ECRN Reflections about the ACHS Biennial Conference in Santiago (December 2022)
This new post features reflections of our members that appeared on July 2023 in the ECRN Newsletter, before the establishment of the ECRSpeak Platform. The reflections spotlight Walter Lowande’s and Ran Wei’s perspectives on the event in the context of their research interests and experiences.
Walter Lowande
Adjunct Professor at the History Department of the UNIFAL-MG, Brazil
ACHS ECRN Member
walter.lowande@unifal-mg.edu.br
In the first place, Chile’s capital can be perceived as a territory disputed by a broad diversity of memory practices. The monumentality of its downtown buildings reminds us of the colonial appropriation of space that marks a great part of the American continent (or, more properly, Abya Yala). But each part of the city is also reminiscent of the resistance of the Mapuche and other racialised peoples, whether in the toponymy, in the practices of reappropriation present in contestatory uses of the colonial/modern edifications and urban space, or even in the cuisine, music, clothes and the very bodies alive and active in that urban ecosystem.
Santiago is also a multilayered evidence/experience of this old spatiotemporal dispute. The Spanish colonisation left several signs of its successive updatings, such as modern conceptions of national states or capitalism, for instance. These materialisations/temporalisations tried to incorporate/domesticate the American indigenous peoples and their allies as slaves, subjects of the crown, Catholics, heathens, cheap workers, citizens, barbarians, natives, inferior races, terrorists, communists, consumers, entrepreneurs, poor, criminals and so on. All of these attempts are territorialized in Santiago governmental palaces, schools, prisons, hospitals, museums and even cemeteries. But even in the cemeteries, such as the monumental Cementerio General, it is possible to find barricades of counter-colonial practices of memory, from simple claimings for future justice to the bigger monuments in honour to the dictatorship victims. Even the Quita Pena bar at the exit of the Cementerio General reminds us that painful memories can be processed as festive and transformative encounters without forgetting the need for reparation. All these ecologies of memories produced in the midst of colonisation and resistance practices become decisively visible to me thanks to the tours in the surroundings of the Baquedano Square proposed by the ECRN (especially thanks the diligent mediation of Victoria Vargas) and provided by our careful ACHS Chilean colleagues.
But I would also like to register the impressions that the ACHS Conference left in my memories. It was a joyful opportunity to see some old friends, to meet in person the ones I only knew online and to make new ones. The conferences and sessions that I was able to attend demonstrated that the critical heritage studies field evolved from the more speculative ideas on heritage ontopolitics prevalent at the last conference in London to actual counter-colonial heritage practices produced by people from different perspectives. It was, again, a great learning opportunity.
The conference was opened to presentations in English, Spanish and Portuguese. Even so, I saw just a few Brazilian colleagues on that occasion in Santiago. But this did not happen due to the organizing committee's fault. We were facing a fascist government in Brazil and the trip costs made it difficult to travel abroad for the majority of my colleagues since the ongoing neoliberal/criminal economic politics took science and education as one of their main victims. Besides that, I think that Brazilian heritage scholars in general do not yet identify themselves with what we are calling “critical heritage studies”, notwithstanding the existence of an important literature in Brazil that could perfectly fit in this tag since the eighties, at least. We could indeed talk of a Brazilian tradition of critical heritage historiography since the investigations produced by Mariza Velozo, Márcia Chuva, José Reginaldo dos Santos Gonçalves, Silvana Rubino, among others. However, these investigations were directed, at that stage, mainly at national heritage politics, and now, thanks to these early efforts, we are finally able to find more transnational connections. I think it is especially due to Amerindian and Afrodiasporic practices of resistance and memory, besides the individual initiative of a few scholars, that the Brazilian critical heritage studies can be now more significant to international interlocutors.
It would be necessary to study this in more detail, but I suspect that this absence is also related to the low level of the internationalisation of our higher education system. For a short period in the last decade, graduate students in Brazil had the opportunity to do part of their education in foreign universities, but this kind of investment is no longer available to most Brazilian heritage researchers. As the English speaking Global North world remains privileged in this matter, it would be great if the ACHS could focus on an internationalisation policy turned to the Global South in order to become truly international.
Santiago offered us, therefore, a unique opportunity to reflectively think about the field of critical heritage studies from our own local perspectives. Thus, I hope that these perspectives can be even more plural in the coming meetings in order to continue enriching our reflections and practices.
Ran Wei
Ph.D. in Regional and Urban Planning Studies, London School of Economics and Political Science
ACHS ECRN Coordinating Team Member
r.wei5@lse.ac.uk
Languages and Decolonisation in (Critical) Heritage Studies
Critical heritage studies has long been focused on advocating the democratisation of and power redistribution within heritage conservation (Waterton, 2005; Waterton & Smith, 2010). An important component of this endeavour is decolonisation in heritage studies and conservation practices (e.g., Turunen, 2020; Ugwuanyi, 2021; Wei & Wang, 2022). At the ACHS Santiago 2022 conference, decolonisation was one of the topics that were extensively discussed (e.g., presentations by Dr. Vera-Simone Schulz, Aysegul Dinccag, Camila Malig Jedlicki, etc., and myself). What I want to continue to discuss in this blog, however, is not exactly the research and practices centred around postcolonialism and decolonisation that scholars and practitioners presented at the conference. It is the use of the English language and the associated Eurocentrism as well as the inclusion of other languages as decolonisation endeavours at the conference that I would like to reflect upon.
What strikes me the most at the conference is that not just English papers and presentations, but also Spanish and Portuguese papers and presentations were included. At one of the roundtables, English as the dominating language in academia and the impacts derived from this dominating position were debated as well. This was perhaps not the first conference that considered the use of different languages but was indeed the first conference that I attended that did so. I personally do not speak Spanish or Portuguese. In the few sessions that I attended which included Spanish or Portuguese presentations, I was not able to comprehend what was discussed. But the interactions between the presenters and the audience clearly showed that the discussions were stimulating and pleasant. Undoubtedly, the use of diverse languages at the conference allowed more scholars and practitioners, especially non-English speakers, to engage with the field and other colleagues. And this is definitely not the last time that the ACHS conferences consider other languages. Galway 2024 in Ireland uses both English and Irish for the conference theme. So does Wellington 2026 in New Zealand which uses English as well as Maori. I am looking forward to the continuation of the “interculturalities” at future conferences.
In fact, I am not an English native speaker myself. My first languages are Mandarin Chinese and the dialect of my hometown in Northern China. The process of learning English in my childhood and getting used to using academic English since I studied in English-speaking countries seemed endless and was indeed challenging. Now around the world, there are many people conducting interesting and meaningful heritage research and practices in different languages. Arguably, these research and practices are significant for decolonising heritage conservation precisely because of the diverse use of languages. Yet language barriers make these research and practices relatively regionalised and localised with limited influence. In this sense, it is necessary to have (a) universal language(s) to facilitate transcultural communications and collaborations, especially considering the number of languages that exist globally. In the meantime, it is recognised that the translation from one language to another usually loses certain subtleties, connotations, and details in the original language (Thøgersen, 2006). Using native languages for research and practices thus has irreplaceable advantages.
In other words, the prevalence of English has so far made substantial contributions to international communications and collaborations. Whereas it is also crucial to recognise the limitations of English as the only universal language currently. The limitations include but are not limited to the difficulty for certain groups to master English, the loss and distortion of certain meanings when translating different languages into English, undermining or overlooking the influence of those languages, and the continuation of colonialism and imperialism embedded in the spread of English until today.
Looking back at the Santiago 2022 conference, the inclusion of Spanish and Portuguese as the conference languages was a great attempt. It is encouraging to see that this attempt will be continued in future ACHS conferences. But beyond these attempts, it is worth exploring how to more fundamentally break through the limitations derived from English being the only universal language as well as the barriers between different languages. It is also worth exploring the use of diverse languages not only in conference scenarios but also more widely, particularly in publications.
References
Thøgersen, S. (2006). Approaching the field through written sources. In M. Heimer & S. Thøgersen (Eds.), Doing fieldwork in China (pp. 189-205). Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.
Turunen, J. (2020). Decolonising European minds through heritage. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 26(10), 1013-1028.
Waterton, E. (2005). Whose sense of place? Reconciling archaeological perspectives with community values: Cultural landscapes in England. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 11(4), 309-325.
Waterton, E., & Smith, L. (2010). The recognition and misrecognition of community heritage. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 16(1-2), 4-15.
Wei, R., & Wang, F. (2022). Is colonial heritage negative or not so much? Debating heritage discourses and selective interpretation of Kulangsu, China. Built Heritage, 6(21). Published online September 23, 2022. DOI:10.1186/s43238-022-00069-7.
Ugwuanyi, J. K. (2021).Time-space politics and heritagisation in Africa: Understanding where to begin decolonisation. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 27(4), 356-374.