is heritage good for local people?

[BAJR Host]

Kind of moving away from the topic in hand...

How did we get onto New Zealand Farmers??

If people want to discuss the funding of farming - please start a new thread.. as people are getting confused about what they are reading...

Threads cost nothing to start..

"No job worth doing was ever done on time or under budget.."
Khufu

[Unitof1]

I cannot think of a single case where heritage management has contributed to the welfare of small, traditional cultures such as those supported by the excellent charity. I suspect a lot of irreparable damage has been done instead

http://kickaas.typepad.com/

[1man1desk]

Suspect away all you like - but please come back with some evidence.

1man1desk

to let, fully furnished

[tom wilson]

Unitof1, if you can't think of any cases where heritage has contributed to the welfare of small, traditional cultures then you have nothing to contribute to this thread. However, you continue to rant on about completely unrelated matters in an effort to wind up other contributers. There is a word for people who who act like that, and it is 'troll' (sorry Troll).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_%28Internet%29
Ladies and Gentlemen, please don't feed the trolls.

Here's another good example (beside the ones previously cited), community mapping projects in Malaysian Borneo have demonstrated how Dyak people have long been using the jungle for shifting cultivation and 'forest products', so it's not an empty natural landscape like the loggers and some bureaucrats in Kuala Lumpur like to think it is. A couple of years ago their government passed a law requiring anyone doing this kind of work to take along a government surveyor, so if must have rattled a few cages.

I do find all this faux piety about archaeological interpretation a bit tiresome. There is another side to every story than the one the people in power want to promulgate, particularly if written history supports that hegemony. Why is it wrong of us to look for other sides of the story? To suggest that it is implies a view that we never make choices in how we present our findings (we most certainly do), or where we chose to dig (rescue archaeology...).

I'm liking the vernacular architecture thing though. I recon something like 'The Weald and Downland Museum', for example is a better option than 'The Come and See the Funny Sussex Bumpkins Jumping Up and Down Experience', which passes for indigenous heritage tourism in much of the world. However, it could still be accused of ossifying a culture for external consumption, rather than giving it space to breathe.

PS There, I knew it: sooner or later I'd end up using the T word. Sorry also for the gratuitous use of the word 'hegemony' though. No time to edit it out now.

'In the busy market there are fortunes to be won and lost, but in the cherry orchard there is peace'.
Chinese proverb

[BAJR Host]

Thanks for returning the thread to the interesting basis it started with. ( thread hijack will be monitored)

"No job worth doing was ever done on time or under budget.."
Khufu

[m300572]

Damn, I was just starting to enjoy myself!

[Unitof1]

enjoy

When I went to the survival site I came straight across the bushman story. I once worked at the Tsumeb mine in Namibia which apparently was part of the area which the “bushman” controlled (long way from the central Kalahari) and from which the bushmen supplied metals –not sure if it was ore or worked, to local “iron age” people and possibly further away prior to the arrival of Europeans. They are supposed to have had some kind of monarchy system. Now thrown all over the survival site is “The 'Bushmen' are the oldest inhabitants of southern Africa, where they have lived for at least 20,000 years.” that this was their “traditional territory” and I cant help but feel that I am supposed to imaging a pure unchanged hunter gather setting 20000 years old. All these statements seems to me can to be a very emotive thing for the rest of the Botswanians who are referred to by survival as the “government” but presumably might to be lumped as iron age people who have only been around southern africa for –and this was a bloody contentious issues for a long time in south African “archaeology” as long as the iron age and not a century or so before the Europeans turned up-Great Zimbabwe. Botswana, a young democracy-population little bigger than Birmingham, “inherited” the CKGR from a bunch of racists and colonialists-(the days of Bechuanaland ended ish 1964- CKGR 1961 started) who were more interested in keeping the area for themselves and gave more of a fig for the “game” than the people –bit like AONBs (sorryish). Botswana also has inherited Europeans and refugees from current and previous conflicts in southern africa. That it is a mess I am in full agreement but I still see very little to commemorate in the name of heritage management and suggest that there are some extremely patronising postures being taken that people should be extremely wary of. I probably am propagating some here myself for which I am extremely sorry but where is the heritage management in the story or others on the survival site. I would prefer the story as owners have mineral rights forcibly taken from them and I think that people might like to consider if they own the mineral rights to their back garden.

And then theres this to “manage” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6293333.stm

How long before DNA mapping becomes the homogeny (pseudo) of archaeological interpretation in ancestral identity cases
Archaeological interpretation- if only

[tom wilson]

Unitof1,
thanks for that, very interesting.

Survival are definitely up for the 'by hook or by crook' approach to campaigning, and they have clearly decided that it serves their purposes to portray the Bushmen as not a million miles from 'noble savages'. They are an unbrella for a loosely affiliated group of human rights organisations started up by a journalist, not archaeologists, or anthropologists. However, they are trying. Your point that the Bushmen have a claim because they live there now (not 20000 y.a.) is a very good one.
The government's main argument seems always to have been an ecological one: that the Bushmen are driving the wildlife to extinction. I'd suggest that what they need is not less archaeology (or heritage management, if you'd prefer that term) but more. Can we demonstrate that the Bushmen have had a stable hunting economy for some time? If so, the government's argument is exposed for the sham it is. We might also find out a bit more about a very interesting society's history.

Of course, if the introduction of firearms etc. really has made the Bushmen's economy unsustainable, they're stuffed either way.

'In the busy market there are fortunes to be won and lost, but in the cherry orchard there is peace'.
Chinese proverb

[Unitof1]

Its a one trick noble savage setup with an EC2 address and gets 1.5 millions from somewhere and I cant help but feel would be a “good” cover for ....

“Can we demonstrate that the Bushmen have had a stable hunting economy for some time? If so, the government's argument is exposed for the sham it is.”

Why would I want to -most governments arguments are shams-look closer to home

stable hunting economy -Its a desert-global warming change happens. These “people” have been moved reserved relocated killed ripped off but so has everybody else in Botswana or is Batswana or is it Tswana- half of whom are living in South Africa (which will have its own issues) and all were also moved reserved relocated killed ripped off and might have a ancestral burial or two in the CKGR (absence of evidence.....)

The thought that somebodys identity only comes from a place is the problem

[tom wilson]

2 wrongs don't make a right Unitof1.

'In the busy market there are fortunes to be won and lost, but in the cherry orchard there is peace'.
Chinese proverb