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The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History
Heritage, while it often constitutes and defines the most positive aspects of culture, is a malleable body of historical text subject to interpretation and easily twisted into myth. When it is appealed to on a national or ethnic level in reactions against racial, religious, or economic oppression, the result is often highly-charged political contention or conflict. The extraordinary theme of this unique book is how the rise of a manifold, crusade-like obsession with tradition and inheritance--both physical and cultural--can lead to either good or evil. In a balanced account of the pros and cons of the rhetoric and spoils of heritage--on the one hand cultural identity and unity, on the other, potential holy war--David Lowenthal discusses the myriad uses and abuses of historical appropriation and offers a rare and accessible account of a concept at once familiar and fraught with complexity. David Lowenthal is Emeritus Professor of Geography at University College London, and the author of the bestselling The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, 1985)
352 pages, Hardcover
First published September 10, 1996
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February 25, 2023
Comps reading. This book was actually quite fun to read. So many little tidbits of trivia tucked away throughout, almost every other sentence. Exactly the type of reading I love. Lowenthal’s citation of Hobsbawm here gets at one of the core issues this book deals with:
“In asserting our own virtues, we harp on others' vices. The worst fault charged against heritage is that it breeds belligerent antagonism. The abuse of history for chauvinist causes is emphatically censured by the historian Hobsbawm:
‘Myth and invention are essential to the politics of identity. As poppies are the raw material for heroin addiction, history is the raw material for nationalist or ethnic or fundamentalist ideologies. [Heritage] is an essential element, perhaps the essential element in these ideologies.’
But resultant havoc shows it a dreadful use of the past.”
Lowenthal notes the conservative or reactionary reputation that ‘heritage’ discourse has among academics, and how it is scorned by them for its nostalgia and conservative political instrumentalization. Lowenthal also recognizes others who trouble this assumed distinction between serious academic history and the more populist form of history pejoratively called ‘heritage.’ While some academic history shares some commonalities with heritage, Lowenthal is very much for the distinctions:
“Yet history too is a heritage. The history we normally accept without demur stems from seldom-tested faith in the cumulative probity of historians, even when we know their chronicles were forged—often trumpeted—in the crucible of self-interest. Rather than stressing the gulf that divides history and heritage, my critics want partisans of both enterprises to acknowledge that, despite their differences, theirs is truly a common cause.
All the more reason, in my view, to underscore distinctions between aims proper to heritage and those proper to history. The two enterprises are inextricably conjoined. But it is crucial to underscore their dissimilar intents. The historian, however blinkered and presentist and self-deceived, seeks to convey a past consensually known, open to inspection and proof, continually revised and eroded as time and hindsight outdate its truths. The heritage fashioner, however historically scrupulous, seeks to design a past that will fix the identity and enhance the well-being of some chosen individual or folk. History cannot be wholly dispassionate, or it will not be felt worth learning or conveying; heritage cannot totally disregard history, or it will seem too incredible to command fealty.”
Yet I must admit I am interested in heritage, precisely because I do want to enhance the well-being of some chosen folk (the proletariat). The thing is, heritage is so often the provenance of reactionaries, but I personally think it has great potential as a tool of revolution and subversion. I think of the Situationist interventions on public billboards as one example. Though these interventions, like street art, operate more on the level of aesthetics or propaganda, I think guerrilla public history has the potential to do similar work (I think of printed out plaques that Black historians installed around the city of Toronto, or Indigenous activists who pasted over river or road signs with Indigenous names.
History can be interesting and fun for its own sake, but I am a lot more interested in history that does stuff and reaches people who don’t read history in their spare time. I like public history because I am interested in the production of historical knowledge that is connected to a broader collective program of social change. This likely stems from some deeply evangelical urge I failed to fully expunge in my early twenties, the sort Haraway alludes to in the Cyborg Manifesto. And Lowenthal alludes to it here:
“At first yours or mine, heritage soon becomes inherently collective. We share what we inherit among colleagues and communities, nations and faiths. Rooted in many allegiances, we may simultaneously be carpenters, communists, Catholics, and Croatians. We are shaped by a congeries of disparate but overlapping legacies; allegiance compels painful choices. Personal bequests conflict with collective patrimonies also at odds. How important is being Pennsylvania Dutch or Navaho, asks a historian, relative to being "also an American, a molecular biologist, a woman, and a Baptist?" Each attachment, whether fixed at birth or freely chosen, presumes our fealty.”
Lowenthal mentions a period when industrial heritage was particularly in vogue, both the industrial mills William Blake called ‘satanic’ in the hymn Jerusalem, and the proletarian heritage program rolled out by French socialists in the 1980s:
“Rather than "a worms-eye view" of the past, the Trust should "illustrate the finest examples of architecture and furnishings." Yet heritage lovers had already made Our Grimy Heritage (1971) and SAVE Britain's Heritages Satanic Mills (1984) coffee-table best-sellers. The populist trend is worldwide. In 1980s France, a Socialist regime legitimated a wide range of working-class legacies. A heritage once wholly patrician now includes 20th-century factories and merely familiar locales; "a simple oven or a village lavatory elicits the patrimonial ardour once given an artistic masterpiece." Populist in theory since the Revolution, American heritage became visibly proletarian after the Civil War, when (as noted in Chapter 6), George Washington got repackaged from austere aristocrat into common man.”
There is some irony though when historic working class places like Wigan Pier became strange little revenue streams under capitalism:
“Lancastrians loathed Orwell's caustic expose of slum squalor in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), but they welcome the receipts from Wigan's "The Way We Were" heritage theme park. "Orwell used Wigan and got a lot out of it," says a local councillor, and "we've done the same thing back to him."”
There’s an interesting tension that has emerged in places like Wigan that pit productive enterprise against tourism, and the replacement of people who are traditionally well-understood as proletarian to a new type of cultural worker that the tourist industry calls for:
“Critics castigate heritage for displacing real industry, with museums breeding like maggots on the graves of enterprise. The sign that once heralded "Chesterfield—Centre of Industrial England" now reads "Chesterfield—Historic Market Town." Loss of skills, prophesy British doomsters, presages "an ill-educated outpost with nothing to sell but our heritage." The advent of a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, struck a fan as rock's death knell, implying the great songs had all been written. Heritage is no substitute for hard labor. "I'm glad I've got a job," says a Welsh coal-museum "miner," "but it isn't real work." Heritage stewardship thwarts farmers' productive zeal; the size of the yield, not the look of the field, makes farming worthwhile. Much legacy care cripples enterprise. Michael Herzfeld shows conservation bureaucracy stifling local initiatives in Rethemnon, Crete.
…Made famous by Sinclair Lewis's Main Street (1920), Sauk Centre "used to be a town to live in" said its mayor after heritage took over; "now it's Sinclair Lewis's town."
There is also a great emphasis on making history not boring (which I agree with), but often people think this can be done by commodifying heritage in some manner, which exactly gets at how Orwell’s legacy serves Wigan or Lewis’s serves Sauk Centre.
“Boredom is taboo. A travel brochure purveys such milestones of Connecticut popular culture as the lollipop, the hamburger, the cotton gin, vulcanized rubber, and all- night "I Love Lucy" festivals as "a history lesson without the boring stuff."
…Legacy peddles everything from cereal to champagne: Moet & Chandon restored two Versailles drawing rooms to celebrate the champagne firms 250-year union with France s national heritage. …”The sun may have set on the Empire, but the legacy lives on," boasts, the Bombay Company of its Singapore Raffles Serving Table.”
Always wondered why my parents were really into stores like Bombay Company.
There was also this little excerpt that I found strange, mainly because it reminded be of funny centrist academics who are terrified of their discipline going to shit because it has been taken over by dogmatic woke moralists or something hilarious like that (though it’s interesting how, almost 3 decades later, you could imagine an academic today still saying very similar things):
“Mainstream heritage agencies now find it hard to limn a national saga without causing ethnic or religious offense. To mollify Indian sensibilities, the American Bureau of Indian Affairs bolted a steel plate with the word Massacre over the previous Battle at Wounded Knee. But correcting earlier biases often simply inverts them. Embarrassed by a 1920s plaque that celebrated the suppression of Canada's rebel Metis at Batoche, the Canadian Sites and Monuments Board went to the opposite extreme, applauding the Metis' survival. Parks Canada brochures used to describe French colonists at Fort Chambly as "needing protection from the terror of the Iroquois"; they now stress that the Iroquois were there from the start until the "white man disturbed their lives in 1609 ." Newcomers, too, are urged to cling to ancestral legacies or to create new communal enclaves. Immigrant, like indigenous, heritage denotes authentic living attachments, as against the dead orthodoxies of national patriotism. "The American Revolution was not their revolution, the Civil War was not their war, the women's rights' struggle as commemorated at Seneca Falls was not their struggle," newcomers may reasonably contend. Hence tribal and ethnic Americans may well choose to venerate other places than those the nation now holds canonical. Commitment to diversity, multiculturalists suggest, should override consensual national heritage. Mainstream mea culpas hallow minority legacies. To admit that the downtrodden have just cause for grievance assuages historical guilt. Heirs of oppressors eagerly admit ancestral cruelty, greed, and genocide. "We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases and the alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers," lamented Australian prime minister Paul Keating, launching the Year of Indigenous Peoples in 1993. "We almost wiped the Indians out," repents a tourist at a Pueblo Ind**n village. To be sure, these evils are past; "we" no longer do these dreadful things. At a Connecticut tribal site in 1988, local youths chatted with a loinclothed Ind**n about fire making and the horrors of con- quest. Within minutes I watched these outsiders turn insiders. English colonists had wrecked the Indian economy, they agreed, but French cultural genocide was worse…”
Perhaps my favourite thing I encountered though was this story of covert rematriation of an Aztec artifact by a Mexican journalist, who liberated (‘stolen’) it from a Paris museum. I just visited Mexico City on my way to a conference in December, and was warned by someone that some exhibits in the Anthropology Museum were not worth spending too much time at because they were full of reproduced artifacts intended to resemble originals. I had wondered if this was because the originals all sat in European or North American holdings, and it’s entirely possible that’s the case. Anyway encountering this story shortly after returning from Mexico was quite fun:
“Heritage causes are supremely self-righteous. Seizing land or commodities is censured as criminal; seizing heritage is condoned as self- respect. A Mexican journalist in 1982 stole an Aztec codex from the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris; the codex was then given to (and kept by) the Mexican state. This patriotic theft was widely hailed, the heritage end sanctioning the illicit means.”
“To this day, the material legacy of Asia and Africa, indigenous America and Oceania is centered in the museums and galleries of London and Paris, Berlin and New York. Beyond Europe and North America no major global repository exists. The concept of global patrimony thus derives from an era of con- quest that leaves much of it in a few privileged hands. The legacy of mankind ends up in the Louvre and the British Museum but is absent from Samoa and Somalia. Universalism endows the haves at others' expense. Few British connoisseurs, dismayed by the 1986 sale to Japan of Newcastle University's collection of Pacific tribal art, spared a moments thought for Micronesians who could not afford to buy back any of the items fashioned by their own forebears. Interest and expertise commonly justify Western custody of other legacies. …The same logic vindicates tomb-robbing today. Arkansas looters of prehistoric graves are "protecting" a heritage to whose beauty Indians are blind.”
Interestingly, the ROM (Royal Ontario Museum) used that excuse for Chinese artifacts acquired by this dubious Anglican bishop and asshole named William Charles White, who smuggled a bunch of artifacts out of China during a period of extreme famine, claiming he was protecting the artifacts from revolutionaries and a poor unstable society in upheaval. For some reason, even though China is prosperous and stable today, the artifacts of the Bishop White Gallery remain on the ground floor of the ROMt. Linfu Dong’s book “Cross Culture and Faith” has the full story. Anyway, commodifying the material culture was commonplace among colonial occupiers and imperialists, and it continues to shape the heritage industry today. Lowenthal even points out a case of Papua New Guinea man’s DNA being patented by the US government, mentioning Haraway immediately after:
“Global demand sanctions the removal of other indigenous legacies— genetic property in plants, animals, and human beings marketed for medicinal and other uses by multinational firms. Human genes, too, as we have seen, are now part of the heritage industry. Despite previous indigenous protests from Brazil, in 1995 the U.S. government patented the DNA of a Papua New Guinea tribesman seemingly resistant to leukemia. Yet again, global interests justify "sharing" Third World legacies, even "the bloody issues of life," in Donna Haraway's censure, by submitting them to Western technological exploitation.”
More on Third World anti-colonial engagements with heritage looters:
“In times past, to the victor belonged the spoils; losers' legacies were routinely purloined. Only at the turn of this century did heritage rights gain even lip service. Third World retrieval was orchestrated in the 1970s, ethnic and minority claims in the 1980s. Skulls and grave goods are withdrawn from public display; museums and academies yield sacred relics to tribal heirs; a spate of rulings mandates repatriating smuggled antiquities. Legacies illicitly dispersed are ever less acceptable to reputable museums and galleries. Chronic victims of rapine are most apt to curtail outside involvement in their heritage. Even though (or because) they have trained and equipped locals, Western archaeologists are often banned from Third World digs. American fossil hunters charged in 1995 with invading an Ethiopian site were warned that Ethiopia would not tolerate "neocolonialist" academics.”
Finally, another fun fact I encountered. I especially love this one because I better understand Malcolm Hulke’s 1970 Dr. Who serial on the Silurians (reptilian humanoids who used to live on the surface of the earth millions of years before humans, in a technologically sophisticated society but went far below the earth’s surface). For the last few months, I’ve been seeing someone for a few months who is a big Whovian and have been working my way through seasons of Dr. Who. I’m particularly drawn to Hulke because he was a communist (specifically a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, on and off for 15 years) and I now understand why he was compelled to name those creatures in his serial the Silurians:
“Professions of priority extend to fossil traces and rock layers. Ancient strata became British national emblems; in 1835 the oldest rocks known were named Silurian, after a tribe famed for resisting Roman invaders. Parallels drawn in 1849 between a British fossil crocodile and a petrified creature from conquered Sind implied, for British imperialists, "a prior claim to the territory justifying the occupation" of that Indian province. The 1995 Chinese quarry fossil find of Eosimias sinensis, the "first" proto-human, launched a Peking claim to primate primacy antedating Africa's "Lucy" by 45 million years.”
Amazing, Silurians were an anti-imperialist tribe that resisted Roman invasion of ancient Britain. There are so many layers to Hulke’s work, literally putting anti-imperialist communist sci-fi out on BBC.
“In asserting our own virtues, we harp on others' vices. The worst fault charged against heritage is that it breeds belligerent antagonism. The abuse of history for chauvinist causes is emphatically censured by the historian Hobsbawm:
‘Myth and invention are essential to the politics of identity. As poppies are the raw material for heroin addiction, history is the raw material for nationalist or ethnic or fundamentalist ideologies. [Heritage] is an essential element, perhaps the essential element in these ideologies.’
But resultant havoc shows it a dreadful use of the past.”
Lowenthal notes the conservative or reactionary reputation that ‘heritage’ discourse has among academics, and how it is scorned by them for its nostalgia and conservative political instrumentalization. Lowenthal also recognizes others who trouble this assumed distinction between serious academic history and the more populist form of history pejoratively called ‘heritage.’ While some academic history shares some commonalities with heritage, Lowenthal is very much for the distinctions:
“Yet history too is a heritage. The history we normally accept without demur stems from seldom-tested faith in the cumulative probity of historians, even when we know their chronicles were forged—often trumpeted—in the crucible of self-interest. Rather than stressing the gulf that divides history and heritage, my critics want partisans of both enterprises to acknowledge that, despite their differences, theirs is truly a common cause.
All the more reason, in my view, to underscore distinctions between aims proper to heritage and those proper to history. The two enterprises are inextricably conjoined. But it is crucial to underscore their dissimilar intents. The historian, however blinkered and presentist and self-deceived, seeks to convey a past consensually known, open to inspection and proof, continually revised and eroded as time and hindsight outdate its truths. The heritage fashioner, however historically scrupulous, seeks to design a past that will fix the identity and enhance the well-being of some chosen individual or folk. History cannot be wholly dispassionate, or it will not be felt worth learning or conveying; heritage cannot totally disregard history, or it will seem too incredible to command fealty.”
Yet I must admit I am interested in heritage, precisely because I do want to enhance the well-being of some chosen folk (the proletariat). The thing is, heritage is so often the provenance of reactionaries, but I personally think it has great potential as a tool of revolution and subversion. I think of the Situationist interventions on public billboards as one example. Though these interventions, like street art, operate more on the level of aesthetics or propaganda, I think guerrilla public history has the potential to do similar work (I think of printed out plaques that Black historians installed around the city of Toronto, or Indigenous activists who pasted over river or road signs with Indigenous names.
History can be interesting and fun for its own sake, but I am a lot more interested in history that does stuff and reaches people who don’t read history in their spare time. I like public history because I am interested in the production of historical knowledge that is connected to a broader collective program of social change. This likely stems from some deeply evangelical urge I failed to fully expunge in my early twenties, the sort Haraway alludes to in the Cyborg Manifesto. And Lowenthal alludes to it here:
“At first yours or mine, heritage soon becomes inherently collective. We share what we inherit among colleagues and communities, nations and faiths. Rooted in many allegiances, we may simultaneously be carpenters, communists, Catholics, and Croatians. We are shaped by a congeries of disparate but overlapping legacies; allegiance compels painful choices. Personal bequests conflict with collective patrimonies also at odds. How important is being Pennsylvania Dutch or Navaho, asks a historian, relative to being "also an American, a molecular biologist, a woman, and a Baptist?" Each attachment, whether fixed at birth or freely chosen, presumes our fealty.”
Lowenthal mentions a period when industrial heritage was particularly in vogue, both the industrial mills William Blake called ‘satanic’ in the hymn Jerusalem, and the proletarian heritage program rolled out by French socialists in the 1980s:
“Rather than "a worms-eye view" of the past, the Trust should "illustrate the finest examples of architecture and furnishings." Yet heritage lovers had already made Our Grimy Heritage (1971) and SAVE Britain's Heritages Satanic Mills (1984) coffee-table best-sellers. The populist trend is worldwide. In 1980s France, a Socialist regime legitimated a wide range of working-class legacies. A heritage once wholly patrician now includes 20th-century factories and merely familiar locales; "a simple oven or a village lavatory elicits the patrimonial ardour once given an artistic masterpiece." Populist in theory since the Revolution, American heritage became visibly proletarian after the Civil War, when (as noted in Chapter 6), George Washington got repackaged from austere aristocrat into common man.”
There is some irony though when historic working class places like Wigan Pier became strange little revenue streams under capitalism:
“Lancastrians loathed Orwell's caustic expose of slum squalor in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), but they welcome the receipts from Wigan's "The Way We Were" heritage theme park. "Orwell used Wigan and got a lot out of it," says a local councillor, and "we've done the same thing back to him."”
There’s an interesting tension that has emerged in places like Wigan that pit productive enterprise against tourism, and the replacement of people who are traditionally well-understood as proletarian to a new type of cultural worker that the tourist industry calls for:
“Critics castigate heritage for displacing real industry, with museums breeding like maggots on the graves of enterprise. The sign that once heralded "Chesterfield—Centre of Industrial England" now reads "Chesterfield—Historic Market Town." Loss of skills, prophesy British doomsters, presages "an ill-educated outpost with nothing to sell but our heritage." The advent of a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, struck a fan as rock's death knell, implying the great songs had all been written. Heritage is no substitute for hard labor. "I'm glad I've got a job," says a Welsh coal-museum "miner," "but it isn't real work." Heritage stewardship thwarts farmers' productive zeal; the size of the yield, not the look of the field, makes farming worthwhile. Much legacy care cripples enterprise. Michael Herzfeld shows conservation bureaucracy stifling local initiatives in Rethemnon, Crete.
…Made famous by Sinclair Lewis's Main Street (1920), Sauk Centre "used to be a town to live in" said its mayor after heritage took over; "now it's Sinclair Lewis's town."
There is also a great emphasis on making history not boring (which I agree with), but often people think this can be done by commodifying heritage in some manner, which exactly gets at how Orwell’s legacy serves Wigan or Lewis’s serves Sauk Centre.
“Boredom is taboo. A travel brochure purveys such milestones of Connecticut popular culture as the lollipop, the hamburger, the cotton gin, vulcanized rubber, and all- night "I Love Lucy" festivals as "a history lesson without the boring stuff."
…Legacy peddles everything from cereal to champagne: Moet & Chandon restored two Versailles drawing rooms to celebrate the champagne firms 250-year union with France s national heritage. …”The sun may have set on the Empire, but the legacy lives on," boasts, the Bombay Company of its Singapore Raffles Serving Table.”
Always wondered why my parents were really into stores like Bombay Company.
There was also this little excerpt that I found strange, mainly because it reminded be of funny centrist academics who are terrified of their discipline going to shit because it has been taken over by dogmatic woke moralists or something hilarious like that (though it’s interesting how, almost 3 decades later, you could imagine an academic today still saying very similar things):
“Mainstream heritage agencies now find it hard to limn a national saga without causing ethnic or religious offense. To mollify Indian sensibilities, the American Bureau of Indian Affairs bolted a steel plate with the word Massacre over the previous Battle at Wounded Knee. But correcting earlier biases often simply inverts them. Embarrassed by a 1920s plaque that celebrated the suppression of Canada's rebel Metis at Batoche, the Canadian Sites and Monuments Board went to the opposite extreme, applauding the Metis' survival. Parks Canada brochures used to describe French colonists at Fort Chambly as "needing protection from the terror of the Iroquois"; they now stress that the Iroquois were there from the start until the "white man disturbed their lives in 1609 ." Newcomers, too, are urged to cling to ancestral legacies or to create new communal enclaves. Immigrant, like indigenous, heritage denotes authentic living attachments, as against the dead orthodoxies of national patriotism. "The American Revolution was not their revolution, the Civil War was not their war, the women's rights' struggle as commemorated at Seneca Falls was not their struggle," newcomers may reasonably contend. Hence tribal and ethnic Americans may well choose to venerate other places than those the nation now holds canonical. Commitment to diversity, multiculturalists suggest, should override consensual national heritage. Mainstream mea culpas hallow minority legacies. To admit that the downtrodden have just cause for grievance assuages historical guilt. Heirs of oppressors eagerly admit ancestral cruelty, greed, and genocide. "We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases and the alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers," lamented Australian prime minister Paul Keating, launching the Year of Indigenous Peoples in 1993. "We almost wiped the Indians out," repents a tourist at a Pueblo Ind**n village. To be sure, these evils are past; "we" no longer do these dreadful things. At a Connecticut tribal site in 1988, local youths chatted with a loinclothed Ind**n about fire making and the horrors of con- quest. Within minutes I watched these outsiders turn insiders. English colonists had wrecked the Indian economy, they agreed, but French cultural genocide was worse…”
Perhaps my favourite thing I encountered though was this story of covert rematriation of an Aztec artifact by a Mexican journalist, who liberated (‘stolen’) it from a Paris museum. I just visited Mexico City on my way to a conference in December, and was warned by someone that some exhibits in the Anthropology Museum were not worth spending too much time at because they were full of reproduced artifacts intended to resemble originals. I had wondered if this was because the originals all sat in European or North American holdings, and it’s entirely possible that’s the case. Anyway encountering this story shortly after returning from Mexico was quite fun:
“Heritage causes are supremely self-righteous. Seizing land or commodities is censured as criminal; seizing heritage is condoned as self- respect. A Mexican journalist in 1982 stole an Aztec codex from the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris; the codex was then given to (and kept by) the Mexican state. This patriotic theft was widely hailed, the heritage end sanctioning the illicit means.”
“To this day, the material legacy of Asia and Africa, indigenous America and Oceania is centered in the museums and galleries of London and Paris, Berlin and New York. Beyond Europe and North America no major global repository exists. The concept of global patrimony thus derives from an era of con- quest that leaves much of it in a few privileged hands. The legacy of mankind ends up in the Louvre and the British Museum but is absent from Samoa and Somalia. Universalism endows the haves at others' expense. Few British connoisseurs, dismayed by the 1986 sale to Japan of Newcastle University's collection of Pacific tribal art, spared a moments thought for Micronesians who could not afford to buy back any of the items fashioned by their own forebears. Interest and expertise commonly justify Western custody of other legacies. …The same logic vindicates tomb-robbing today. Arkansas looters of prehistoric graves are "protecting" a heritage to whose beauty Indians are blind.”
Interestingly, the ROM (Royal Ontario Museum) used that excuse for Chinese artifacts acquired by this dubious Anglican bishop and asshole named William Charles White, who smuggled a bunch of artifacts out of China during a period of extreme famine, claiming he was protecting the artifacts from revolutionaries and a poor unstable society in upheaval. For some reason, even though China is prosperous and stable today, the artifacts of the Bishop White Gallery remain on the ground floor of the ROMt. Linfu Dong’s book “Cross Culture and Faith” has the full story. Anyway, commodifying the material culture was commonplace among colonial occupiers and imperialists, and it continues to shape the heritage industry today. Lowenthal even points out a case of Papua New Guinea man’s DNA being patented by the US government, mentioning Haraway immediately after:
“Global demand sanctions the removal of other indigenous legacies— genetic property in plants, animals, and human beings marketed for medicinal and other uses by multinational firms. Human genes, too, as we have seen, are now part of the heritage industry. Despite previous indigenous protests from Brazil, in 1995 the U.S. government patented the DNA of a Papua New Guinea tribesman seemingly resistant to leukemia. Yet again, global interests justify "sharing" Third World legacies, even "the bloody issues of life," in Donna Haraway's censure, by submitting them to Western technological exploitation.”
More on Third World anti-colonial engagements with heritage looters:
“In times past, to the victor belonged the spoils; losers' legacies were routinely purloined. Only at the turn of this century did heritage rights gain even lip service. Third World retrieval was orchestrated in the 1970s, ethnic and minority claims in the 1980s. Skulls and grave goods are withdrawn from public display; museums and academies yield sacred relics to tribal heirs; a spate of rulings mandates repatriating smuggled antiquities. Legacies illicitly dispersed are ever less acceptable to reputable museums and galleries. Chronic victims of rapine are most apt to curtail outside involvement in their heritage. Even though (or because) they have trained and equipped locals, Western archaeologists are often banned from Third World digs. American fossil hunters charged in 1995 with invading an Ethiopian site were warned that Ethiopia would not tolerate "neocolonialist" academics.”
Finally, another fun fact I encountered. I especially love this one because I better understand Malcolm Hulke’s 1970 Dr. Who serial on the Silurians (reptilian humanoids who used to live on the surface of the earth millions of years before humans, in a technologically sophisticated society but went far below the earth’s surface). For the last few months, I’ve been seeing someone for a few months who is a big Whovian and have been working my way through seasons of Dr. Who. I’m particularly drawn to Hulke because he was a communist (specifically a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, on and off for 15 years) and I now understand why he was compelled to name those creatures in his serial the Silurians:
“Professions of priority extend to fossil traces and rock layers. Ancient strata became British national emblems; in 1835 the oldest rocks known were named Silurian, after a tribe famed for resisting Roman invaders. Parallels drawn in 1849 between a British fossil crocodile and a petrified creature from conquered Sind implied, for British imperialists, "a prior claim to the territory justifying the occupation" of that Indian province. The 1995 Chinese quarry fossil find of Eosimias sinensis, the "first" proto-human, launched a Peking claim to primate primacy antedating Africa's "Lucy" by 45 million years.”
Amazing, Silurians were an anti-imperialist tribe that resisted Roman invasion of ancient Britain. There are so many layers to Hulke’s work, literally putting anti-imperialist communist sci-fi out on BBC.
May 28, 2021
I think my opposition to this book, though I have read Lowenthal for years, is his linkage of the heritage world with museums. P. 160 “ museums are meant to show only sanctified and sometimes scandalous bits of the past.” I spend my hard won career trying to shift that even in local museums. This should not be.
February 14, 2023
A very thoughtful and provocative outline of the issues surrounding heritage as both an ideology and practice.
January 26, 2026
Great book for students of culture and heritage.
July 31, 2007
Read it! It was awesome. History is protean. History is protean.
November 5, 2007
Heritage = bad, history = good with slipshod examples. I can't believe I paid thirty dollars for this.
August 12, 2013
There are some very useful ideas about the commodification of heritage in this book.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews