Term and Research Project
Term Project
Discourse Analysis of Cultural Property Through the Media and the Journal International Journal of Cultural Property 1935–2015
Background
In this research project I want you to do a discourse analysis of cultural property in the media and through the seminal International Journal of Cultural Property. In this project I am referring to ‘discourse analysis’ as an approach to understanding the way specific kinds of language can be used to affect patterns of knowledge production and relationships of power (ref). For instance, how does the way in which the very term ‘cultural property’ get transformed over time; who uses this term and what does its use implicitly designate or signify; are there specific regions or places in the world where this term gets used and to what extent is this in response to larger social-political events; can tracing the use and iterations give us a clearer sense of how ideas of ‘culture’ and ‘property’ are converging or separating? These are just some of the questions that I hope our discourse analysis can reveal.
For this project we have two primary sites:
1. Media such as newspapers and other digital media commentary
2. The International Journal of Cultural Property
Media has been and remains a primary site for discussing and circulating the term cultural property. It is interesting to see if this was always the case, especially during and post WWII when some of the most important international conventions were created, or whether this is a product of international policy producing a term that becomes naturalized within the everyday. Newspapers also give us a good sense of what we might describe as cultural property ‘hotspots’ where major questions about preservation/destruction (and hence ideological ideas about culture) are occurring. We could easily see that these ‘hotspots’ are in Iraq and Syria at the moment, as this is where a lot of coverage and concern about cultural property destruction is occurring. In situations where cultural property issues are playing out, but that are less ‘exciting’ and ‘newsworthy’, it is interesting to see the downplay of claims, and a reduction in the urgency to remedy the problems. Because of this what starts to get produced is a hierarchy of cultural property – where some instances register as critical and others as just inevitable. International policy is being developed to try and deal with the critical, when perhaps it should also be focused on the inevitable. The multiple ways in which cultural property is represented mobilizes a range of different parties, and that is also interesting for our purposes.
The International Journal of Cultural Property has existed since 1992 and has become one of the primary sites for academic inquiry into the diversity of cultural property. Some of the most important theorists have written pieces for this journal, so we might say this this is the site for a specific kind of academic production of cultural property. Importantly this journal is inter-disciplinary, and this allows a certain possibility to trace the different disciplinary movements (law, anthropology, heritage studies, policy) over time, as well as when and where one or another discipline assumes a certain authority over the framing and the discourse (this is most often law). The articles themselves also give a sense of the geographic 13 locations of cultural property issues/disputes/debates, as well as to what extent these change or have not changed over time. For instance, it is interesting that the director of UNESCO is calling the destruction of cultural property by ISIS a war crime. Similarly, it has been interesting in the last five years to see the convergence of cultural property with ideas of human rights.
Research Project
In groups of two, three or four I want you to choose one of the below ‘projects’ and work together to identify the data as well as a way to represent it visually – for instance through digital mapping, a wordle, a graph, or any other visualization technique of your choosing.
Project 1: Emergence of Cultural Property 1935–1960
In this project I want the group to look at media, mainly within newspaper reporting in five major international newspapers about how cultural property is being defined, interpreted and understood. For example, do these early representations map onto our current usage, or is it largely based around objects or places or monuments? Since this is new language are there any attempts to make the concept of cultural property clearer – and if so, how? Can we see an emergence here that influences the Hague Convention of 1954 and beyond?
Project 2: Cultural Property HotSpots pre-1970
In this project I want you to look at media, mainly within newspaper reporting in five major newspapers internationally, for the locations of cultural property hotspots. It is interesting to explore where these locations are, how they change over this period, and through the complementary project below, whether these sites are the same in the post-1970 period. Can the location of cultural property hotspots in this period tell us anything about some of the primary politics, ideas and ideologies that are built into this concept?
Project 3: Cultural Property HotSpots Post-1970
In this project, like the above project, I want you to look at media, mainly within newspaper reporting in five major newspapers internationally, for the locations of cultural property hotspots post 1970. This period is interesting because of the global decolonizing that is happening which opens up countries to make new claims to material held in previous colonial institutions, as well as the emergence of new conflicts in regions that are considered to be rich in cultural property and cultural heritage.
Project 4: Disciplines of Cultural Property
Using the International Journal of Cultural Property as the research site, I want you to develop a sense of the different disciplines that this journal represents as well as which disciplines are dominant in taking on responsibility for defining terms, and which focus more on case studies and examples of cultural property issues in action. Tracking this disciplinary movement across the life of the journal gives a very good sense of who it serves and what kinds of cultural property issues it seeks to represent.
Project 5: Cultural Property Popularism
The Elgin Marbles must be one of the most popular examples of cultural property. Why? When did this begin? How many times has it been discussed and debated in the contemporary media? Does anything really shift in these discussions or do they retain the same ‘internationalist’ and ‘nationalist’ ideological framing that John Merryman advances in his work? Where is this case the most discussed and how is it used to index colonialism, or histories of Empire? Is there another example that is more popular than the Elgin Marbles? Is there one that should be?