In today’s world, there seems to be no corner of the world that has not been affected by globalization – for good and for bad. While the world becomes more hegemonized socially and culturally, local ...communities are fighting to preserve their way of life as part of their heritage. Travel and cultural institutions use this "uniqueness" to promote travel and tourism, and while this brings in revenue and exposure, cultural heritage sites that were preserved by virtue of their isolation are now being severely damaged and even destroyed. At the same time, there is a growing awareness that while this unique heritage is used to define a community, society or nation, it also can be a basis for conflict. The volume addresses a deeply political aspect of heritage preservation and management as it relates to human rights. Social and community advocates assert that heritage is necessary for the articulation and preservation of cultural identity. The display of heritage monuments and performance can be a strategy for asserting minority identity in the face of majority pressure – as well as a tool for resistance and the expression of difference. Conversely, the erasure of cultural expressions—such as buildings, monuments, language, religion, and social practices—is a powerful tool in warfare and political regulation. In the assault on human lives and political autonomy, the cultural history and values of a community are also attacked, destroying not only individuals but the very fabric of society. Is there a universal right to the free expression and preservation of cultural heritage, and if so, where is that right articulated and can it be protected? How is the notion of "heritage" used variously to unite and divide communities? Who defines cultural heritage and who should control stewardship and the benefits of cultural heritage?
"In the course of my research," writes D. Fairchild Ruggles, "I devoured Arabic agricultural manuals from the tenth through the fourteenth centuries. I love gardening, and in these texts I was able ...to enter the minds of agriculturalists and botanists of a thousand years ago who likewise believed it was important and interesting to record all the known ways of propagating olive trees, the various uses of rosemary, and how best to fertilize a garden bed." Western admirers have long seen the Islamic garden as an earthly reflection of the paradise said to await the faithful. However, such simplification, Ruggles contends, denies the sophistication and diversity of the art form.Islamic Gardens and Landscapesimmerses the reader in the world of the architects of the great gardens of the Islamic world, from medieval Morocco to contemporary India. Just as Islamic culture is historically dense, sophisticated, and complex, so too is the history of its built landscapes. Islamic gardens began from the practical need to organize the surrounding space of human civilization, tame nature, enhance the earth's yield, and create a legible map on which to distribute natural resources. Ruggles follows the evolution of these early farming efforts to their aristocratic apex in famous formal gardens of the Alhambra in Spain and the Taj Mahal in Agra. Whether in a humble city home or a royal courtyard, the garden has several defining characteristics, which Ruggles discusses. Most notable is an enclosed space divided into four equal parts surrounding a central design element. The traditional Islamic garden is inwardly focused, usually surrounded by buildings or in the form of a courtyard. Water provides a counterpoint to the portioned green sections. Ranging across poetry, court documents, agronomy manuals, and early garden representations, and richly illustrated with pictures and site plans,Islamic Gardens and Landscapesis a book of impressive scope sure to interest scholars and enthusiasts alike.
Heritage is a concept to which most people would assign a positive value. The preservation of material culture – objects of art and of daily use, architecture, landscape form – and intangible culture ...– performances of dance, music, theater, and ritual, as well as language and human memory – are generally regarded as a shared common good by which everyone benefits. Both personal and community identities are formed through such tangible objects and intangible cultural performances, and a formation of a strong identity would seem to be a fundamentally good thing. But heritage is also intertwined with identity and territory, where individuals and communities are often in competition or outright conflict. Conflicts may occur over issues of indigenous land and cultural property rights, or between ethnic minorities and dominant majorities disputing the right to define and manage the cultural heritage of the minority. At stake is the question of who defines cultural heritage and who should control stewardship and the benefits of cultural heritage.
Archaeological research has long focused on studying tangible artifacts to build a picture of the cultures it examines. Equally important to understanding a culture, however, are the intangible ...elements that become part of its heritage. In 2003, UNESCO adopted a convention specifically to protect intangible heritage, including the following: oral traditions and expressions, including language, performing arts (such as traditional music, dance, and theater), social practices, rituals, and festive events, knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe, and traditional craftsmanship. Since this convention was adopted, scholars and preservationists have struggled with how to best approach intangible heritage. This volume specifically focuses on embodied intangible heritage, or the human body as a vehicle for memory, movement, and sound. The contributors to this work examine ritual and artistic movement, theater, music, oral literature, as well as the role of the internet in cultural transmission. Globalization and particularly the internet, has a complex effect on the transmission of intangible heritage: while music, dance, and other expressions are now shared easily, the performances often lack context and may be shared with a group that does not fully understand what they are seeing or hearing. This volume draws on case studies from around the world to examine the problems and possibilities of implementing the new UNESCO convention. The findings in this volume will be vital to both professionals and academics in anthropology, archaeology, history, museum studies, architecture, and anyone else who deals with issues of cultural heritage and preservation.
Whereas reliance on official texts such as chronicles often leads modern historians to overlook women, the built works of female patrons can provide a valuable historical source because they stand ...publicly for female patrons who were themselves unseen. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine Damascus and Cairo without the visually prominent tombs and pious foundations of the otherwise invisible Fatimid and Ayyubid women. Among the latter was Shajar al-Durr, a Turkic concubine who rose from slavery to become the legitimate sultan of Egypt in 1250. Her short reign and subsequent marriage ended violently with her death in 1257, but in that space of time she made architectural innovations that ultimately inspired lasting changes in Cairo's urban fabric. Shajar al-Durr's impact as architectural patron was as pivotal as her political role: the tomb that she added to her husband's madrasa led to his permanent and highly visible presence in central Cairo, an innovation that was followed in the endowed complexes of the Mamluks. In her own more modest tomb, she chose not monumentality but iconography, representing herself pictorially in dazzling mosaic, a daring gesture in a world where female propriety meant invisibility.
On Location Ruggles, D. Fairchild
2011, 20111112, 2011-12-28
eBook
On Location: Heritage Cities and Sites merges the material and the social perspectives of preservation and historical interpretation in urban landscapes. The essays in this volume focus on the ...social life of historic cities and large-scale sites. They examine the ways that cities are dynamically changing as they are made and then remade by the people who inhabit or simply visit them, and concentrate on change, pluralism, and fragmentation. The strength of On Location: Heritage Cities and Sites is its comparative approach to both theory and grounded research. It includes an introductory essay that explains the heritage principle under study--the challenges of scale in the environment of a city or large complex--and its development as seen in the policy instruments of ICOMOS, UNESCO, and other major heritage organizations.The combination of wide-ranging case studies (including essays on North America, South America, Central America, the Middle East, and Europe) and the theoretical background make this volume an invaluable asset for researchers in archaeology, urban studies, art and architecture, cultural heritage, public policy, and tourism. D. Fairchild Ruggles is Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, with additional appointments to the School of Architecture, Program in Art History, Women's Studies Program, and Medieval Studies Program. She co-founded the Collaborative for Cultural Heritage and Museum Practices at the university. She wrote two award-winning books on Islamic gardens (2000 and 2008) and edited the collection, Women, Patronage, and Self-Representation in Islamic Societies (SUNY Press, 2000), and co-edited the award-winning Sites Unseen: Landscape and Vision (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007). In the field of heritage, she co-edited Cultural Heritage and Human Rights (Springer, 2007) and Intangible Heritage Embodied (Springer 2009) with Helaine Silverman. With colleagues in the Department of Landscape Architecture, she co-authored two heritage management reports for Champaner-Pavagadh (India), a site which received UNESCO world heritage designation in 2004.
Ideologizing the Past Ruggles, D. Fairchild
International journal of Middle East studies,
08/2013, Letnik:
45, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Because the ideological landscape of the present does not match the ideological configurations of the past, the past and present of national monuments often collide in ways that complicate their ...utility as “patrimony” and “heritage.” In Spain, Islamic monuments such as the Alhambra Palace (built in Granada by Nasrid monarchs in the 13th and 14th centuries) exist in the present as popular tourism sites and points of entry for an imaginative encounter with the Iberian peninsula's Andalusi past. The past evoked is a recognized part of Iberian history and yet, as patrimony, it is simultaneously admired as something that distinguishes Spain from the rest of Europe and resisted as something belonging to an exiled people who left long ago for places like Fez and Istanbul. Under Franco's dictatorship (1947–73), Spain was adamantly Catholic and, despite a small wave of conversions to Islam and the recent immigration of Muslims from northern Africa, it remains predominantly Christian.
The Rajput princes of South Asia in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries built beautiful palaces with gardens and commissioned manuscript paintings that rivaled those of their Mughal ...contemporaries. Although the Hindu Rajputs and Muslim Mughals were variously allies and foes, neither political relations nor religious faith prevented artistic exchanges from occurring between them. Just as the Mughals embraced and internalized Indic forms such as the chhatri, the Rajputs likewise appropriated forms such as the four-part garden known as the chahar bagh, not as a direct transfer but a reworking and renegotiation of form and expression. While the Rajput chahar baghs are the only ones to have attracted the attention of historians, most likely because they fit neatly into a recognized architectural type, Rajput patrons also built other kinds of gardens with rectilinear and curving parterres, deep pools with "floating" pavilions, lotus gardens, and orchards resembling sacred groves. Some of these appear in Mughal sites too, typically inserted into a chahar bagh. The essay looks at how typological forms were shared and adapted by the Mughals and Rajputs, and asks what such forms may have meant to their respective patrons. It concludes by proposing that the definition of art historical fields-divided along religious lines between Islam and Hinduism-often impedes such inquiries.
Convivencia is a term that suggests that by virtue of living in close proximity the people of the Iberian Peninsula enjoyed cultural diversity between the arrival of Islam in 711 and the expulsions ...in 1492. Ruggles argues that convivencia should be understood in distinctly gendered terms in which the concept of race or ethnic was used by men in order to link themselves with the ancestors who gave them their legitimacy as rulers, yet was in actual practice countered by the presence of women whose ethnic difference introduced alternative cultural habits.
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