TY - JOUR
T1 - Prejudice, military intelligence, and neoliberalism
T2 - examining the local within archaeology and heritage practices in Jordan
AU - Abu-Khafajah, Shatha
AU - Miqdadi, Riham
N1 - Funding Information:
Professor Peter Stone in Newcastle University provided the much-needed encouragement to initiate the critical approach in this article back in 2007 when Shatha was his PhD student. Professor Zeyad Al-Salameen and Dr Aahed Khliefat recently read and commented on earlier versions of this article. Our friends and colleagues in the Hashemite University and the United Arab Emirates University contributed to this article through supportive structured and casual conversations. The CBRL Prize for Best Article Committee and the editor of Contemporary Levant provided intense revisions of the ideas and the language of this article. We are grateful to all of them.
Funding Information:
A particular theme dominates the contemporary scene of archaeology and heritage in the neoliberal context of Jordan today: sustainable development on the basis of local participation. The United Kingdom’s Art and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Newton-Khalidi fund announced in February 2019 awarded financial support to seven projects submitted for the Cultural Heritage and Sustainable Development Programme in Jordan. The winning projects will establish cooperation between British and Jordanian universities and scholars in an interdisciplinary approach to archaeology and heritage sites in order to deliver sustainable development to related communities’ lives. Similarly, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) took a shift from its 1980s tourism-oriented Cultural Resource Management Programme (CRM) when, in 2014, it established its community-based project entitled ‘the Sustainable Cultural Heritage through Engagement of Local Communities Project (SCHEP)’. The four-year project (recently extended until 2022), implemented by the American Center of Oriental Research (ACOR), has operated on nine different sites in different parts of Jordan with an aim to preserve, manage and promote ‘cultural heritage resources … through job creation and capacity building for communities around archaeological sites’ (ACOR ). Remarkably, literature and public lectures, often presented by foreign archaeological teams to explain their work, have increasingly embraced the rhetoric of sustainable development on the basis of local participation. As part of their projects, the teams turn archaeological and heritage sites into development projects where they engage with selected locals, educate them, and ultimately empower them. Project literatures and presentations are laden with images and videos documenting the engagement of locals’ with the teams and sites. Sometimes locals attend these lectures to speak live to the audience about their ‘empowering’ experiences in the projects.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019, © 2019 Council for British Research in the Levant.
PY - 2019/7/3
Y1 - 2019/7/3
N2 - A particular theme dominates contemporary heritage projects in the neoliberal context of Jordan: sustainable development on the basis of participatory approaches. Although these approaches are celebrated in academic and governmental circles, the history and power dynamics within which they operate remain underexplored. We aim to establish a theoretical framework that examines why and how local communities in the Arab region shifted from periphery to centre, and from background to foreground, in the field of archaeology and heritage. We situate archaeology and heritage within two seemingly different contexts, colonialism and neoliberalism, that have governed the relationship between the West and the Arab region. As we contrast colonialist exclusionary policies with the inclusivity promoted by neoliberal policies in archaeological and heritage projects in Jordan, we argue that despite the obvious differences between the two, they both managed to make substantial shifts in the perception of and attitudes toward archaeology and heritage. In spite of participatory paradigms, the shifts seem to have always come ‘from the outside’, operating on sites and peoples alike.
AB - A particular theme dominates contemporary heritage projects in the neoliberal context of Jordan: sustainable development on the basis of participatory approaches. Although these approaches are celebrated in academic and governmental circles, the history and power dynamics within which they operate remain underexplored. We aim to establish a theoretical framework that examines why and how local communities in the Arab region shifted from periphery to centre, and from background to foreground, in the field of archaeology and heritage. We situate archaeology and heritage within two seemingly different contexts, colonialism and neoliberalism, that have governed the relationship between the West and the Arab region. As we contrast colonialist exclusionary policies with the inclusivity promoted by neoliberal policies in archaeological and heritage projects in Jordan, we argue that despite the obvious differences between the two, they both managed to make substantial shifts in the perception of and attitudes toward archaeology and heritage. In spite of participatory paradigms, the shifts seem to have always come ‘from the outside’, operating on sites and peoples alike.
KW - Colonialism
KW - archaeology-based and heritage-development projects
KW - neoliberalism
KW - participatory approach
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U2 - 10.1080/20581831.2019.1667667
DO - 10.1080/20581831.2019.1667667
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85081904637
SN - 2058-1831
VL - 4
SP - 92
EP - 106
JO - Contemporary Levant
JF - Contemporary Levant
IS - 2
ER -