Robert Springborg: Culture and Cultural Heritage in the Middle East & North Africa (MENA)

WILLIAM WANKER: Hello and welcome. I am William Wonker, and you are listening to Dignify Audio, a podcast brought to you by Human Dignity Projects and Dignify Magazine, both of which I co-created and co-curate with Pamela Kelly. Today we are continuing the conversation with our highly regarded friend Robert Springboard. In episode one, our conversation focused on the economics and politics of the Middle East, and in episode two, Our conversation focused on what Robert has called the Arab Dignity Deficit. For those of you who have not listened to them, I would highly recommend you do so. But today the conversation taking place in our final episode, episode three, will now shift to focus on Robert's work involving culture and cultural heritage. So again, let's jump in. Thank you for joining us, Robert. I'm looking forward to this conversation as well. Me too, William. Thank you. Many people may not know that you have long been interested in culture and cultural heritage. Can you give us some background on your interests and work in this space? Well, as we discussed before, I went to the Middle East when I was reasonably young and was bulled over by the accessibility of profound cultural heritage. UNESCO's World Care Heritage Sites in the Middle East are really quite phenomenal and proportionally speaking more than in any other part of the world. So from the pyramids to Roman ruins to prehistoric remains and so on, that's a remarkable heritage of the world culture. And so one was interested in that and you could not study contemporary Middle Eastern politics without being made aware of that cultural heritage, because the political actors themselves drew upon it to identify themselves as they were wont to do with some of the great eras, regimes, dynasties of the past. Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, Nasser, went after another of them would, you know try to equate their regimes with those of the pharaohs, or for example, those of the great Bassad Aramaya dynasties and so on. So that was in the air. It was just part and parcel of the place. Then I had the opportunity as director of the American Research Center in Egypt to be responsible for ⁓ the largest USAID, United States Agency for International Development. sponsored project on cultural heritage preservation. ⁓ we operated on an annual twenty five million dollar grant to ⁓ work with the Egyptians in preserving cultural heritage, which was defined as any cultural object more than a hundred years old. And so we covered not only prehistoric period going back to seven, eight thousand BC, but up to let's say Coptic tapestries of the nineteenth century. So a huge array of cultural objects built heritage, ⁓ or manufactured heritage, not behavioral heritage, which was outside the scope of our work. And through that I came to appreciate yet more the political role that heritage plays in contemporary politics and how contemporary politics in turns shapes how cultural heritage is preserved and presented. And I think of various episodes that made me aware of that. Possibly one of the most striking episodes. was when one of the board members of the American Research Center in Egypt wrote an open letter criticizing the government of Egypt for its heritage practices. And the allegation was that it was violating the Venice Protocol, which basically prohibits the use of concrete when quote repairing or restoring ⁓ built heritage sites. And indeed that was the case. We had to operate within the confines of the government of Egypt and the other operators who would be involved in cultural heritage preservation, and one of the biggest operators was the military. The military in Egypt played a significant role in the economy and especially in construction. And so the military was involved in doing preservation work in various parts of Egypt, and there was the military that was violating most egregiously the Venice Protocol. So what happened in that case was that the government of Egypt, wanting to disassociate itself from such practices, which it indeed was well aware of and had condoned, then invited UNESCO to come and pass judgment on the work that the government of Egypt through these military owned companies ⁓ was conducting. And so UNESCO sent a delegation along and they were whined and dying, and at the end of their visit they issued a statement. basically sanctifying the work that the government of Egypt through its own military had conducted. ⁓ it was just an eye opener to see that the United Nations organization, United Nations Education, Social and Cultural Organization, which is responsible for identifying World Heritage Sites and naming them as such, would be so fundamentally corrupt that they were just bought off and UNESCO is underfunded, like most UN organizations. And so the government of Egypt made a pledge to it. And that was enough to have them overlook these egregious violations of the standard protocol for preservation work, which is the Venice Protocol. And so I learned that you could not trust either the government or the international body responsible for overseeing this sort of work. And you had to think about doing things to ⁓ ensure that cultural heritage was properly preserved. And that has been then a mission that I've been engaged with ever since that time. This now goes back. To over a quarter of a century ago. And so I won't go on at this point, it'll come up later, but I've been engaged with subsequent activities since that time. But that's indeed how I became interested in cultural heritage. Very interesting. You've you've recently shared a concluding chapter in a book you were developing at the time with me that spoke to the issue of states and societies and the political economy of cultural heritage in the Middle East and North Africa, more commonly known as MENA. I was really interested in a position you took and an argument you made, positions and arguments of which I think the audience would also be interested in. So to introduce all, let me start by quoting a comment you made about a line from Milan Kundera's book, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. And I apologize for the long quote, but I think it's really very, very interesting. You said cultural heritage, including both tangible and intangible forms of memory, is at the heart of Kundera's statement. Which is the struggle of man against power, is the struggle of memory against forgetting. And you go on to say it's a prime target of power wielded b overwhelmingly by states, especially in MENA. And then you went further on to say the centrality of states to MENA culture or heritage is doubly paradoxical. One tends to think of cultural heritage as a societal product, reflecting a people's collective efforts and wisdom. This is undoubtedly the case in less developed societies entirely or almost entirely lacking statehood. It is less true where societies have given rise to states, which in turn assume considerable, if not sole responsibility for producing what comes to be seen as cultural heritage. Contrast, for example, Palestinian embroidered dresses, Sudanese hand woven baskets, or raw music of North Africa. All examples of societally produced cultural heritage to Egypt's pheroic temples, Iraq's Babylon, or Jordan's Petra, all of which are manifestations of state power. Clearly, material and at least some forms of non material cultural heritage are at least state influenced, if not generated and sustained by states. But despite this obvious truth, cultural heritage itself and its reification in scholarship Is frequently caught in a tug of war between claimed rightful progenitors, meaning either peoples and their societies, or states and their policies. So clearly you see a link between culture and power. And can you tease this premise out for us? Well, we don't need to be focused on the Middle East and North Africa to appreciate that during the Trump administration. The struggle over the presentation of American history has become front page news. This Masonian, the very museum embodiment of American history, has become a lightning rod of criticism coming from the Trump administration, and indeed the director of Smithsonian has recently tendered his resignation. And it has to do with how American history is presented. And the Trump administration did not believe that this Masonian was presented in a way that it approved of and so has applied pressure in various ways to have it ⁓ present American history in a way that seems to be more supportive of the political line of the Trump administration than what's just played out in the United States is played out and has been played out for years in the Middle East and North Africa. And it is a struggle over the past to present the current power structure in the best possible light. And that struggle will pit different elements of a population against one another. So let's take Lebanon, for example, which is a multi confessional, as they call it, but that is multi religious denomination society. And whether or not Lebanon's past is traced to the Phoenician era, which was the great power of the Eastern Mediterranean. at the time of the Romans, or you present the Lebanese past as being a manifestation of the conquest of Islam, for example, then has clear significance for the contemporary balance of political power between Christian communities who want to trace their heritage to the Phoenician era, and the Muslim communities which want to trace it to the Muslim conquest or to the rise of the Shi'ism following the death of the Prophet. And so what is true in Lebanon is true throughout the region, namely that how you present your history is extremely pertinent to what goes on today, and so sticking with the Lebanese case, the civil war that began in nineteen seventy five and ended in nineteen eighty nine really led to the death of over a hundred thousand Lebanese, displacement of probably a million of them and so on. And it's analogous to situations now in Yemen's Libya, Sudan and so on. So how have the Lebanese managed to engage in truth and reconciliation of the famous South African variety? The short answer is they have not. The efforts to do that, which ⁓ were crystallized in a couple of museums which tried to preserve documents, footage, any sorts of bits of evidence, indeed the bullet holes in their walls of the Civil War so that people would be able to know the truth, what really happened. And on the basis of the truth of it, hopefully then improve the current relations between what are warring communities in Lebanon, let's say simplified Christians on the one hand and Shi Muslims on the other, it became a very, very sensitive point. When the National Museum tried to do it, the government stopped it. In a temporary display it had of the facts of various sorts, photographs and otherwise, were taken down. Another museum, which was private, and was being put together by a very brave individual who lived in the Shia quarters of the the Dahi, the suburban area south of Beirut, and he was warned to cease and desist by Hezbollah, the militia that represents a significant portion of the Shi population of Lebanon. And ⁓ when he didn't abide by their command, they assassinated him. And so the sensitivity of cultural heritage in this particular case, the facts, if you will, the historic facts is embodied in film footage, in the testimonies of individuals recorded, their diaries, all the rest, tells you how incredibly sensitive these matters are. That's the contemporary version. Then you can go to the presentation in museums of much older materials, dating let's say to the Roman times, to Phoenician times and so on, and how that's done. It has contemporary relevance and everyone knows it. So these are hot political potatoes and they are best dealt with, in my humble opinion, by democracies, where you have individuals who have different interpretations of the past, such as in the United States, and to allow those different interpretations to be put forward and let people then come to know them better and decide which one they think is more persuasive or neither of them, whatever it might be. But the United States becoming more authoritarian in these regards is no longer serving as an adequate model of how to present one's cultural heritage, and the Middle East, ⁓ which needs a an open and democratic model so citizens can themselves express their views about their cultural heritage and have some impact on what's preserved and how it's preserved, ⁓ is basically still a Wayne Hope. So the region of the world that has proportionate the greatest amount of global cultural heritage. is one that is not managing it well at all. This is so interesting insofar as I do think there is direct relevance to what's happening in the United States. And in that same chapter you were prodding us when asking the question what can be done to improve the management of cultural heritage, to really think things through by provocatively claiming at the end of that chapter that the short answer, and I'm quoting you here, is very little, if anything, can be done directly. The primary obstacle to improvement is the very structure amenus states, which were not amenable to reform so long as they remain captured by specific social forces and institutions, unquote. Again, this has direct implications for the future of America. And clearly you have some recommendations, some of which you just went through, but Particularly insofar as you suggest that cultural heritage should be or might ought to be regarded not as a dependent variable, which is focused on factors that shape the presentation and preservation of cultural heritage, but as an independent variable, by which I understand you to mean that some economists and economic historians believe that culture does have an independent and identifiable impact. Is that correct? And can you say more? Yeah, let's break it down, William, into Two things. What can be done to improve the management of cultural heritage, its presentation and its preservation? And how can you think about ⁓ cultural heritage as an independent causal factor in the performance of government, economic and political? The first idea is information. Information is power. And that is this case I mentioned to you of UNESCO. basically papering over the inappropriate preservation practices of the government of Egypt is a case in point. And no one is aware of that. It's only because I happen to be working in that area on the site next door that I became aware of it. So I'm fortunate in that I have an association with the Hisham Malawi Foundation. Now Muli Hashem Malawi, who's a member of the Moroccan royal family and someone who is done very significant academic works, joined me in editing The book from which you quoted. And he did so out of his interest in cultural heritage preservation, driven originally because he is Moroccan and a member of a dynasty that goes back to sixteen seventies and which is very proud of the cultural heritage of Morocco, and presents it, I would say, a rather more open way than many other Arab countries. And so the question is, well. what can be done to improve preservation of presentation. And we agreed that information is about as much as one can do in the absence of regime change. And since we're not engaged in regime change, then it's information. So ⁓ the Hishamalawi Foundation is now sponsoring what we are calling provisionally a cultural heritage observatory. And this observatory ⁓ will take the form, we're putting it together now, of a global index starting With several countries in the Middle East, then expanding to the entirety of the Middle East and North Africa and hopefully the world beyond in due course. It's interested not in providing information about sites of cultural heritage, which the Aga Khan Foundation does the world's best job on their website. If any of you are interested, go to the Aga Khan Foundation and you will see their website, which is an encyclopedia of global heritage sites, and a very good one indeed. What we're interested in the process of preservation is and presentation and how open and how effective that process is. How much can citizens, whether those directly affected, let's say, by the excavation of a site where they live or by a museum that presents, as I was just mentioning, the Lebanese Civil War or whatever, what are the processes by which these decisions are made? How open are they? How definitive are they? How benefit is the Bureaucracy in carrying through the wishes, the policy wishes, determined by some sort of an open and democratic process. So we're going to create, much like the World Bank's indicators of say doing business or global democratization indices or the anti-corruption index, we want to create a cultural index. And so that's what we're going to do. And we'll have a website that will rank countries on various dimensions of their management of cultural areas. And we're hoping by virtue of the fact, That you will quote, expose through information the relative openness, effectiveness, responsiveness of governments to preservation of the to cultural heritage, you will cause them to want to improve their acts. So that's a sort of a passive way of doing it. But I think it's probably the only thing that is academics and as a foundation that one can possibly do. So that's the way by which we've chosen to try to address the problem. As far as the idea that culture is an independent variable. that it does impact political and economic development is one that probably is most close to the various names of prominent figures who've written to that point. The one that's currently most prominent is a Turkish American by the name of Daron Asmolo, who teaches at MIT and who won a Nobel Prize in economics for a book he co authored and workes co authored more generally on the institutional importance to economic development that The institutions by which economic policies are made and implemented are absolutely vital to their success. And so what he's arguing is that these institutions are culturally rooted and they are reflective then of the collective capacities of a national culture, whether through their adherence to the rule of law, whether constitutionality, whether information generation and exchange and so on. So he won a Nobel Prize. For putting forward this argument and sustaining it in a variety of different settings. And he is just now come under attack, maybe not surprisingly given the sensitivities of these intellectual matters these days, by the empiricists. And this is a general problem of cultural heritage. It's very hard to count cultural heritage. And economics now, black political science are dominated by empiricists. And anything that's not countable is given short shrift. And empirical economics, which is focused on counting, accuses Asimoto and his colleagues of being basically not economists, that they are dealing with something that's too non empirical, they can't really quantify it, and so they're just asserting this without adequate evidence. Now this approach is the right off history altogether and and culture itself, and is indicative of a state of sort of empirical dogmatism. Which is characteristic of our economics and of our political science. So if you're interested in in this debate in the last few issues of the economists have taken it up. And good for the economists, ⁓ British magazine, for doing so and it then stimulated reactions by F. Mola himself. And so it's an interesting debate, but I think he is correct. Namely that institutional background rooted in cultures has a big impact. on how well we manage our societies and our economies and our politicians and it's worthy of serious investigation which he engaged in even if you can't count it. So on that happy or unhappy note, Wim ⁓ All right. Well I certainly thank you. This has been most interesting and I'm going to be following up with you on a lot of questions and maybe some ideas about how we might join forces to promote what you just described, as well as some ideas that we've been working on independently with human dignity projects. But I think that will end the podcast series here and maybe move to another time when we can explore other dimensions of what you're doing. But I think at the end of this podcast series, which has explored the economics and politics and culture of the Middle East, you have truly fulfilled the promise of the podcast by providing a clear way of tying together the importance of craft and culture and power. In a way that a lot of people may not think about things. So many, many thanks for joining us today, Robert. It was, as I had anticipated, fascinating. And if people want to reach out and contact you, how might they do so and where might they find your books? Well, the most recent books are published by Lynn Reiner Publishers, a Reiner R-I-E-M. double N E R who operates out of Boulder, Colorado, and the books are listed there on the Lynn Reiner Publishers website and through Lynn Reiner I can be contacted and just any Google search will show up some of my other publications and will provide email and other contact information. Great. Well, let me say say thanks to our audience again for listening. We always look forward to connecting again across the airwaves as we continue to explore human dignity and living a dignified human existence through the ideas and innovations of yet other designers, artists, craftspeople, heads of companies and nonprofits, and political commentators via Dignify Audio. And again, to find a list of past and future podcasts. Please go to Humandignity Projects dot org, all podcasts of which are distributed through Spotify, Apple, and YouTube. And make sure you catch up on the latest edition of Dignify magazine or catch up on past issues by visiting the same, humandignityprojects.org. Thank you again, Robert. It was a pleasure. I look forward to seeing you. Best to you and your family. And thank you again for listening. I am William Wonker, and this is Dignify Audio.