Word from the Chair
What is a Landscape Biography? What do you look at if you want to carry out a Heritage Impact Assessment? And why should we care about heritage anyway?
Last week we had the pleasure of hosting Professor Pieter ter Keurs, Leiden Professor of Museums, Collections, and Society, at our International Studies staff meeting. He came to tell us about the progress being made with the Centre for Global Heritage and Development, for which he is the Academic Director. The Centre is a collaborative venture between the universities of Leiden, Delft, and Rotterdam (Erasmus), otherwise known as LDE. The Centre intends to locate in The Hague as part of our campus, a development that could open up interesting possibilities for collaboration.
We can think of heritage as those features of a culture that have particular meaning for that culture’s historical identity and self-understanding. Heritage can be material, in the form of buildings or objects, but also immaterial, in the form of language or sound. Pieter’s position combines both the Faculties of Archeology and Humanities, and the links with the Humanities are plainly obvious. From the perspective of International Studies, History covers where this heritage comes from, Cultural Studies and Linguistics how that heritage still influences today’s societies, Economics the wealth that enabled the heritage to take the form it did and that it still represents, and Politics the recognition of some heritage instead of others.
This last point is of course the main issue of today. No heritage is politically (or culturally) neutral – it always represents a particular understanding of what is important, and by default what is then considered not important, in the making of history. As a result, wealth and power have determined much of what has been considered to be heritage, and thus preserved as heritage, over time. This situation has rightly been challenged for its distorted, limited, and uncritical image of the nation’s past and how that has flowed through into influencing the present. The history of slavery is obviously central here.
Recently I attended a gathering at the Oostkerk in Middelburg on the legacies of slavery, its place in the history of Zeeland and the need to address it more in the public spaces of the town. At the moment there is only a small, rather non-descript monument in a square, next to a fountain that has become a popular target for students with bottles of bubble bath. The buildings from the period when Middelburg was the No. 2 trading city in the Netherlands make no mention of their connection to the slave trade. The local museums are not much better either. But over the past 18 months the rise of the BLM movement in the US and its connection with popular critiques of colonialism in Europe has generated a response in this corner of the Netherlands. So where to go from here? There are no statues for the statue-smashers to tear down (there is one of Michiel de Ruyter in nearby Vlissingen, but no-one had that in their sights). Better to start with education. What kind of heritage is being presented, and does it sufficiently reflect the diversity of Dutch society in the 2020s? Who decides what heritage is, and how can we best deal with the inequalities and hierarchies of power that the orthodox view represents? Why not deal head-on with what is in the archives, as part of a process of national self-renewal? All valid questions, with no easy answers. Questions equally valid for all former colonial powers, not just the Netherlands.
We look forward to the arrival of the Centre for Global Heritage and Development in The Hague – it will provide a perfect stimulus for further reflecting on the society and urban landscape around us, and what its heritage really is.