Cultural Heritage and Human Rights

An international workshop at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Sponsored by
Collaborative for Cultural Heritage and Museum Practices
March 10-11, 2006

The workshop addresses a deeply political aspect of heritage preservation and

management: human rights and social justice. Human rights advocates assert that heritage is
necessary to the articulation and preservation of cultural identity. The display of heritage
monuments and performance can be a strategy for asserting minority identity in the face of
majority pressure, and it can be a tool for resistance and the expression of difference.
Conversely, the erasure of cultural expressionssuch as buildings, monuments, language,
religion, and social practicesis a powerful tool in warfare and political regulation. In the
assault on human lives and political autonomy, the cultural history and values of a
community are also attacked, destroying not only individuals but the very fabric of society.
Is there a universal right to the free expression and preservation of cultural heritage,
and if so, where is that right articulated and can it be protected? Is cultural heritage a
concept that serves to enforce group conformity or can it be a way to maintain and display
difference? How is the notion of heritage used variously to unite and divide
communities? Who defines cultural heritage and who should control stewardship and the
benefits of cultural heritage? What is the impact on human lives and social groups of
heritage preservation policies and designations? Are international heritage trusts or
grassroots organizations more successful at promoting local welfare?

Keynote Address
4:00 p.m. Friday, March 10
Plym Auditorium, Temple Hoyne Buell
William Logan (Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia)
Closing Pandoras Box: Human Rights Conundrums in Cultural Heritage Protection

Workshop
8:30 a.m.-6 p.m., Saturday, March 11
IPRH Building, 805 W. Pennsylvania Avenue, Urbana

8:30 Coffee

8:45 Helaine Silverman and D. Fairchild Ruggles

Welcoming Remarks and Introduction

9:00 Hugo Benavides (Fordham University)

Historical Disruptions: Reproducing an Indian Past in Latin America

9:45 Larry Zimmerman (Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis)

Indigenous People and Resistance to Public Heritage Commemoration of Their
Pasts
10:30 Jan French (Duke University)
Buried Alive: Imagining Africa in the Brazilian Northeast

BREAK

11:30 Charles Orser (Illinois State University)

Transnational Diasporas and Heritage: Who Has Rights to What, Where?

12:15 Anne Pyburn (Indiana University)

Wagging the Dog: Archaeology as a Positive Political Force in Kyrgyzstan,
Central Asia

1-2 pm LUNCH BREAK

2:00 Laurajane Smith (University of York, England)

Intersections of Archaeological Management Practice on Areas of Public Policy
and the Cultural Politics of Identity

2:45 Elazar Barkan (Claremont Graduate University)

Burkas and Genes: Predicaments of Human Rights and Cultural Property

3:30 Chris Silver (UIUC)

Cultural Heritage and Human Rights in Indonesia: The Challenges of an
Emerging Democratic Society

4:15 James Wescoat (UIUC)

The Indo-Islamic Garden: Conflict, Conservation and Conciliation in Gujarat,
India

5:00 BREAK

5:15 William Logan (Deakin University, Australia)

ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION: Key Issues and Case Studies in Cultural Heritage
and Human Rights

6:00 Karan Grover (Baroda Heritage Trust, India)

Presentation and Exhibition of the Baroda Heritage Trusts work in Champaner-
Pavagadh (India) workshop moves to the atrium of Temple Hoyne Buell

6:30 DINNER RECEPTION in the atrium of Temple Hoyne Buell

CHAMP thanks its collaborators: Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities,
Human Dimensions of Environmental Systems, Center for Global Studies, Department of
Anthropology, Department of Landscape Architecture, and the Baroda Heritage Trust
 SPEAKER BIOS

Elazar Barkan is Professor of History and Cultural Studies at Claremont Graduate

University in Los Angeles. He is also the director of the Institute for Historical Justice
and Reconciliation (http://www.salzburgseminar.org/ihjr), an independent, nonprofit
institution. He specializes in modern European intellectual and cultural history, cultural
property, imperialism, colonialism and post colonialism, history of anthropology, race
and racism, and primitivism and modernism. He is interested in the evolving new-world
system as it confronts the morals of the global with the local. He examines the ways in
which enlightenment principles of individual human rights come into collision with
traditions and group rights. Of particular concern to him is the predicament evolving from
the collision of identity and morality as manifested in competing local spaces. His
research explores the role of history in contemporary society and politics, and the way the
conflict of tradition and modernity unfolds around the debate over groups and individual
rights and international justice, including victimization as an identity, the use of
relative victimization as a form of political power, and, with particular emphasis on the
response to gross historical crimes and injustices and human rights. Professor Barkan
recently co-edited (with Ronald Bush) Claiming the Stones, Naming the Bones: Cultural
Property and the Negotiation of National and Ethnic Identity, published by the Getty
Research Institute (2003). He is also the author of The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and
Negotiating Historical Injustices (2000), based on the 1998 conference he organized at
Oxford University and a recent international conference in Claremont. He is the author of
Retreat of Scientific Racism, and the co-editor (with Marie-Denise Shelton) of Borders,
Exiles, and Diaspora. He edited (with Ronald Bush) Prehistories of the Future:
Primitivism, Modernism and Politics.Taking Wrongs Seriously: Apologies and
Reconciliation (an edited volume with Alexander Karn) is forthcoming.

O. Hugo Benavides is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Latin American and

Latino Studies, and International Political Economy and Development at Fordham
University. He was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador but has lived over half of his life in New
York City. His books Making Ecuadorian Histories: Four Centuries of Defining Power
(2004) and The Politics of Sentiment: Imagining and Remembering Guayaquil (2006) are
published by University of Texas Press. His articles have appeared in Latin American
Antiquity (Anthropologys Native Conundrum: Uneven Histories and Development
24/2: 159-178 [2004]), Journal of Latin American Anthropology (The Representation of
Guayaquils Sexual Past: Historicizing the Enchaquirados, 7/1:68-103 [2002]), Social Text
(Seeing Xica and the Melodramatic Unveiling of Colonial Desire, 21/3: 109-134 [2003])
and Critique of Anthropology (Returning to the Source: Social Archaeology as Latin
American Philosophy, 12/4:355-370 [2001]) as well as several Latin American journals.

Jan Hoffman French (Ph.D., Cultural Anthropology, Duke University, 2003; J.D.
University of Connecticut Law School, 1981) has just been hired as an assistant profesor
in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Richmond in Virginia. She
recently completed a visiting fellowship at Kellogg Institute for International Studies at
the University of Notre Dame. She has also held a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship at
Northwestern University and a postdoctoral fellowship at Center for Latin American
Studies of University of Maryland, College Park. A former practicing attorney in Brazil
and the United States, French's articles have appeared in the American Ethnologist,
American Anthropologist, and Political and Legal Anthropology Review. She is currently
completing a book manuscript, The Rewards of Resistance: Legalizing Black and Indian
Identities in Northeast Brazil.

William (Bill) Logan holds the UNESCO Chair of Heritage and Urbanism in the School
of Social and International Studies at Deakin University in Australia. He has been
involved in cultural heritage conservation since the early 1970s. Since 1986 he has been
an International Expert for the UNESCO Division of Cultural Heritage in Paris, where his
work has mainly been related to UNESCO's international campaigns to safeguard world
cultural heritage sites in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Vietnam. He has
also acted for the UNESCO World Heritage Centre at international meetings of experts in
Vietnam, Indonesia and Korea and has contibuted to its 'State of the World Heritage'
Report (2005). He is a member of Australia ICOMOS, the national committee of
ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites), based in Paris, and was the
national president from 1999 to 2002. He has represented ICOMOS at international
meetings in Japan and Korea. He has been a consultant to AusAID, the Australian
Heritage Commission and Department of the Environment and Heritage, and the
Victorian Department of Infrastructure, and he is a member of AusHeritage (including
Board Member, 1998-89). This involvement with international and national heritage
bodies has directly led to course innovations and research activities at Deakin University.
Professor Logan introduced two courses in Vietnamese history and culture and instigated
the development of an Asian Studies major. He led the establishment of the Cultural
Heritage postgraduate program at Deakin in 2000. He is Director of Cultural Heritage
Center for Asia and the Pacific, a research and training center that has UNESCO
endorsement. His research record includes numerous Australian Research Council and
other grants, and two recent books on heritage in the Asian region (notably Hanoi:
Biography of a City, which won the International Planning History Society Book Prize in
2002; and The Disappearing "Asian" City: Protecting Asia's Urban Heritage in a
Globalizing World, published by Oxford University Press in 2002). He also is the author
of numerous articles in refereed and professional journals, and conference papers. He was
awarded the Deakin University Researcher of the Year Award in 2002 and was made an
Alfred Deakin Professorship in 2004. In addition to establishing heritage programs in
several universities in Victoria, he helped develop postgraduate heritage courses at
Silpakorn University in Bangkok and the University of Santo Tomas in Manila. He is
also a member of the International Advisory Board of the Academy of Irish Cultural
Heritages, University of Ulster, UK.and the editorial board of Spatial Habitus, a series of
mongraphs published by the University of Hawai'i Press and the China Institute in
America, New York. Currently he is engaged in the following research projects:
(1) 'UNESCO as an Agency of Cultural Globalisation?' (ARC Discovery Grant, 2002-
2005; team leader, with M. Askew, M. Langfield, C. Long, A. Smith, J. Sweet)
(2) 'Heritage Site Management in Australia and China: A Cross-Cultural Study of Site
Identification, Management and Interpretation' (ARC Linkage Grant 2002-4, with K.
Altenburg, S. Sullivan, J. Sweet)
(3) 'Urban Activism in Melbourne in the 1950s and 1960s (ARC Discovery grant, 2003-
4, with G. Davison, R. Howe)
(4) 'Imperial Hue: Townscape Transformation of Vietnam's Nguyen Dynasty Capital,
1802-2002' (with C. Long)
(5) 'Cultural Heritage and Urban History of Vientiane, Laos (with M. Askew, C. Long)
(6) 'Places of Pain and Shame: The Heritage of Imprisonment Sites (Deakin University
Central Research Grant, 2003)
(7) 'University Planning and Design: The Vietnamese Experience' (with Prof Nguyen
Hong Thuc, Hanoi Architectural University)
(8) 'Dien Bien Phu, Vietnam: significance and management'

Charles E. Orser, Jr. is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Illinois State

University. A historical archaeologist, he uses anthropologically informed archaeology to
investigate the lives of men and women ignored by official, written history and their
interactions with people of power. His books include The Material Basis of the
Postbellum Tenant Plantation, A Historical Archaeology of the Modern World, Historical
Archaeology, and Race and Practice in Archaeological Interpretation. He is also the
founding editor of the International Journal of Historical Archaeology and the editor of
the Encyclopedia of Historical Archaeology.

K. Anne Pyburn is Professor of Anthropology & Gender Studies at Indiana University

(http://www.indiana.edu/~anthro/people/pyburn.html) and the Director of the Center for
Archaeology in the Public Interest (CAPI)
(http://www.research.indiana.edu/centers/capi.html). Her primary research has been
conducted in Belize, where she integrates concerns with ethics, gender, early cities, and
the ancient Maya. At the site of Chau Hiix she is investigating an ancient Maya town and
she convenes a field school on alternate years at the invitation of the government of
Belize and the residents of Crooked Tree Village
(http://www.indiana.edu/~overseas/flyers/chauhiix.html). She similarly applies principles
of ethically and socially engaged archaeology in the Koch Kor Valley of Kyrgyzstan
where she is directing a project designed to nurture the development of community
museums (http://www.indiana.edu/~capi/). She is the co-editor of Archaeologies: The
Journal of the World Archaeological Congress
(http://www.altamirapress.com/RLA/journals/Archaeologies/index.shtml) and Director of
the Making Archaeology Teaching Relevant in the XXI Century Project (MATRIX)
(http://www.indiana.edu/~arch/saa/matrix/) of the Society for American Archaeology.

Chris Silver is Head of the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the
University of Illinois. His planning interests converge from three distinct but related
areas, including urban and planning history, international planning, and housing and
community development. Planning history has been the central focus of his published
research, including three books, Twentieth Century Richmond: Planning, Politics and
Race (1984), The Separate City: Black Communities in the Urban South, 1940-1968,
with John Moeser (1995), and Planning the Twentieth Century American City, with Mary
Corbin Sies (1996). He is currently completing a history of planning in the urban South
from the 1890s through the 1950s. Beginning with a Fulbright Senior Lectureship in
1989-90, he has been teaching, researching and consulting on international planning, with
a focus on urban development and decentralization in Indonesia, over the past decade.
This includes three years (1995-1997) as an Urban Development Advisor to Indonesia
under a U.S. Agency for International Development project based in Jakarta. A new book
project links this international work with planning history through an examination of the
emergence of Jakarta as a megacity in the twentieth century. The focus of Dr. Silver's
teaching, consulting and research is housing and community development, including the
role of historic preservation in urban revitalization. Through collaboration with several
Indonesian universities, that work has been broadened to incorporate democratization,
social capital formation, and community-based planning. Current research involves a
critical assessment of the current decentralization and democracy movements in
Indonesian cities.

Laurajane Smith is co-director of studies in the Masters in Archaeological Heritage

Management at the University of York, England. Her research interests include the
politics of heritage management, the intersection of archaeological and management
practices on areas of public policy and the cultural politics of identity, community
involvement in heritage management and research, heritage tourism, archaeological
ethics, archaeological theory in general and feminist archaeology in particular.
Prior to her arrival in York she taught both Indigenous Studies and Cultural Heritage
Management at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. She also directed
her own cultural heritage consultantancy business for a number of years in south-eastern
Australia. She recently published Archaeological Theory and the Politics of Cultural
Heritage (Routledge, 2004).

James L. Wescoat, Jr. is Professor and Head of the Department of Landscape

Architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He earned a Bachelor of
Landscape Architecture degree from Louisiana State University and Masters and PhD
degrees in Geography from the University of Chicago.His research has concentrated on
water systems in the US and South Asia from the site to river basin scales. At the larger
scale, he has written about water policy issues in the Colorado, Indus, Ganges, Aral Sea,
and Great Lakes basins, including the history of multilateral conflicts and water treaties.
He led an NSF-funded project on Water and Poverty in Colorado, and a USEPA-
funded study of climate change in the Indus basin, that included a paper on The Right of
Thirst for Animals in Islamic Water Law. In 2003, he published Water for Life: Water
Management and Environmental Policy with geographer Gilbert F. White (Cambridge
University Press). For the greater part of his career, however, Professor Wescoat has
focused on the small-scale historic waterworks of Mughal gardens in India and Pakistan.
He led the Smithsonian Institutions project titled, Garden, City, and Empire: The
Historical Geography of Mughal Lahore, which resulted in the publication of Mughal
Gardens: Sources, Places, Representations, Prospects (1996), The Mughal Garden:
Interpretation, Conservation, and Implications (1996), and numerous articles. More
recently, he has contributed to a cultural landscape heritage conservation project at the
Champaner-Pavagadh World Heritage Site in Gujarat, India, with Architect Karan Grover
of the Baroda Heritage Trust; Professors Sinha, Ruggles, Kesler; and teams of students in
landscape architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Larry Zimmerman is Professor of Anthropology & Museum Studies and Public Scholar
of Native American Representation at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis
and the Eiteljorg Museum. He earned his PhD in Anthropology at the University of
Kansas-Lawrence. He taught at the University of South Dakota, leaving in 1996 as
Distinguished Regents Professor, served as Visiting Professor of Anthropology and
Chair of American Indian and Native Studies at the University of Iowa, and as Head of
the Archaeology Department at the Minnesota Historical Society. He is Vice President of
the World Archaeological Congress, has held a number of offices and editorships for
professional organizations, and has been a National Lecturer for Sigma Xi, the Scientific
Research Society. He has published more than 200 articles and book chapters and has
authored, edited, or co-edited 19 books including Native North America, Presenting the
Past, and Ethical Issues in Archaeology. His scholarly interests are in Great Plains
archaeology, cultural and intellectual property issues, and relationships between
American Indians and archaeologists. He recently began a major research project on the
archaeology of homelessness.