During the last decade the concept of heritage has received considerable attention, both from policymakers and from scholars. Initiatives for the protection of various kinds of heritage abound, and the body of scholarly literature is growing rapidly.
In the Maghreb “heritage” also has been a focus of interest, in politics, museum management, tourism, as well as in research. It is striking to see how many new museums of both “traditional” and cotemporary art have recently been inaugurated. A fine example is the Musée Berbère in the Jardin Majorelle in Marrakech. Publication of luxurious books on arts and crafts, often illustrated by art works from private collections, form part of this trend. On the economic side we witness an increase in the marketing of arts and crafts (e.g. Taylor 1991) and the establishment of local auction houses. Recently Morocco has issued new legislation on its heritage, which has been commercially published in a separate volume (Mehdaoui 2011).
This workshop focuses on the scholarly analysis of heritage politics, policies, and studies in the Maghreb, critically questioning these trends in order to better understand them. Some work has been done on the invention of cultural heritage during the colonial period. Both French and Spanish administrators and scholars were involved in collecting, protecting, educating, and studying in the fields of archaeology, monuments, manuscripts, and arts and crafts.After independence manuscript collecting and preservation became one of the prime focuses of national heritage policies. The appropriation and control of private and waqf libraries was also a means to express power, as the history of the national and royal libraries in Morocco demonstrate. These library politics have hardly received any critical scholarly attention. In recent years various new initiatives have been taken in different fields, such as music and performing arts (e.g. Le Festival de Fès des Musiques Sacrées du Monde; the Gnawa performing globally, cf. Kapchan 2007), monuments , crafts, especially texiles and carpets (e.g. Chikhaoui 2002), and the cultural heritage of the Berbers/Imazighen (in Morocco promoted by IRCAM; cf. Jlok 2007). Increasingly modern and contemporary art is being elevated to the status of national heritage. François Pouillon has studied this phenomenon extensively for painting in Algeria (cf. Pouillon 1992, 1997, 2002), and Hunsinger has analysed developments in contemporary art in Morocco (2007).
The attention for heritages of various sorts is intimately linked to the politics of colonial, nationalist, regionalist, and ethnic identities, in the framework of the modern nation state. Stating that heritage is an invention to be deconstructed is a truism unfortunately hard to avoid. One of the issues to explore is how people, policymakers, activists and scholars, relate the notion of heritage to memory (cf. Waugh 2005). The economic dimension of heritage includes the domains of tourism and the production of crafts, both for national and foreign markets, which have long tradition in the Maghreb. The rise of some cities as privileged heritage sites cum tourist destinations, such as Marrakech (cf. Escher & Petermann 2009) or Fez, could be he subject of case studies. The presence of rather considerable communities of Maghribi origin in Western Europe, who increasingly show interest in their “heritage”, adds a dynamic transnational dimension (cf. Buskens 2011). The shared historical past, as well as the many differences between the present nation states, make the Maghreb into a good unit for comparative analysis.
This workshop intends to bring together scholars working on the Maghreb, with an emphasis on Morocco, for formal and informal exchanges in order to explore possibilities for amore structured programme in this field under the aegis of the Centre Jacques Berque in Rabat (CJB) and Leiden University Centre for the Study of Islam and Society (LUCIS). We also would like to build on previously created expertise in this field by Professor Nira Wickramasinghe of Leiden University, who together with Michael Herzfeld organised a summer programme “Heritage Conserved and Contested: Asian and European Perspectives” at the international Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden (IIAS) in 2011, and Dr Annette Schmidt at the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden (RMV), who has been involved in several projects on heritage preservation in West-Africa for several decades. Both have been invited to critically comment upon the presentations from their own experiences in order to place the Maghreb in a larger framework and to start a debate. This initial meeting in Leiden might be followed by another meeting in Rabat and eventually lead to a publication.
In the morning we will have a limited number of short case studies as specific materials to think with. The afternoon will be reserved for an open debate. The general exchange of ideas will be introduced by the two discussants who will offer us their extensive expertise on heritage studies on areas other than the Maghreb. Some of the participants who did not have the opportunity to present their work in the morming will be invited to give a brief introduction, not exceeding five minutes, of their own interest and questions. The working languages will be both French and English.
References :
Amahan, Ali & Cambazard-Amahan, Catherine; 1999, Arrêts sur sites. Le patrimoine culturel marocain, Editions Le Fennec Van Beek, Wouter & Schmidt, Annette (eds.) ; 2012, African Hosts and Their Guests. Cultural Dynamics of Tourism, Woodbridge & Rochester, NY : James Currey Buskens, Léon; 2011, Transacties in de levensloop van Marokkaanse sieraden in: Mols, Luitgard (ed.), De kracht van zilver. Etnische sieraden uit de collectie Smith-Hutschenruyter, Brussel: Mercatorfonds/ Rotterdam: Wereldmuseum, pp. 72-79 Cauvin-Verner, Corinne; 2007, Au désert. Une anthropologie du tourisme dans le Sud marocain, Paris: L’Harmattan Chikhaoui, Saïd; 2002, Politiques publiques et société. Essai d’analyse de l’impact des politiques publiques sur l’artisanat au Maroc, Rabat: Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines, Université Mohammed V Escher, Anton & Petermann, Sandra; 2009, Tausendundein Fremder im Paradies? Ausländer in der Medina von Marrakech, Würzburg: Ergon Verlag Gaultier-Kurhan, Caroline (ed.); 2003, Patrimoine culturel marocain, Maisonneuve et Larose Gutron, Clémentine; 2010, L’archéologie en Tunisie (XIXe-XXe siècles). Jeux généalogiques sur l’Antiquité, Paris : Karthala Hunsinger, Wolfgang; 2008, Zeitgenössische Werke marokkanischer Künstler. Traditionsverankerung und emanzipatorische Bestrebungen, Weimar: Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften Irbouh, Hamid; 2005, Art in the Service of Colonialism. French Art Education in Morocco 1912-1956, London & New York: Tauris Academic Studies Jlok, Mustapha (ed.); 2007, Patrimoine et musées au Maroc, Rabat : IRCAM Kapchan, Deborah; 2007, Traveling Spirit Masters. Moroccan Gnawa Trance Music in the Global Marketplace, Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press Krätli, Graziano; 2011, Camel to Kilobytes: Preserving the Cultural Heritage of the Trans-Saharan Book Trade, in: Krätli, Graziano & Lydon, Ghislaine (eds.), The Trans-Saharan Book Trade. Manuscript Culture, Arabic Literacy and Intellectual History in Muslim Africa, Leiden & Boston: Brill, pp. 319-358 Maffi, Irene & Daher, Rami (eds); 2013, The Politics and Practices of Cultural Heritage in the Middle East. Positioning the Material Past in Contemporary Societies, London: I.B. Tauris Pieprzak, Katarzyna; 2010, Imagined Museums. Art and Modernity in Postcolonial Morocco, Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press Mehdaoui, Abdelouahed; 2011, Guide du patrimoine culturel et naturel au Maroc, Tanger: Editions Maraya (with accompanying CD ROM) Pouillon, François; 1992, Exotisme, modernisme, identité: la société algérienne en peinture in : Basfao, Kacem (ed.), Le Maghreb, l'Europe et la France, Paris : Editions du CNRS, pp. 209-224 Pouillon, François; 1997, Les deux vies d’Etienne Dinet, peintre en Islam, Paris : Editions Balland Pouillon, François; 2002, 150 Years of Algerian Painting. Relevance for Understanding the Postcolonial Situation, In: French Politics, Culture and Society 20(2002) no. 2, pp. 141-158 Pouillon, François & Vatin, Jean-Claude (eds.); 2011, Après l’orientalisme. L’Orient créé par l’Orient, Paris: Karthala Scheele, Judith; 2011, Coming to Terms with Tradition: Manuscript Conservation in Contemporary Algeria, in: Krätli, Graziano & Lydon, Ghislaine (eds.) The Trans-Saharan Book Trade. Manuscript Culture, Arabic Literacy and Intellectual History in Muslim Africa, Leiden & Boston: Brill, pp. 291-318 Taylor, Alf; 1991, A Treasure Hunter’s Guide to Morocco. A Common Sense Approach to Sightseeing, Shopping and Etiquette in the Land Known as Maghreb Al-Aqsa: Islam’s Far West, Tucson, Arizona: The American Museum of Moroccan Art Waugh, Earle H.; 2005, Memory, Music, and Religion. Morocco’s Mystical Chanters, Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press Wickramasinghe, Nira; 2011, Authenticity and Hybridity: Scrutinising Heritage, in: The Newsletter no.57(2011), pp. 20- 21 Wickramasinghe, Nira; 2012, Producing the Present: History as Post-War Heritage in Patriotic Sri Lanka, Colombo: International Centre for Ethnic Studies
Programme
Jeudi 2 mai 2013
Arrivée à Leiden Diner d’accueil au Faculty Club, Rapenburg
Vendredi 3 mai 2013
9.00 h: Accueil et café 9.15 h: Introduction par Léon Buskens et Baudouin Dupret 9.30 h: Présentation 1 10.00 h : Présentation 2 10.30 h : Présentation 3 11.00 h : Pause café 11.30 h : Présentation 4 12.30 h : Présentation 5 13.00 - 14.30 h : Déjeuner au Faculty Club 14.30 h : Introduction du débat par Nira Wickramasinghe et Annette Schmidt 15.15 h : Débat général 16.00 h : Pause café 16.30 h : Débat général, suite 18.00 h : clôture 18.00 h : Cocktail suivi par diner de clôture
