Annual Reviews Conversations Presents

A Conversation
with David Lowenthal
David Lowenthal1 and Yannis Hamilakis2
1
Emeritus Professor of Geography at University College London
2
Joukowsky Institute of Achaeology, Brown University, Providence, Rhode
Island 02912; email: [email protected]

Annual Reviews. 2017 David Lowenthal needs no introduction. An Emeritus Professor of

Annual Reviews interviews are online at
Geography at UCL (University College London), a fellow of the
www.annualreviews.org/topic/multimedia British Academy, he has taught at a number of universities around the
world and has earned numerous prizes and honors. Most importantly,
Copyright © 2017 by Annual Reviews.
All rights reserved
his work has been and continues to be hugely influential in a number
of fields, including social anthropology, archaeology, heritage, and
conservation studies. He kindly agreed to an informal conversation,
at his house in London, on the occasion of the publication of his new
book, The Past Is a Foreign Country—Revisited, a 660-page volume which
is much more than a revised edition of his earlier celebrated volume
and a work that will be at the center of scholarly debates for many
years to come. The interview was recorded on the 28th of January
2017. The text that follows is an edited version of that interview.

Yannis Hamilakis: David, shall we start with the early years, your
education and upbringing, your formative experiences? I’m sure
you have reflected yourself on how these early years have shaped
your subsequent work. Could you share with us the most important
moments of these years?

 1
 David Lowenthal: Thank you, Yannis. I went to a very strange school when I was young. The
Lincoln School of Teachers College in New York was the brain child of the famous philosopher
John Dewey. Dewey believed in childhood education through experience, that is to say, learning
by doing. So, for example, we would have a discussion about the history of the labor movement
in the United States, which we had to learn about not only by reading, but by disassembling a car,
and then putting it back together again.

Yannis Hamilakis: That’s amazing.

David Lowenthal: I was not very good at that, but I did enjoy the philosophy. I also had a
childhood experience over two summers in the American Southwest. I was fascinated by Navajo
and Pueblo culture and by the science of chronology, which was just then developing on tree
rings. So, I spent two summers in a kind of archaeological, anthropological field camp in the
Southwest where I began to learn a little bit about these cultures that had been so important in
the Southwest long, long ago.
So, those are two very early experiences. After that, I suppose what was most important was
going to university at Harvard and finding that I didn’t really like most of the formal curriculum,
that I didn’t want to specialize in anything. I simply became fascinated by all kinds of things. For
example, I was fascinated by Celtic literature. So, I did work on Irish language and literature,
which was fascinating to me partly because it was so beautiful, and it was the beauty of it more
than anything else that attracted me. So, I didn’t really succeed as a specialist in anything at
university; I simply enjoyed what was on offer.
Then I was in the army in the Second World War immediately after graduating, a formative
experience that was not my choice, but was hugely important because it introduced me to the
world of Europe. So, I was in France and Germany and a little bit in Czechoslovakia and Belgium
during the war, first in the infantry, and then later in military intelligence, where I became a
geographer, never having heard of the subject at all, but I was asked to do reconnaissance work
in Western Europe, which gave me a chance to understand a region through its people and its
artifacts and buildings a little better (Lowenthal 2007).
So, when I came back to the United States, I became interested in geography as a way of
understanding the world, and I went to the University of California at Berkeley where my mentor
was Carl Sauer –

Yannis Hamilakis: Of course, yes –

David Lowenthal: – who was an extremely well known geographer at the time. I should say
historical geographer because he insisted always that you understood things only by how they
came to be. You could not understand how things were now without understanding their origin
and development. He was very, very close to the anthropologists at Berkeley, especially Alfred
L. Kroeber and Robert H. Lowie, who were his great friends and companions even in his work,
especially in Mexico, but Sauer also believed, I think quite correctly, that it was not desirable to
specialize. It was important to be broad, and so he insisted that all of his students take work in
other disciplines.
He was against disciplines. I share that view. I hate disciplines. I think that specialization
has been the bane of American education ever since it imbibed the German philosophy of
the disciplines in the late nineteenth century. Sauer also insisted on field work as a part of any
understanding of a people, and that field work should be untrammeled by previous demands or
 2 Lowenthal
any fixed framework of previous thinking. You should go into the field with open eyes. And you
should go into the field without preconceptions, as far as possible. The famous story is that he
was supposed to have said, his method of training was you give a youngster a hundred dollars and
a bag of peanuts, send him into the field, and tell him to come back with a dissertation (Williams
et al. 2014).

Yannis Hamilakis: I see, yeah. So, this is all very fascinating, and I think for me is very interesting
too. As you know, I just started teaching at an American university, at Brown, and one of the things
I appreciate is the openness of the curriculum, the freedom it gives to students to study different
subjects and different topics.

David Lowenthal: Yes, yes.

Yannis Hamilakis: So, you are now saying to us something very important, that it was that
freedom and openness that allowed you to explore so many different issues. The other thing that
actually fascinated me in your response was the link with the military and the warfare, that it was
your service during the war years that actually made you want to study geography –

David Lowenthal: Yes

Yannis Hamilakis: – understanding the spatial dimension, knowing different countries,

appreciating that comparative perspective, it is very interesting. As I am just starting teaching a
course on the link between archaeology and warfare (see also Hamilakis 2009), I could see the
importance in what you are saying. But I’m interested also in the change, the shift you made
from the US to the UK. How did that shape your own work and also how were the two cultures
different, the US academic culture and the UK academic culture?

David Lowenthal: It was really not just two cultures; it was essentially three cultures because
as part of my work in Berkeley, I undertook field work in the Caribbean. A complete accident for
me because starting at Berkeley, I was immediately thrust into a new way of understanding things
in a program that was largely focused on Latin America, and I did not know Spanish. Within two
weeks I had to choose an area and write something about this area, get to work on it. So I found
the only part of Latin America where Spanish was not requisite, that is to say the three Guianas,
Suriname, French Guiana, and British Guiana, and that was my undergraduate – sorry, my master’s
degree work, and I went to do field work there shortly afterwards. I thus became tremendously
excited by island studies, small society studies, the way that each small society would develop its
own outlook on things, its own sense of particularity, its own sense of individuality, and that each
island also, if it were small, was apt to be a place in which people had to be polymaths. In a small
society, nobody just does one thing; people do a whole range of things, and this fascinated me as
a way of life that was completely unlike anything I’d experienced in America or in Continental
Europe (Lowenthal 1972).
So, when I – after working, especially in the British Caribbean and the French Caribbean, I
had to do archival work on some of the studies I had made, which brought me to Britain, back
to Britain again after the first time in the war, and then the second time in the Caribbean and
West Indian studies. I began to look at Britain as another place. This time I was also working
on landscape studies in the United States. So, looking again at Britain, I was asked, well, what’s
the difference between Britain and the United States, how do they deal with their country and

www.annualreviews.org  •  A Conversation with David Lowenthal  3

 countrysides, how do they deal with their built environments, and how do they deal with each
other?
Well, in a way, Britain was like the Caribbean. Britain is in many ways a small island. I know it
has 60 million people, but still it behaves like a small island in which each group, each institution
has its own little band of devotees and important people, and they behave like a little place in
which secrecy matters, the difference between insiders and outsiders matters, and you know right
away that you’re an outsider. So, that was one big difference that I began to focus on. The other
big difference was the sense of the past, which was so clearly unlike that in the United States
at that time and I’m talking about the ’60s and ’70s. The American public generally were very
uninterested in the past. The past was something you got over. We think about the future, we
don’t deal with the past, that’s done.

Yannis Hamilakis: Yeah, it’s history as they say.

David Lowenthal: That’s history. Whereas in Britain everything was history, everything,
everyone, every place seemed to be absolutely saturated in the past, and it was these differences
that first impelled me to do the kinds of work that I’ve done in The Past Is a Foreign Country
(Lowenthal 1985).

Yannis Hamilakis: So, the conception of that book happened here –

David Lowenthal: Yes –

Yannis Hamilakis: – in the UK.

David Lowenthal: Yes.

Yannis Hamilakis: But obviously you brought together the diverse experience –

David Lowenthal: Yes –

Yannis Hamilakis: – that you had in different countries. I was quite intrigued to hear about
your interest in islands, and I was wondering about your recent Mediterranean work, and I was
thinking, is that interest to do perhaps with your early Caribbean work? Is the connection with
islands as a theme or are there other reasons?

David Lowenthal: It’s both. Or perhaps even more than both, it’s also because I became
interested in the classical past.

Yannis Hamilakis: Of course, yes.

David Lowenthal: And the classical past is essentially and in considerable measure an Aegean
past, and so here again we have island cultures.

Yannis Hamilakis: Exactly.

David Lowenthal: And yes, absolutely, it was that kind of connection that made me feel at
home. When I came to Britain I still remained involved with Caribbean studies, but I was working

 4 Lowenthal
with others who were dealing with the Scottish islands for example, Orkney and Shetland and the
Hebrides. Or else with Mediterranean studies in Sicily and Sardinia, Malta, Crete and so on. So,
all of these things became another realm of comparison and contrast for me.

Yannis Hamilakis: Yeah, yeah, now you taught at University College London (UCL) –

David Lowenthal: I taught at UCL –

Yannis Hamilakis: – for many years.

David Lowenthal: Yes.

Yannis Hamilakis: The university system, here in the UK, is very different academically,
because students have to specialize from very early on.

David Lowenthal: Yes.

Yannis Hamilakis: From their first year. How did you encourage your students to become
broad minded and explore many different things? Was it difficult, was it easy?

David Lowenthal: I was not very successful at that, but I have to say that we’re talking about
the ’60s and ’70s and early ’80s, which were different from now. In those days it was possible to be
more catholic in the way that you dealt with subject matter than it has become since.

Yannis Hamilakis: Yes.

David Lowenthal: Already in the United States the disciplinary boundaries had hardened a
great deal. In this country it was not so bad at that time.

Yannis Hamilakis: At that time, yes.

David Lowenthal: And it was easy for me also because I came from a background of more than
geography and history; I had also taught landscape architecture at Harvard for two or three years,
and environmental psychology. So, I was asked to participate in programs at University College
that brought me in contact with people in all of those fields and art history as well. I taught also
at the Warburg Institute and at the Bartlett School of Architecture and Planning. Half of my
students were architects and planners.

Yannis Hamilakis: That’s very interesting.

David Lowenthal: They were the best students in fact because they really wanted to know and
they were articulate, much more articulate than the geographers. And also, the other difference
for me was that because I was an outsider, I was not supposed to have anything to do with
administrative work. This was a real blessing because in America I had had to do a great deal of
administrative work, but one thing I needed to say before we pass on to other topics was that the
two greatest places I had taught were my first teaching experience in the ’50s at Vassar College
because it was a college confined to women as students, and it had the best faculty I have ever
been with, mostly women, and in those days, really splendid women scholars could not get jobs at

www.annualreviews.org  •  A Conversation with David Lowenthal  5

 the major universities in the United States. So, I was surrounded a panoply of remarkable women.
The second place that was so special was Jamaica because I was not only teaching there, but
I was part of something called the Institute of Social and Economic Research, which embraced
geography, history, anthropology, sociology, economics. There was a group of maybe a dozen of
us from different fields but because we were all working on small islands we all worked together,
and we all understood that in order to understand a place, you have to look at it broadly, you have
to encompass all of these so-called different subject matters. They’re different, yes, but they really
require an overview that means you have to dapple in all of them.

Yannis Hamilakis: Absolutely, absolutely. Now, since we are still dealing somehow with
biographical matters and with your formative years and experiences, I would like to ask you about
an episode that is important for us in archaeology, and I speak as an archaeologist here, and that’s
to do with the ’80s, a 1986 event which is known as the foundation of the World Archaeological
Congress (WAC) at Southampton in the UK, the place where I used to work until 2016. I know
that you, together with others, Peter Ucko, Peter Gathercole, were instrumental in organizing
that key event, and you and Peter Gathercole organized the session that became a very influential
book on the politics of the past (Gathercole and Lowenthal 1990). This was one of the books that
spearheaded the whole discussion about the politics of archaeology and the social significance of
the past in the present.
Now, for many of us, the foundation of the World Archaeological Congress is the moment
when archaeology lost its political innocence, because it raised so many crucial issues. It opened
Pandora’s box in relation to archaeology’s links with colonialism, its Eurocentric past, its dealings
with indigenous groups, all these important matters. I understand that this was also a very
controversial event at the time (cf. Ucko 1987). When I went to Southampton in 2000, I could still
feel the echoes of that founding event, and it seemed that even at that time the divisions hadn’t
been actually healed. Now, I know and we’ve discussed this before, that the history of that event
hasn’t been written yet in its entirety, and I know that you have some memories of it and some
thoughts and ideas. Would you like to tell us a couple of things about it?

David Lowenthal: Yes, it was a remarkable episode in academic history, and I got involved
because Peter Ucko had been a colleague of mine at University College London. He taught in the
Anthropology Department before he went first to Australia and then came back to Southampton,
so I knew him well, and he had read my book and he invited me, along with several others, to join
him in organizing sessions for the forthcoming World Archaeology Congress in Southampton,
which was to be different from previous archaeological congresses dominated by the old guard –

Yannis Hamilakis: Yes –

David Lowenthal: – anthropologists from France, Belgium and so on, and it was to be more
populist, and for the first time not to be dominated by people who were invited, but by anyone who
wanted to come and offer a paper. So, in that sense it was archaeology from the ground up in terms
of people, and it seemed quite thrilling as an opportunity, and so I became very much involved,
especially with my friend Peter Gathercole, whom I had already known for some time and with
whom I formed an early partnership. The problem with the World Archaeological Congress arose
initially because soon after we began to arrange things, the African National Congress, the South
African National Congress, issued a ukase that no South African should attend. It was part of the
effort to resist apartheid, which had to be done according to the ANC by divorcing South African

 6 Lowenthal
academe as well as everything else in South Africa. Well, at first this seemed terrible in many ways,
but ultimately Peter Ucko felt that it was essential, and because it was also backed by every civic
group in Southampton – it was accepted; however, acceptance instantly ran into many difficulties
because many people felt that although it was – the ambition of ridding South Africa of apartheid
was certainly wonderful, that on the other hand to ban academics, and all of the South African
academics who were involved at this point were either black or liberal anti-apartheid whites, that
this involved a kind of anti-intellectual and anti-liberal view about academic work that seemed to
run counter to the whole enterprise.
Well, I had experienced the academic politics of the free speech movement and the ethnic
studies movement at Berkeley in the 1960s already. I was aware of what happened when academics
were ordered to take loyalty oaths, and were banned from teaching if they refused to do so. So,
it seemed to me that the importance of academic freedom outweighed the ukase from the ANC.
Peter Gathercole and I differed on this point.

Yannis Hamilakis: Okay.

David Lowenthal: But as time went on and as things got worse, we agreed that we were going
to stay the course because it was clear that on the one hand, Americans were withdrawing, others
were withdrawing, money was being lost. By the time – well, I was going to say I’m going to make
a long story short, but I’m not.

Yannis Hamilakis: That’s all right.

David Lowenthal: Because every time our committee met, we were a smaller and smaller group,
and many other issues arose that became more and more difficult to resolve. Part and parcel of the
program that Peter Ucko had devised was not only the work – the congress itself in Southampton,
but the books that would emerge from it, and there were 26 books that were supposed to come
out of this, and somebody said at one of the committee meetings, but what are we going to do
with the South African essays in these books; how will people from the Third World feel about
having their essays next to a South African essay, and I remember somebody saying, well, we have
somebody from the Third World right here, why not ask him. So, this poor guy from India, the
only archaeologist from India on the committee –

Yannis Hamilakis: On the committee, yeah

David Lowenthal: Let’s ask, how would you feel about having your essay next to a South African
essay? Well, he was very sensible and didn’t really answer this question, but you can see the level to
which we were reduced in our discussions, and ultimately as things went on, we reached the point
where nobody was left on the committee, the organizing committee at all except one person; it
was David Wilson, then director of the British Museum.

Yannis Hamilakis: Yes, yes.

David Lowenthal: And we gathered at the British Museum at a point when the ANC had
seemed to relent and they had changed their view, and suddenly we were all going to be – enable
the South Africans to come back, and then they changed their mind again. At this point we were
left with the dilemma and we all met at the British Museum and David Wilson said we had two

www.annualreviews.org  •  A Conversation with David Lowenthal  7

 choices: we could meet in Southampton as a rump radical group or we could all resign, and
he said, but for me there’s only one choice because I am a member of 50 different academic
organizations. If I resign, we go bankrupt, and then I have to resign from all 50 groups, so for me
the only choice is to keep –

Yannis Hamilakis: To go –

David Lowenthal: – Southampton. This was after we had gone around the room. I had been in
charge of two sessions, one on anthropology and law, I forget the other one. All of my people had
quit, every single one. So, David Wilson said at the end, all right, go home now, we’ll meet again in
the morning, but meanwhile we should thank Peter Ucko for the wonderful work he has done. He
has really worked like – he’s worked like a, he’s worked like a, he’s worked like a, and he couldn’t
stop, but he couldn’t find another word for “slave.” The archaeologist Thurstan Shaw put his hand
on David Wilson’s shoulder and said, worked like a Trojan, sir? And the next day they agreed to go
to Southampton, and the following day David Wilson resigned.

Yannis Hamilakis: Okay, okay.

David Lowenthal: And then we had a wonderful meeting in Southampton. To almost everyone’s
surprise it was a splendid meeting.

Yannis Hamilakis: Yes.

David Lowenthal: Quite an extraordinary gathering.

Yannis Hamilakis: Yeah, that event was very important in the subsequent development of the
World Archaeological Congress and organization. It’s seen today as a very positive thing, despite
all these controversial moments. But I would like us now, if you don’t mind, to discuss in some
more detail your own work, and especially the major book that we have mentioned already, The
Past Is a Foreign Country. Now, one of the things that always amazes readers and scholars of your
work is your incredibly expansive scope, your reliance on a vast range of sources of different kind.
One of the first questions I wanted to ask is, how do you do it, or how did you do it? How can
you command so many references and sources and organize them in a coherent and powerful
narrative?

David Lowenthal: I have to say I don’t really know, but I’d have to go back to what I said earlier
that it’s curiosity.

Yannis Hamilakis: Curiosity.

David Lowenthal: And I don’t feel that I’m very well organized, especially now that I’m older.
In the past I used to have a card file system that worked, and I kept my notes very well, but I’ve
almost forgotten those days because I no longer have a library that I can consult. I even had my
books alphabetized for a while, but as time has gone by, the way in which one gathers information
changes. It’s all very different now with the Internet, and I rely heavily on the Internet because
I can no longer explore libraries in the way that I used to, but I think the main lesson here is
never to stop being curious about things. And I have always enjoyed meeting with people and

 8 Lowenthal
having discussions, like our discussion now, with people in different fields, and archaeologists
have always seemed to me to be very open to this, partly because archaeologists have had such
problems with their own discipline. It’s one of the few disciplines I know that’s based – was based
in the past on a single idea of evidence, material evidence, and many archaeologists have been
plagued by the narrowness of this, and, of course, everything has now altered, as you’re aware, and
anthropologists have always also been open to the psychological and sociological implications of
their work more than any other discipline. One of my great friends was Mary Douglas. She gave
me her book, Purity and Danger (Douglas 1966)—with an inscription, may you enjoy the one and
avoid the other, but she didn’t say which.

Yannis Hamilakis: I’m interested in you as a field worker as well, when you go out and you see
things. Do you always keep a notebook and a photographic record of what you see or what you
encounter?

David Lowenthal: No, I don’t always do that. I have done it. I did it in the ’60s with photography.
I made a photographic record because that was the particular job that I was doing, and in my work
in the Caribbean I did have a notebook, but my usual technique was not to be very elaborate
in note taking, but essentially to gather material almost happenstance, and I was not very well
organized.

Yannis Hamilakis: Well, as I said, the scope of the book shows that you have accumulated so
much, and you have mastered it. Now, you describe your The Past Is a Foreign Country book as a
cabinet of curiosities, a well known phenomenon. I found that metaphor very successful because
I think it also suggests a specific way of reading it, of approaching it, in many ways different from
other books. You can’t read your book in the same way you read any other book, and it seems to
me that reading it from cover to cover is not really the purpose. That it is a book that you have
to return to time and again, dive into selectively, much like somebody reads Walter Benjamin’s
classic, the Arcades Project (Benjamin 1999).
I have found that it needs to be read in association with your other books like The Heritage
Crusade and the Spoils of History (Lowenthal 1998), which is a smaller book but it has an organized
narrative about the role of heritage today, or articles where you summarize one idea, one argument
in a very succinct way. So, this is not a criticism, just kind of a praise for an inexhaustible and
lasting work, which is The Past Is a Foreign Country—Revisited, but I would like to ask you, could
you give us your own guide in reading your own books? How would you suggest we should
approach them?

David Lowenthal: I wish I could say take it to bed and relax, but it’s too, too heavy. So, I can’t
really, I can’t really say. I think an author is the last person to ask how to read a book because as an
author I never read my own books again. I try hard not to. It’s not very difficult because you want
to move on to something new. I suppose the best general advice would be, as you say, not to read
it from cover to cover, but to dip into it from time to time, and I’ve always liked books of that sort
myself. I wrote a biography of a nineteenth-century American polymath –

Yannis Hamilakis: Marsh, yeah –

David Lowenthal: – conservator and diplomat (Lowenthal 2000a), whose most famous book,
Man and Nature is that kind of book also [Marsh 2003(1864)]. It’s full of different kinds of things

www.annualreviews.org  •  A Conversation with David Lowenthal  9

 everywhere and what appealed to me about that book and about his work generally was this
combination of an understanding of the physical world and the social world and that the two
things are not unrelated, and maybe the best way to get this is not to write a heavy book on just
one subject, but to touch on a range of different things and different places or at least that’s the
way it appeals to me as a person or as a scholar.

Yannis Hamilakis: That’s very interesting. I would like us to talk a little bit about the disciplines
that were at the background of your work. Of course, we talked about your own hate of disciplines
and your own kind of understanding of the whole world of knowledge and experience as something
unified, but one could see in your book references to history, of course, references to geography,
to environmental perception, to landscape studies, to heritage. One is thinking about social
anthropology though. My own perception of it, and it might be wrong, is that there are fewer
references to ethnographies of heritage, social anthropology books on the past or on history or on
heritage, and I was wondering is this impression correct or is there something that is there, but it’s
not very prominent? On the other hand, your book is full of casual comparative approaches; you
want always to compare, as we said before, Britain and US, the Caribbean and European cultures.
Australia is another region where you actually talked a lot about, the Mediterranean is another.
But I notice that in your recent book, you say in the introduction and I quote, “For non-European
cultures, equivalent studies would reach radically different conclusions” (Lowenthal 2015, p. 3).
So, my question is, in the current scholarly debates in archaeology and anthropology we want
to explore not only different pasts but also different ways of living. Is, in that context, your book
primarily a Eurocentric book? Is it about the West and not other regions outside the West, so
could somebody who wants to study South America or South Asia or East Asia, learn things from
your own book, or could a different study on these regions actually have to rely on other theses,
on other books, on other conclusions?

David Lowenthal: Well, in the first place, it doesn’t seem to me that one can so easily separate
Western culture from other cultures.

Yannis Hamilakis: Of course.

David Lowenthal: We live in a world in which hybridization is the rule rather than the exception.
So, you speak of Latin America, for example, we’re dealing with a world in which the Hispanic and
subsequent influences are as great as that of the British and the French and the Spanish in North
America. I don’t see the problem as quite what you’re suggesting.

Yannis Hamilakis: My question was meant to be provocative, to prompt us to have this

discussion.

David Lowenthal: I became involved especially with Chinese culture because some of my close
colleagues have worked in China and I became tremendously interested both in Chinese and
Japanese apprehensions of the past, ways of dealing with the past, and I have talked a bit about
that in my work, but I’m talking about it as a different kind of outsider, more of an outsider
in the sense that I’ve never really lived in either China or Japan, and I’m not familiar with the
general literature of either country in the way that I am to a certain extent familiar even with
the culture of Mediterranean. There are different levels of knowledgeability it seems to me, and
one has to constantly be aware of what one doesn’t know. And cultivate, if possible, a degree of

 10 Lowenthal
humility. That’s all I would say, not that nobody reading – somebody reading my book who’s from
Indonesia would not understand anything, although I have had this experience, especially with
some Chinese scholars with whom I have had some interesting discussions about heritage, but
we find it very difficult to not speak past one another. In Japan, it is much easier somehow for
me, whether this is temperamental or whether it’s historic, an historical difference, I don’t know.

Yannis Hamilakis: Have there been Chinese and Japanese translations of your book?

David Lowenthal: Yes, there is one in China.

Yannis Hamilakis: Okay.

David Lowenthal: And I think one in Japan.

Yannis Hamilakis: But you don’t know what the reception has been.

David Lowenthal: I don’t know what the reception has been. I don’t even know what the
reception has been in Russia or Portugal because I’m not in touch – I was in touch with my
Russian translator. I think I mentioned in the preface to the new book that I was influenced by
him to actually do the revision because all of my references from the 1970s and ’80s were out of
date.

Yannis Hamilakis: And it is a recent translation, right?

David Lowenthal: Yes.

Yannis Hamilakis: David, some critics have suggested that your work ignores the political
dimension, and I think that’s probably an unfair criticism because there are political references in
your work, several of them in fact, but they are more subtle than others perhaps would have liked
and they’re not explicit in the sense of a political kind of provocation. How would you respond
to that criticism?

David Lowenthal: Well, I have been accused of being apolitical. I don’t regard myself as
apolitical, but it is true that in my work I tend to write sometimes not in a polemical way, but in
a descriptive way for the most part, and I’m reminded of the difference from my time at Harvard
when Isaiah Berlin came to visit Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he was stunned by the difference
between his students here in Britain and the ones in America. He said students in America were
so socially concerned, so involved that they felt ashamed of studying Greek epic because it’s so
remote from modern day concerns, and they feel they have to make amends in some way by being
social workers. At the same time, how do they have time ever to think about anything in the past
or anything except immediate current social concerns [Berlin 2012 (1949)]?
Well, almost everything that I’ve been involved with [has political implications] because I deal
with disciplines that are, like archaeology or heritage, crisis disciplines, these are disciplines that
are constantly involved with topics that make them important because they’re of the moment that
something has gone wrong or something needs to be fixed in the world. This also makes them
somewhat incoherent intellectually, and this is the problem with many of them, that they lack the
kind of formal coherence that we associate with the older disciplines.

www.annualreviews.org  •  A Conversation with David Lowenthal  11

 I see my role as a scholar in these disciplines as one of trying to not be above the fray, but to
stand back a little in the same way that I describe in one of my essays, “White Elephants and Ivory
Towers: Embattled Museums?” (Lowenthal 2000b). The art historian, Erwin Panofsky, said you
need an ivory tower, you need for someone to watch, not be active all the time, but watch, and
this is the purpose of much of higher education, and it requires a certain degree of aloofness at
least some of the time to be able to think straight and not become too heavily involved with the
immediate concerns of the present (Panofsky 1953).
Every museum director has to cope with this issue because in order to raise money they
have to appeal to a public and to a board of trustees concerned with immediate receipts and
attendance and so on, but they also have to remember that they’re caring for a hoard of materials
and nowadays of programs that are supposed to inform the future as well as the present, and that
we really need to constantly remember that we’re part and parcel of a continuum because if it’s
only of the present, then it has no durable meaning whatsoever.

Yannis Hamilakis: Thank you. David, can you tell us what do you think has changed in the
public perception and appreciation of the material past in the West in the last 30 years, from the
publication of the earlier The Past Is a Foreign Country to the appearance of the new book? What
do you see as the major changes in how people in the West perceive of and relate to the past?

David Lowenthal: Perhaps the most important is that the material past is no longer seen
as something separate from the intangible past, that along with professional recognition
by archaeologists, anthropologists, art historians and so on, and along with proclamations by
UNESCO, the general public is much more conscious that the material relics and structures
that we’ve inherited in whatever form are works in progress; they’re part of processes that are
continuing rather than fixed entities.

Yannis Hamilakis: Static entities.

David Lowenthal: Static entities. I know that this is hard for many people, especially maybe
for curators in museums, but I think it is part of a general awareness, not without its difficulties
because it enables people to politicize the past even more than they had previously. That’s the,
perhaps, conjoined perception of material structures is that they’re part of a politicization in
which the past has become increasingly both nationalized and tribalized.

Yannis Hamilakis: Tribalized?

David Lowenthal: Tribalized and nationalized at the same time as it’s being internationalized,
and the difficulties involved here are enormous and not easily soluble because on the one hand
we have a world in which scholars understand that everything is hybrid and heterogeneous and
multiple in its origins and so on, and on the other hand we have national states making claims
even on the basis of things that are now valorized because they’re heterogeneous; making claims
for the possession or even the sole ability to use things on the basis of their location here or there,
and I think this has become much worse and is getting worse all the time especially with ISIS, war,
the various implications of the loss.

Yannis Hamilakis: Yes, yes, one—talking about recent challenges, one of the most prominent
and defining features of our era is the migration from the Global South to the Global North.

 12 Lowenthal
David Lowenthal: Yes.

Yannis Hamilakis: Which I think is making colonialism present. Many of these people are
from former colonized countries, but at the same time, this migration is producing a new material
heritage of border walls, of fences, of detention centers, but also material traces of the border
crossing experience, the things that people leave in the desert or on beaches in the Mediterranean
(Hamilakis 2016). How are we to deal with this new phenomenon, both the resurfaced colonial
past, but also the material heritage of this new global migration movement and phenomenon?

David Lowenthal: Well, there are quite a number of important and diverse considerations. One
is the fact that much of this reflects a new evaluation of the past not as something to be celebrated
because of triumph or –

Yannis Hamilakis: National –

David Lowenthal: – splendor, but to be mourned because it is evidence of terrible things that
have happened, so that a lot of what has come into heritage is now the heritage of the dispossessed
and the repressed, and all of the museums of conscience all over the world are reflections of this,
almost to the point that we can hardly escape from the sense of the past as a graveyard rather
than –

Yannis Hamilakis: As a glorious moment.

David Lowenthal: Yes, and this goes along, I think, with another big change in the way that the
past is perceived as an experience rather than a set of objects or a landscape, so that the past has
become internalized in memory, in memory studies, and memory studies have taken over to such
an extent that historical truth has been put at considerable risk. It’s a reflection of contemporary
politics again in which truth doesn’t matter. I have my truth, you have yours, and – but more
seriously, the experiential quality of a memory experience becomes the significant element for
many people and it’s very hard to argue against this because if you argue against it, you’re saying,
oh, your experience doesn’t really matter. It’s –

Yannis Hamilakis: Because my experience is different and matters more.

David Lowenthal: But it is a part of a privatization of the past that has overtaken a great deal of
heritage work, it seems to me.

Yannis Hamilakis: That’s very interesting you were just saying because I would like to move
to the last set of questions which are to do with heritage as a whole. So, just as an introduction to
this: You have been one of the most ardent, perhaps the most ardent critic of the phenomenon
that you have called the heritage crusade, the title of your other book (Lowenthal 1998), and
most commonly known as the heritage industry as the whole phenomenon that’s to do with
management, and with marketing. Others call it the heritage machine as an operation, as an
apparatus. Now many of us have also spoken about the heritagization of the past, something that
carries connotations of commodification, commercialization, and managerialism, you know, the
development of all these university courses on management of heritage, but others, and here I
can just cite one of your early interlocutors, in the broader sense, in Britain, Raphael Samuel. In

www.annualreviews.org  •  A Conversation with David Lowenthal  13

 his book, the Theaters of Memory (1995), he has celebrated what he calls the heritage from below,
something that could be seen as the theaters of memory for the working classes. In more recent
years we’ve also seen the development of the field called critical heritage studies. It’s heritage
studies, but critical, critical of all these phenomena we talked about, partly in response to the
commodification of the past. So, in the light of these developments, I want to raise a number of
questions and the first is: How do you see the heritage industry operating today, and what do you
consider as the most urgent and important tasks for critical heritage scholars, scholars who want
to work on heritage but from a critical perspective?

David Lowenthal: I’m uneasy, unhappy about so-called critical heritage studies –

Yannis Hamilakis: That’s interesting –

David Lowenthal: – and that kind of terminology because it seems to me to suggest an

understanding of the past that is dependent on postmodern criticism of the sort that denies truth.
Everything is a construction; everything is to be seen only in terms of who says it, who values it.
So, there—everything then becomes atomized into a whole range of different points of view –

Yannis Hamilakis: The privatization of the past you talked about before

David Lowenthal: And the complement of this is to destabilize the understanding of the past in
the same way. It’s a reactivation of seventeenth-century Pyrrhonism, in which historical scholars
were suddenly learning, oh, a lot of these documents are fake, a lot of these documents were
written parti pris by people who simply wanted to convince you of something or other, we cannot
really trust anything from the past because it’s all fraudulent or all self-interested. Well, this way
lies nihilism and then you don’t know anything anymore at all, and I think it encourages a retreat
from an understanding of the past and the present which – well, we’re talking about history, which
is based on a kind of scholarship that is not ever written in stone.
Not just that it can’t ever change, but that its acceptance requires a certain faith and a high degree
of reliability. Radical skepticism also encourages a problematic relationship between the past and
the present in which the present overwhelms the past, and in which, well, let us say, take a particular
kind of case in which there are quarrels now between people who are proponents of living heritage
and the old fashioned kind of heritage which is museumized heritage, and in which the proponents
of living heritage, let’s say, take a case in point, Meteora in Greece. You’re familiar?

Yannis Hamilakis: Meteora, of course, the rock formation in central Greece with the Eastern
Orthodox monasteries on the top, yes, of course.

David Lowenthal: And this is, this is a situation in which the heritagization of the monastic
area has resulted in a diminution of monastic practice and a warping of monastic practice for
touristic purposes. Not only of monastic practices but of the premises themselves and the religious
activities (Poulios 2014). So, to what extent does one say, well, this is living heritage, you can’t –
you shouldn’t do that, you should value the monastic work that goes on, but for how long, and
how does one make this choice? Is the choice to be made on the basis of what is now important
or on the basis of what we think future generations may want or on the basis of a temporal length
of something? It’s very hard to make these decisions, but this is the kind of quarrel, the kind of
conflict that we’re now very much involved with in heritage I think.

 14 Lowenthal
Yannis Hamilakis: In the case of Meteora, for example, what would be your suggestion to try to
avoid this over commercialization or heritagization of these monastic establishments?

David Lowenthal: Since what’s happening at Meteora is partly a consequence of UNESCO –

Yannis Hamilakis: World heritage status.

David Lowenthal: Yes, world heritage, but UNESCO in this case, of course, is largely backed
by some local interests, so we have three or four different players involved. We have the monastic
establishment itself, we have various components of that establishment, we have local people
residing in and around the area, and we have the tourists and pilgrims and we have the national
government. So, all of these are players and this is replicated all over the world now, this kind of
issue.

Yannis Hamilakis: Yes, and I think this is a case where an ethnography of archaeological
practice or archaeological ethnography, or ethnography of heritage could help us a lot –

David Lowenthal: Yes –

Yannis Hamilakis: – you know, somebody to actually do intensive interviews and to live within
these communities and report on these different perceptions and clashes. Now, for the last two
questions I would like to move first to the issue of digital heritage and digital memories and also
the new media. Now, I know that in the epilogue of your book, you discuss a little bit the new
media, the Internet, the construction of the self in these new media. How would you see the new
digital phenomena as producers of heritage? Can we talk about digital heritage?

David Lowenthal: Yes, when you said produce, my immediate reaction was no, they don’t
produce –

Yannis Hamilakis: They don’t –

David Lowenthal: – they traduce heritage because the impact of especially the digital media
is on the one hand to make everything available from the past, so that we’re overwhelmed by
the possibilities of having everything, and on the other hand because we’re overwhelmed by
everything, we make choices in terms of how – what’s easy and what’s easy is what’s recent. So,
the impact of this is to attenuate the past and to make everything that’s before unimportant,
inconsequential, not relevant. I find this very, very discouraging, but I don’t know what to do
about it, especially as the other consequence is that we forget everything and that with digital
media we keep forgetting that in order to retain the past you have to continually update both
software and hardware, and I know from work that I’ve seen in America and elsewhere, much has
already been lost because nobody is doing the upgrading –

Yannis Hamilakis: Because these new media, both the hardware and the software, become
obsolete very fast.

David Lowenthal: So, we’re reduced to almost folklore in terms of certainly the recent military
history of the United States. Almost all of the major agencies are defective in the way in which

www.annualreviews.org  •  A Conversation with David Lowenthal  15

 they steward the past. It’s not totally—not only that they don’t want to retain it because they’re
afraid that secrets might get out, no it’s just that they’re totally negligent.

Yannis Hamilakis: And to come to our final question, I know that you have been writing recently
about the Anthropocene, and based also on your earlier work on environmental perception and
conservation, my question then to you is: How are we to relate to and care for the material past
and the material present in the era of accelerating anthropogenic, climatic, and environmental
changes, and finally how can we overcome anthropocentrism? And I am asking because I know
that this is a section title in one of your articles on the Anthropocene (Lowenthal 2016).

David Lowenthal: I don’t think we can overcome anthropocentrism. I think we’re doomed to
anthropocentrism because we are people and I know that some scientists make efforts to say, what
is it like to be a bee or a camel or a flower, and there is some quite fascinating studies of these
kinds, but ultimately we are bound to be human and we should not pretend that we’re not, but I’m
comforted a little bit by the fact that I think science has taken the lead here in the understanding of
things like the Anthropocene. Science has taken the lead in trying to help us bring together time.
It used to be said that back in hunter-gatherer time there was no need for people to think more
than a generation or two ahead because anything – more time devoted to more remote periods
would be counterproductive. Then with civilization, no need to think more than a few hundred
years ahead because likewise. Now we’re conscious that we need to think thousands of years
ahead; and this actually has become not only intellectually true, but technologically necessary,
certainly with respect to nuclear power, and I’m very much concerned with the consequences of
nuclear power as I am also with efforts to maintain things like the Svalbard Global Sea Vault as a
microcosm of potential recovery from catastrophe.
And I think to the extent that more and more people are thinking in these ways, it’s a major
advance. I mean even at so small a scale as the possibility of asteroid impacts, we’ve moved far
beyond what people used to be concerned with, and it seems to me that this is one of the relatively
few major advances –

Yannis Hamilakis: And positive developments.

David Lowenthal: Positive developments that we’ve made in regard to the understanding
of time. Another is something that I’ve recently been coming across at Hebrew University in
Jerusalem; Ronnie Ellenblum has taken the lead in this. Are you familiar with his work at all?

Yannis Hamilakis: No.

David Lowenthal: He’s an historian of the crusades and of centuries before, and immediately
following (Ellenblum 2007, 2012). He points out that the way that scientists use time and have
persuaded historians to use time has been in terms of the longue durée involving measurements like
the decay of isotopes, but these measure things at a scale, however, that’s centuries or millennia
long, and they do not tell us what historical science – scholars are beginning to understand. That
temporal events, climate change and so on, on a scale of a few years or even months, maybe
a decade, are the main drivers of social change for good or for bad, frequently, and it’s only
because historical scholars have now equipped themselves with the tools to understand region-
wide changes as Ellenblum has done throughout the Near East, Middle East, to be able to read
six or seven different languages from the period and to compare documents from all of these

 16 Lowenthal
different civilizations that you can find out what’s happening and what’s to some extent driving
change. He and some of his colleagues elsewhere have been pioneering, not long-term, but short-
term historical change, and – but to be able to combine the long-term and the short-term is
the major problem, and I’m fascinated by the Big-History enterprise to meld understanding of
the entire past from the Big Bang to the present. But Big history enthusiasts don’t understand
intentionality. They’re very good on other aspects but they don’t understand intentionality. Or
human psychology even. And the historians don’t understand numbers.

Yannis Hamilakis: So, we need both, both approaches.

David Lowenthal: When you talk to an historian about time in terms of 10 to the ninth (in
years, about a quarter of the age of the Earth), they don’t know what you mean.

Yannis Hamilakis: So, the need for multi-scalar approaches, both the long term and the short
term –

David Lowenthal: Yes –

Yannis Hamilakis: – which is very, very important, but also what I take from your own work
and from what you have said to us today, the need to think about duration.

David Lowenthal: Yes.

Yannis Hamilakis: That the past is still here with us –

David Lowenthal: Yes –

Yannis Hamilakis: – and we need to pay attention to that, what we could call a multitemporal
prospective (cf. Hamilakis 2013; Hamilakis & Labanyi 2008), that we can’t just be presentist, we
have to think about –

David Lowenthal: Yes –

Yannis Hamilakis: – the duration of the past. I think on this positive note in relation to the
advances of science and the discussion of the Anthropocene as a kind of awareness, on this positive
thought within the dark moment we live, I think we could stop. We have discussed so many
interesting and important issues, and I think this discussion has been very, very exciting for me
and I hope for you, David, and I’m sure that –

David Lowenthal: Thank you, yes –

Yannis Hamilakis: – our readers, as well, will appreciate it. Thank you.

David Lowenthal: Thank you very much.

www.annualreviews.org  •  A Conversation with David Lowenthal  17

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