Culture and Perspective at Times of Crisis: State Structures, Private Initiative and the Public Character of Heritage

Introduction

Sophia Antoniadou, Giorgos Vavouranakis, Ioannis Poulios and Pavlina Raouzaiou

Do you care about the past? Do you want to be a part of what we call culture heritage? Does archaeology matter to anyone else but archaeologists and culture heritage professionals? This book reappraises the place of archaeological and other culture heritage matters in contemporary society through the evaluation of old methods, the questioning of established practices and the critical exploration of new domains in this research area. In so doing, the essays of the book touch upon many overlapping fields, such as culture heritage management, museum studies and heritage, social media and heritage, entrepreneurship and heritage, and the press and heritage. The common theme addressed here is the active involvement, both physical and digital, of the public in the culture heritage process.

In recent years, this subject area has seen a proliferation of published texts aimed primarily at the academic market, particularly in the UK and the USA (see, for example, for the last decade alone: Skeates 2000; Carman 2002; Howard 2003; Merriman 2004; Smith 2004; Carman 2005; Mathers et al. 2005; Hunter and Ralston 2006; Smith 2006; Colwell-Chantonaphonh and Ferguson 2008; Fairclough et al. 2008; Naffé et al. 2008; Rubertone 2008; Smith and Waterton 2009; Sørensen and Carman 2009; Benton 2010; Harrison 2010; Messenger and Smith 2010; Smith et al. 2010; West 2010). This book investigates the diversity of these matters, with a focus on Greece and Cyprus during the turbulent years of the still pending government-debt crisis. At the same time, it draws upon international examples of principles, practices and stakeholder roles in public archaeology and culture heritage.

The common starting premise of all papers is the fact that the past is gone and that our knowledge of it inevitably starts as vague. It becomes concrete and actual when it is mediated through heritage, which is nothing other than the material (and immaterial) configuration of the past today through its remains. Heritage is inextricably linked with the sense of inheritance, which promotes the idea that the present has a particular ‘duty’ to the past and its monuments. This duty hinges, on the one hand, upon the reception and reverence accorded to what has been passed on and, on the other hand, upon the sustainability of this inheritance, its effective passing on to future generations (Smith 2006, 19).

This sense of inheritance of the past for the present and the future is rooted in the so-called ‘authorised heritage discourse’ (Smith 2006), developed in the Western world and then introduced to – and in many cases imposed on – the non-Western world. In the context of the authorised heritage discourse, the ultimate aim of conservation is to protect the monuments, which are considered and listed as belonging to the past, from the cultural and social processes of the present for the sake of the future generations. To this end, the authority in the conservation process is the hands of the national heritage authorities, the so-called ‘experts’, while the public is a rather abstract, faceless group that needs to be educated, trained and involved in the conservation process by the heritage authorities.

There has been an attempt to question some of the aspects of the authorised heritage discourse through the increasing inclusion of a wide range of heritage expressions, stakeholders and values as promoted by values-based management (de la Torre et al. 2005; Labadi 2013) and illustrated, for example, in the Nara Document of Authenticity (Larsen 1994) and more recently in the Nara+20 Document (ICOMOS Japan 2014). Notwithstanding the significance of international legislation, critical voices have pointed out that the core of the authorised heritage discourse has yet to be really challenged (Poulios 2015). Be that as it may, the questioning of the authorised heritage discourse has allowed the emergence of a new definition of conservation and heritage theory and practice, which hinges upon a set of different key issues: who can speak for the past? Who can decide and who can take part in the real emotional and cultural work that the past achieves as heritage for both individuals and communities? Living in times when wide public active participation in the safeguarding and reproduction of heritage is frequently taken for granted, what is the role of the specialists? What is the role of states and other institutions in the archaeology, conservation and other heritage processes, given the progressively larger role both demanded and played by the private sector in heritage management?

The volume focuses largely on Greece, with additional reference to Cyprus and the international context of heritage management. Greece is a special case and, as such, it may be of interest and concern to a wider conservation audience. Ancient Greek culture still occupies a prominent place in the foundations of Western civilisation and, as a result, Greek archaeological heritage attracts worldwide attention. The latter accentuates the international significance of the Greek heritage discourse. In addition, and more importantly, it also constitutes a challenge to the present discussion on the definition and role of stakeholders in relation to that of the local communities, as even the most distanced tourist is considered to be a potential active prosumer – and not a passive consumer – of Greek heritage in its entity, comprising archaeological sites, museums, folkloric dances, food and wine.

The global dimension of Greek heritage is in stark contrast to the dominant policies in Greece. Since its formation in the 1830s, the Greek State has been following – notwithstanding individual exceptions – a state-controlled and top-down model of heritage conservation and management, and also of tourism development that focuses on the preservation and promotion of monuments and places the authority in the hands of state administration, mostly the Ministry of Culture. Coupled with a weak social contract, this model usually alienates the local communities from their own heritage. This authorised heritage discourse model perpetuates the popular perception of antiquities as ‘heterotopias’, that is, places that remain outside daily life, with the almost sole function of fuelling Greek national pride within the collective imagination (see Vavouranakis, this volume).

The dominance of the authorised heritage discourse in Greece usually shifts attention away from several aspects of heritage management that have been operating outside the tight grip of the state, if not exactly in private sector terms, for a long time outside. One striking such example is provided by the monastic communities of the Byzantine and post-Byzantine sites of Athos and Meteora, both UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The monasteries of Mount Athos are managed by an independent council, whose members include state and local community representatives, as well as academics (Alexopoulos 2013). Since both the state and the Orthodox Church of Greece co-own the monasteries, their preservation has frequently been tackled on private terms and through programmatic contracts between these two major stakeholders, yet the state retains the supervision of these projects. At Meteora, the social and economic power that the monastic communities gain from their involvement in the tourism industry has allowed them to construct a series of unauthorised buildings in the zone A of the World Heritage Site, with a serious impact on the authenticity of the same World Heritage Site (Poulios 2014). The activity of the said monastic communities moves beyond the authorised heritage discourse and falls within the community-led living heritage approach, developed on an international level by the International Centre of the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM) (Stovel et al. 2005; De Caro and Wijesuriya 2012).

A second example of non-state-driven practices in Greece is provided by rescue excavations. The ratification of European legislation and particularly of the European Convention for the Protection of the Archaeological Heritage (the ‘Valetta Convention’: Council of Europe 1992) resulted in the development of a large pool of contract archaeologists who have been undertaking a considerable part of archaeological works in Greece ever since, while the Ministry of Culture has retained a progressively lessening degree of supervision. Greek archaeological resource management, then, should be described as divided between a dominant, rigid and usually dated authorised heritage discourse, and a subordinate, but long-standing and frequently unregulated (if not uncharted) field of privatised practice.

The pending government debt crisis has opened wide the gap between state and private heritage management since late 2008, when the Greek government started imposing austerity measures throughout the public sector. The subsequent resort to the financial support of the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank in April 2010 resulted in the close monitoring of the Greek government’s fiscal policy and of the implementation of very strict austerity measures. The latter hit the Ministry of Culture hard, with severe budget cuts, forced staff retirements and the shrinking of organisational plans. The supervision of archaeological works loosened, with fast-track procedures permitted in cases of development works, and allowing developers to hire their own archaeological personnel.

In tourism, the state cannot adjust its product to the changing trends of the industry, and even lags behind in adapting its legislation, while the role of the private sector has been increasing: infrastructures directly related to tourism, such as ports and airports, are being privatised, alternative tourist products – such as medical tourism, religious tourism, therapeutic tourism and ecotourism – are operated by private agents, and a large part of society, almost everyone in fact, can potentially be an interpreter and seek a role in the tourism industry. At the same time, major monopolies of gigantic tour operators have taken over the lucrative tourist market and control the tourist product globally, while disenfranchising their destinations and paying no dues. Therefore, the crisis should not only be seen as a factor that leads to severe and even dramatic cuts but, more importantly, as

a phenomenon that is bending and shaping mentalities, structures and practices in the heritage and the tourism sector. The established Classicist stereotype, which has operated in the context of an ‘authorised heritage discourse’, which has dominated the tourism and heritage sector throughout the history of Greece and which has managed to survive and thrive in spite of the strong changes and challenges that have taken place over time, is now challenged for the first time and tends to be gradually replaced by a new framework of conceiving, protecting and experiencing heritage – an ‘authorised crisis discourse’. (Touloupa and Poulios 2015)

Evidently, Greece is a distinct and didactic case, due to the global appeal of its antiquities, as well as the excessively strained relationship between state agencies and private practices. The pending crisis has operated as a magnifying glass for all features of Greek heritage management. It has brought controversies and shortcomings to the fore and created additional challenges that demanded immediate attention. At the same time, the traditional investment of Greek heritage with a sacral national aura has minimised discussion on heritage issues until recently, while publications on the effects of the global crisis upon heritage have not treated the Greek case in adequate detail (e.g. Schlanger and Aitchison 2010; Magliacani 2015), despite notable exceptions (Howery 2013, including responses; Korka 2014; Angouri et al. 2017).

Furthermore, and given that the crisis is not only a Greek but a global issue, the discussion in the present book of the authorised crisis discourse, wherever such a discourse might lead, may be of relevance also outside Greece. Lessons from the Greek experience, despite certain peculiarities of the local context, could potentially help various heritage authorities and organisations in different parts of the world (from both ‘non-Western’ and ‘Western’ countries) to deal with the ongoing crisis – or even prepare themselves for a crisis to come. A series of directly related questions include

•the downgrading and shrinking of state structures, that is, the dominant mechanisms on heritage management for decades and even centuries;

•the upgrading and expansion of the role of the private initiative towards the covering of the gap created by the state insufficiency; and

•suggestions on how synergies developed between the state structures and private initiatives can guarantee the public character of heritage in terms of heritage ownership as well as access.

The chapters of the present book address these questions in connection with a wide range of topics within the broader spectrum of conservation theory and practice, such as: renewed definitions of the notion of the ‘public’; digital media and their new type of public; the changing role of museums in the current socioeconomic environment; policy planning and implementation; legislation; the role of non-governmental and non-profit agencies; heritage and entrepreneurship, especially in the tourism sector; and development and energy infrastructures in proximity to historic environments.

All the chapters engage the aforementioned sense of duty to the past and its monuments critically; they try to encourage the reader’s thinking forward towards new directions for future academic and professional work. They attempt to further open up the field of public archaeology and culture heritage, and propose alternative ways of managing and communicating the past to society. The chapter authors purposefully include established and younger scholars, professionals working for private cultural institutions, as well as commercial agents, in order to secure a more holistic coverage of the topics. Several chapters present narratives on the current status and future prospects of archaeological resource management, while others question established attitudes and approaches to archaeological and, more generally, to culture heritage.

More specifically, John Carman adopts an international perspective upon heritage and sets out to pinpoint a series of key factors that affect its management. He stresses that any heritage protection and promotion model has the potential to work effectively, provided that there is a consensus among all interested stakeholders and parties and a common will to make it work.

Giorgos Vavouranakis argues that Greece has to shift emphasis away from the execution of archaeological works per se and towards the production of knowledge about the past as an open-access good. The nominally dominant, but actually receding, state Archaeological Resource Management (ARM) services may play an important role in the future discourse on Greek archaeological heritage as primi inter pares, in cooperation with local authorities, higher education and other non-profit-making institutions, and the private sector.

Ioannis Poulios and George Arampatzis shift the focus towards modern development and argue that it is possible to fashion a model that combines both privately initiated infrastructure projects and the effective protection of the historical environment. Admitting that the relation between the state and private investors is always difficult, they propose that the state should develop better reflexes towards the rapidly and ever-transforming business world and private investors should become more detailed in their approaches to heritage and its protection within infrastructure and other development projects.

Katerina Giannitsioti, Smaragda Touloupa and Ioannis Poulios examine cultural tourism in Greece. They point out the mismatch between the relatively inflexible state heritage mechanisms and the booming private tourist industry sector, which has been recently focusing on the experiential aspect of cultural tourism and tailor-made products. This mismatch may only be mitigated through wider synergies, between the state, private business holders, local communities and the wider public.

Marlen Mouliou looks at museums in government-indebted Greece. She reviews the impact of the crises on state heritage curation and proposes a systemic rethinking of museums and their way of operation. This should include a detailed examination of their structure and functions, the establishment of accreditation criteria, the reinforcement of their diverse character, a dynamic process of continuous transformation in response to feedback from the public and the establishment of a wide network of partnerships.

Myrto Hatzaki contrasts Greek with international policies as regards the hosting of private venues in museums. She argues against rigidly academic approaches that endorse a formal approach to heritage, as such approaches tend to alienate museums not only from the wider public but also from private funding, both by wealthy individuals and the crowd, on which they have been progressively relying. She thus calls for open-mindedness and a positive attitude as only they may point to the successful middle way between state, private and public types of heritage management practices.

Loukia Loizou Hadjigavriel employs the Leventis Municipal Museum of Nicosia in Cyprus as a case study of successful partnership between the municipal authorities of Nicosia and the private sector. The Museum opened in 1989 after the Mayor of Nicosia had appealed to the A. G. Leventis Foundation for sponsorship in 1984. The detailed agreement and sincere partnership between the Municipality and the A. G. Leventis Foundation has resulted in a museum exhibition about the history of the city of Nicosia, which has evolved into a significant warm and vibrating cultural hub in Cyprus.

Costis Dallas turns to the digital dimension of Greek heritage today and, more specifically, the place of the latter in social media. Facebook postings by the Goulandris Museum of Cycladic Art and the Acropolis Museum adhere to their institutional character, while the Benaki Museum page often combines items from its collections with the promotion of events. By contrast, the page of the atenistas activist group is predominantly about guided tours in Athens and photos of the group’s activities. He considers these postings as media assemblages that are not only about the public engagement with or consumption of heritage discourses, but also, and most importantly, objects with a capacity for performative agency that shapes the collective memory and identity of the people that post them and see them.

Andromache Gazi concentrates on the public, which should be the primary focus of any model of heritage management and of any endeavour of cultural expression and activity. According to Gazi, the public is rarely concerned with issues such as whether heritage is managed on a state, semi-private or private basis. The public is interested in accessibility and participation, and these interests may only be served through heritage policies that go beyond the pseudo-dilemma of state vs. private and include all interested stakeholders. This is particularly necessary in the case of government-debt Greece, where the survival of the cultural sector is in dire need of flexibility and adaptation.

Finally, Mary Adamopoulou also tackles the issue of public engagement and participation in heritage and culture in Greece. She notes the oxymoron of people who are proud of their archaeological heritage and yet find museum visits boring and tiresome. She traces the roots of this problem in the poor and inadequate communication strategies adopted for the promotion of heritage in education curricula and the press, but most of all in archaeological sites and museum exhibitions.

Acknowledgements

This volume is the result of a one-day symposium on ‘Culture and Perspective: State Structures, Private Initiative and the Public Character of Cultural Heritage’, which took place in Athens on 23 November 2015. The editors would like to thank the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens for hosting the symposium; the A. G. Leventis Scholars Association (Greece) for co-organising it; the A. G. Leventis Foundation for sponsoring both the conference and the present book; all the speakers, most of whom have contributed chapters in the book and, additionally, Kris Amiralis, Demetris Athanasoulis, Despina Catapoti and Petros Themelis; the external reviewers who provided insightful and detailed comments to all papers; Don Evely for copy-editing all the texts effectively and at a very short notice; and Oxbow Books for publishing it.

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