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Expertise and Heritage Ethics in the Middle East

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 October 2017

Trinidad Rico
Trinidad Rico*
Affiliation:
Department of Art History, Rutgers University–New Brunswick, New Brunswick, N.J.; e-mail: trinidad.rico@rutgers.edu
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Extract

By the time I completed fieldwork in Qatar in 2016, the Msheireb project that aimed to redevelop the heart of Doha was nearing completion of its first phase. The way this development project unfolded during this time was indicative of broader negotiations of Qatari cultural brokers with ideas of indigeneity and expertise: the project was rebranded from Dohaland, “The Heart of Doha,” to Msheireb (after the local wadi) in the first half of 2011, while the iconic Al Kahraba Street—the “spine” of the old city and the first street to be electrified in Qatar—was referred to in architectural notations as the “Champs-Élysées” of Doha. The politics of indigeneity of place-making in these negotiations reflected an unresolved unease with the cosmopolitan nature of expertise. This tension was related not necessarily to the ingenious remixing of traditional and modern concepts of cultural and environmental sustainability, but rather to the active erasure of foreign expertise. We see this, for example, in the active rebranding of the I. M. Pei's Museum (in reference to the Chinese American “starchitect” who designed it) in order to take its rightful “local” name, the Museum of Islamic Art. While these efforts would suggest an intention to localize expertise and build local capacity as part of national objectives, I argue in this essay that this mastering in fact obscures local expertise by dissociating it from the cosmopolitan context in which knowledge production is negotiated in Qatar.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 49 , Special Issue 4: Forced Displacement and Refugees , November 2017 , pp. 742 - 746
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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References

NOTES

1 See Isenstadt, Sandy and Rizvi, Kishwar, eds., Architecture and Politics in the Twentieth Century (Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

2 Rico, Trinidad and Lababidi, Rim, “Extremism in Contemporary Heritage Debates about Islam,” Future Anterior: Journal of Historic Preservation, Theory, and Criticism 14 (forthcoming)Google Scholar.

3 See Brusius, Mirjam, “Misfit Objects: Layard's Excavations in Ancient Mesopotamia and the Biblical Imagination in Mid-Nineteenth Century Britain,”Journal of Literature and Science 5 (2012): 38–52 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Layard, Henry Austen, Nineveh and Its Remains: A Narrative of an Expedition to Assyria (London: John Murray, 1867), 312 Google Scholar.

5 Exell, Karen and Rico, Trinidad, “Introduction: (De)constructing Arabian Heritage Debates,” in Cultural Heritage in the Arabian Peninsula: Debates, Discourses and Practices, ed. Exell, Karen and Rico, Trinidad (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 1–15 Google Scholar.

6 On this debate in the context of Southeast Asia, see, for example, Byrne, Denis, “Buddhist Stupa and Thai Social Practice,” World Archaeology 27 (1995): 266–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 This was noted ethnographically, but also quantitatively in the frequency of successful and proposed Qatar National Research Fund National Priority Research Program projects that included a significant element of oral history research.

8 Dudley, Kathryn M., “In the Archive, in the Field: What Kind of Document is an ‘Oral History’?,” in Narrative and Genre, ed. Chamberlain, Mary and Thompson, Paul (London: Routledge, 1998), 163 Google Scholar.

9 Hillerdal, Charlotta, Karlstrom, Anna, and Ojala, Carl-Gosta, introduction to Archaeologies of “Us” and “Them”: Debating History, Heritage, and Indigeneity, ed. Hillerdal, Karlstrom, and Ojala (London: Routledge, 2017), 9–10 Google Scholar.

10 Clifford, James, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988)Google Scholar. See also Bennett, Tony et al., Collecting, Ordering, Governing: Anthropology, Museums and Liberal Government (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017)Google Scholar.