Download - German Historical Institute London

Local Histories, Global Heritage, Local Heritage, Global Histories
Museum’s antiquities collection against the backdrop of an Anglo-
French competition for the acquisition of antiquities.
Due to the inability of the keynote speaker Monica Juneja
(Heidelberg) to deliver her talk in person, the paper was read out.
Juneja drew out the tension between religion and aesthetics, and the
clear separation of the two, that goes back to colonial engagements
with India’s tradition and underlies the postcolonial definition of
heritage as it is articulated in public discourse in India today.
The second day of the conference began with a session on
‘Colonial Heritage and Metropolitan Cultures’, which was chaired by
Daniel Sherman (North Carolina/Chapel Hill). All three papers
engaged with colonialism and heritage in metropolitan cultures.
Robert Aldrich stressed the ways in which indigenous heritage
played a role in French colonies and how this heritage made its way
into the French patrimoine. Nathan Fisher (Oxford) focused on
domestic debates as well as the specific climate of internationalism in
the aftermath of the First World War to explain Britain’s archaeological
policy in the Near East. Daniel Steinbach (Dublin) dwelt on the
construction of a past in Germany’s African colonies by means of a
Heimat history, which enabled German colonialists to inscribe the
history of the colonies into the history of the German nation.
The session ‘Travelling Images, Objects, Sites: Changing Mean -
ings and Locations of Heritage’, chaired by Deborah Sutton (Lan -
caster), was dedicated to the essential mobility and changeability of
images and objects in the construction of heritage. Thus Marieke
Bloembergen and Martijn Eickhoff (KITLV, Leiden/NIOD, Amster -
dam) drew on the example of the Buddhist temple site of Borobudur
in Java to show how such sites produce and disseminate knowledge
that then leads to the production of a large number of artistic objects,
and finally to the growth of international art collections centred on
the site. The travels of these objects reveal how academic, trade, and
tourist networks in the nineteenth century started to develop and
interact from local to global levels and vice versa. Hyung Il Pai
(California, Santa Barbara) developed the theme of moving objects
and images for the tourist trade for the construction of a past that
continues to this day. Arne Segelke (Hamburg) used the case of the
Gal Vihara in Sri Lanka to show that the multiple and changing readings
of the site included, in turn, a historical, an aesthetic, a national,
and a religious significance.
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