This article examines the 19th-century ‘antiquities rush’ – the frenzy of archaeological digging, scientific expeditions, and straightforward looting of artefacts in the broader Mediterranean – through the framework of international status competition. To do this, I first situate material culture at the foundation of international status-seeking and demonstrate the importance of cultural objects as status symbols for states. I then elaborate two logics of status-seeking that explain why states engaged in massive cultural extraction practices in the early 19th century. The first logic is that of cultural custodianship, where states pursued status as guardians of the cultural heritage of humankind. The second logic is a claim to cultural descendance, where states sought recognition as cultural heirs of classical civilisations. Cultural extraction, therefore, was critical in the establishment of the 19th-century international cultural hierarchy. Echoes of these arguments reverberate today in the competing claims of ownership and restitution of these antiquities. To illustrate these arguments, the article focuses on the international competition between France and Great Britain over the extraction of antiquities, examining in detail the removal of the Parthenon Marbles from Athens at the turn of the 19th century.

The article is concerned with contemporary changes in the spatialization of the Russian-Finnish borderland as an example of re-bordering politics. The main material is a long-term ethnographic study in the territory of former Finnish Karelia, ceded by Finland to the Soviet Union following World War II. By extending the historical context of bilateral relations between the USSR (later Russia) and Finland, the article questions the implications of changing international relations regimes for situational forms of borderwork. The article contributes to the debate on contemporary border practices and the contradictory effects of foreign diplomacy by combining institutional and situational approaches to border territoriality and by focusing on border memory and heritage as resources of local identity and instruments of soft power. Examining the successive shifts of de- and re-bordering regimes in the Russian-Finnish borderlands from the late Soviet period to the present, the article demonstrates the unforeseen impact of foreign relations on local life and memory.

This article examines the use of heritage in the context of populism. It is interested in how populists’ division of society in an us-versus-them dichotomy and exclusionary politics intersect with the appeal to the past and the weaponised politicisation of history. More specifically, the analysis focuses on far-right populism’s selective embrace of nostalgia. To this end, we examine heritage politics under the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right populist who ruled Brazil between 2019 and 2022. By surveying government speeches and policies, we developed a typology of the uses of heritage as a form of political power: (1) Heritage as historical revisionism, which has mainstreamed distorted and/or inaccurate history in the official narrative; (2) Heritage as identity repositioning, which has redefined core aspects of Brazil’s identity based on particular understandings of history and tradition; and (3) Heritage as alliance building, which has brought Brazil closer to some countries based on shared narratives and legacies. We find that the selective construction heritage has become an indissociable element of Jair Bolsonaro policies’ quest for domestic and international legitimacy.

This article reflects on the 2024 public humanities project “Susannah Darwin at The Mount: Hidden Maternal Histories,” held at Charles Darwin’s family home in Shrewsbury, England. Focusing on Katy Alston’s Mapping Susannah Darwin, a co-produced creative map stemming from the project that shows The Mount from the perspective of Darwin’s mother, Susannah, I reframe the fixed project “output” as the product of much more fluid sets of relationships and circumstances. This article blends personal reflection with insights from critical cartography, concepts of the object “life cycle,” and my underpinning research on the Darwin family and home. I aim to provide an accessible but critically informed account of the practices, relationships, serendipities, and setbacks that can characterise the humanities in action.

Travel accounts provide both benefits and challenges to survey archaeologists. This article presents a case study, generated by the Vayots Dzor Silk Road Survey, which aims to reconstruct the medieval (tenth to fifteenth centuries ad) landscape of Vayots Dzor in the Republic of Armenia, ‘excavating’ literary accounts of its landscape. Knowledge of this region in the Middle Ages is dominated by a core text written in the thirteenth century by Bishop Step’anos Orbelyan. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the region was visited by travellers who found links between the places they visited, the inscriptions they recorded, and the events and locations attested in Orbelyan’s text. Through examples from the site list of the Vayots Dzor Silk Road Survey, the authors explore how these and other sources accumulate, creating local knowledge about places that inform archaeologists and heritage professionals. They argue for reflection on the ways that local memory, archaeology, and the physical landscape inform complex makings of place.

Mehmed Ziya, an Ottoman Muslim educator and intellectual, published an art historical treatise on the Chora Monastery/Kariye Mosque in Istanbul in 1910. This was largely a translation of three articles by the French Byzantinist Charles Diehl previously published in Études byzantines and in Le Journal des savants. Through his book, Mehmed Ziya attempted to acquaint the Ottoman Turks with this Byzantine monument, especially its rich decorations. Two letters appended in the book reveal his efforts to raise awareness among the youth in this respect, and to mobilize the Ottoman authorities regarding the protection and promotion of the Chora monastery more particularly.

This article reports from an interdisciplinary, archaeological and philosophical research project developing and using an analogue model in archaeological research. With prominent uses outside of archaeology, analogue models can offer a unique participatory perspective to prehistoric processes. As such the paper contributes to recent discussions in this journal and elsewhere on the role of games, play and gamification in archaeological research, teaching and cultural heritage. Our analogue model critically discusses cultural-evolution-based models of selected European Neolithic and Bronze Age models and develops a perspective based on the life history and the Capability Approaches. In times of climate and war stress, our model can offer a hopeful perspective of the human past, present and future without compromising on scientific insights.

This paper seeks to explain the process of collaboration among civil society organizations towards preserving the voices of the “comfort women” and registering related documents with UNESCO. The 14 civil society organizations from 8 countries, mostly those that suffered Japanese invasion and occupation, but also including one from Japan itself, have worked together to compile a dossier of “comfort women” documents for the submission of a joint nomination proposal to UNESCO. However, this project was threatened first by the political deal between South Korea and Japan in December 2015, and later by attempts to use money and state power to subvert UNESCO’s Memory of the World program (MoW). The resulting temporary freeze on the MoW program, talk of changes to its statutes and regulations, and UNESCO’s continued delay in implementing its own decisions raise serious doubts concerning the legitimacy and meaning of the program. A more fundamental question concerns whether and how the voices of victims of violation or discrimination, in this case of the “comfort women”, will be heard, preserved and transmitted to future generations to prevent the recurrence of such atrocities. If the efforts of the recent civil society movement end in failure, what alternative strategies are open to us?

This article surveys the highlights of Japanese political assassination from 1909 to 2022 through the commemoration of the victims and photographs of the major sites in Tokyo.

In this introductory essay to the special issue of The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus on “The Comfort Women as Public History,” we analyze the turn since the early 2000s towards “heritagization” of this controversial issue. After reviewing the political, cultural and historiographical background to ongoing disputes over “comfort women,” we examine how the reframing of this issue as “heritage” has been accompanied by increasing entanglement with the global politics of atrocity commemoration, and associated tropes. Prominent among such tropes is the claim that commemoration fosters “peace”. However, following recent critical scholarship on this issue, and drawing on the papers that comprise this special issue, we question any necessary equation between heritagization and reconciliation. When done badly, the drive to commemorate a contentious issue as public history can exacerbate rather than resolve division and hatred. We therefore emphasise the need for representation of comfort women as public history to pay due regard to nuance and complexity, for example regarding the depiction of victims versus perpetrators; the transnational dimension of the system; and its relationship with the broader history of gender politics and the sexual subjugation of women.

In October 2017, the application to list the Voices of the Comfort Women archive on UNESCO's “Memory of the World Register” was rejected (or “postponed”). In this paper, I set that decision in the context of other recent instances of “heritage diplomacy” in East Asia, highlighting the tensions between nationalistic agendas and UNESCO's universalist pretensions. I then discuss the nature and extent of similar tensions in the framing of the “comfort women” issue, as manifested in “comfort women museums” (institutions closely associated with the preparation of the 2016-17 Memory of the World application). I focus especially on the case of China, where the Xi Jinping regime first sought to weaponize this issue against Japan, only to pull back in 2018 as Sino-Japanese ties warmed. I conclude by considering how the story of the comfort women might be reframed to underline its global significance (or “outstanding universal value”), in a manner that makes it more difficult for Japanese nationalists to portray the campaign for recognition and commemoration as an anti-Japan conspiracy.

Calls for reparations and apologies for crimes committed during the 1930s/40s war in Asia have been major points of contention in East Asia's public memory since at least the 1980s. In recent years, a “history/memory war” over the “comfort women” issue has intensified. At the same time, the battleground has also shifted to the terrain of “heritage” and has increasingly taken on a global dimension. This paper considers an increasingly significant arena for East Asian memory wars, involving diaspora communities in Western countries. Its particular focus is the coordinated “comfort women” activism of Korean American and other Asian American diaspora groups in certain regions of the United States. While their decades-long activism has produced a ‘memory boom’ in its own right and resulted in raising the political profile of Asian Americans, I argue that this has also come at the cost of straining to breaking point post-war arrangements for symbolizing and cementing US-Japanese reconciliation. The paper builds on existing research to delineate the expanding scope of Asia's memory wars and introduces new insights into some of the US activists' inter-ethnic alliance building that underscores the increasingly global nature of these memory conflicts as well as the potentially lasting repercussions for societies far beyond East Asia.

Street signs in Italian, Hebrew and Arabic, installed in the twenty-first century, mark Palermo's former Jewish quarter, over half a millennium since Sicily last had a substantial Jewish population. They recall a medieval Jewish minority, but also symbolise what some consider to be Palermo's essentially pluralistic character. What motivates this inchoate revival of ‘Jewish space’, and what does it mean for contemporary Palermo? ‘Rebranding’ Palermo as a crossroads of civilisations encourages tourism, but this alone does not explain the re-evaluation of its multi-religious heritage. Palermo is an often-overlooked case study for the contemporary emergence of Jewish ‘sites of memory’. Using a micro-scale ethnographic study to analyse a narrative rooted in history, I show how the ‘rediscovery’ of Jewish history can have multiple catalysts. In Palermo, these include a Europe-wide interest in ‘things Jewish’, and Sicily's increasing religious diversity in the present.