Heritage in Conflict and Consensus: New Approaches to the Social, Political, and Religious Impact of Public Heritage in the 21st Century

November 9 - 13, 2009

International workshop to take place over five days at the campuses of UMass Amherst, Massachusetts, and Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. The public portion of the workshop will be held at UMass Amherst on November 9-10. There will then be a roundtable for invited participants and the Bard campus community on November 12-13.

"Throughout the world, historic districts, archaeological sites, religious monuments, ethnic traditions, and traditional customs—once cherished as timeless symbols of collective identity and continuity—have increasingly become the targets of violence and a source of discord. The destruction of the Mostar Bridge in Sarajevo, the obliteration of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, the battle between Hindus and Muslims for the site of Ayodhya in India, the controversies over the Temple Mount/Haram esh-Sharif in Jerusalem, and the looting of the Baghdad Museum are but a few recent examples of significant damage to cultural heritage in times of ethnic and religious conflict and state-to-state war.

Yet while the term “heritage in conflict” has been primarily associated with armed or violent conflicts, it should also be linked to the wider issues of conflicting interpretations or conflicting domains of intangible heritage that may endure even after violent conflict has ceased.

It has become increasingly clear in the 21st century that people, working in an increasingly multicultural environment, must be able to cope more effectively with contested heritage in city streets and rural regions—as well as on the battlefield. We must examine and understand the role of interpretation—not merely as the dissemination of objective facts about the past—but as a public means of reflection about the contemporary cultural significance of tangible and intangible heritage and the modern identities that are based on it. We should reexamine the processes of management, presentation, and heritage commemoration to assess their effectiveness in a world that is not made up of homogeneous, territorially discrete populations, with a single historical perspective, but a dynamically evolving mosaic of immigrant and diasporic communities, ethnic groups, and new nations living together in a globalized world."

Website: http://www.umass.edu/chs/news/workshop.html