What follows is the correspondence I conducted with Dacia in early 2017, prior to an interview that was published in EuropeNow on her research regarding historical memory. The final interview itself can be found at the end of this exchange. It was redacted for the editorial purposes of the publication, and I am now sharing the entirety of the warm and human interaction preceding it for Convisero.
Sherman, February 1st, 2017
Dearest Dacia,
This is a long overdue email. You are remembered fondly. I hope you are doing wonderfully. Congratulations on your academic trajectory - stunning! Not surprising!
I wish you had been able to participate in the last formal EPIIC under my aegis, Europe in Turmoil, and its symposium.
You would have been, in so many ways, ideal.
I do not know if the news has reached you. After thirty years, I am now happily Emeritus! Hardly retired. Rather, new vistas! As one enterprise, I have joined the Advisory Board of the Council for European Studies at Columbia University, and I am engaged in a number
of initiatives with them.
Their latest /EuropeNow/ issue's special theme, on “Forced Migration, Cultural Identity, and Trauma,” was put together by my alum, your peer, (from 1985!) Turhan Canli, after I introduced him to Nicole Shea, CES's Executive Director.
I have also joined the board of Turhan's new center, the Mind/BrainCenter on War and Humanity. In the issue, I interview another superb alum, Mike Niconchuk (EPIIC 2011), who is using his expertise in social cognition, behavioral science, and neurobiology to help refugees in the Za’atari camp in Jordan.
Now I would like to interview you for the April edition of /EuropeNow. The theme of the April /EuropeNow/ issue will be “Cultural Heritage, Memory, and Politics of the Past.” How’s that for serendipity! I will soon have an abstract that I can send you.
I have already received approval to feature you in an interview similar to the one I conducted with Mike. Here my objective is to regularly interview young scholars
for their monthly publication.
My "style" of interviewing is to be as minimalist and recessive as possible, wanting only to prompt you to expose what you most wish to reveal and offer the CES community. I believe that there are as of now fifty thousand "subscribers." Would this be desirable from your
perspective? I truly hope so!
As you can see by my tagline below, I have an Oxford appointment in their Department of Politics and International Relations. While it is happily non-resident, I will be in England at least several times a year. I therefore have hopes of visiting you, should you wish it. Yet
that will not happen before the deadline for the April /EuropeNow/ issue, which is March 10th. So this most likely will have to be done remotely. I would love to talk with you. A number of thoughts are rumbling around in my mind. Do you Skype?
You have heard me refer frequently to the concept of and IGL community. Now, I want to more intentionally “ignite” it, as an extraterritorial reality. Much of what I am intent on doing into the future is integrating our Institute community, an extraordinary bounty
of wonderful alumni who have gone on to extraordinary careers. As I knit this community together, I am trying to find all the alumni I can. Who are you still in touch with that you think would like to hear from me?
Do update me on your life. I surely hope all is well.
Warmest regards
Dacia, February 2nd
Dear Sherman,
How wonderful to hear from you! I read your e-mail on my phone while half asleep this morning and had to remind myself now that I did not dream it.
I would really have loved to participate in that last EPIIC under your command, and in the many celebrations that there have been in your honour. Since graduating from Tufts and coming back to Europe it really does take a lot to get me back across the Atlantic and all the more so in the past two years. The good and the bad all seem to come in clusters and for me the Lectureship position and getting pregnant coincided, so I have been juggling being a single Mom (by choice) to a fantastically feisty little girl, Lyra, who turned 22 months today while at the same time taking on all the responsibilities, and trying to meet expectations, of the new post. It has been exhilarating and exhausting in equal parts.
Your e-mail reaches me at a moment when I am working on setting up two institutional projects here (a Heritage Research and Policy Centre at the Department and a comprehensive scheme revolving around professional photojournalists coming as fellows to Selwyn College). It would be great to run these ideas by you and get your thoughts. In both instances I want to try to create platforms for practitioners and academics to establish firm working relationships and regular exchanges.
How great that you are involved with Columbia. One of my current MPhil students, Alicia Stevens, worked in their global outreach programmes for many years - you would like her, even if she isn't an EPIIC alum. I see that you are keeping busy and making connections as only you can. When I have a calm moment I will follow up on all of the links that you sent. I do not know if I can do you/it justice but of course I would be delighted to contribute to the issue on “Cultural Heritage, Memory, and Politics of the Past", especially if it involves is being able to have a good conversation with you! Even if remotely. And absolutely the next time that you are in the country and at 'the other place' you should definitely come to Cambridge. I can find a room for you either at Selwyn or Darwin Colleges and introduce you around to a few people here, if you'd like. It would be fantastic to see you here.
I'm on skype at daciaviejo . I will read your interview with Mike Niconchuk. With motherhood and the lectureship I have been doing less research and 'proper' thinking in the last few years but hopefully your prompts will fire my brain cells and get me back into it and not schpieling platitudes.
Ignite indeed. I'm all for it. Tufts was a strange period for me of feeling very out of place in many ways and only two friendships have withstood. Of those one participated in EPIIC the year after I did but was a bit less involved, I think: Kyra Miller. We are still in touch occasionally and she jet sets between Hong Kong, San Francisco, and Shanghai. She's at kyra.miller@gmail.com It was also a strange period in her life but I am sure that she would be happy to hear from you.
All my best
Dacia,
Dacia , March 8th
Dear Sherman,
Yesterday after our chat I sat down to try to write up some material for you for the interview, the peace lasted about 10 minutes before student matters intervened and I had to see to one thing and another before going to teach and then to a meeting at the museum here, the evening (after Lyra was in bed) was taken up by trying to make my way through 130 fellowship applications that I need to rank by Monday. Unfortunately, the rest of this week is no clearer and the weekends are happily consumed by Lyra who is reluctant to miss a moment of our time together by napping...
So, in order to get something to you by next week's deadline, coming as it does at the intensely busy period of the last legs of the Lent teaching term here: we need a strategy.
Could I suggest that you e-mail me one question each day which I answer that day and send it back to you? This would provide me with bite-sized pieces which is probably all that I can manage right now and should give us the results we need.
It also strikes me as a nice Platonic/Voltairian/Rilke-ian way to go about our conversation.
I can start off today replying to your prompts for the preface and the impact of the Institute and we could take it from there.
Sherman, March 8th
Dearest Dacia,
Agreed! Love this sensibility - Platonic/Voltairian/Rilke-ian dialogue - perhaps at a Goethe-Institut
Prompts for the preface - I would actually do that last together with you - let's see what happens in the substance of the interview itself.
Essential first question for me - What drew you to this pursuit? An extended answer which we might cut into several sections. Your autobiographical sequence - experiential and intellectual evolution...
Another core question - What is the essence of your interdisciplinary approach...
Re the impact of the Institute, that might be the penultimate question - with the final question asking you what are the intellectual challenges ahead for you
Thanks for your introduction to your friend on Terezin! Thanks for describing me as you did. Humbling when I see what you have and are creating. I will write him today.
VERY EXCITED about all of this! Cannot get the photojournalist initiative out of my head as well.
Dacia, March 9th
Attached is what I have managed today, I realise that it is probably not what you were after and far too personal but it was what I needed perhaps to get going.
More tomorrow, further questions and a tough steer welcomed.
Like many of my students I can trace the origins of my academic interests back to my childhood although it did take me a while to fully identify what it was that was driving my interest. I grew up in Spain as the Franco regime took it last breath and in the midst of the ensuing transition, my father worked as a journalist though much of his energy was really taken up with clandestine resistance work with the Unions and the Communist party. We soon left Spain however, as he became enormously disappointed with the compromises made during the transition process which felt to many who had been active in the resistance like a betrayal of what they had fought for. We moved to my mother’s home town, New York, where he began to work as a translator in the UN and that building soon became my preferred playground, security was more lax at the time, darting between offices until I found an empty one and slipping in to write ‘coded’ messages on peoples typewriters.
Going to the UN international school also opened a whole world to me in terms of international awareness, not only on ‘wear your national dress to school’ days when I would swish in decked in a flamenco dress, the woman who taught me English was Nigerian, my home-room teacher was from India and both wore the traditional dress daily, but also because of the occasional bomb threats when we were evacuated from the school and the yearly ritual of collecting funds for UNICEF. It was also living in New York when I began to get hooked on to my mother’s passion, she was finishing her art history PhD when we first arrived and I would play under her desk as she typed away, but once that was in we would roam the city on weekends going to museums and galleries and so the Whitney and MOMA’s sculpture garden became favoured urban playgrounds. As an only child I have ever since been trying to combine do justice to and pay my respects to the interests of booth my parents in politics- heavily imbued with a sense of social justice and responsibility on the one hand, and the arts, history, museums, and heritage on the other. We then moved to Geneva and the end of my high-school years in Geneva were marked by the invasion of Iraq because there were children in my school whose family members were leading actors on the different sides of the conflict.
When making a decision about what to study at university I was adamant that I wanted to study international relations and psychology in order to understand why people go to war and how to stop them, it was this youthful ideal that lead me to Tufts. For various reasons I was not quite able to bring these two together in the way that I had hoped - psychology was very much approached through experimental and statistical means and I probably needed someone to introduce me to Lacan!
During my undergraduate studies at Tufts the best thing that I did by far was to participate in the EPIIC programme (Education for Public Inquiry and International Citizenship). It provided everything that I was looking for and expecting from a university education: passionate debate, asking difficult questions, trying to solve big problems, challenging myself in all kinds of ways to do more than I thought I could do. The year that I participated our theme was “2020 Visions of the Future: Anticipating the year 2020” we took on board and explored a vast array of issues. To this day I cherish the memory of a serendipitous conversation that I had with one of our key-notes Murray Gell Man about quarks, poetry, when, hearing that I wanted to work in peace building but was frustrated by the UN mechanisms as I understood them, he said ‘well get in there and change it!’
My time at Tufts also coincided with the break-up of the former Yugoslavia and that affected me quite profoundly. The first thing I did after graduating from Tufts was to do an internship at the, then named, United Nations Department of Humanitarian Affaires (summer and fall of 1996), among the issues that they were then trying to cope with was the end of the war in Bosnia, the fall out of the Rwandan genocide with continuing, and disastrous floods in Cambodia. It was this experience that sparked the start of my interest in disasters and their aftermaths but I also became further disillusioned with the UN system, a disillusionment which if I had to pinpoint it might be with how the ideals of the organisation are translated into the nitty-gritty of every-day functioning. As a result I switched to pursue my interests in culture instead, interning at an auction house and an association dedicated to the protection of artists’ rights in Spain before going to graduate school. While a graduate student in Paris I began interning at UNESCO on a project dedicated to cultural policies for development, the internship turned to contracts and I ended up spending nearly three years working there.
It was while I was at UNESCO that the strands of my interests came together and I found my ‘thing’. I was there at an exciting moment, the organization had a mandate for implementing the Dayton Peace Accords in terms of its specialist areas – so cooperation between the countries of South East Europe on areas of culture, science, and education –, and the first drafts of what would become the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Heritage (2003) and the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (2005) were being hammered out. Perhaps because of my earlier experiences or because in Paris I stumbled into a community of ‘former Yugoslavs’ who became my friends I became particularly obsessed with what UNESCO was doing in the region. I did all the horse trading I could with my then boss so that in exchange for doing some dreary work I was sent to sit in on meetings between representatives – ministers and ambassadors – of these countries and to read through the projects being developed by the Culture Sector in this regard. This is how I cam to learn about the project for the reconstruction of the Mostar bridge, among many others. It was that bridge, and the project to rebuild it, that became a pivotal moment.
On paper the project was everything that I had hoped for and thrilled me as here was a way to bring use culture, cultural heritage, as an instrument in peace-building and recovery. Not only did the project aim to rebuild the bridge itself as materially authentically as possible, but in doing so, and drawing on the strong bridging metaphor, it aimed to reconstruct the links between the communities of the town that had been severed by the war. The use of such a symbolic heritage site to motor peace and recovery through the celebration of its universal values was irresistibly seductive to me. Then I went to Bosnia and Herzegovina, to Sarajevo to see how the reconstruction of the town’s multicultural and religious heritage was being rebuilt, to Mostar to see the final stages of the bridge’s reconstruction, and from there to Serbia and Belgrade to see how cultural heritage institutions were faring there.
What I found on the ground came to me as a rude awakening. In Sarajevo each of the reconstruction projects of the main sites of worship of the different religious groups had large signs posted at their entry thanking the funding bodies involved: for instance, the Orthodox church rebuilt with particular thanks to the Government of Greece, the Catholic Church rebuilt with particular thanks to the Governments of Poland and the Vatican, Mosques rebuilt with thanks to the governments of Indonesia and Turkey. They also had the logos of the international agencies involved be it the UN or the European Union. This struck me as a cementing rather than an erasure of the divisions that the war had deepened if not created. In Mostar I found the most divided town in the entire country including segregated schooling such that children had to take turns using the same school building in order not to be taught together, with two football teams, and with a festering resentment around who had been consulted and who had benefited from the reconstruction of the bridge.
From the conversations that I had on the ground, at best, the project for the reconstruction of the bridge had failed in its peace-building aims; at worst it had actually contributed to festering tensions and feelings of resentment. This was patently clear in the built landscape that emerged around the bridge with an enormous bell tower going up on one side of the river, and minarets on the other each filling the town’s sound-scape at regular intervals throughout the day in this mutually defiant clang. With this cacophony of impressions still ringing in my ears, I returned to UNESCO and told anyone who would listen about it. Of the various responses that I got the most constructive one was: we are doing the best that we can with good intentions but there is no research on this.
The idea of heritage has expanded tremendously since the 1972 World Heritage convention.
In 2016 the University of Cambridge created a Lectureship in Heritage and the Politics of the Past based in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology which I now hold. This is testament to the growing recognition of the centrality of heritage to so many pressing issues facing society and the urgency of research on heritage. My aim is to use this Lectureship as a springboard to develop our work in three directions: 1) integrated teaching, 2) research synergies across disciplines, and 3) dialogue with communities of practice and policymaking.
The graduate programme in heritage, developed by Professor Marie Louise Stig Sørensen, here approached the subject from what is still a unique angle that has two core strands one focusing on the socio-politics of the past and another on the management of heritage - by which is meant the decisions, agents, and above all values that shape thinking and action. This backbone can then be complemented with additional options specifically dedicated to museums or to different aspect of archaeology.
Sherman, March 10th
Dearest Dacia,
I am very touched by your vivid personal and intellectual diary essay. Thank you for sharing as you are. Blaze away. Love what you are doing! I truly hope this experience will be valuable for you in human terms. Do not worry about it being too personal at this point. Go for it! You will refine it, and Nicole and her editors will refine it further.*
Some of what you have written has tugged at my own heart strings! Excuse me for this rambling, but one of the things I am trying to do as I age, is to remember my own background. Jerome knows this too well - he is reconstructing the first formal CV I really ever had! They are nonsense squibs of information, but the guts that lies behind them is revealing.
MOMA was also my playground went I traveled in 1955 by foot across the 59th Street Bridge from my tough housing project in Long Island City to visit the Donnell Library and I discovered MOMA across the street, and Picasso's /Guernica/! This at the advice of my wonderful junior high school social studies teacher Mrs. Witzling - teachers do have an impact! You have chosen a wonderful career!
The alleged "Good Fight" and the Spanish Civil War became one of my intellectual and human obsession. Still is, I'm about to read Paul Preston's /The Spanish Holocaust. /
Yeah, the passionate counterfactual of what would have happened if Hitler had only been opposed early, and spared the Spanish people, my family and millions of others. The nuanced complexity of politics and betrayal, Koestler Orwell. etc. Made me the radical centrist that I am. Immunized me against ideologies.
MOMA... they displayed/Guernica /isolated in one room, with his many sketches surrounding his ultimate brilliant canvas - and it led me into my first sensibility of how one might actually dare to create anything - that you could make "mistakes" that things evolved. That "editing" and patience was critical. I actually drew my own /Guernica/ - and what I thought was a fastidious copy - and I was convinced that there was a hidden elephant in the painting, and I had the silly audacity to try and get a letter to him via a publisher, thinking he had intended to somehow conjure up Hannibal Barca's crossing of the Alps. Never heard back of course. (Thinking of Barca FC - what "lightning" indeed!...an amazing classic game for the ages!! - They became my team and I passionately hated Real Madrid for their Francoist past!)
One of the first symposia I did outside of EPIIC, was when I was named Special Advisor for Undergraduate Intellectual Life at Tufts in 1986 (a bizarre title not of my choosing) was on the on the politics and culture of the Civil War , and I actually brought to Tufts, Rudolph Arnheim, the famed art historian whose book/, Guernica: The Genesis of A Painting,/ was so important to me as an undergraduate. It intellectually confirmed the creative process that I felt as a 12 year old!
So 1955 was also the time I went to see the extraordinary /Family of Man/ photographic exhibition with my parents - and that too totally stunned me. It was displayed in a meandering tunnel - and it began my love affair with photography!
Ah Lacan! Provocation! I too remember my frustrating intro psychology course at Johns Hopkins 1962? when what I thought was going to be psychology, given my introduction to Frankl by my Dad, turned out to be Skinnerian rat mazes. I actually was asked to participate in Milgram's experiment. I remember protesting to the Professor, Dr. James Deese - he understood my qualms and released me. An expert in learning cognition he co-authored the classic book - How to Study.
I am touched that EPIIC had the effect on you that it did. Loved your anecdote of Murray Gell-Mann's injunction. You got Nobel Laureate Advice! He told us, in your year'skeynote, 1995 - our tenth anniversary that:
/"Much mischief has been done in the world by trying to fit human beings into some neat scientific or mathematical idea, extrapolated beyond its validity. Nevertheless, it is worth making models of the future, but we have to regard them as 'prostheses for the imagination.' That's one of the theses emphasized here at EPIIC, and I couldn't be happier with this experiment in education." /Murray Gell-Mann Nobel Laureate in Physics; Founder, Santa Fe Institute.
Remember this!?
http://www.tuftsgloballeadership.org/1995-darwinism-and-artificial-intelligence
I just was in Santa Fe/Los Alamos for a nuclear conference linked to my Pugwashian revival efforts, and when I tried to see him, I sadly learned Murray is suffering from Alzheimers. Seize every day!
So proud to be working with you. So excited for this, and our future collaborations. Keep writing!
Dacia, March 11th
Dear Sherman,
Thank you so much for your own thoughtful and generous response.
Yes, Guernica made an equally important early impression on me when it was there in MOMA. The way it was displayed on its own on the wall and with the dramatic lighting turned it into almost a sacred space. How wonderful that you saw and elephant in there! The best recent work on the painting that I know of is Gijs van Hensbergen's "Guernica. The Biography of a Twentieth-Century Icon".
Paul Preston was one of my PhD examiners. We met at a conference marking 70 years since the start of the war in July 2006, I didn't dare speak to him as I was in the first year of my PhD and was in awe of him but we coincided at a pub on the first night of the conference. He is extraordinarily generous with his time and support of young scholars, especially considering what a prolific writer he is and how much in demand from the press, in Spain especially. In December I took Lyra to London and had lunch with Paul and Carmen Negrin (the grand-daughter of the last President of the Spanish Republic whom I had coincided with at UNESCO where we became friends). Being her usual social and adventurous self Lyra spent much of the time rearranging chairs in the restaurant and being busy-busy with people at other tables who all commented on her lovely grandparents - imagine! Luckily they both have grandchildren and were very sweet with her. Carmen still lives in Paris and the main topic of conversation revolved around concerns with the up-coming French elections. I have read parts of "The Spanish Holocaust", I can't quite bring myself to read it all yet, but have found myself in the surreal situations of defending Paul and his choice of the word in numerous public debates; having to explain, as he states from the onset, that the choice of words is in part to emphasize that the Spanish war was the start of what was to come, not a separate episode and thus has to be understood in the continuum of atrocities that was the Holocaust, and in part to highlight the ambitions of extermination, the ideology of racial purity, the scale of the violence that was waged in Spain.
My counter-factual has always been more along the lines of what would have happened if the French, Malreaux, had kept their word and the Allies had ousted Franco from power but by the end of the the Second World War the fear of the Soviet Union and communism was too rife I suppose; a weak fascist dictatorship was seen as less of a threat than a leftist democracy.
Yes, I've always preferred Barca over Real Madrid for the same reason, especially when Guardiola was there.
I quite like the "Special Advisor for Undergraduate Intellectual Life" even if it sounds like something out of "A Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy".
The VII Foundation and The Peace Project both look amazing. I see that Lebanon is tbc, do you need any contacts there? I know this fantastic kick-ass woman, Joanne Farchakh Bajjaly, who trained as an archaeologist but has been working as a journalist for the past twenty years or so covering Iraq, Syria... She also set up an NGO to try and reconnect children - Lebanese, Palestinian, Syrian - with their heritage. We met ten years ago at a conference in London where Donny George spoke about his experience as Director of the National Museum of Iraq during the 2003 invasion, we then coincided at the first meeting on the International Committee of the Blue Shield (the Hague Convention's attempt at establishing a Red Cross for culture) in Seoul of all places. [Did you mention that you were going to South Korea, my former student and current friend there is Hyun Kyung Lee (http://snu-kr.academia.edu/HLee).] You can tell Gary of my conversation with Marcus
Bleasdale by all means, not quite formal plans yet, I promised him that I'd sit down and write out a revised plan based on our conversation and send it to him once term was over and I had a chance to catch my breath. I also have to do this for the Development Officer here who wants to put something together to present to the Fellows, the Master is Roger Mosey, soonish.
Yes, it was all Skinner in Tufts in 1993 also, with SPSS thrown in. My most memorable moment from that failed course of study was when my professor in social psychology said, in the very first lecture and in a deadpan tone: De-nile isn't just a river in Africa!
I had forgotten that 'prostheses for the imagination', wonderful.
Yes, I absolutely remember that Darwinism and Artificial Life session, Dennett, Minsky, and Mazlish in particular made impressions on me. One for his God-like appearance, the other for his Frankenstein-esque persona, and the third for his kindness. But I also still remember the debate and the images that Minsky showed of algorithms where different shapes evolved through competition and cooperation. I actually requested a meeting with Dennett and took my existential crisis about psychology to him but when he heard that I already had a major in IR he said not to worry and do whatever I wanted with the rest, so I combined philosophy and art history instead and took lots of classes with Robert Devigne because they were so much fun.
So sorry to hear about Murray Gell-Mann, I remember our conversation quite vividly still, he was grumpy because there had been some mix up about picking him up from the airport and he had been waiting around for a long time so he arrived late as we were all having dinner, you walked in with him in his huff, saw me sitting by myself and placed him in front of me, before his backside even hit the chair he was looking at my name-tag and asking why I was named after an ancient province of Romania - or something along those lines. The look of surprise on my face must have so pleased him - it was the first time in my life that a stranger recognised the origins of my name - that he instantly became jolly and told me all about how inspiring his wife's poetry was to his astrophysics thinking and how wonderful it was to, at his age, have a young son even if everyone at nursery thought he was the grandfather.
Yes, I caught the booth on re-reading, not the worst of my errors by any means, past or yet to come.
I am going to try to finish the biographical writing in the next hour and send that along to you so that we can use it as a base for going in what ever direction you want to take the conversation. I've gotten as far as the PhD in Cambridge but just have to run through the ten years since then.
Sherman, March 11th
Dear D! Running late. Wonderful serendipitous stuff. Will respond to your points later - Just enuf time to say how deeply appreciative I am that I found you again! Fun to both reminisce and move the ball of life forward towards what end I am not certain! I recall that Minsky opened up the AI workshop with this sentence "Before we begin, can we all agree that death is a waste of time" Deadpanned it - serious as heck. Went on to publish his remarks in Scientific American on the scientific basis for immortality! I had the temerity to ask him where lust factored into the equation.
Good thinking! We are going to exceed the word limit by thousands of words - I do not fear that, but I am concerned for your time!! Unless this is a wonderful exercise for you - tighten up the bio - *though I LOVE reading it* and get to the "scholarly" meat.
Sherman, March 13th
My weekend unexpectedly got away from me - in a good way - family time. My Terezin reflection will have to wait. Have not contacted Gary yet either. Uggh!! Will do so.
I hope you know that I love what you have been writing- doing! Nothing "generous" in my response - simply put - you are admirable.
Amazing that Picasso's Guernica was woven into both our lives. Yeah (Mal)raux...So much to think about together.
Bruce Mazlish has sadly passed away - he was the husband of Neva Goodwin, a good friend, and one of David Rockefeller's daughters. She is an environmental economist - "externalities" expert... Founder of GDAE at Tufts - Suing Exxon - Life is so ironic at times. ...
Looking forward to your penultimate? version.
Sherman, April 4th
Here it is!
It is great to see you in print here - given the importance of what you do, and who you are, I am very pleased to have done this with you! And it appears the EuropeNow is getting the recognition it deserves. See below from Nicole.
Love to think next about whatever you and Marcus conjure up - and the "PNDPish vision you have. Marcus's work was a core part of our exhibition IGL "Questions without Answers" exhibition celebrating 25th Anniversary effort I never met him, but respect his work greatly!
And yes to a symposium forum on these issues at Selwyn in the years ahead would be very gratifying to assist you with.
For Convisero I am thinking of reprinting the original larger interview with your permission. Please review that, and might I include the sentences about EPIIC's impact? And your Mostar picture as well?
Dacia, April 4th
Great, thank you. I hope it helps us to rally some support in terms of raising funds for the heritage research centre.
I'm just getting a first draft of the proposal for Selwyn together to send to the development officer and then we'll see how to transform it into a project that is meaningful to us (Marcus and I) and attractive/feasible to the College.
For the Convisero piece, perhaps the long version of the interview/conversation was a bit too personal - it was largely intended as a catch up with you. But of course you are welcome to include the part about EPIIC's impact and the picture from Mostar.
The Published Interview
In this interview, Dr. Viejo-Rose talks about disputed memory and the socio-politics of the past, explaining why she is deeply concerned with how “cultural heritage is used and abused during armed conflicts and in their aftermath, to divide, exclude, and intimidate.”
Unravelling contested histories, probing the complexity and contradictions of the politics of remembrance, and the contested material and psychological landscapes of our lives, Dacia is committed to examining “ways of ‘disarming’ heritage, so that it can be a tool for constructive dialogue, dignity, and respect.”
Dacia grew up in Spain in the waning days of the Franco regime. Her father, a journalist engaged in clandestine resistance against Franco, eventually emigrated to the US and became a translator for the UN. Her mother earned her doctorate in art history. Dacia’s work is heavily imbued with both a profound sense of social justice and responsibility and respect for the arts, history, museums, and heritage, reflecting, as she acknowledges, her efforts “to do justice to and pay her respects to the interests of both her parents.”
Upon graduating college, while interning at the United Nations Department for Humanitarian Affairs in Geneva, she was exposed to the aftermath of the war in Bosnia, the fallout of the Rwandan genocide, and disastrous floods in Cambodia; an experience that sparked her interest in the violence and aftermaths of man-made and natural disasters.
Subsequently, at UNESCO, she observed the diplomatic wrangling and eventual drafting of what would become the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Heritage (2003) and the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (2005).
Bringing these two worlds of crisis and culture together, Dacia’s on-going research interests lie at the nexus between cultural heritage and the politics of the past. She sensitively understands the fluidity, complexity and contradictions of her subject, describing how “heritage has come to resemble a protean creature.”
EuropeNow What drew you to this pursuit?
Dacia Viejo-Rose It was while I was at UNESCO that the strands of my interests came together and I found my “thing.” I was there at an exciting moment; the organization had a mandate for implementing the Dayton Peace Accords in terms of its specialist areas—so, cooperation between the countries of the former Yugoslavia on areas of culture, science, and education—and the first drafts of what would become the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Heritage (2003) and the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (2005) were being hammered out. In relation to the first of these, I was able to sit in on meetings between representatives—ministers and ambassadors—of these countries, and to read through the projects being developed by the Culture Sector in this regard. This is how I came to learn about the project for the reconstruction of the Mostar Bridge, among many others. It was that bridge, and the project to rebuild it, that became a pivotal moment for me
On paper, the project was everything that I had hoped for and thrilled me, as here was a way to use culture, cultural heritage, as an instrument in peace-building and recovery. Not only did the project aim to rebuild the bridge itself as materially authentically as possible, but in doing so, and drawing on the strong bridging metaphor, it aimed to reconstruct the links between the communities of the town that had been severed by the war. The use of such a symbolic heritage site to motor peace and recovery through the celebration of its universal values was irresistibly seductive to me. Then, I went to Bosnia and Herzegovina, to Sarajevo to see how the reconstruction of the town’s multicultural and religious heritage was being rebuilt, to Mostar to see the final stages of the bridge’s reconstruction, and from there to Serbia and Belgrade to see how cultural heritage institutions were faring there. What I found on the ground came to me as a rude awakening.
In Mostar, I found the most divided town in the entire country, including segregated schooling such that children had to take turns using the same school building in order not to be taught together, with two football teams, and with a festering resentment around who had been consulted and who had benefited from the reconstruction of the bridge. From the conversations that I had on the ground, at best, the project for the reconstruction of the bridge had failed in its peace-building aims; at worst it had actually contributed to festering tensions and feelings of resentment. This was patently clear in the built landscape that emerged around the bridge with an enormous bell tower going up on one side of the river, and minarets on the other, competing visually, but also each filling the town’s sound-scape at regular intervals throughout the day in a mutually defiant clang-call. With this cacophony of impressions still ringing in my ears, I returned to UNESCO and told anyone who would listen about it. Of the various responses that I got, the most constructive one was this: we are doing the best that we can with good intentions but there is no research on this. So I left to do some of that missing research.
In this bout of research, I worked on how cultural heritage was being used in reconstruction and recovery projects in Bosnia with the aim of seeing what worked or not and why. This research convinced me that one of the problems with the way that the protection of cultural heritage was being approached was the assumption made that it has an inherently positive dimension—inclusive, celebratory of universal values, rallying and inducing of social cohesion – and as such a natural peace builder. But this assumption, upheld by the utopian vision and ideals of international heritage bodies and their attractive discourse, does not pan out on the ground. Cultural heritage can just as easily be used to exclude, intimidate, divide, and legitimize factional and fundamentalist aims. This realization lead to a further focus in my research on the (ab)uses of cultural heritage, and this began with trying to get a better understanding of the functions of heritage beyond its aesthetic or historic value.
EuropeNow So, what is heritage?
Dacia Viejo-Rose The idea of heritage has expanded tremendously since the 1972 World Heritage Convention. There, you see a categorization of heritage sites, with the natural and cultural sites running in parallel: monuments, groups of monuments, and monuments in a context/landscape. But since then, our understanding of heritage has been transformed; heritage has gone from being celebrated for its “thingyness” and historicity, and the authenticity and value thereof, to being appreciated as a process that uses the past as a resource to construct meaning in the present (Smith, Harvey). There is an alliteration of Ps that illustrates this semantic evolution: from heritage as property, to place, product, performance, project, and finally process. At the center of this transformation has been the shift in focus from protection, to interpretation.
On a practical level, heritage is increasingly asked to be delivered by policy-makers and politicians keen to justify their public spending, and by practitioners angling for recognition and resources for their work. As a result, high expectations have been put on heritage to contribute quantifiable outcomes to a vast field of issues, including urban renewal, job creation, sustainable development, peace and reconciliation, climate change mitigation, and tourist industry growth. These often unrealistic expectations have led to frustration among stakeholders, causing tensions between local communities, national governments, the private sector, and international organizations.
The result has been disillusionment with heritage as a cure-all that has resulted in the centrality of heritage to some of the very core issues being faced today being overlooked. For heritage is central to understanding some of the most pressing societal issues: responses to and consequences of crisis moments, the rise of fundamentalism and xenophobia, the future of cities, the increasingly fragile social contract, tensions between universal and local visions, developing strategies towards climate change, unpacking the ever more numerous claims over historical injustices, and rebuilding fractured societies.
EuropeNow Tell me more about how you understand the relationship between cultural heritage and violence.
Dacia Viejo-Rose The destruction of cultural heritage during armed conflicts has recently received much media attention. The explanations most often heard for what motivates these actions are along the lines of “hitting the other where it most hurts” or “terrorizing.” The difficulty in discovering the actual motivations is to a large extent the result of the dense nebulous mass of propaganda. And while it is possible to find responsibilities for those acts of destruction, even find the person or persons who ultimately gave the order and/or carried out the destruction, this will not necessarily reveal the motivations. In order to discover the dynamics that underlie this destruction, we have to develop more sophisticated analytical tools. And there is a great urgency to do this. For one thing, the research has shown clearly that cultural heritage, its destruction and subsequent reconstruction, plays a part in cycles of conflict; in the same way it can foster dialogue and a sense of community, it can also perpetuate violence, fomenting a sense of alienation, exacerbating exclusion, and accentuating rifts that prolong narratives of injustice and feed desires for retribution. To this end, I have developed a typology of destruction and a protocol setting out key dynamics of reconstruction (Viejo Rose 2013).
One of the issues that concerns me the most is the violent dimensions of cultural heritage, as I found in my PhD research on Spain and earlier on Bosnia, cultural heritage can be used as an instrument of war to intimidate, exclude, and wound, that is to say it can be weaponized. What I also learned in this research is that the post-war reconstruction of cultural heritage can set off a ticking time bomb when that reconstruction cements divisions and perpetuates a sense of injustice. The question then is how to disarm heritage, how to diffuse that bomb. The direction that I am moving towards in this is one of multivocality and polysemy. This means undoing the powerful, yet false perception that a heritage site represents one group, one narrative, one meaning, evokes one emotion. Undoing its singularity. Armatya Sen (2006) and Amin Maalouf (1998/2000) have both written powerfully and convincingly about the violence of singular identities that do not allow for our multiple selves. What I have found is that in the same way that this multiplicity makes individuals more resilient, if one of their multiple identities is threatened they have others to fall back on so that threat is not mortal and can be defended against but not to the death as it were, it also makes heritage sites more resilient.
EuropeNow Tell me about your teaching.
Dacia Viejo-Rose The Cambridge University graduate programe in heritage, situated within the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, was created and developed by Professor Marie Louise Stig Sørensen and was one of the first in the world. It approaches the subject from a unique angle that has two core strands, one focusing on the socio-politics of the past and another on the management of heritage—by which is meant the decisions, agents, and above all values that shape thinking and action. This structure can then be complemented with additional options dedicated to museums or to different specializations within archaeology.
Currently we are embarking on a revamp of the MPhils offered at the Department. For heritage this will mean new options including a course to be entitled “Special Topics in Heritage Studies,” which will be seminar-based with rotating themes drawing on the expertise of researchers here. The heritage research community here works on a vast range of topics, ranging from the use of digital printing and virtual technology for reaching wider audiences and testing notions of authenticity, to exploring the ideological underpinnings of the way we value heritage and project it into the future. We are increasingly moving towards developing integrated teaching that offers practical experience, various ways of learning and being assessed, as well as a solid grounding in critical thinking.
I have also been charged with developing an undergraduate strand with heritage elements to be called “The Present in the Past,” which will be directed at third year undergraduate students. The aim of this is to get undergraduates thinking about the impact of their work and their responsibility towards how it might be interpreted. So, for instance, how projects investigating the ways in which societies responded in the aftermath of natural disasters over a thousand years ago might help inform mitigation and adaptation strategies today.
In 2016, the University of Cambridge created the first ever Lectureship in Heritage and the Politics of the Past based in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology that I now hold. This is a testimony to the growing recognition of the centrality of heritage to so many pressing issues facing society and the urgency of research on heritage. In terms of teaching, my aim is to use this Lectureship as a springboard to develop integrated teaching that stimulates research synergies across disciplines, and includes a strong practical dimension in the shape of collaborations with communities of practice and policymakers.
EuropeNow What are you researching now?
Dacia Viejo-Rose My current line of research, building on the work that I have done on violence, conflict and its aftermath, is three-pronged: risk, reparations, and displacement.
Risk interests me for two reasons. First, because during crises of existential risk we turn to cultural heritage in very explicit ways, as though it were an anchor, providing a certain grounding and security, why is this the case? Second, because the idea of protection is at the core of much heritage policy and practice and my argument is that the other side of that coin is a sense of endangerment and threat: protection from what exactly? These two dimensions to the heritage and risk relationship are of course linked, for it is largely protection from disappearing, which reverts to the sense of existential risk. Since cultural heritage cannot be understood from any one angle, building a holistic approach is, to me, the single most important factor in designing methods of risk assessments that will actually provide a full picture. To this end. I am collaborating with colleagues to develop tools for assessment with which to, through an interdisciplinary lens, chart out socio-cultural ecosystems and help make decisions that are as informed as possible.
On the reparations side of things, I am working together with colleagues from the Law Faculty at Queen’s University Belfast to explore what form reparations to the destruction of cultural heritage might take. The trial of Al Mahdi at the International Criminal Court has sparked this initiative—this case has been especially important, as it is the first time that someone has been tried in an international court only for crimes against culture. Now that he has been found guilty of the destruction of shrines in Timbuktu, the challenge is to come up with reparations. Some precedent exists for this type of reparation, but it is often resolved in monetary terms and that is not a very satisfying solution when the value of heritage is understood to lie primarily in its network of meanings, memories, emotions, narratives, and references. The results of this research will be important for informing not only what happens in the case of Mali, but also in Syria.
My interest in displacement stems in part from my own background of growing in different places, partly from my own students increasingly responding to the question “where are you from?” with narratives of movement, and from witnessing the impact of war and natural disasters on populations forced to leave their homes and familiar environments. At the heart of this is what I see as another shift in the focus of heritage narratives: from roots to routes. In this shift, the intangible dimensions of heritage naturally come to the fore because it is the heritage that people take with them—the recipes, music, stories, poems, languages, celebrations, dances. The first loss that many Syrian refugees refer to when asked what they most miss of their culture and heritage, what they most mourn, it is not the arc at Palmyra that comes to mind but rather the tradition of regular social gatherings amongst neighbours, friends, and family.
EuropeNow What do you see as the challenges for action?
Dacia Viejo-Rose One of the biggest challenges for this type of academic research is how then to communicate results so that assumptions are dismantled, policies begin to change, and practice on the ground is improved. So far I have tried to do this by feeding the results of this research back to UNESCO and participating in the meetings of the International Committee of the Blue Shield (an instrument of the 1964 Hague Convention which seeks to, as far as possible given the differences, be a Red Cross for culture).
My experience working in the field and presenting at numerous venues indicates that there is an urgent need for strong collaborative connections linking researchers, cultural heritage managers, civil society, teachers, policy-makers, and politicians together with the military, police, and security forces. These professional networks have to be international so that they are firmly in place and can be activated in potentially precarious situations, such as those in Mali and Egypt. Initiative on the part of ICOM, ICCROM, ICOMOS, and the Blue Shield national commissions represent important efforts towards this end; however, we need to deepen these avenues of communication so that they are built into stable working relationships and do not only get remembered in moments of crisis when mitigating damage. Not preventing it is the only option remaining.
My aim is to develop a regular mechanism for communication between the various communities of practice. I absolutely want to do what I can to avoid the mistakes made in the post-war reconstruction of cultural heritage in Bosnia being repeated in Syria.
EuropeNow And the challenges for scholarship and teaching?
Dacia Viejo-Rose The intellectual and academic challenges lie in reining in the concept, grounding it and continuing to develop methodological tools (Sørensen and Carman) that are specifically tailored to the needs of this type of research that often involves a combination of disciplinary approaches that include the legal, historical, ethnographic, sociological and psychological.
In addition to the need for deepening our understanding of these processes, there are two more avenues that require further exploration. The first is the imperative of developing a greater critical awareness and identifying exactly when cultural heritage is being instrumentalized symbolically and rhetorically at different stages in armed conflicts: run-up, fighting, negotiations, post-conflict reconstruction. The second is the need to fully appreciate the implications of the realization that armed conflict not only destroys cultural heritage; it also has deep transformative effects on it as sites are interfered with and re-interpreted or become the location of critical events in the fighting. Guernica, Coventry, Dresden, and Hiroshima, are but a few examples; all of these cities became signifiers for new sets of symbolic meanings after their respective bombings.
Dacia Viejo-Rose is a Lecturer in Heritage and the Politics of the Past at the University of Cambridge, where she takes part in coordinating the postgraduate degree program in heritage and museum studies. She is also a Director of Studies in Archaeology at Selwyn College, Cambridge. She was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow (2012–2014) based at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge on a research project exploring cultural violence and violence against culture, and a Postdoctoral Fellow on the Cultural Heritage and the Reconstruction of Identities after Conflict – EU FP7 (CRIC) project. She is the author of Reconstructing Spain: Cultural Heritage and Memory after Civil War (SAP, 2011) and co-edited War and Cultural Heritage: Biographies of Place (CUP, 2015) as well as numerous articles.
This interview with Dacia Viejo-Rose is part of our special feature Memory and the Politics of the Past: New Research and Innovation.
Read Dacia’s syllabus for Archaeological Heritage and Museums here.
References:
Harvey, D.C. 2008. “The History of Heritage,” in The Ashgate Companion to Heritage and Identity. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp 19-36.
Maalouf, Amin. 2003. In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong. London: Penguin Books.
Sen, Amartya. 2007. Identity and Violence. London: Penguin Books.
Smith, Laurajane. 2006. Uses of Heritage. London: Routledge.
Sørensen & Carman. 2009. Heritage Studies. Methods and Approaches. Abingdon: Routledge.
Viejo Rose, D. 2013. “Reconstructing Heritage in the Aftermath of Civil War: Re-visioning the Nation and the Implications of International Involvement” in the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, vol. 7/ issue 2, 2013, pp.125-148.