Cultural Heritage in the Age of Pandemic: A Review Essay

Anybody interested in questions of cultural heritage should read these two books.

With that, I am tempted to end my review.

But I will go on: to introduce them, of course, but also because of the strangeness of reading about “culture” and “community” from the isolation of my home, as all of us separately but together live through the terror, uncertainty, and monotony of global pandemic. This is surely an experience that threatens to recast taken-for-granted understandings of culture and community, the tangible and intangible, the real and virtual, and everything that folklorists and other students of human creativity are interested in. As the science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson writes in the New Yorker, “The virus is rewriting our imaginations. What felt impossible has become thinkable. We’re getting a different sense of our place in history. We know we’re entering a new world, a new era. We seem to be learning our way into a new structure of feeling.”[1]

It is impossible to be too melodramatic about the magnitude and rapidity of change. The question of how much of the change will be part of a “new normal” or “new structure of feeling,” and how much is just a momentary stopgap, is also part of the current uncertainty. So much of this change relates to how we comprehend culture, community, and heritage. From our disparate safe havens during this period of breach, we watch with dismay as celebrated traditions around the world—everything from the Palio in Siena, the running of the bulls in Pamplona, March Madness in the US, the Summer Olympics—are cancelled, in many cases for the first time in history. We wonder when (and if, or how) everyday gestures of human sociability—shaking hands, hugging, breaking bread with friends—will become quotidian again. At the same time we also marvel at the lithe creativity of newly invented traditions. Some draw on the affordances of emerging technologies, like Zoom happy hours and dance parties; others revise or repurpose older ways of doing things, as people bake sourdough bread, sew facemasks or whip up Dalgona coffee. We even have new, and hopefully temporary, customs of signing off at the close of an email (e.g., “stay safe, stay healthy”).

It is exactly during this moment of rupture and reinvention that our assumptions about cultural heritage also become uncertain—and demand reexamination. And that is why the two books under review feel especially pertinent: insightful as they may have been before the pandemic, they can be read differently now as we consider the fragility (and flexibility) of notions of community and traditionality, and even experience the (temporary?) end of tourism as we know it. Moreover, questions of how cultural heritage is understood and managed always reflect an intertwining of local on-the-ground circumstances with global (and national and regional) structures of expertise and bureaucracy—a situation that eerily parallels the local-global realities of the Coronavirus pandemic.

Particularly since UNESCO’s 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Cultural Heritage of Humanity, intangible cultural heritage and ICH, have become key terms in folkloristic discourse. An increasing number of folklorists and ethnomusicologists are contributing productively to understanding how cultural policies play out in local communities, at regional and national levels, and in global, diplomatic, and bureaucratic arenas. The authors of the two books under review, Regina Bendix and Valdimar Tr. Hafstein, are prominent folklorists who have both dedicated a great deal of intellectual labor to grappling with culture and cultural policy. They have long been at the forefront of these explorations, and for many of us their pioneering insights already feature as touchstones for our own research.

Both authors have studied in Europe and the United States but currently work in Europe (Bendix in Germany; Hafstein in Iceland), and both are past presidents of SIEF (International Society for Ethnology and Folklore); they are fluent in the intellectual traditions of folkloristics in various regions, giving them unique perspectives on differences and similarities between academic worlds. Both books implicitly bridge this scholarship.

The title of Bendix’s Culture and Value: Tourism, Heritage, and Property is appropriate because, as the author explains on the first page, “Questions of value permeate tourism, heritage and cultural property” but “only in the past decade have I been able to see more clearly the constant undercurrent of issues revolving around the (e)valuation, distinction, and individual and social economic, ideational, and scholarly value inherent to these interconnected parts of my work” (1). The book is a compilation of (mostly) previously published work. This does not detract from its significance—in some cases the initial publication was not easily accessible (or not in English) and the new juxtaposition and organization of older material allows for fresh synergies and discoveries.

Through the chapters gathered here we get a sense of Bendix’s intellectual journey, shaped through the major (and overlapping) concerns of her career thus far. The first section assembles four articles focusing on tourism and tourist economies; the second section consists of four articles grappling with issues of heritage and heritage regimes; while the final section of four articles tackles the question of value head on, discussing “culture as resource” and “culture as property.”

The introduction to the volume previews what she will do in the book itself and also, to a certain extent, explains Bendix’s own intellectual evolution as a scholar with one foot each in American and European academia. There is no space here to summarize the range of ideas covered in the chapters that follow, but I would note that they reflect constant engagement with issues that would become increasingly relevant as folklore and related disciplines embarked on what we might call the “cultural heritage turn.” The very first chapter, for example, “Tourism and Cultural Displays: Inventing Traditions for Whom?” about the Unspunnen festival in Interlaken, Switzerland, was originally published in 1989 in the Journal of American Folklore. Its age and contents remind us that Bendix had prescience in doing this sort of research three decades ago when discourses of authenticity, invented tradition, and tourism were just gaining intellectual traction and sophistication within folklore studies and related disciplines. Even as her insights from that period helped shape current folkloristic directions, they remain relevant and perceptive now.

A chapter I found especially thought-provoking is “The Dynamics of Valorizing Culture: Actors and Shifting Contexts in the Course of a Century.” This essay will be new to English-language readers, as it was translated from the original German (first published in 2013) for the current volume. Bendix explains here that “both the heritage regime and tourism—to varying degrees—use culture as a resource, meaning that in both, cultural goods and practices are associated with values” (171-172). This simple acknowledgement allows us to explore cultural phenomena through the lens of economic thought—which, after all, concerns questions of value and valuation. Bendix points out that not all economic analysis is about monetary value; there are philosophical and abstract ramifications within the language of economics that provide ways to understand heritage. Indeed, she purposefully uses the term “valorization,” in distinct contrast to “commoditization,” to emphasize the fact that associating cultural phenomena with value does not necessary mean transforming it into a product for sale or alienating it “from human or cultural values” (172).

Like many of her chapters, this one is front-loaded with theoretical preparation for relatively brief case studies that, nevertheless, provide strong support for her arguments. I should note in this regard that Bendix’s style is not always easy: she writes thickly, with long paragraphs chock full of references and theoretically rich terminology. But each chapter is worth reading with patience and care, considered bit by bit, because every paragraph is packed with insights. Bendix has a tremendous grasp of social theory and contexts, and is adept at chronicling histories of ideas and consciousness(es).

In addition to her own interventions, the value of this work comes from Bendix’s ability to assimilate disparate but related threads, tying them into a discursive knot that binds history and theory with, ideally, an illustrative case study. She assimilates, clarifies, contextualizes—exactly what is so often needed in our field—to provide a big picture analysis. In a sense, then, the book’s contribution is not in its discussion of individual case studies (there is ethnographic detail here, but it is comparatively minor), but in its broader analysis of abstract concepts including heredity, hybridity, property, and the commons as they are deployed within disciplinary and political contexts.

Hafstein’s Making Intangible Heritage: EL Condor Pasa and Other Stories from UNESCO provides both contrast and complement to this approach. By Hafstein’s own reckoning, about half the material has previously appeared elsewhere, but it has been significantly revised and edited, with parts redistributed from one chapter to another, so that the book reads as a sustained coherent exploration. Hafstein’s grasp of the issues is broad and nuanced; he draws from similar discourses as Bendix (indeed, Bendix herself is often referenced), but his own sights are tightly trained on UNESCO and the 2003 Convention. His analysis of the convention is grounded in long-term fieldwork of a very particular kind: his is an “ethnography in glass elevators” (12), a participant-observation study of bureaucratic structure, decision making, ideas, and the “diplomats and experts who negotiated the convention, and the scholars, administrators, and cultural workers charged with implementing it” (5). Hafstein was literally in the room at UNESCO headquarters in Paris in 2003, where he “observed and took part in drafting the Intangible Heritage Convention” (16).

Hafstein frames his work in terms of folkloristics. It is well known that “intangible cultural heritage” emerged in part to replace baggage-laden words such as “folklore” and Hafstein succinctly locates the 2003 Convention within this historic context. More intriguingly, he adeptly analyzes UNESCO itself through a folkloristic lens, reminding us that diplomats and bureaucrats also engage in forms of performance and expressive culture—and that “storytelling in the United Nations is not so different from storytelling elsewhere” (29). He is interested in narratives and the “power of words” because—in the context of diplomacy and cultural policy-making—“they bring into being new realities, new concepts and categories that people then draw on in sundry settings around the world” (5). For those of us like myself who have encountered such “new realities” in our own fieldwork in such “sundry settings,” Hafstein provides an oddly exhilarating glimpse backstage, a snapshot of the sausage being made.

Hafstein suggests that the “book’s ambition is to change how we think about intangible heritage” (2). One aspect of this means showing “how a new concept and category comes into being and goes to work in the world” (21); accordingly, each of the first three chapters explores a different origin story or “etiological narrative” (27) for intangible heritage. He presents the narrative and then unpacks its rationale, revealing often hidden political motivations and implications.

The first of these origin stories concerns “El Condor Pasa,” a song best known from its 1970 Simon and Garfunkel incarnation. At first glance, the story of the song’s journey demonstrates how questions of cultural appropriation and ownership, indigenous rights, intellectual property, ethnic diversity, and transnational cultural flows inspired a newfound recognition of the necessity of cultural heritage as a category. By digging deeper, however, Hafstein shows that such ethical underpinnings are intertwined with less sanguine motivations, such as nationalism and “hegemonic strategies within states” (48). It is clear from his nuanced telling of this particular story that Hafstein has recounted it before (I recommend watching his video documentary on the subject: https://vimeo.com/263124485).

Indeed, Hafstein is a good storyteller who keeps the narrative on track even as he takes theoretical and historical detours to explain its significance. As with Bendix’s book, summarizing here would do justice to neither the ideas nor their telling, but for me the most stimulating “origin story” comes in the third chapter, “Making Lists,” in which Hafstein shows the diplomatic wrangling and hairsplitting that went into establishing the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Those of us who study the effects of UNESCO in local communities know that, for better or for worse, this list is one of the most influential and argued-over metacultural products of the 2003 Convention. Not surprisingly, a list is never just a list, because lists “artifactualize cultural practices and expressions” (80), singling out, making transferable, decontextualizing, recontextualizing. The origin story rehearsed here is one in which East Asian countries (particularly Japan and South Korea) and several African nations push back against the European/Western bias of the 1972 World Heritage Convention (basically “tangible” heritage) to reify the value of the intangible. This tale articulates a critique of materialism, monumentality, definitions of authenticity, and even distinctions between permanence and impermanence—and moreover illustrates how cultural policy responds to shifting power relations and realpolitik even as it helps shape conceptual understandings of how we live.

Although Haftstein focuses specifically on the ICH Convention, his analysis goes beyond UNESCO and his insight into these issues and the role of folkloristics is broadly transferable. Perhaps because I read Hafstein’s book immediately after reading Bendix’s, I could not help thinking that by exploring how we understand, define, preserve, create and narrativize heritage, Hafstein is also ultimately dealing with issues of “value” and “valorization,” because as Bendix puts it, “both material value and mental valorization are passed on to the future and recipients face decisions of how to carry forward this individually and generationally marked boon and burden” (151).

Certainly, both books would be perfect for graduate seminars in folkloristics, anthropology, or cultural policy. But I hope they will also be used by students of political science and economics—or better still, that they will be read by professionals in these fields. I also hope they will inspire publications on these issues from different disciplines and perspectives, and especially from cultural and geographical regions where intellectual property and heritage do not necessarily fit the Western-oriented schemata undergirding much current global cultural policy. A new book on Chinese folklore is a step in this direction, but I hope we will get additional perspectives from Asian, African, Middle Eastern, and Latin American cultures and communities.[2]

Folklorists have long understood that the concept of heritage itself obtains differently (if at all) in different cultural contexts and at different times. The discursive web spun around the contemporary concept of heritage is formed as much by the past as by the present, as much by history as by the politics of now. In addition to the rupture and panic of the pandemic—which is already shifting understandings of culture and community—our own particular “now” is also informed by a potentially revolutionary reckoning with systemic racism and the legacies of injustice and colonization that have shaped so many of our institutions (including, of course, disciplines such as folkloristics, ethnology, anthropology, etc.). In this context the word “heritage” (often along with “tradition”) has emerged in popular discourses as a rationalization for despicable values that should no longer be viable; in the United States people justifying the Confederate flag or monuments to Confederate soldiers often invoke “heritage” and its concomitant emotion of pride as sacrosanct signifiers somehow immune from critical evaluation. But as both Bendix and Hafstein remind us, heritage is always a reflection of values and valorizations in the present, created through political machinations and power structures. Heritage is never disconnected from ideology.

With this in mind, another space in which these two texts overlap is that they share a critical concern with politics and suggest that humanist scholars—folklorists, ethnologists, anthropologists, literary critics, whatever we call ourselves—should not be afraid to intervene in cultural policy and issues of state. For the most part, this call quietly haunts the pages, but on occasion it emerges full force, as when Bendix writes:

"I wonder sometimes about the caution, fear, and rejection on the part of humanistic scholarship to involve itself in societies beyond 'educating' or 'documenting' and 'interpreting' or 'understanding.' Economists are never scared of the impact their knowledge has on the nation-state. Indeed, they regard it as their task to produce such knowledge, the more quickly the better—one applicable theory chases the next, modelled, tested, used, discarded....Economists, much like professors of law, moral philosophers, or medical researchers intend to affect a polity, a society, or ailing bodies. Hence, I would wish for more ethnologists to have the courage to think about their own agency as made possible through the knowledge they produce. Our field was one of the first to examine its disciplinary history in the postwar period and gained momentum precisely from this self-reflective move. It is arguably better equipped than many to practice engaged knowledge transfer in a circumspect fashion and to advise cautiously in the realm of heritage, cultural property, and the use of expressive resources." (206)

If there is one thing we have learned from the Trump Administration’s failure to manage this pandemic it is that the knowledge and participation of scientists is critical. It goes without saying that during a pandemic medical workers and public health professionals should rise into leadership roles, as essential actors in shaping policies and practices. When we begin eventually, hopefully, to create a post-pandemic society, it will be critical to have culture professionals—folklorists and others who think about culture in a critical way—actively involved in its reconfiguration. When Kim Stanley Robinson says that the “virus is rewriting our imaginations,” he goes on to suggest that “how we feel is shaped by what we value, and vice versa. Food, water, shelter, clothing, education, health care: maybe now we value these things more, along with the people whose work creates them.” Bendix and Hafstein remind us that value is also affixed to the intangible. When someday we can actually be with each other again to participate in community activities and face-to-face vernacular practices (experiencing, is it were, the exquisite tangibility of intangible heritage), folklorists should be essential players in this reimagining project. If culture and heritage are political, it is time to engage in politics.

Notes:

[1] Kim Stanley Robinson, “The Coronavirus Is Rewriting Our Imaginations,” The New Yorker, May 1, 2020.

[2] See Lijun Zhang and Ziying You, eds, Chinese Folklore Studies Today: Discourse and Practice (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019).

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[Review length: 3069 words • Review posted on September 3, 2020]