going shifts in the global ordering of power. As public events reaching huge audiences, they have also reflected the aims and anxieties, beliefs and values of their time. No exception, Shanghai 2010 was framed by a moment in history defined by China’s rise as a global superpower, and by the multiple challenges associated with sustaining life on an ever-warming planet. More specifically, the event provided a window onto the historically significant shifts now occurring, as global capital moves east and new economic superpowers come to the fore. Together with the Beijing Olympics, held just two years previously, the 2010 Expo delivered a definitive statement about the economic, developmental and geo-political pathways China is now pursuing. In this regard, Shanghai 2010 struck distinct parallels with London 1851. The Great Exhibition harvested the success, ambition and optimism of a Britain entering the Victorian era and an age of industrialised modernity. The event was ground-breaking in a number of ways, thereby 1 Tim Winter and Patrick Daly capturing the imagination of scholars and bureaucrats as well as the general public, creating a legacy that would influence Britain, its empire and other European colonial powers for decades to come. One of the event’s most remarkable features was an architectural design that used an elaborate cast iron structure, across which vast expanses of glass were stretched. The ‘Crystal Palace’, as it came to be known, enabled light to be shed – both metaphorically and literally – onto sprawling displays of machinery; the material culture of a new age of industrial might and technological modernity. This radical use of iron and glass demonstrated for the first time how buildings could be constructed on an industrial scale, and the power of engineering as a new form of knowledge. Hosts of subsequent World’s Fairs across Europe and the United States would use a similar language of bold, experimental architecture to claim the future as theirs (Greenhalgh 2000; Geppert 2010). It was a demonstration of national power and confidence that found its zenith in the Exposition Universelle in Paris, 1889, through the construction of the thousand-foot-high Eiffel Tower as the event’s centrepiece. When it came to designing the centrepiece for Shanghai 2010, however, the Chinese chose an architectural style that expressed altogether different values. Rather than conveying the sense of a nation embracing modernity and the future, the China National Pavilion took its inspiration from the past and tradition. Designed to be three times the height of all other pavilions at the Expo, the building was dubbed ‘The Oriental Crown’ because of its resemblance to an emperor’s crown. The grand scale of the structure demanded modern technologies and the reinforced concrete, steel and glass familiar to the modern construction industry. In its symbolism though, the pavilion integrated and foregrounded different elements of a cultural heritage distinct to China. Most explicit was the nod to ‘dougong’, a unique element of traditional Chinese architecture in use for almost 2,000 years (see Figure 1.1). Dougong is a system of multiple interlocking bracket sets that help support the weight of wooden horizontal beams and large overhanging eaves. Both artistic and functional, it is found on many of China’s most historically significant buildings. Beyond this signature feature, the pavilion also took inspiration from ‘ding’, a style of ancient Chinese vessel recognisable by its squat legs and round handles.1 Calligraphy adorned the façade of the building and when seen from the air it took the form of a ‘sudoku’ grid, or nine-square grid layout: an urban planning feature distinct to ancient Chinese cities (Schinz 1996). Finally, hues of red were preeminent; a colour associated with honour, courage, loyalty, success, fortune, happiness and passion in Chinese culture. In interviews, He Jingtang, the chief architect of the pavilion, explained the intended symbolism of the building: The China Pavilion integrates lots of Chinese elements. If it were specific to one particular thing then it couldn’t represent Chinese culture broadly. From the architecture perspective, I feel that we used a traditional framework – a dougong, which is a system of brackets unique to traditional Chinese architecture. An upturned dougong is meant to give off a feeling of our country’s self-reliance and our national rejuvenation. (He Jingtang quoted in Chi and Xia 2010) We mean to show the spirit and face of the Chinese people against the background of a rising nation. We hope visitors will feel the changes of the country, and the glory and confidence of the Chinese people [ … ] It is the first time that I dared to use red on such a large-scale building. We collected every kind of red color that we needed and tried to find the right Chinese red from these colors, such as the red of Tiananmen, the Forbidden City and the Chinese national flag. (He Jingtang quoted in Yuan 2010) 2 Converging forces, conflicting values Figure 1.1 Shanghai Expo, China National Pavilion (Photo T. Winter) The decision to select a tradition-oriented design from among the hundreds that were submitted for consideration reveals much about the ways in which China imagines itself as a modern, forward looking nation. Fully confident in its project of modernity, China is able to present itself on the international stage and to its Asian neighbours as a country where simultaneous presents co-exist; a civilisation seemingly comfortable with one foot in the future and one in the past. Modernisation and the challenge of becoming a ‘first world country’ in both its own eyes and the eyes of others is no longer driven by desires to shed unwanted pasts or abandon anachronistic traditions. Instead, through a language of national heritage, the past is embraced as part of the future. It is an ‘imagineering’ of the community of nation, to rework Benedict Anderson’s (1991) oft coined expression, that explicitly looks to the past for inspiration and guidance, a theme reproduced across many of the host nation’s exhibits. In the Joint Provincial Pavilion, the majority of the country’s twenty-two provinces oriented their displays around a combination of pre-modern architecture, pristine landscapes, and the traditional practices of culturally or ethnically distinct groups. In a celebration of heritage predicated on the ideology of ‘unity through diversity’, Tibet and Xinxiang were absorbed into a rendering of Chinese culture as cosmopolitan, wherein they became part of the peoples of China. For Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, the cultural integration was unequivocally expressed in the location of their stand-alone pavilions, each carefully positioned in the shadow of The Oriental Crown’s overhanging eaves. It was a mise en scène in which the imperative for culture and nature to perform particular social and political functions was clearly discernable. Intriguingly, the architecture of the pavilions – together with the material culture displayed inside – of Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and various other Asian countries 3 Tim Winter and Patrick Daly also self-identified through a language of heritage. While countries like Canada, Denmark, United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates and the United States all presented futurity via bold, experimental architecture or large-screen immersive video displays, the majority of Asian countries chose to celebrate tradition and the inherited, emphasising how culture-natures inherited from previous generations are now integral to the values and aspirations of contemporary society. Visitors to the Shanghai Expo were thus offered a valuable window onto much larger, complex processes now shaping much of Asia. The event spoke of the dramatic shifts that have occurred in recent years regarding the way states in the region negotiate their national histories and how they appropriate cultural pasts and natural environments within strategies of governance and identity making; a theme returned to later in this chapter. Seen together, the Asian national pavilions also raised a host of intriguing questions. Does the use of tradition and the traditional suggest ‘alternative modernities’ are in play here? Is the arena of heritage mobilising new discourses of primitivism and pre-modern exotica? Or is the language of sustainability producing a new era of coloniality, as nations are hierarchically ordered on the international stage, with some looking backwards to the past and others to progressive futures? In all its complexity then, the Shanghai Expo provided an important glimpse into some of the reasons why heritage – as a concept, an arena of policy and as an expression of identity, confidence or anxiety – has gained such traction in Asia in recent years. As we shall see throughout this book, the language and idea of heritage, both cultural and natural, now reaches across multiple aspects of social and private life, such that it has become an important theatre of respect and harmony, beauty and pain, discord and abuse, and optimism and despair. Together, the twenty-three chapters in this book follow these multiple pathways. The volume is divided into four parts: Part I: Challenging Conservation: the view from Asia; Part II: The Politics and Governance of Heritage; Part III: Rethinking Relationships, Remembrance and Loss; and Part IV: Negotiating Modernity and Globalisation. While chapters that focus on quite different issues are pulled together under particular thematic or conceptual umbrellas to define these four parts, certain analytical threads run through and across the book as a whole. To provide navigation through the Handbook, each Part begins with a summary of the chapters contained therein. This opening chapter offers further pointers to the content of specific chapters, but is primarily concerned with laying out the intellectual landscape that has framed and given shape to this project as it has unfolded over a number of years. The scale and scope of the topic in hand – heritage in Asia – means we have approached it with both caution and ambition. Throughout the process, we have been committed to constructing a text that crosses disciplines and challenges boundaries, but at the same time respects and draws on previous scholarship. We have felt it particularly important to deliver an analytically and thematically expansive volume, rather than delimiting the discussion to particular heritage ‘sectors’. Given the book’s geographic and conceptual scope, however, we have remained mindful of the inevitable gaps and omissions that arise with such an approach. For reasons of timing, practicality, availability, not to mention our limitations as editors, not all countries are covered and neither are all the topics that could quite easily fall within the scope of this book. We make no claims of analytic, thematic or geographic comprehensiveness. And for those seeking insights into the technical aspects of conservation or preservation, or models for heritage management, the following pages might appear to offer few insights. Whilst that may well be true, given these are not our points of focus, it is our belief that an understanding of the socio-political linkages between residual pasts and projected futures is critical for anyone interested and working in the field. To this end, the book aims to offer alternative ways of thinking about the production, conservation, and governance of culture-natures in Asia by exploring the unfolding complexities that surround the use of heritage as a term, set of values or concept today. This opening chapter is designed to 4 Converging forces, conflicting values both orient the reader analytically for the chapters that follow, and simultaneously address a series of issues and complexities, that – we believe – warrant a greater level of attention and critical discussion than they have received previously. We begin by briefly considering some of the parameters of ‘Asia’ and ‘heritage’, as they pertain to the themes under investigation here. ‘Asian’ boundaries There is a long tradition of scholarship that considers the boundaries of regions and continents. One of the most revealing texts in this field is The Myth of Continents, by Lewis and Wigen (1997). As the authors illustrate, the term ‘Asia’ has a long history of contestation, fluidity and ambiguity. Given that political terrains rarely map onto features of the natural world, the boundaries of Asia have continually shifted back and forth, as expedient geographies have been evoked within particular contexts. Definitions have, in themselves, been defined by partial knowledge, misunderstandings, political appropriation and competing ontologies. The idea of Asia has also been the subject (and object) of a discourse of meta-geography, whereby notions of East and West come with deeply rooted inflections and generalisations. Rabindranath Tagore, for example, one of India’s most renowned nationalists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, saw India as a bridge between a materialist West and spiritualist East. For Mark Ravinder Frost (2010), the technological advances of print media and maritime communications at this time enabled an ‘idea of Asia’ to emerge among intellectuals living in different parts of the region. Tracing an intellectual sociability, which saw literati in Calcutta linked with others as far apart as Ceylon and Japan, he argues the closing years of the nineteenth century were pivotal in the formation of a pan-Asian idealism, one that was often defined in civilisational terms: Asian civilisation was derived from the key elements of Hinduism, Buddhism, and, to a lesser extent, Confucianism. Buddhism took pride of place and was crowned as ‘that great ocean of idealism’ – the primary means by which cultural exchange and common ideals had generated regional unity. In the Tagore circle’s discussions of Asian civilisation, Islam was particularly conspicuous by its absence. (ibid.: 267) While Indian intellectuals overlooked Islam in their imaginings of Asia, in China, prominent intellectuals of this period such as Hsu Chi-yu and Liang Qichao, helped shape public ideas about an Asia that had China at its historical and cultural heart. Liang asserted that the region, and China in particular, was the origin of all the world’s civilisations, and that China’s superiority stemmed from its rich cultural and technological past.2 Decades later, the implications of such metageographical generalisations would be rendered visible through the seminal work of Edward Said (1993, 1995). His notion of Orientalism set in train a discussion that continues to this day regarding the ways in which the East, in European eyes, solidified as a series of tropes and fantasies. In tracing the knowledge, power relations through which the Orient came to be known from afar. Said’s analysis was deeply significant in revealing how the cultural and political processes by which Asia was constructed historically extended far beyond its physical boundaries. Lewis and Wigen (1997) have also illustrated how the borders and margins of Asia have frayed and shifted in accordance with the context of definition. The case of Australia provides an interesting example of how Asia expands and contracts depending on the political, institutional or legal forces at play (see Hall 2008). Likewise, in the opposite direction, countries as far apart as Israel, Turkey and Pakistan move in and out of Asia; and to the north, Mongolia and Siberia 5 Tim Winter and Patrick Daly continually move between Russia and Asia, and the imagined territories of the so-called Second and Third Worlds. The issue of Southeast Asia raises particularly intriguing questions. As a largely post-World War II and post-colonial construct, recognition of the region as an entity in itself has been late in coming. Prior to this period, European travellers, scholars and bureaucrats largely saw it through a lens of historical and cultural derivation. Colonial-era archaeologists and historians of material culture built fields of scholarship around the idea of an ‘Indo-china’; a topography defined by the cultural and religious influences absorbed from the great civilisations of East and South Asia (Norindr 1996). The approach we have taken to this volume recognises such historical complexity and fluidity, and we have intentionally avoided ascribing too hard and fast a definition of what constitutes Asia as a region. In large part this is because any attempt to be representative or comprehensive for a region as complex, large and diverse as Asia would be misguided. A focus on heritage, as we shall see shortly, also involves significant diversity, whether that be spatial, cultural or historical, or in terms of the sectors and themes that warrant consideration. In approaching Asia, rather than labouring its cartographic complexities, we instead wish to point to two characteristics of the region that are distinctive and pertinent to the study of heritage, as ventured upon in this volume. First, regardless of ascribed borders and boundaries, Asia is a region of immense cultural and natural diversity. It is home to some of world’s oldest continuous settlements, and with around forty per cent of the world’s population living in the region, Asia is characterised by extraordinary levels of cultural, religious and ethnic diversity, often within individual countries. All the major world’s religions are represented, as are most of the planet’s eco-systems. Asia is home to some of the world’s most extreme physical landscapes, whereby deserts, tropical rain forests and snow-capped mountain ranges not only have their own uniquely complex eco-systems but have also spawned highly distinctive ways of living and cultural traditions. Second, Asia is witnessing a level of region-wide social and physical change that, in its speed and scale, has few parallels elsewhere in the world today. Across large parts of the continent, countries are embarking upon programs of economic development and reform that are profoundly transforming the lives of tens or hundreds of millions of people and creating enormous societal upheaval. Over the coming four decades a staggering ninety-five per cent of urban population growth will come from the developing world (United Nations 2008: 15). While many cities in the developed world will experience a slow, but distinct, decline in population, UN-Habitat estimates that around five million people per month are currently relocating to cities in developing countries. In Asia around sixty per cent of the population is still rural. Long-term urbanisation, however, means that for countries like China more than seventy per cent of its population will be urban by 2050. Asia is set to continue the trend of the 1990s as one of the fastest urbanising regions in the world. Rapid economic growth meant that 111 of the 140 new large or big cities emerging after 1990 were in the region (ibid.: 21). As Campanella notes ‘China has built more housing in the last twenty-five years than any nation in history’ (2008: 286). In addition to on-going ruralurban migration, 1.25 billion people will be added to Asia’s population by 2025, more than half of which will live in cities. But the region’s cities face many of the challenges confronting the rest of the developing world. Poor planning, corruption and ineffective management all mean the infrastructures of ever-expanding, extended metropolitan regions will struggle to cope with the demands placed on them. With few exceptions, energy, water, waste, population, health, housing and highly stressed transport infrastructures will continue to be critical issues for cities, large and small. While the quality of life will undoubtedly improve for many, hundreds of millions will continue to live in sub-standard housing, without access to basic services. 6 Converging forces, conflicting values China accounts for the lion’s share of the region’s march towards urbanisation, with its cities expanding at a rate more than double the global average. Mega cities like Shanghai epitomise this trend, which grew from seven million inhabitants in 1970, to eight million in 1990, and accelerated to over sixteen million in 2010. Economic liberalisation has meant the city has doubled its population in just two decades (UN-HABITAT 2010: 13). By 2020 it is predicted more than twenty-two million people will make Shanghai their home (ibid.: 15). It is a pattern of accelerated growth repeated elsewhere, from Dhaka to Mumbai, from Lahore to Jakarta. The widespread trend towards economic development is also evidenced in infrastructure projects. In the case of China, for example, in 2005 the country had no high-speed rail. Just five years later it had built more kilometres of rail than there are in Europe, and if the current building program is maintained the country will have more kilometres of high-speed track in 2015 than in the entire rest of the world (see Robinson 2010). And while China often grabs the headlines across the world, other countries across the region are experiencing similar surges in infrastructure investment, powered by sustained per annum GDP growth rates of around 7–10 per cent. In the Greater Mekong Region, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) is helping fund an integrated rail network that will complement the Asian Superhighway and create an integrated transnational infrastructure for trade and mobility (ADB 2010). According to the ADB, this emerging form of Asian regionalism represents a historically significant moment: We are witnessing the beginnings of a strong, prosperous, outward-looking Asian economic community, regionally integrated yet connected with global markets, and with responsibility and influence to match its economic weight. Emerging Asian regionalism is a powerful historic force. (ibid.: 8; ADB 2008) Of course, this picture of socio-economic growth is not evenly shared across the region, with North Korea, Japan and Myanmar among those currently experiencing periods of economic stagnation or slow growth, albeit for very different reasons. Nonetheless, there are few communities that lie outside, and are thus unaffected in some form or another by the overarching trajectories of industrial or post-industrial forms of development. With the ideological ruptures of the Cold-War now firmly in the past, the principles of free market capitalism have provided a template for development for a significant number of countries across the region. As governments have opened their borders and economies, the effects of contemporary global modernity have been profound and rapid. In a few short decades countries like India, Thailand and Korea have emerged as ‘consumer societies’, with concomitant shifts in economies and identities (Wilhite 2008; Yao 2001). As states and their leaders have embraced the transformative power of today’s global capitalism, place and culture have been re-configured in the name of wealth accumulation. It is a trajectory that has seen nature increasingly, and in some cases dramatically, appropriated for economic exploitation. Rivers, lakes, forests and animals have all been subjected to new forms of governance, enabling them to be transformed into ‘resources’ within a developmentalist logic, a theme Vinita Damodaran takes up in her chapter. This does not mean, however, that such processes should be read simply as the unilinear transformation of traditional, localised culture-natures into homogenous, rationalised forms; a position the conservation sector often takes as it bemoans the loss of the ‘authentic’ or ‘traditional’ in the face of modernity and globalisation. Instead, and as Wee reminds us in his account of cultural modernities in Southeast Asia, it is analytically ‘more rewarding to examine cultural heterogeneity interacting with the political and social divisions within society as capitalist culture makes inroads into a nation’ (2002: 14). 7 Tim Winter and Patrick Daly Throughout Asia today the meta-narrative of ‘development’ is both carried by and carries forth the ethos of progress. For many, particularly the young, there is powerful optimism that tomorrow will be better. For those experiencing rapid social mobility at the everyday level, improvements in their life conditions have been dramatic. For the political elites of the region, there is a growing confidence that we are indeed entering ‘the Asian century’, a time when economic might will be accompanied by greater political power on the global stage. But for populations living in some of the fastest growing economies of the world, rapid change is a force of social and personal instability. Large-scale transformations in the physical landscape often has the effect of disconnecting people from their pasts and their sense of place in the world, as their built environment changes rapidly or they are ‘forced’ to relocate. As noted already, the diversity and size of Asia means patterns of social and physical transformation vary greatly between and within countries. In the case of Japan and South Korea, for example, change in cities at the beginning of the twenty-first century has been considerably slower than it was in previous decades, and during times of post-war recovery. Indeed, the so-called ‘Tiger Economies’ of East and Southeast Asia have surged and spluttered in recent times. But looking beyond such sub-regional patterns and variations, the over-arching trend we wish to highlight here is that of a region experiencing rapid and large-scale disruption and upheaval in the face of a capitalist development logic that has swept across the region and gained momentum in recent decades. Unlike London, Paris or New York, cities like Tokyo, Singapore, Bangalore, Bangkok and Shanghai are all now largely unrecognisable when compared to photographs taken in the 1930s, 1970s or even the 1990s. But, as the chapters in this volume illustrate, social and physical change has been felt far beyond the region’s great cities. And as we shall see, it is a meta-trend that raises critical questions about transmission, tradition, memory, loss, beauty and responsibility. ‘Heritage’ boundaries The question thus arises of what the term ‘heritage’ connotes precisely. In very broad terms, the term typically centres on the notion of culture-natures that are inherited from those that came before us and are safeguarded in the present in order to be bestowed for the benefit of future generations.3 Beyond the precise definitions offered by organisations like UNESCO, in many languages the popular use of the term ‘heritage’ has rendered its meaning increasingly amorphous. The online address of heritage.org, for example, points to The Heritage Foundation, a US based conservative think tank advising on issues like free enterprise and national defense issues.4 Down the road from their headquarters in Washington DC, the chain store Banana Republic promotes their exclusive range of ‘heritage’ clothing; ‘a modern, limited edition collection defined by craftsmanship and authenticity’. But while the term in English seems to have become ubiquitous and multifarious, in the context of Asia semantic ambiguity and confusion not only arises from the different ways the term has been linguistically loaded, but can also stem from its actual absence from a language. Tamil, Dzongkha and Pashtu are among those that have words for culture, nature, inheritance and tradition, but no actual term – and thus concept – for a heritage that integrates the past, present and future. Looking beyond the unusual circumstances of ‘difficult heritage’ (Logan and Reeves 2009), the modern heritage movement, which emerged across the world over the last hundred and fifty years or so, has been oriented by a clear moral imperative to conserve and safeguard that which is irreplaceable and in danger of being lost, destroyed or misused. Far more than merely a practical or political position, it also rests on certain ontological claims. Anxieties about loss and disappearance involve a certain disposition towards social and physical change, such that the ‘isms’ and ‘isations’ of the modern, industrial and global are typically read as processes that 8 Converging forces, conflicting values imperil the authentic and traditional, unique and local. The speed and scale of economic growth now occurring across large parts of Asia, together with early indications of climate change, have only served to enhance these anxieties and this view of the world for many. Rightfully so, the voices of concern about the fragility and loss of the irreplaceable have become more vociferous and legitimate. Accordingly, frameworks for conservation and protection, together with the very concept of ‘heritage’ – both natural and cultural – have come to the fore across a multitude of contexts in Asia in recent times. Indeed many countries have made dramatic steps in the last fifty years or so with a multitude of heritage and conservation related research institutions, bureaucracies and legal frameworks all helping to ensure contemporary society acts as an appropriate custodian for future generations. A history of encounters If we are to situate such developments in their wider historical contexts, we need to look beyond the boundaries of Asia and consider the European origins of what would become the modern, international, institutionalised arena of heritage conservation. In the case of the cultural sector, one of the key moments was the first declaration concerning the respect of cultural property rights, which occurred in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars of 1803–15. The 1815 Congress of Vienna, which partially succeeded in enforcing restitution orders on the French delegation, proved to be a watershed moment in the governmental approaches to culture (and nature) that form the backbone of international heritage conservation policy today. In addition to the emergence of particular legal instruments designed to protect within and across national borders, a pivotal component to this evolution would be the division of knowledge production into ‘disciplines’, which took place across Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Many of the ideals held by thinkers of the European Enlightenment, such as the secularisation and restructuring of scholarly enquiry, were finally realised along the corridors of universities in the nineteenth century. As fields like political science, economics, chemistry, archaeology and anthropology mapped out their own identities and territories, each would begin to create disciplinary specific methodologies and paradigms of knowledge construction. It was an intellectual division that would lead to the emergence of what C.P. Snow (1998) famously coined as the ‘two cultures’. For Snow, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards the natural sciences and humanities would irrevocably divide into two. Looking back from his perspective of the late 1950s, he argued that the degree to which these two cultures had separated was evident in the seeming inability of either camp to comprehend, and thus communicate with, peers working on the other side of the divide. The birth of fields like anthropology, history, economics and mathematics in universities across Britain, the Germanies, the Italies, France, and the United States was in part driven by the need for social recognition and respect for different forms of scholarship. Not surprisingly, it was a fragmentation defined by struggle and contestation. As the new arbiter of truth, the natural sciences would, however, retain the supremacy and social recognition that it had already gained over philosophy and theology. The demonstrable verification of general laws would enable scientists to marginalise philosophers and secular humanists alike. As the Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences states: ‘Newtonian science had triumphed over speculative philosophy and had therefore come to incarnate social prestige in the world of knowledge’ (Wallerstein et al. 1996: 10). For Immanuel Wallerstein, such processes were essential to the evolution of the World System, a series of political economic relations stretching over the five hundred-year-period of c.1450–1900. In his recent book, European Universalism: the Rhetoric of Power, Wallerstein revisits 9 Tim Winter and Patrick Daly the relationship between knowledge production and, most notably, the rise of scientific rationality in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the solidification of a world order, defined as it was at that time by a series of core, periphery zones. By focusing specifically on the ways in which knowledge production came to be hierarchically ordered in Europe, Wallerstein argues that for the World System to work smoothly it was dependent upon a ‘cultural-intellectual scaffolding’ (2006: 54). More specifically, he points towards rational science and Orientalism as two interweaving paradigms, which in their ascendancy enabled Europe to proclaim certain values as universally applicable and infinitely extrapolative. These evolving, mutually constitutive processes would be the backdrop against which Europeans encountered Asia’s cultures and natures. Most pertinent here was how this hierarchical ordering of knowledge and the disciplinary fragmentation of its production led to specific ways in which culture and nature were identified, produced, captured and valued. Certain forms of ‘data’ came to be privileged as particular fields of expertise came into existence. A number of authors have traced such processes, and added nuance to Wallerstein’s global picture, by addressing different aspects of conservation in Asia. Richard Grove, for example, provides a fascinating account of the emergence of environmental epistemologies and nature conservation in India and elsewhere under the conditions of European rule. He argues that to see the capital-intensive transformation of people and their environments within the contexts of colonialism merely as ‘exploitation’ misses the important role professional scientists and committed environmental commentators played in Europe’s approach to governing its territories (1995: 8–9). Over the course of the eighteenth century these men became an essential part of ‘the administrative and hierarchical machinery’ of the newly formed Dutch, British and French trading companies, and ‘their new environmental theories [ … ] were quickly diffused through the meetings and publications of a whole set of “academies” and scientific societies’ (ibid.: 9). He also details how the garden and the island became the totemic forms for a tropical nature. Both tied into deep cultural and religious roots of Europe as expressed in ideas such as Eden and Paradise and aligned them with the fantasies of botanically abundant and manageable remote lands in the tropical and sub-tropical East. Crucially though, Grove’s central thesis in this account is that European scientific environmentalism and its knowledge forms did not simply progress via its ‘application’ to colonial territories. Rather, it evolved through the ongoing adoption and incorporation of the epistemologies, experiences and ideas of those from outside Europe, the subjects of Empire. As he states: The ideological and scientific content of colonial conservationism as it had developed under early British and French colonial rule amounted by the 1850s to a highly heterogeneous mixture of indigenous, Romantic, Orientalist and other elements. (ibid.: 12) Staying with the subcontinent, intriguing parallels exist in the ways material culture was framed and given meaning within an evolving Indian historiography. In his seminal text on the ‘transformation of objects’, Cohn states: India was to be provided with a linear history following a nineteenth century positivist historiography. Ruins could be dated, inscriptions made to reveal king lists, texts could be converted into sources for the study of the past. Each phase of the European effort to unlock the secret of the Indian past called for more and more collecting, more and more systems of classification, more and more building of repositories for the study of the past. (1996: 80) 10 Converging forces, conflicting values Cohn’s account traces how an arena of cultural governance and valuation emerged that delineated which sites and landscapes should be conserved as monuments of history, which objects should be moved to museums for protection and display, and which objects were allowed to travel or be traded as ‘mementoes’ or ‘artifacts’. It is a story of classification that has been subsequently expanded upon by others. Ray, for example, in her examination of the emergence of modern archaeology in South Asia, argues that the path toward a more technically rigorous form of research took time, and only really emerged once the Archaeological Survey of India gathered momentum under the stewardship of Alexander Cunningham in 1871 (see also Guha-Thakurta 2004). But as Ray indicates, throughout the twentieth century questions continued to be raised about the scientific basis of archaeological research in the sub-continent, most notably by Mortimer Wheeler in an address to the Indian Science Congress in 1946 (see Ray 2008: 65). Saloni Mathur has added to this picture through an analysis of cultural display practices in nineteenth-century Britain and India and the categorisation of arts from crafts. She addresses the intersections between ‘the world of art, the emerging science of anthropology, the fashionable culture of the department of store, and the professional practices of painters and museum curators’ (2007: 12) in order to interpret the aesthetic qualities and socio-political values attributed to various forms of Indian culture. Particularly revealing is her discussion of how the craftsman and traditional modes of cultural production were fetishised within both the consumption aesthetics of Victorian Britain and the politics of nationalism in India. Although these accounts traverse quite different aspects of the culture-nature continuum, they all indicate how a modern preservationist paradigm emerged in Asia via an encounter between an imported set of discipline specific knowledges and methodologies, and localised, indigenous approaches and frameworks.5 In some situations the former was imposed with little regard and acknowledgement given to the latter. But elsewhere, there was a greater degree of fusion whereby the governance of heritage formed as an integration of foreign and local ideas. If we leap forward to the present, in countless situations across Asia today we see the legacy of this hierarchical ordering of knowledge production, not least in the privileging of highly technocratic, science-based approaches to conservation and heritage management. As studies on Tibet (Shepherd 2009), Indonesia (Daly and Rahmayati 2011), China (Du Cros and Lee 2007), Cambodia (Winter 2007) and Southeast Asia (Dove et al. 2011) have shown, institutionalised policies to cultural and natural heritage can largely ignore localised, non-scientific values and ideas.6 But if we are to fully consider what constitutes heritage in Asia today it would be a mistake to limit the discussion to formal, discipline-based approaches, as this would exclude forms of custodianship of culture and nature that predate and/or run parallel to modern scientific methodologies. Accordingly, chapters by Bräuchler, Byrne, Daly, Denes and Lloyd discuss forms of custodianship and curatorship that involve the transmission of knowledge and skills across generations and/or large geographies. Beyond the domain of ‘experts’ and reports, monasteries with their monks and nuns, guilds with their craftsman, and schools with their masters are among the long standing contexts and actors through which the conservation, protection and transmission of the environment, both cultural and natural, has been upheld in Asia. Many of these traditionbased approaches date back centuries and as such have been continually immersed in other spheres of life. Indeed, while much is made of the new cultural economies of tourism and urban redevelopment, it is fundamental we recognise that the social and economic ties, which enable the transmission and conservation of culture and nature, have deep rooted histories. The following chapter explores these various issues via a roundtable discussion on whether Asia requires particular philosophical and methodological approaches to conservation. As we shall see over the course of this volume, for some the contemporary arena of heritage serves as an effective means for protecting those landscapes, rituals, artifacts or traditional values 11 Tim Winter and Patrick Daly endangered by rapid socio-economic ‘progress’ and development. Equally though, for others it has come to be an effective language for achieving goals quite unrelated to conservation, with poverty alleviation, the creation of narratives of place and past, nation building or the cultural profiling of citizens being among the examples that might be cited here. Right across the region heritage has become a significant sector of both business and government, a theme we will return to shortly. States, civil society organisations and the private sector have all come to adopt, and in some cases co-opt, the heritage paradigm to fulfil a multitude of ends. We can thus speak of a ‘heritage culture’ that has emerged in Asia in recent decades, whereby its ascendancy needs to be read, in part, as an expression of contemporary social and political life and its values, and in relation to identities and economies becoming increasingly tied to modes of post-industrial, globalised capital production. This volume has thus been conceived from such understandings and a belief that as we move forward the contestations surrounding heritage in Asia will only continue to intensify. We wish, through our authors, to examine heritage with regard to the contexts and changes outlined in this opening chapter, and read how imperatives to safeguard and revive, shed and destroy, emerge from a series of converging forces and conflicting values. The chapters that follow approach heritage as a series of interfaces: between the material and the social; the past and present; the cultural and natural; and the human and non-human. In this regard, the book explicitly challenges a number of the assumptions that commonly underpin conventional discourses on heritage. For example, by considering both cultural and natural heritage in a single volume, we have taken steps to address the culture-nature divide, which all too often continues to define both policy and academic research on heritage (Lowenthal 2005). While we have a number of chapters that focus more specifically on one over the other, other authors examine the intersections between the two, illustrating the need to continue developing approaches and analytical frameworks that transcend the culture-nature dichotomy. We hope such an analytical approach will contribute to the steps now being to made to resolve this divide, which have recently taken root in the corridors of UNESCO, World Wildlife Fund, and other conservation agencies. From conservation to sustainability: transitions in the meta-narrative? For many the watershed moment for the arrival of ‘sustainability’ as an international buzzword was the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 (Hirsch and Warren 2002; Scoones 2007). As the term hit the global stage in the lead up to this conference it migrated from its original home in ecology into a wide variety of contexts, a trend that has continued ever since. Not surprisingly, such mobility has created confusion, semantic instability and in some cases a malaise around what the term actually means or refers to. As Scoones (ibid.: 589) notes, sustainability operates as a ‘boundary term’, promising mediation between sectors and ideas that might otherwise be disconnected. Two distinct, albeit overlapping, tracts in the discourse have formed, namely ‘environmental sustainability’ and ‘social sustainability’. Broadly speaking, both are guided by two core principles. First, sustainability pivots around the idea of extraction from a finite source without incurring its depletion for future generations. Second is an advocacy for the sustainable, or, to be more specific, the creation of the self-sustaining, whether it be bio-diverse environments, traditional cultural practices, national economies or bureaucratic institutions. As the language of sustainability appears in different contexts, the balance in emphasis between these two principles shifts. For example, within a paradigm of ecological conservation, the overarching concern is the preservation of the finite resource, and the promotion of management strategies that avoid depletion. Within the ‘development sector’, 12 Converging forces, conflicting values however, organisations like the World Bank or Asian Development Bank have adopted a language of sustainability to build initiatives that sustain economic growth over the longer term. Their primary goal has been to design programs and institutions related to poverty reduction, health or infrastructure construction in ways that are self-sustaining. Much effort has been given to ensuring the goals and agendas of environmental and social responsibility are compatible and mutually attainable. The Millennium Development Goals, for example, has contributed significantly to the integration and reconciliation of divergent or discordant approaches to sustainability. In recent years countless eco- or cultural tourism initiatives have been founded on the premise of mutually compatible goals, where socio-economic development both sustains and is sustained by a program targeting environment and cultural conservation. Complication and contradiction arises though as understandings of sustainability slide between vastly different spatial and temporal scales. The measures of sustainability move back and forth between the local, national, and planetary, and stretch between short-term and glacial notions of time. As a result, projects oriented towards sustainable development, defined in socio-economic terms, all too often continue to have a detrimental impact on the sustainability of their cultural and natural environments. As we shall see throughout this book, the heritage arena straddles these two strands of sustainability and is deeply implicated in both. As a concept rooted in the eco-environmental world, sustainability has shifted the focus from conservation to utilisation. This reworking changes the dynamic and as sustainability has spilled across into other sectors of heritage conservation there has been a growing normalisation of the idea of culture-natures as ‘resources’ for utilisation (Dove et al. 2011). This has meant paradigms of sustainability have filtered into the cultural and natural in different ways and at different moments. Much of the term’s power comes from its malleability and ability to be loosely applied across a multitude of contexts and agendas. That looseness also enables a slippage in accountability, wherein a wide variety of agendas and outcomes can be articulated and justified within a broadly defined set of aims. It is important to recognise that when the concept enters the arena of heritage and conservation it is inherently referential. In essence, sustainability needs to look to the past. With regard to the safeguarding of nature, reference is made to existing and past practices of sustainable custodianship, or at the very least the idea of preserving a ‘nature’ that was inherited from our ancestors. In the context of cultural sustainability, it is the traditions and material forms handed down from previous generations that need to be safeguarded. But given that sustainability has powerfully solidified as a progressive addition to the vocabulary of modernisation and development in Asia, it is also widely employed within future oriented projects. Sustainability has thus changed the socio-political framework within which heritage operates and is situated. The near ubiquitous discourse of ‘sustainable development’ has explicitly moved conservation closer to modernity and capitalist wealth creation, powerful trajectories within the region. Indeed, since the early 1990s, sustainability has rapidly ascended to the centre of these two socially orienting forces across Asia. Its transformation from being an issue for marginal lobby groups to mainstream policy has occurred in part because of its seeming ability to reconcile, align and harmonise agendas previously regarded as being in conflict. The language of synergies has proved politically expedient, enabling detractors of modernisation and economic growth to be brought into the fold, such that concerns for conservation and environmental care are now discussed and treated as integral to wider ‘progress’ oriented goals. But as Hirsch and Warren (2002) illustrate through the example of river dams in Southeast Asia, discourses of sustainability and environment are readily open to appropriation. For the opponents of large dams, they cause irrevocable damage to local habitats and down river ecologies. And yet the proponents of dam construction point towards the need for non-fossil fuel energy production and the carbon 13 Tim Winter and Patrick Daly reduction benefits of hydropower. Dams thus operate as both important markers of national development and metonyms for social movements concerned about widespread environmental destruction. In this regard, organisations involved in the conservation of culture-nature heritage are now being drawn into a wide array of politically and ethically charged arenas, including energy production, tourism, urban planning, international aid, poverty reduction and so forth.7 It is this meta-trajectory that we want to elucidate here. Much of the research previously conducted on Asia’s heritage has been oriented by specific disciplinary boundaries and often privileged techno-managerial issues without giving due regard to wider socio-political factors and contexts. In seeking to address this analytical space, our intention for this volume has been to contribute to broader understandings of heritage in Asia. The Shanghai Expo, and the national pavilions of the Asian region built for the event vividly illustrated some of the ways in which sustainability has now gained traction as a powerful idea; enabling connections with culture-natures inherited from the past to be upheld and safeguarded within a paradigm of societal and economic progress, or, in the case of the Expo, a ‘better’ urban life. It is the simultaneous co-existence of these two powerful gazes – into the past and the future – and how they define a highly vibrant present in Asia today that we wish to tease out here. As the remaining sections of this chapter illustrate, our aim has been to create an analytical architecture for interpreting some of the interconnected contexts within which heritage is emerging and disappearing, and the multitude of processes that determine whether it is (re)appearing in or fading from different aspects of public life. In the name of development Cities If we look across Asia, although we see a highly variegated picture in the way conservation and different modes of development come together, it is clear the widespread re-orientation of national economies towards tertiary sectors has brought culture and nature into ever more complex social relations. Dramatic transformations, spanning a few short decades, can be seen in the way cities now treat their past and environmental settings. As Kong and O’Connor (2009) have indicated at length, since the late 1990s cultural and creative sector industries have become important drivers for urban regeneration and enabled cities to position themselves competitively in the global arena. In cities like Shanghai and Beijing, the emergence of these new ‘creative economies’ has led to the transformation of industrial buildings into art-district, heritage precincts, popularly referred to as Moganshan Road and District 798 respectively. Through adaptive re-use, once vacant factories and warehouses now house artist studios and galleries, along with the restaurants, cafés, shops and apartments now familiar to many inner cities.8 Beijing and Shanghai are part of a regionwide trend whereby numerous cities incorporate the idea of cultural quarters, or hubs into their planning process. A new interest in museums, historic waterfronts, historic properties and urban parks, which together constitute an urban heritage, has emerged via processes that place cities across the world in a ‘network’ of competition and comparison (Sassen 2002). Mumbai, Singapore, Hong Kong and Seoul now promote their ‘unique’ heritage in an effort to attract tourists, business travellers and expatriates. As volumes by Kelly (2001) and Li and Luo (2004) illustrate, museums in particular contribute significantly to the economies and sense of place of cities around the region. Somewhat paradoxically though, strategies for attracting attention also involve looking the same as elsewhere. The recent proliferation of mega architecture in the name of urban place-making has now expanded from sky-scraping office towers and sports stadia to include cultural sector buildings. Designed by the Swiss architects Herzog and 14 Converging forces, conflicting values de Meuron, the Kolkata Museum of Modern Art is the latest addition to a genre of architectural spectacle – as exemplified by the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and Louvre Abu Dhabi – that is linking cities around the world in an international network of culture. As Kolkata demonstrates, to become a node in that network involves constructing place-less architecture, in this case a multi-leveled, interlocking cube design, that might equally be at home in London, Milan or Los Angeles (Kumar 2011).9 For a number of smaller urban regions in Asia, such as Galle, Macau, Melaka or Pingyao, major economic transformation has occurred through World Heritage designation and the arrival of large-scale tourism. These and many other examples provide evidence of how the historic built environment has come to be absorbed into development trajectories that utilise the new cultural economies of heritage. In other contexts and at other moments, historic quarters continue to be seen as an obstacle to development. In both Beijing and Shanghai, the hosting of the Olympics and World Expo in 2008 and 2010 respectively involved extensive demolition. Across many Asian cities the rapidity of economic growth coupled with cheap labour and materials means the most valuable asset to be traded and re-traded is often the land itself, rather than the architecture that sits on it. The volume The Disappearing ‘Asian’ City (Logan 2002) represents the most comprehensive analysis to date of the complexities involved in promoting a conservation ethos in fast changing urban contexts. As chapters on Calcutta (Ghosh 2002), Hong Kong (Cody 2002) and Nagasaki (Hajdu 2002) illustrate, different cities have taken radically different decisions about the preservation or shedding of memories of colonialism and Western cultural imperialism. In unison, the chapters in the volume vividly demonstrate how monuments, buildings, city walls and so forth have become sites of intense political and symbolic contestation through the convergence of developmental and governance frameworks that oscillate between past and future, local and global (see also Lu 2004; Philp and Mercer 2002). Beyond the idealism of ‘balance’ Looking beyond the new economies of modern metropolitan centres, the broad spectrum of societies in Asia, ranging from the ‘pre-’ to ‘post-industrial’, and ‘developing’ to highly ‘developed’ – using such terms advisedly – means that we also need to take seriously the new ways in which heritage is being used as a component in poverty reduction initiatives for some of the region’s most impoverished rural areas. One of the defining characteristics of the heritagetourism-development nexus in Asia is the way it pulls together a multitude of public and private sector organisations, governmental and non-governmental institutions, and localised and supra-national agencies. Indeed, the multiple trajectories of sustainable development, as seen earlier, mean that bodies as diverse as the World Bank, World Health Organization, UN Development Program, International Labor Organization, and UN Habitat are among those that incorporate forms of culture-nature conservation into their collaborations with Asia’s governments. Perhaps the most commonly used hinge for the conservation development relationship has been tourism, an industry that straddles multiple sectors and creates complex, and often fraught, public-private sector exchanges. Throughout Asia it has become commonplace for tour operators and hospitality companies to assist with community based conservation projects through the promotion of ‘cultural’, ‘eco’ or ‘adventure’ tourism products. In the case of the Silk Road, for example, tour operators are extensively embedded in a range of cultural heritage projects. In addition to the direct funding that comes from the agencies themselves, these tours act as an important source of private philanthropy, as visitors continue to ‘sponsor’ individuals or projects once they return home.10 In Gansu, China, the World Bank has conceived a five-year project 15 Tim Winter and Patrick Daly spanning 2008–13 that directs substantial funds into that part of the Silk Road’s cultural and natural heritage. Their program of ‘sustainable heritage tourism’ seeks to both enhance capacities for environmental conservation and realise a number of socio-developmental aims targeted to improving sanitation, health, social services and regional infrastructures.11 Of course the benefits of creating public-private partnerships in the field of heritage tourism have long been recognised by governmental and non-governmental agencies working within a paradigm of community-based development. Perhaps most common are projects that build on long-standing traditions of handicraft production, which (re)brand traditional practices as forms of authentic ‘intangible heritage’, enabling them to remain an economically viable form of labour for families and communities. In places like Angkor, Bagan, Borobudur and Hampi the success of the hand-crafted is intimately tied to the material and semiotic connections it affords between local residents, the region’s archaeological ruins and the buying tourist (Figure 1.2; see also Causey 2003). The ties between heritage conservation and development highlighted here are global patterns. Asia is thus far from unique in this regard, but there are a number of regional characteristics that give the situation in Asia a particular vibrancy. First, there are very uneven levels of development both within and across countries, coupled with the extremely rapid shifts towards new economies and new forms of wealth accumulation. Transitions from pre-to post-industrial societies, which spanned several decades in Europe and North America, only required a few short years in late-twentieth-century Asia. A second factor has been the accelerated escalation in land values. In the region’s most dynamic economies, speculation in land, fuelled by corruption and the widespread sell-off of state property, has meant countless buildings, forests, bio-reserves, archaeological remains and whole villages have all been lost to property developers over recent decades. Finally, within the corridors of various governments across the region there is an on-going commitment to master plans and mega-projects. This is particularly so in single-party polities and/or where civil-society organisations are weak or non-existent and where centralised planning dominates. In countries like China, Laos, Myanmar, Singapore and Vietnam, for Figure 1.2 Angkor souvenirs, Cambodia (Photo T. Winter) 16 Converging forces, conflicting values example – all of which inherit a political culture of planned economies – master plans remain very much in vogue today. To really appreciate the significance of the various shifts taking place in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, it is helpful to situate them historically. If we look back through the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth centuries, a pattern of widespread destruction of land and nature is apparent. As the nineteenth century advanced, a build-over and extract mentality transformed large parts of Asia’s culture and nature. The harvesting of timber and planting of palm oil, spice and rubber crops are among the many examples of industrial scale agriculture and raw material production that impacted landscapes and nature in highly destructive ways (see Grove 1995; Kathirithamby-Wells 2005; Zerner 2003). In the years immediately after World War II, the emergent ‘development sector’ continued to treat culture and nature as obstacles to modernisation and the betterment of society. More explicitly, for Modernisation theorists, traditional cultural forms were the antithesis of socially progressive futures (Nederveen Pieterse 2001). At the international level, such ideas were driven in large part by the philosophies advanced by the Bretton Woods institutions: the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (later to become The World Bank). Indeed, in pointing out that ‘in terms of culture, virtually all early modernization theorists were convergence theorists’, Wood (1993: 51) highlights how industries like tourism were enthusiastically adopted by such organisations as a means to reform or erase localised, traditional cultural practices. The eventual ascendancy of the sustainability paradigm and the associated idea of sustainable development in the 1990s was thus hailed by many as a panacea for the resolution of entrenched conflict; whereby discordancy would now be replaced by harmony, synergy and collaboration. Indeed, at its most optimistic and evangelical, the rhetoric of sustainability proclaims the transcendence of the culture-nature divide and the achievement of holistic perspectives. All too often, though, the reality is somewhat different. Writing in 2005, Dove et al. consider recent trajectories of nature conservation in Southeast Asia, arguing that much of the planning and policy discussion continues to be oriented around an artificial dichotomy between humans and their natural environments. Communities remain external to the eco-system, and are typically regarded as ‘alien elements responsible only for its destruction’ (2005: 6). This leads to a misguided approach that attempts to reconcile or ‘balance’ conservation with development. They argue it would be more productive to move beyond essentialised bipolar positions of natural and unnatural and address the patterns of social relations that contribute to conservation. Only by doing so can researchers and policymakers begin to understand the multiple ways in which communities have managed and enhanced the conservation of natural resources over long periods of time. Support for this position comes from the various research studies documented in their volume. Frossard’s (2005) account of rice cultivation in the Philippines critiques ‘science’-based approaches – within sustainable development programs delivered by outside experts – that have little regard for local practices and knowledge. Techniques for managing rice diversity, developed over generations, are rarely acknowledged within the research centre ‘scientism’ favoured by conservation agencies and state bodies. Writing in the context of Malaysian National Parks, Lye (2005) similarly argues western scientifically-oriented approaches to protected area management fail to see how localised, long established, practices of the indigenous Batek population are vital to the health of the ecosystem. Dove et al. (2011) have furthered these themes in a more recent volume, arguing that we are now moving towards a ‘post-equilibrium paradigm’ where the idealism of the ‘balance’ between conservation and development is being replaced by more rigorous understandings of conflicting and divergent agendas. They cite recent studies in the area of nature conservation that expand the analytical 17 Tim Winter and Patrick Daly gaze of the field, revealing how ‘the discourse of conservation disguises other, more political ends and/or that it contains within itself subtle mechanisms of state discipline’ (ibid.: na). Among the most critical accounts of the environment-development nexus is Goldman’s (2005) analysis of national parks in Laos. In an analysis of recent World Bank conservation-development policies in the country, Goldman suggests Laos has been transformed into an ‘environmental state’. It is an argument informed by Foucault et al.’s (1991) concept of governmentality and James Scott’s (1998) reading of how states in the region have operated historically: It is through the Bank’s green neo-liberal project – in which neocolonial conservationist ideas of enclosure and preservation and neoliberal notions of market value and optimal resource allocation find common cause – that this institution has made particular natures and natural resource-dependent communities legible, accountable, and available to foreign investors … Only from a distance is it possible to maintain the fiction that World Bank-style development is simply a technocratic intervention generated outside of the politics, culture, and history of imperial social relations. (Goldman 2005: 184–85) Hirsch and Warren (2002) pursue a similar political ecology critique of ‘sustainable development’ programs developed for Southeast Asia’s waterways, forests and agricultural regions. Their analysis reveals the intense contestation that surrounds mining and the damming of rivers, as well as the transformation of forested regions into ‘assets’ through the signing of timber concessions (see also Barber et al. 1995; Kathirithamby-Wells 2005). Interestingly, critical readings of the transformation of cultural heritage into a ‘resource’ or ‘asset’ within the institutionally complex arena of sustainable development have been less forthcoming. The volume Cultural Heritage and Tourism in the Developing World (Timothy and Nyaupane 2008) is indicative in this regard. The book offers a series of interesting and informative essays on issues like the politics of representation and memory or the management of heritage sites. But its critical understanding of the complexities and contradictions of the development sector and sustainable development projects in relation to heritage tourism is much less well developed. The exploitation of sites like Angkor, Preah Vihear and the Potala Palace suggest that the ‘resource curse’, a term more associated with the natural world, is rapidly becoming equally applicable to cultural heritage sites across Asia. One of the ways in which this can be seen most vividly is in the fast growing sector of Asian tourism. Domestic and intra-regional mobility in Asia is set to soar over the coming decades, a process that is giving momentum to region-wide economic integration. In addition to the construction of new airports, highways and rail lines, as highlighted earlier, whole new satellite cities are being built adjacent to a number of Southeast Asian World Heritage Sites, on the back of regional tourism growth. In Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, Chinese and Korean investors are staking hundreds of millions of dollars on urban development schemes that will primarily generate revenue from tourists originating from Northeast Asia.12 Such trends exemplify how the embedding of culture within the economic and socio-political spheres of growth and development has set in motion a ‘particular performative force’, to use Yúdice’s words, whereby the cultural has a ‘social imperative to perform’ (2003: 12). There is thus an urgent need to look beyond the issues of sustainable conservation and heritage management and understand what is ‘being accomplished socially, politically and discursively’ through culture (Domínguez 1992: 21). The nature and conditions of ‘sustainable development’ agendas require critical attention and important questions need to be addressed concerning how its rhetorical deployment by states and developmental agencies is recoding and transforming cultural forms inherited from the past. 18 Converging forces, conflicting values Figure 1.3 Local tourism businesses, Guilin, China (Photo T. Winter) An implicit thread here has been a recognition of the overarching trend towards the incorporation of cultural and natural heritage into what is commonly known as the ‘neoliberal’ agenda of development. It is critical we recognise how culture and nature, and the human bearers of these, are being increasingly transformed into resources for capital accumulation, as local and national markets are opened up for the international connectivity and interventions of today’s global capitalism. Particularly vulnerable are culture-natures found in developing countries, where heritage has emerged as a key ‘asset’ for exploitation and where national economies are dependent upon a small number of key industries. The track record of sustainable heritage tourism programs vary significantly. In many cases profound social inequalities emerge, as a small elite accrue substantial wealth though tourism related concessions and highly profitable cadastral transactions and contract agreements. National or World Heritage designation also often involves an escalation in the cost of living for local residents – from land to transport to food – creating considerable hardship for many (Fisher et al. 2008; Su and Teo 2009). Of course, the arrival of heritage tourism can also mean local residents often see a dramatic rise in salaries (Figure 1.3). Employment in tour guiding, the hospitality industry, agriculture and other service sector industries associated with tourism are among the ways in which heritage can have far reaching benefits for the economic welfare of communities (Butcher 2003; Hitchcock et al. 2010). Modernity and coloniality Modernity, a refuge of tradition? Mapping the entanglements between tradition and modernity remains a perpetual challenge and one that eludes definitive answers. On the one hand, modernity acts as a powerful force in the destruction of the traditional, and the causal relationships in this process are often visibly manifest. As noted earlier, we see this most directly in the destruction of material heritage, such as archaeological sites and historic buildings. Over the last few decades there has been a great deal of important scholarship raising awareness about what is being lost as societies modernise and 19 Tim Winter and Patrick Daly industrialise, and why protectionist lessons need to be learned (UNESCO 2007). For those focused on Asia, these critiques have become increasingly prescient in the wake of accelerated change. Arising from such analyses has been a parallel concern about the homogenisation of culture and nature through contemporary forms of globalisation, understood as the carrier of modernity. Within analyses of non-western countries, it is a perspective that frequently points to ‘western’ cultural imports that imperil and endanger the survival of the local. In many instances such arguments have a clear validity. However, the widespread, and often casual, use of the terms ‘commodification’ and ‘McDonaldisation’ in the heritage literature and profession has also led to overly simplistic readings of the economic dimensions of culture-natures within non-western modernities. Other scholars have pursued a somewhat different analytical path, emphasising how the traditional is either invented in, or re-valourised in and by the modern (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; AlSayyad 2004; Phillips and Schochet 2004). This has led to considerable debate around the role of monuments, festivals, ruins and landscapes as vehicles of memory (re)making and commemoration. In understanding how heritage discourses arise under conditions of modernity and the speeding up of life, attention has also been given to institutionalised responses to loss: of memory; of community; of attachment; or of continuity (Lowenthal 1998). Interestingly, this desire to reclaim and seek comfort in the past has been read by those working in the field of heritage studies in very different ways, ranging from sympathetic ‘human nature’ perspectives, to sardonic critiques of aesthetic nostalgia (Hewison 1987; Fagan 2006). To cite one example from Asia of this divergence, quite different readings have been offered regarding the various ways in which Mao has come to be remembered and commemorated in both popular culture and by the Chinese state (Hooper 1994; Schrift and Pilkey 1996; Cheek 2010). In the literature on heritage and modernity in Asia, much less attention has been given to what might be referred to as the ‘informal’ spaces and moments of modern life, within and through which the traditional appears. Nuanced accounts of how information communication technologies, modes of mass transport, new formations of community and changing mobilities together facilitate the reconfiguration and democratisation of tradition are very much required. We need to be sensitive to the ways in which the institutions and technologies of modernity allow deeply rooted traditions to be enacted and expressed in unexpected forms. From Afghanistan to Indonesia, mobile phone wallpapers, car dashboards and nightclub interiors are among the many spaces in and upon which the sacred finds expression in the everyday secular (Figure 1.4). Ancestral spirit shrines are also a common feature of many Asian homes, even for those living in newly constructed high-rise or ‘gated community’ complexes. Two chapters here, by Shinde and Hosagrahar, take up such issues in order to remind us of the importance of moving beyond interpretations of heritage predicated on the dualisms of the pre-modern/pre-economic, traditional/ modern and the authentic/commodified. Of course the revitalisation and invention of tradition in the modern is a globally familiar pattern. However, as cultural and historic specificities have given modernities across the world their own particular inflections, it is a relationship and dynamic that demands closer attention at the regional and national level. Vibrant debate has formed in recent years regarding the degree to which non-western modernities can be adequately understood within Euro-American analytical frames (Gaonkar et al. 2001; Alatas 2006). Walter Mignolo (2003), Partha Chatterjee (1993), Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) and Timothy Mitchell (2000) are among those that have convincingly argued the historiography of modernity suffers from profound euro-centric biases. As Mitchell puts it: One of the characteristics of modernity has always been its autocentric picture of itself as the expression of a universal certainty, whether the certainty of human reason freed from 20 Converging forces, conflicting values particular traditions, or of technological power freed from the constraints of the natural world. So its history has always claimed to be a universal one, in fact the only universal history. (ibid.: xi) Mitchell makes a point, however, of distancing himself from those advocating a history of ‘alternative modernities’ (Gaonkar et al. 2001), suggesting instead that we attend to the incomplete universalisms and singularities of modernity’s project in different regions of the world under specific historical conditions (Mitchell 2000: xii–xiii). A detailed exploration of Asian modernities and the validity of claims of universality is beyond the scope of this discussion. Any comparative analysis in this regard would rapidly draw us into labyrinthine debates concerning the geographical roots of global capitalism, world systems, and so forth (see Hopkins and Wallerstein 1982; Bayly 2004; Behdad 2005). Instead the more modest aim here is to consider the relationship between modernity and tradition through two thematic prisms: revolutions and ruptures; and colonialism and coloniality. The series of revolutions in thought and cultural life that swept across Europe in the eighteenth century and constituted the Enlightenment are once again relevant here. As this new wave of ideas migrated across the continent, the ascendancy of rational thought and belief in science was accompanied by the trumpeting of freedom, democracy and reason as the values and mechanisms of social emancipation. As Denis Byrne notes later in this volume, crucial to this process was the preceding European Reformation, a catalyst in the displacement of ‘the magical element in Christianity’ and the eventual disenchantment of Europe. Such changes left a profound legacy on European societies. Most notable here was the secularisation of social life and its governance through a series of separations: of church and state; of mind and body; and of the sacred and profane. The Enlightenment and Reformation, together with events of epochal importance like the French Revolution, are now widely recognised as key factors in the shaping of European modernity. More recently though, Chris Bayly (2004) has drawn on Hobsbawm’s (2002) notion of the ‘age of revolutions’ to argue such changes were not confined to Europe Figure 1.4 Traditional henna design, Srinagar, Kashmir (Photo T. Winter) 21 Tim Winter and Patrick Daly alone. Accordingly, he describes the period of 1780–1820 as a time of ‘converging revolutions’; not only would the after-shocks of events in Europe be felt in Asia, North Africa and the Americas, but ‘the repercussions of these extra-European conflicts fed back into the European convulsions’ (ibid.: 86). To substantiate this, Bayly points to the travel of ideas over great distances, citing revolts by North Indian Sikhs, central Arabian Wahhabi Muslims and Chinese sectarians as among the transitions that enabled a ‘new order of the ages’ to be proclaimed in both Africa and Asia (ibid.: 87). He also suggests events in Japan and China at this time can, to a degree, be seen as analogous to those occurring in Britain and France respectively. In Japan for example, civil war and foreign attacks would lead to the replacement of the ruling dynasty over the three generations after 1789 (ibid.: 104). The importance of Bayly’s arguments lie in their rejection of Asia as a region of unchanging, immutable cultures. Too often the latter continues to be diametrically juxtaposed against a European Enlightenment to explain cultural differences at the meta-regional level. As Bayly reminds us, the dance between the modern and traditional, religious and secular has a long, complex history in Asia. Reading his account should not, however, lead us to abandon regional differences in favour of flattened global histories. Bayly is clear in identifying how the age of revolutions had a profoundly transformative effect on European political, economic and cultural life. The work of Partha Chatterjee is also instructive here. As part of his account on the emergence of nationalism in Asia and Africa, Chatterjee argues the modern national identity that formed in India was largely based on difference with Europe and the Americas. More specifically, he argues a nationalist imagination, rooted in the domain of the spiritual and traditional, formed in response to the social and material reforms that made up the modernisation ideology of colonial rule. For Indian intellectuals, the country’s spiritual and classical past became the apparatus of sovereignty, whereby language, art, literature, religion and architecture were all used to exclude Europeans. Tradition and a classical past thus provided the necessary political foundations for constructing a modern Indian nationalism that was distinct, and in large part autonomous, from a more rational, secular European modernity. As Chatterjee (1993: 102) states: For Indian nationalists in the late nineteenth century, the pattern of classical glory, medieval decline, and modern renaissance appeared one that was not only proclaimed by the modern historiography of Europe but also approved for India by at least some sections of European scholarship. What was needed was to claim for the Indian nation the historical agency for completing the project of modernity. To make that claim, ancient India had to become the classical source of Indian modernity. Interestingly, Chatterjee’s turn of phrase here resonates with how Cooper (2005) suggests we treat modernity analytically. Rather than attempt to identify and historically delineate a particular sets of attributes, good or bad, he suggests it is more helpful to see ‘the language of modernity as a claim making device’ (ibid.: 146). If modernity is merely discussed as an abstracted package of interconnecting and inevitably nebulous processes, we miss the ‘debates, actions, trajectories and processes as they took place in history’ (ibid.: 135). He thus argues we attend to the ways in which modernity is discursively articulated at various social levels; how leaders and those in power claim to represent progress and cast broad trajectories for the future. It is a perspective that is particularly prescient for interpreting much of the radical revolutionary politics of twentiethcentury Asia and the ways in which leaders treated tradition and the traditional in their claims of societal progress. In China for example, the May Fourth Movement of 1919 set the stage for an anti-traditionalist politics that would reach its zenith in the Cultural Revolution of 1966–76. Mao Zedong’s revolutionary rhetoric would lead to the destruction and damage of countless 22 Converging forces, conflicting values historical sites, artifacts and archives, and the dismantling of associated traditions. As part of the attack on Confucianism, temples and shrines were desecrated, and heavy restrictions were placed on authors, artists, dancers and musicians. The revolution proclaimed particular arts and forms of literature as bourgeois and elitist, paving the way for their purging in a violent class based struggle. In relative terms though, the attack on culture and its bearers in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge had an even greater social impact than it did in China. Between April 1975 and January 1979 Democratic Kampuchea, as it was known then, endured one of the most brutal social experiments ever inflicted upon a country. Pol Pot’s declaration of ‘year zero’ represented a call for the eradication of virtually all traditions and cultures inherited from the past. This meant many of the bearers of Cambodian culture were tortured and systematically executed in an effort to erase a history seen as corrupt and an obstacle to societal development. A cursory scan through the decades of the second half of the twentieth century reveals further examples of state-based attacks on tradition and its bearers across Asia. In Indonesia, Suharto systematically persecuted the country’s ethnic Chinese in the late 1960s. More recently, between 1998 and 2004, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India pursued an aggressive and highly contentious nationalist politics that proclaimed Hindu roots of Indian civilisation and offered little tolerance to Muslims or Christians. Archaeology and art history were put to work in an attempted re-writing of the sub-continent’s history, whereby Sanskrit was declared to be the mother of all languages and the Vedas the foundation of all modern knowledge. Naturally, to better appreciate the nuances of each situation would require a close reading of the complex politics and ideological struggles in play. The motivations for eradicating or suppressing tradition and past cultures are many. In cases like India, these recent claims of modernisation and progress have involved attempts to establish the dominance of one tradition at the expense of others. Whereas in places like Malaysia or Sri Lanka, the rhetoric of nationalist politics has been defined more by attempts to close down a multi-ethnic or cultural pluralism, or retain a cultural ‘integrity’ by keeping outside traditions at bay. In light of such examples, and various others that might be cited here, it would be naïve to suggest that tradition, heritage and culture-natures inherited from the past will not continue to be enmeshed in aggressive and violent politics in the future. The desire to destroy or eradicate will not disappear any day soon. Nonetheless, if we look at the situations in Cambodia and China today, we see states with dramatically different attitudes towards their national heritages. In the revolutionary politics of just a few decades ago, the governments of both countries at that time inflicted profound violence on the pasts of their citizens. In stark contrast, today they declare themselves responsible custodians of ‘national treasures’, safeguarding a wide range of culture natures for the future generations of their respective countries. And as examples like the Shanghai Expo vividly illustrate, countries in Asia now explicitly declare their heritage as integral to their national futures. When seen in relation to events of just a few short decades ago, these are seismic changes that speak of a wider pattern of fast-shifting modernities in Asia. From colonialism to coloniality For those countries subjected to colonial rule in Asia – whether it be European or intra-regional in origin – the years before and after Independence were moments where claims for a new modern nation and societal progress were especially vibrant. Political and cultural sovereignty was, for many, a catalyst for optimism and the implementation of new economic development plans by ambitious leaders. They were times when societies, eager to shed past humiliations, looked forward and confidently embraced uncertainties. As we now look back at these historically significant moments and the legacies of colonialism, questions of post-coloniality and 23 Tim Winter and Patrick Daly neo-coloniality become particularly intriguing when viewed through the lens of heritage, with its rubrics of preservation and conservation. Debates around such issues have largely centred on select themes. The role of museums and colonial era architecture as vehicles of memory, or the politics of representation in heritage tourism are notable examples here (Bishop, Phillips and Yeo 2003; Hall and Tucker 2004; Henderson and Weisgrau 2007; Jennings 2003). As highlighted earlier, a growing body of research has also formed that critically examines the legacy of colonial-era knowledge practices in fields like archaeology or nature conservation. Within this, attempts have been made to interpret the structures of heritage governance which have solidified in the decades after independence, and the historically-fashioned webs that continue to bind local, national and supra-national institutions in complex, politically delicate relations. The chapters by Ray and Barnard valuably advance this theme of research. We also wish to draw attention to a number of analytical themes pertinent to questions of coloniality that have yet to receive the attention they deserve in the analysis of heritage in Asia. To do so it is necessary to turn to the influential arguments offered by Hardt and Negri (2001) in their book Empire. In brief, Hardt and Negri contend that an age of imperialism, an era defined by the strong demarcation of political boundaries, has passed and that we have entered a phase which has no spaces ‘outside’ the logics of capital. Capitalism is no longer driven by an old regime of Eurocentric colonial states and confined to the borders of specific territories, and is instead ‘a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers’ (ibid.: xii). The arrival of this last and definitive stage of capitalism is also characterised by a move away from a wealth creation built upon the production of commodities, to an economy that is immaterial and driven by the circulation of symbols, data and commoditised forms of knowledge. In an age of intellectual labour in high value-added sectors, they argue the manual work and slave economies of colonialism are relegated to history. This means that with the core and peripheries of a colonial era made redundant, the ‘other’ of a European identity also fades away. According to Hardt and Negri, the ‘dialectic of colonialism’, whereby the European self of modernity emerges in opposition to the constructed subjectivity of the colonised, stops functioning. Interesting responses to this thesis have come from the field of Latin American Cultural Studies, most notably through authors like Santiago Castro-Gómez (2007) and Arturo Escobar (2004). Castro-Gómez agrees with much of Hardt and Negri’s thesis but takes issue with this final statement above. Drawing on Foucault’s account of disciplinary power, he invokes the distinction between colonialism and coloniality. Colonialism pertains to a historical period in which a series of territorial ‘domains’ were subjugated to a powerful core via a series of knowledge/ power relations. Accordingly, Europe’s modernity constructed its values of reason, civility and culture in large part by distinguishing itself from the supposed barbarism, irrationality and tradition of the pre-modern periphery. Whereas coloniality refers to ‘a technology of power that persist until today, founded on the “knowledge of the other”’ (Castro-Gómez and Martin 2002: 276). The latter term specifically departs from placing the traditional and modern in chronological order and instead sees them in synchronic terms, such that ‘coloniality is not modernity’s “past” but its “other face”’ (ibid.). To illustrate this, Castro-Gómez considers aspects of the global economy which fall within Hardt and Negri’s notion of immaterial production in relation to the politics of development. As he notes, the profound shifts that have occurred in Western developmentalist discourse since the World War II have realigned relations between the ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’. As we saw earlier, in the 1960s and 1970s it was held that modernisation occurred only through industrialisation; ‘traditional’ society was equated with underdevelopment and an inferior phase to full development (Castro-Gómez 2007: 436). It was a discourse that not only reflected the 24 Converging forces, conflicting values legacies of colonialism and Orientalism, but also perpetuated the chronological ordering of the traditional (backward/underdeveloped) and modern. Escobar (1995, 2004) critically examines how the language of sustainable development, which emerged in the 1990s, has realigned the traditional and modern, asking the question of whether, in fact, much has changed. Accordingly, he argues sustainable development focuses more specifically on ‘human capital’ as the locus of economic growth, rather than the ‘physical capital’ of manufactured products, infrastructures or natural resources and in so doing continues to uphold an imperialist politics of development. To illustrate this, both he and Castro-Gómez offer the example of biodiversity conservation. Like most observers of this issue, they point to The Agreement on Biological Diversity signed at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, as a landmark agreement which catapulted the ‘common heritage of mankind’ into the global economy of biotechnology and genetic research. The vast industries that have emerged through the capturing, modification and ownership of genetic material created a need for the recognition of property rights at the international level. As Castro-Gómez and others point out, the introduction of Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights, or TRIPs agreements, would give a small number of multinational companies monopolistic control over much of the planet’s genetic resources. It is these very processes which lead Castro-Gómez to disagree with Hardt and Negri’s description of Empire as an era which dispenses with alterity and the othering of the traditional by the modern. Accordingly, he argues frameworks of biodiversity and sustainable development re-fix the traditional in ‘new representations of development [which] reinforce the modern/colonial hierarchies in a post-modern register’ (2007: 440). The indigenous person for example, once considered the inhibitor of progress and development, becomes the guardian of traditional knowledge forms and cultural practices that are now of economic value. Sustainable development thus becomes about sustaining the ‘intangible heritage of the world’; a process Escobar describes in the following critique as a ‘semiotic conquest’: Once the semiotic conquest of nature is complete, the sustainable and rational use of the environment becomes imperative. Here is found the underlying logic of the discourses of sustainable development and biodiversity. This new capitalization of nature not only rests on the semiotic conquest of territories (in terms of biodiversity reserves) and communities (as the ‘guardians’ of nature); it also requires the semiotic conquest of local knowledges, in the sense that ‘saving nature’ requires the valuation of local wisdom about the sustainability of nature. Modern biology begins to discover that local systems of knowledge are useful complements. (Escobar 2004, quoted in Castro-Gómez 2007: 441) By way of a clarification, Castro-Gómez indicates that this coming together of the traditional and modern is driven by pragmatic agendas and does not represent an epistemic shift: Although the wisdom of indigenous communities or black communities can now be seen as ‘useful’ for the conservation of the environment, the categorical distinction between ‘traditional knowledge’ and ‘science’, elaborated in the eighteenth century, is still in force. The former continues to be seen as anecdotal knowledge, not quantitative and lacking methodology, while the latter continues to be taken as the only epistemically valid knowledge. (ibid.) 25 Tim Winter and Patrick Daly Crucially, it is a hierarchical distinction that enables the traditional to be subsumed into a complex web of science constructed by multinational companies like Johnson & Johnson, DuPont or Pfizer, as well as the global developmental sector. But as Castro-Gómez points out, it is a web that has closely aligned itself to, and associated itself with, the agendas of those involved in the conservation of ‘the traditional’. There is little doubt that for those pushing the implementation of TRIPs and the cooperative agreements set up between bodies like the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) from 1996 onwards, their agendas will be well served by UNESCO’s move in October 2003 to sign the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. In stipulating its purpose, the convention states ‘consideration will be given solely to such intangible cultural heritage as is compatible with … the requirements of mutual respect among communities, groups and individuals, and of sustainable development’.13As Castro-Gómez suggests, the convention will make countless previously un-recorded knowledges and traditions visible, rendering them at once ‘susceptible to appropriation by multinational corporations through patents’ (2007: 440). To summarise, the case of biodiversity begins to illustrate some of the ways in which ‘the traditional’ of heritage comes to be enmeshed in the knowledge/power relations that serve the ends of capitalism today. World Heritage offers us further evidence of such processes. Few would contest that as we approach 1,000 listed World Heritage Sites, such recognition has brought these places into new capital relations: whether it be through physical infrastructure upgrades, construction industries, tourism or even via the industries associated with conservation itself. The point to note here however, is that these processes also frequently perpetuate previously constructed hierarchies of the traditional/modern. Tourism, an industry that has long capitalised on a cultural economy of the exotic and primitive, is one of the contexts within which this can be seen most clearly. Recent developments at Angkor and Lhasa are highly illustrative in this regard. In the case of Angkor, particular tourism discourses intersect with heritage management frameworks oriented by rational science. To preserve the ‘authentic spirit’ of the site, most notably in certain ‘ruined’ temple complexes, technically-oriented, positivist conservation strategies reproduce mythologised histories infused with the nostalgia of abandoned civilisations. It is a representation of landscape and history that revisits the narratives familiar to an era of nineteenth-century colonialism. Alternative readings of the site as a space imbued with localised values and meanings, including animistic ones, are subsumed, and thus erased, by the universalist assertions of global heritage and global tourism.14 In distinct contrast to biodiversity conservation, the interweaving of globalised capital and globalised governance structures in the management of an architectural site serves to exclude locally specific, non-scientific forms of knowledge, rather than bring them to the fore. However, in both cases the hierarchical positioning of the traditional/modern in a state of coloniality, that Castro-Gómez and Escobar talk of, endures. Robert Shepherd (2006, 2009) picks up similar themes in his insightful analysis of heritage policies in Tibet. Shepherd examines the interplays between heritage policies and the narratives of tourism in the on-going construction of Tibetan culture as the geographically remote, backward ‘other’ of modernity. The long held notion of Tibet as the real life Shangri-La, the quintessential exotic, mountainous culture, neatly fits into Chinese government programs for tourism development which align minority groups with backwardness and as communities in need of modernisation (see also Anand 2007). He notes: This positioning of minority groups as less developed and following in the footsteps of more advanced societies is rooted in the stage based evolutionary social model of late 26 Converging forces, conflicting values nineteenth century anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan and the twentieth century historical materialism of Joseph Stalin. (Shepherd 2006: 250) Crucially, the Chinese state uses this vision of Tibet and its people to advance a model of tourism that depoliticises the region. Stripped of their political and social values, Tibetan cultural practices are transformed into cultural motifs in readiness for consumption by both international and domestic tourists. Aesthetically rendered, traditional Tibetan culture thus emerges as a celebration of the nation’s cultural diversity. At the same time, a language of sustainable tourism development enables the state to modernise the region in a way that draws it ‘closer’ to Beijing. As an illustration of this process, Shepherd describes how parts of Lhasa have been demolished to make way for a museum and a large square modelled on Tiananmen Square (ibid.: 250). Perhaps the most assertive move in this direction, however, has been the construction of a rail-link into the region, connecting Lhasa up to a host of other cities in China including Chengdu, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shanghai, and of course Beijing. For Shepherd, a complicit partner in this process has been UNESCO. The organisation’s approach to conservation in Tibet has been underpinned by their twin pronged worldview concerning the promotion of cultural diversity/cultural pluralism and the safeguarding of culture from the destructive forces of modernisation, including those delivered by tourism. Once again, however, it is a concern that results in an intervention principally focused on the technical aspects of physical conservation. As a result, he suggests, there has been a reluctance on the part of UNESCO to recognise the cultural politics of heritage in the region. To illustrate this he gives the example of the Potala Palace in Lhasa; nominated as a World Heritage Site not because of its importance within a Tibetan national history but because it represents the ‘outstanding skills of the Tibetan, Han, Mongol, Man and other nationalities’ (UNESCO 1993, cited in Shepherd 2009: 258). In fairness, and as Shepherd acknowledges, worrying about the consequences of such assertions might have been less important for UNESCO, given their desire to help China move away from a recent past characterised by the widespread destruction of cultural property. Nonetheless, it is a position that means UNESCO’s apolitical stance towards cultural preservation feeds directly into the heritage-tourism-development nexus created by the state. Tibet’s past, reduced to questions of aesthetics and the technicalities of material conservation and thus stripped of all its political impetus, is absorbed into a wider narrative of Chinese modernisation and national progress. Seen together then, such examples – biodiversity, Angkor and Tibetan Culture – begin to illustrate some of the ways in which today’s global capitalism, described by Hardt and Negri as Empire, comes to value the traditional, the exotic, the primitive and the particular. As today’s capitalism furthers the project of modernity it operates as ‘a machine of segmentary inclusions, not of exclusions. Non-occidental knowledge is welcomed by the global agendas of Empire because it is useful’ (Castro-Gómez 2007: 441). In other words, Empire is a totalising system which does not dispense with coloniality but merely reorganises it. Heritage politics and governance One of the defining features of today’s interconnected world is the proliferation of globally roaming organisations operating in the field of conservation. Notable and familiar examples here include the World Wildlife Fund, Getty Conservation Institute, Aga Khan Trust For Culture, World Monuments Fund, and Conservation International, as well as the various bodies known primarily around the world through their acronyms: UNESCO, IUCN, ICOM, ICCROM, and 27 Tim Winter and Patrick Daly ICOMOS.15 There has also been a growth in the number of organisations and foundations that have engaged with culture-nature conservation in order to advance other institutional priorities like education or health. Examples here include the Henry Luce Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Fondazione Zegna and Lee Foundation. Closer examination of the operations of these organisations invariably reveals distinct cultural/ geographical leanings or imbalances. While a number of today’s supra-national organisations claim to be ‘global’ in nature, in reality various historical and political factors are at play that mean their geographical coverage is rarely even in nature. Even the archetype and architect of today’s global heritage movement, UNESCO remains deeply imbalanced in its coverage, as their map of the World Heritage Sites by region illustrates.16 The overwhelming concentration of World Heritage properties in Europe speaks as much about the political standing of the region in the second half of the twentieth century combined with UNESCO’s institutional history in Paris, as it does about the histories of population settlement or distribution of ‘natural wonders’ across the globe. It is a history that leaves large parts of the Asia-Pacific region ‘underrepresented’. Although UNESCO is committed to addressing this euro-centric imbalance, the inherent complexities of reforming such a large organisation mean this will no doubt take some time to achieve. In the case of the Aga Khan Trust For Culture, however, this sense of cultural and geographic concentration is explicitly expressed, with the organisation openly declaring its primary focus as communities of the Muslim faith. Although actively engaged in Western Europe and North America, many of their long running heritage projects have been housed within a larger organisational remit of social, cultural and economic empowerment across the most impoverished countries of Asia and Africa where Islam is a prevalent faith. The umbrella institution, the Aga Khan Development Network (the Trust for Culture being one of its member organisations) is made up of agencies dedicated to health, education, economic development and the advancement of civil society. Today, the vast majority of the organisation’s activities are financed through a highly advanced set of partnerships with national governments, private donors and a variety of non-governmental bodies. As of 2011, the Aga Khan conducts operations through collaborations with thirty-five governments and their aid agencies and around twenty organisations that might best be categorised as multi-lateral. A number of projects have also been co-sponsored by universities around the world, cultural sector institutions like the Smithsonian and through grants from the Ford, Gates and Shell foundations. In this regard, the Aga Khan provides a good example of the complex global infrastructure and financing of heritage governance that is now in place in regions like Asia. Indeed what is clear is that heritage conservation has become part of that amorphous entity known as ‘global civil society’, what Keane describes as a ‘new cosmology’, and defines as: a dynamic non-governmental system of interconnected socio-economic institutions that straddle the whole earth … an unfinished project that consists of sometimes thick, sometimes thinly stretched networks, pyramids and hub-and-spoke clusters of institutions and actors who organise themselves across borders, with the deliberate aim of drawing the world together in new ways. (2003: 8) At the governmental level, the growing presence of heritage conservation projects in formal bilateral aid arrangements is an important development that warrants critical attention. As numerous authors have highlighted, the provision of financial assistance through aid is inherently political and shaped by past and present world orders (Duffield 2001; Ignatieff 2003). While it 28 Converging forces, conflicting values might be tempting to regard the provision of assistance in the ‘revival’ or ‘preservation’ of a country’s cultural heritage as a benign, politically inert activity, closer inspection reveals how donor states have effectively engaged in this sector as a mechanism of ‘soft power’ (Khanna 2008). Even if heritage bodies are not state funded, when operating overseas their operations become part of a country’s ‘cultural export’ and as such they are, in many cases, absorbed into the bureaucratic structures of diplomacy and international relations. In the case of the US, the J. Paul Getty Trust, Rockefeller and Luce Foundations, are among those that contributed to favourable diplomatic relations and the country’s popular appeal as it increased its global influence during the second half of the twentieth century. The cultural-political dynamics of heritage funding can also be clearly seen in the context of today’s post-colonial relations. For the former European powers of Britain, France, Portugal and Spain, for example, the export of heritage projects and assistance often aligns with governmental priorities for maintaining ties with former territories, including those in the Asian region. The heritage sector provides the ideal forum through which linguistic and cultural links can be celebrated, promoted and re-affirmed. Interestingly, although this might be a more established sector in Europe and North America, China, India, Indonesia and Thailand are among Asia’s ‘developing countries’ that have joined this table of cultural diplomacy, actively exporting their expertise and ‘assistance’ in the field of heritage conservation. In many cases such activities are an effective means of securing influence at the regional level. Both China and India, for example, have recently stepped up their involvement in archaeological and museological projects in Central and Southeast Asia in order to maintain or re-establish their cultural, political and economic influence in these regions. We noted earlier that across the region governments have implemented national heritage registers, zoning regulations and laws pertaining to the protection of conservation areas and the illicit trafficking of items of national importance, whether it be cultural artifacts or endangered species. When seen together, these add up to a broad, if far from comprehensive, infrastructure of heritage governance operating at the national and sub-national level. However, a number of forces converge to present major challenges for this sector. The speed and scale of modernisation and economic growth profoundly impacts the ability of organisations involved in conservation – whether they be local, national or international agencies – to react and respond. The vast majority of organisations, particularly governmental ones, are unable to recognise, process and respond to threatened heritage at a speed that keeps pace with the physical and social changes occurring around them. In many cases, such challenges are compounded by environments characterised by corruption or weak legal and judicial systems. As the twentieth century came to a close the rise of non-governmental organisations, more commonly known as NGOs or INGOs, represented a significant development in the arena of heritage governance for a number of reasons. In both the cultural and natural sectors, they provide some of the most commonly recognisable forms of advocacy and action. In Asia’s developing countries elaborate networks have formed, whereby environmental and cultural sector agencies link to each other and with other non-governmental agencies operating in very different sectors of society. As we saw earlier, such proliferation and connectivity has, in many cases, formed around the umbrella concepts of sustainability and sustainable development. Both Dove et al. (2005) and Hirsch and Warren (2002) have illustrated some of the ways in which this civil-society conglomeration has changed the dynamic of domestic politics in Southeast Asia. To cite one example, Hirsch and Warren give the example of minority peoples who now ‘have growing numbers of listeners through national and international NGO networks including the World Council of Indigenous Peoples, Survival and Cultural Survival’ (ibid.: 3). Such accounts have been important in revealing the part NGOs have played in creating awareness about the links between conservation and identity politics issues. In a number of 29 Tim Winter and Patrick Daly Asian countries, NGOs have made significant advances in protecting communities and marginalised groups from abusive state power by addressing the environmental and cultural aspects of human security and human rights. A large body of evidence exists that illustrates the vulnerability of tradition-based land rights and long-standing practices of environmental custodianship – as vital forms of material and non-material security – in the face of economic development (Barney 2009; Tsing 2005). The non-governmental sector has also been particularly active in support and promotion of intangible heritage. The rapid growth in interest in this area along with its formal designation in the international arena of heritage policy in the 2000s has raised further challenging questions about human rights and the rights of indigenous groups. The 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage states that it is ‘compatible with international human rights instruments’ and makes a positive contribution to the governance of rights because intangible heritage ‘promotes respect for cultural diversity and human creativity’.17 But as Silverman and Ruggles (2007) and Langfield et al. (2010) point out, creating widespread countenance towards open, pluralistic identities is far from easy. A number of our chapters here, most notably those by Bräuchler, Damaodaran, Denes, Dove and Lloyd take up such issues, and offer important analyses of this difficult and fast changing aspect of heritage conservation. As events in Kashmir, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Thailand and West China in the late 2000s all demonstrated, identity and culture have become key fault lines along which violent conflicts between states and their citizens now erupt. The level to which governments across the region wish to adopt UNESCO’s paradigm of cultural diversity and cultural pluralism thus varies case by case. Despite becoming signatories to the convention, a number of Asian governments have pursued contentious policies that exhibit little tolerance for diversity or cultural pluralism in their attempt to suppress unrest from ethnic or religious groups. What it is strongly evident in such examples, together with the various other issues discussed in this introductory chapter, is that the arena of heritage in Asia raises highly challenging and complex questions that stretch far beyond neatly bounded ideas of preservation, revival or safeguarding. Heritage as an idea, an ethos and a theatre of policies and laws is on a long-term path of expansion and pluralisation in Asia. Powerful political and economic forces will ensure this. We believe the converging forces, conflicting values which enmesh heritage today will only continue to intensify as it permeates ever further across public and private life. This book originated and has been nurtured with such trajectories in mind. Acknowledgements Tim Winter would like to thank the Getty Conservation Institute for the facilities, resources and hospitality which made much of this chapter possible. Thanks to Jeff Cody, Kecia Fong, Mark Ravinder Frost, and Thalia Kennedy for feedback on earlier drafts. Special thanks to Anna Duer for her tireless energy and enthusiasm in sourcing materials from the Getty library and archives. Notes 1 This vessel was also the inspiration for the Shanghai Museum building. 2 See Lewis and Wigen (1997: 71) for further discussion of spatial constructs of East and West. 3 With regard to cultural heritage, definitions revolve around the idea of an inherited legacy of physical artifacts and intangible attributes of a group or society. The term ‘natural heritage’ typically refers to the legacy of objects and intangible attributes, which constitute the natural environment, including biodiversity and geological forms. 4 For further details, see www.heritage.org/About 30 Converging forces, conflicting values 5 Numerous other examples from across the region could be cited here. Among the European schools of conservation established in Asia, the École Française d’Extrême Orient, established in Hanoi in 1901, was a good example of an integrated research program into the history and culture of a region. In the case of EFEO, researchers from the fields of archaeology, anthropology, philology and monumental conservation principally studied the ‘classical civilisations’ of the region, largely understanding the region through a lens of Indian and Chinese influence (Clémentin-Ojha et al. 2007). 6 See also Askew (2010) and Turtinen (2000) for discussions on UNESCO. 7 One of the key challenges then has been the positioning of loss and curation within discourses of economic growth and societal modernisation. 8 Another development worthy of mention is the Xintiandi area in Shanghai. Re-developed as an urban ‘lifestyle center’ – defined as such in terms of shops, cafés, bars and restaurants featuring indoor and outdoor dining and pedestrianised areas – Xintiandi is expected to serve as a template for other Chinese cities. 9 For further details of museum see http://kmomamuseum.org 10 Notable examples here include Sairam Tours, Oriental Travel and Audley Travel. 11 For further details see: http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTURBAN DEVELOPMENT/EXTCHD/0,contentMDK:21782457~menuPK:430436~pagePK:64020865~piPK: 149114~theSitePK:430430,00.html 12 For a detailed account of these urban development programs that have appeared across Southeast Asia from the mid-2000s onwards see Winter (2010). 13 As stated under General Provisions I, Article 2, 1. 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