Assembling the Historic City: Actor Networks, Heritage Mediation, and the Return of the Colonial Past in Post-Soviet Cuba

Hill, Matthew J.

doi:10.1353/anq.2018.0064

Cited by 9 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…The question of whose heritage should prevail becomes especially important when one considers the development of UNESCO sites such as Mostar's Old Bridge (Forde, 2016). Here international experts might work with national or local political leaders, but neglect civic groups (Brumann, 2018;Hill 2018;Silverman 2020).…”

Section: The Construction Of Spacementioning

confidence: 99%

Public Spaces and Conflict Transformation: From Mostar’s Old Bridge to Its United World College

Davison

Tešan

2021

J Ethn Cult Stud

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The purpose of this analysis is to offer a complementary approach to top-down ethnic conflict resolution which depends upon international organizations, peace treaties, laws, and political elites. While legal and institutional approaches can possess merit, they neglect the necessity of engaging people and rebuilding community. Further, citizens can perceive a top-down approach as coercive. This paper focuses upon an alternative approach of transformation through the construction of post-war public spaces which create places for interaction and sociability, and thereby possess healing power. We adopt the philosophy of architect Lebbeus Woods, who offered specific principles for the post-war reconstruction of Sarajevo. These guidelines included an acknowledgement of the damage and destruction, but also the necessity of community participation in rebuilding. We also accept the contentions of Keller Easterling who identified the potential coerciveness of ‘extrastatecraft’, that is structures imposed upon a community from above by the state, or from outside by international organizations. The specific focus of this research is upon Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the work of international organizations and national political leaders ended the military conflict in 1995, but still fails to reconcile the three ethnic groups to a shared future. The method is rooted in comparative political anthropology, which entails an evaluation of processes, agency, and structures, as well as an account for the emotional aspects of identity and politics. Interviews regarding conflict and reconstruction, and ethnographic observations of public spaces are employed. The work concludes that the contributions of the United World College – Mostar contrasts to the relative failure of the reconstruction of the Old Mostar Bridge partially are due to the emphasis of the former on community engagement and inclusion. The results admit the difficulty of post-conflict transformation in ethnically divided systems, but contend that both the process and outcome of community engagement in the reconstruction of public spaces facilitates reconciliation and democratization.

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Section: The Construction Of Spacementioning

confidence: 99%

Public Spaces and Conflict Transformation: From Mostar’s Old Bridge to Its United World College

Davison

Tešan

2021

J Ethn Cult Stud

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“…Claiming the notions of "heritage as a 'mediator'" and "heritage assemblage", Hill understands heritage not as a mere collection of disparate relics and historic sites but as a resilient field where things are perpetually reassembled and release differing spatiotemporal dimensions. The project's long-term delay due to the conflicts of opinion between stakeholders moves on and generates unexpected results through the "chain of permissions and refusals, alliances and losses" [16,17].…”

Section: Rethinking Heritage Through Antmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reassembling Heritage after the Disaster: On the Sungnyemun Debate in South Korea

Paek

2020

Sustainability

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This article explores the changing values of heritage in an era saturated by an excess of media coverage in various settings and also threatened by either natural or manmade disasters that constantly take place around the world. In doing so, we focus on discussing one specific case: the debate surrounding the identification of Sungnyemun as the number one national treasure in South Korea. Sungnyemun, which was first constructed in 1396 as the south gate of the walled city Seoul, is the country’s most acknowledged cultural heritage that is supposed to represent the national identity in the most authentic way, but its value was suddenly questioned through a nationwide debate after an unexpected fire. While the debate has been silenced after its ostensibly successful restoration conducted by the Cultural Heritage Administration in 2013, this article argues that the incident is a prime example illustrating how the once venerated heritage is reassembled through an entanglement of various agents and their affective engagements. Methodologically speaking, this article aims to read Sungnyemun in reference to the growing scholarship of actor-network theory (ANT) and the studies of heritage in the post-disaster era through which to explore what heritage means to us at the present time. Our synchronic approach to Sungnyemun encourages us to investigate how the once-stable monument becomes a field where material interventions and affective engagements of various agents release its public meanings in new ways.

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“…Such theories treat relations between things as ontologically more fundamental than things themselves (Wildman 2010: 55). For example, Matthew Hill suggests that the objects and practices we call 'heritage' are outcomes of historical and political projects establishing relations between 'heterogeneous groups of people, institutions, ideas, and things', as well as 'mediators' that shape those groups and their structures (Hill 2018(Hill : 1237. His perspective resonates with the critiques of endangerment sensibilities discussed earlier, even when they do not explicitly adopt it.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This section then segues to an analysis of how people reassembled new communities and new traditions from the fragments of those destroyed in more severely damaged areas, revealing the potential that loss also creates. R e a s s e m b l i n g i n t a n g i b l e p r a c t i c e s Many anthropologists studying 'heritage' have given structural, scalar and symbolic explanations of its origins and politics, according to Matthew Hill (2018). However, assemblage theories and relational ontologies are increasingly gaining ground.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…John Pendlebury, meanwhile, has argued that we need to shift our focus from these items to the wider 'assemblages [of] institutional organizations, norms, objects (e.g. laws and regulations, and normalized practices' (Hill 2018(Hill : 1237) that constitute them and imbue them with meaning and value. Finally, Hill cites Rodney Harrison (2013), who argues that assemblage theory can move us beyond analysing what heritage means and show how it is actively produced through networking heterogeneous entities.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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The potential of intangible loss: reassembling heritage and reconstructing the social in post‐disaster Japan

Littlejohn

2021

Social Anthropology

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Assembling the Historic City: Actor Networks, Heritage Mediation, and the Return of the Colonial Past in Post-Soviet Cuba

Cited by 9 publications

References 35 publications

Public Spaces and Conflict Transformation: From Mostar’s Old Bridge to Its United World College

Public Spaces and Conflict Transformation: From Mostar’s Old Bridge to Its United World College

Reassembling Heritage after the Disaster: On the Sungnyemun Debate in South Korea

The potential of intangible loss: reassembling heritage and reconstructing the social in post‐disaster Japan

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