TY - CHAP
T1 - Prejudice, Military Intelligence and Neoliberalism
T2 - Examining the Local Within Archaeology and Heritage Practices in Jordan
AU - Abu-Khafajah, Shatha
AU - Miqdadi, Riham Hussien
N1 - 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 that they had awarded financial support to seven projects submitted for the Cultural Heritage and Sustainable Development Programme in Jordan. The winning projects were to 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) shifted 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
Funding Information:
Professor Peter Stone of Newcastle University provided the much-needed encouragement to initiate the critical approach in this article back in 2007, when the first author 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 at 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.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - A particular theme dominates contemporary heritage projects in the neoliberal context of Jordan: sustainable development based on participatory approaches. Although these approaches are celebrated in academic and governmental circles, the history and the 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 the peripheral to the centre, and from background to foreground, of 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 based on participatory approaches. Although these approaches are celebrated in academic and governmental circles, the history and the 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 the peripheral to the centre, and from background to foreground, of 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 - Archaeology-based and heritage development projects
KW - Colonialism
KW - Neoliberalism
KW - Participatory approach
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U2 - 10.1007/978-3-031-07446-2_1
DO - 10.1007/978-3-031-07446-2_1
M3 - Chapter
AN - SCOPUS:85142036843
T3 - One World Archaeology
SP - 3
EP - 23
BT - One World Archaeology
PB - Springer Nature
ER -