CULTURAL HERITAGE, CULTURAL DIVERSITY
Cultural heritage is another of those sticky concepts I get hung up on. Having looked over the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) website I still don’t really know what cultural heritage is or, therefore, the purpose of safeguarding it.
I understand and appreciate that if some potential or imminent threat exists to an aspect of someone’s culture UNESCO is here to intervene and help preserve it in some form, even if that’s just by documenting it. That makes sense to some degree, but really only superficially. It’s hard not to think of the whole project as a rather simplistic and romantic endeavour, one of saving all the pretty things and putting them in museums. To me, this distorts and drastically diminishes culture, right down to the meaning of the word, as well as its artifacts.
In its mandate UNESCO is selective about what constitutes “culture worth preserving” – both by creating a hierarchy of cultures, where certain cultures are purveyors of world cultural heritage and others are not, and by picking out the bits that are currently tasteful. As well, while stating the value of “traditional, contemporary, and living traditions,” it does not in reality appear to attempt to preserve cultural practises in any broad sense. For example, scanning their “Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity” I notice songs, storytelling, cloth-making, and carving dominate. It’s a list of cute “ethnic” activities. If it can be considered exotic or old it counts as “culture”. The word “traditional” is in most entries and is always followed by a craft form or folk art. How parochial. But, I’d like to ask, what about the whole “shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices” aspects of culture? And what about all the messy stuff, that’s culture too isn’t it?
Surely any meaningful definition of culture can’t just include the fun, pretty bits that are more or less universally appreciated across cultures. I’m thinking about things like, Seppuku, Japanese ritual disembowelment; or the Italian Castrati, the centuries old tradition of castrating young boys from poor families so that they might one day maintain a soprano vocal range but with an adult lung capacity, (and win national opera stardom); or what about Capacocha, the Incan ritual of child sacrifice – involving death by strangulation, a blow to their head, or by leaving the child to die of exposure in the extreme cold of the Andean mountains (as offerings to the gods in return for a bountiful harvest.) Each of these practises are endemic to the culture they are found within, are rare or extinct, and were deeply informed by and connected to countless other beliefs and practises of the people therein. Surely these are all meaningful links in the intricate, interwoven tapestry of the ethnosphere. No?
In my mind, suggesting that components of a culture are, should, or even could be preserved, independent from the rest of the culture, is quite a bizarre and daunting task. For instance, in order to say something like “I wish the Incan culture had been preserved” requires you to partition your mind such that you can pretend an aspect of Incan culture has meaning or value, or is even recognizable, without a foundational spectrum of other beliefs and practises (of child sacrifice, forced cranial deformation, slavery, and perpetual war – all for the purpose of appeasing temperamental, weather-manipulating gods, say.) While it feels like a noble endeavour, you simply cannot separate, say, the tumi (that ornately carved golden ceremonial knife that has become a popular icon of Incan civilization) from the purpose and cultural context of the tool. The tumi was used for ritual sacrifice, the cutting open of live prisoners of war so that their still functioning organs could be used to divine the future. Separating this knife from heart and bowel divination and the belief in gods of harvest and war just leaves you with a pretty knife. Doing so misses out on all the “traditions, practices, and knowledge” of this culture and what I understand to be the whole stated purpose of the exercise. This is just the “salvage paradigm” all over again: decontextualized trinkets behind museum glass. Such artifacts (physical or intellectual) may as well be conceived via algorithm in San Francisco, produced in a sweatshop in Vietnam, labelled “ancient cultural artefact” and then put on sale in giftshops in Copenhagen. No?
Additionally, from my perspective, omitting the objectionable bits of cultures – as UNESCO appears to be doing – is an admission of a sort (admission by omission.) It looks as though this is just a new, friendlier, and more inclusive form of cultural imperialism. By filtering as it does, isn’t UNESCO admitting that twentieth century cultural relativism is dead? Aren’t they saying that they don’t pretend to be totally ignorant about what human flourishing looks like and how misery is generated, and that valuing one over the other isn’t a form of confusion or oppression? Seems so. Seems like they’re making a value judgement about what is and what is not good culture. Interesting.
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