On her book A Future in Ruins: UNESCO, World Heritage, and the Dream of Peace
Cover Interview of February 06, 2019
The wide angle
While it is true that UNESCO status bestows a level of
international prestige upon ancient sites, for archaeology as a discipline the
organization means very little. World Heritage might offer the only truly
global platform to showcase the world’s most famous archaeological sites to a
global public, but it has had minimal impact upon the history of our
discipline. I wanted to understand why. I soon discovered that archaeologists,
like many other scholars, had no great admiration for the organization and are
more likely to summarily dismiss, misrepresent, or criticize UNESCO and its
World Heritage List than to acknowledge its achievements. Educating ourselves
about UNESCO then seemed to me the first step, and this project began as an
exercise to understand the workings of World Heritage. It was nothing short of
a discovery to find that the discipline of archaeology was originally part of
UNESCO’s early intellectual momentum and had even extended back to its
illustrious predecessor, the League of Nations. And while there was an
archaeological component to UNESCO’s famous Nubian Monuments Campaign to save and
study the sites and temples in Egypt and Sudan scheduled for submersion with
the completion of the Aswan Dam, this was short-lived.
Many critical accounts and analyses of UNESCO have been
written, coupled with official histories and narratives by well-placed
insiders. Together they tell the story of an imperfect organization that began
with midcentury optimism but rapidly devolved from an assembly of statesmen to
a tyranny of states. Originally a globally oriented organization, UNESCO was
transformed into an intergovernmental agency, a mere shadow of its former
ambition for a world peace and mutual understanding between peoples. The overreach
of powerful governments has come to permeate all aspects of its functioning.
This is reflected in the workings of many of its high-profile programs,
including World Heritage — the program that seeks to identify, protect, and
preserve outstanding cultural and natural heritage sites around the world.
While there are considerable problems, as this book reveals, they should not
detract from UNESCO’s achievements in creating a planetary concern for heritage
preservation and its ability, however circumscribed, to exert pressure on its member
states to honor the treaties that they have ratified.
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The wide angle
While it is true that UNESCO status bestows a level of international prestige upon ancient sites, for archaeology as a discipline the organization means very little. World Heritage might offer the only truly global platform to showcase the world’s most famous archaeological sites to a global public, but it has had minimal impact upon the history of our discipline. I wanted to understand why. I soon discovered that archaeologists, like many other scholars, had no great admiration for the organization and are more likely to summarily dismiss, misrepresent, or criticize UNESCO and its World Heritage List than to acknowledge its achievements. Educating ourselves about UNESCO then seemed to me the first step, and this project began as an exercise to understand the workings of World Heritage. It was nothing short of a discovery to find that the discipline of archaeology was originally part of UNESCO’s early intellectual momentum and had even extended back to its illustrious predecessor, the League of Nations. And while there was an archaeological component to UNESCO’s famous Nubian Monuments Campaign to save and study the sites and temples in Egypt and Sudan scheduled for submersion with the completion of the Aswan Dam, this was short-lived.
Many critical accounts and analyses of UNESCO have been written, coupled with official histories and narratives by well-placed insiders. Together they tell the story of an imperfect organization that began with midcentury optimism but rapidly devolved from an assembly of statesmen to a tyranny of states. Originally a globally oriented organization, UNESCO was transformed into an intergovernmental agency, a mere shadow of its former ambition for a world peace and mutual understanding between peoples. The overreach of powerful governments has come to permeate all aspects of its functioning. This is reflected in the workings of many of its high-profile programs, including World Heritage — the program that seeks to identify, protect, and preserve outstanding cultural and natural heritage sites around the world. While there are considerable problems, as this book reveals, they should not detract from UNESCO’s achievements in creating a planetary concern for heritage preservation and its ability, however circumscribed, to exert pressure on its member states to honor the treaties that they have ratified.