The Politics of Cultural Heritage in the Middle East

This seminar looks at the longstanding and ongoing instrumentalization of cultural heritage in the politics of the Middle East.

In political parlance, cultural heritage remains an elastic term encompassing not just antiquity but various materialities of social custom, religion, tradition and folklore often reinvented and promoted by the state for various reasons – be it the legitimisation of the state, the creation of ‘authentic’ expressions of the nation, or to promote tourism. Beyond these top-down processes, cultural heritage has also been a site of political and economic contestation between various institutional and non-institutional actors over the meaning, purpose and utility of cultural heritage. This seminar examines these dynamics in a diverse range of contexts in the contemporary Middle East. 

Programme 

10:30-10:45 Introductions
10:45-12:00

Tobias Richter (ToRS, University of Copenhagen)
Heritagewashing – two case studies from Turkey and Saudi Arabia

Thomas Brandt Fibiger (Aarhus University)
Heritage and (non)sectarian identity making in Bahrain. The National
Museum, shrines and the 2011 uprising
12:00-12:20 Break 
12:20-13:30

Christine Aster Crone (ToRS, University of Copenhagen)
Reconstructing Baathist Syria: the restoration of Aleppo’s cultural
heritage in the media

Mehiyar Kathem (University College London)
Liberation and the politics of cultural heritage in Iraq