Cultural Heritage in Transit: Intangible Rights as Human Rights

2. Heritage, Legacy, Zombie: How to Bury the Undead Past

C h a p t e r 2 Heritage, Legacy, Zombie: How to Bury the Undead Past Dorothy Noyes If we connect up with the law, we’ll be connected to this man, this body, for the rest of our lives. We’ve got to get rid of him. —James Dickey, Deliverance, 1970 Das Widerstehn, der Eigensinn Verkümmern herrlichsten Gewinn, Daß man, zu tiefer, grimmiger Pein, Ermüden muß, gerecht zu sein. Recalcitrance and wilfulness Can mar the most superb success, Til to our painful, deep disgust We tire of trying to be just. —Goethe, Faust Part II, Act V The protagonists of James Dickey’s novel are saved from the consequences of a murder by the construction of a dam. Modern development projects create their own state of exception by making no exceptions. Connections formed by history are sundered by the flood of present necessity. Particularities are Heritage, Legacy, Zombie 59 forcibly submerged. It is nothing new: in Goethe’s Ur-narrative of development , Faust regretfully leaves his pastoral hosts Baucis and Philemon to be dealt with by henchmen so that his dike building can proceed unimpeded, just as earlier he abandoned Gretchen, singing at her spinning wheel.1 Nor has anything changed in that larger portion of the world we still call “developing .” New dams along the Yangtze, Mekong, Tigris, and Euphrates Rivers continue to displace millions of people and submerge millennia of human history, with artifacts rescued here and there to serve as “heritage” (Goldman 2005; Morvaridi 2004; Shoup 2006). In the nineteenth century, Gretchen’s song was recognized to have the same instrumental value as Gretchen’s spinning. Both the expressive and the productive labor of the common people were conscripted in the construction of the nation-state. The former was christened folklore. But Gretchen’s body posed a problem; the will attached to it still more. If the modern subject Faust is to preserve his freedom of action, he must be allowed to break his connection with her. Thus she is seduced and goaded into acts of petty violence that disrupt not Faust’s plans but her own community, and these enable her to be condemned to death. Now her song becomes not an adjunct to labor but an uncanny trace of her personhood, issuing from the prison to remind Faust of his own violence against her. “Fliege fort!” she sings. The song flies away, but she cannot. Folklore is both resource and reminder, both incorporated into and excluded from modernizing projects. Neither arrangement is an easy one. Emergent in the intimacy of making and performing at close range, folklore can never be wholly cleansed of the trace of the subaltern body, with its possibility of independent action. This is the undertone of the nineteenth-century conception of folklore as cultural survival, for while E. B. Tylor and others emphasized the anomaly and absurdity of survivals in a changed lifeworld, the very word asserts vitality and persistence. Early modern and nineteenthcentury scholars, who often and not coincidentally were clergymen, state officials , or colonial administrators, were typically concerned not just to document but to eradicate superstition and other purported survivals of premodern social forms. Some survivals threatened efficiency; some of them posed outright political threats—and here we can think of a long history of suppression of worker and indigenous social organization. Discredited by twentieth-century ethnographic and historical scholarship, survivalist explanations have themselves survived to be revived in the postCold War political realm. “Age-old hatreds,” “medieval attitudes,” “cultural 60 Dorothy Noyes tradition,” and so on are routinely applied to the myriad local impediments that once again rise up to challenge the renewed expansionist ambitions of capital or disrupt the reconfiguration of the international community. Survivalist theory as a discursive resource anticipates and molds the range of policy devices that seek to contain, manage, or eradicate threats to processes defined in their turn as progress. In this chapter, drawing on examples from Afghanistan, Northern Ireland , and Appalachia, I explore some of the successor concepts to the nineteenth-century notion of survival, “heritage” being both the most fully developed and the privileged choice within a broader matrix shaping the ways in which local disruptions can be named and addressed under neoliberal conditions. I use the word “local” well aware of its ambiguous status as the constructed contrary of the equally constructed “global.” Of course I do not mean to construct the local as...