Since the late twentieth century, ‘heritage’ has developed into a vast and indefinite field with its own conventions, centres, conferences, departments, teaching, teaching staff, handbooks, periodicals, theses and other literature. It has been divided into a number of different categories depending on type of heritage, period, region, methodological approach or theoretical attitude. This sector has now gained a voluminous conference publication with 853 pages on cultural heritage.
Hani Hayajneh at Yarmouk University in Irbid in Jordan—who specialises in Near Eastern Cultures and Languages and has held a UNESCO Chair of Heritage and Sustainable Tourism—has edited the proceedings from an international Humboldt conference in 2019 in Jordan on cultural heritage. The resulting publication Cultural heritage: at the intersection of the humanities and the sciences contains 57 articles written by 82 authors from a range of disciplines and countries. The articles are dived into 11 sections showing the variety of the conference content: I) Between Humanities and Natural Sciences; II) Archaeology, Ancient Civilizations and Cultures of the Middle East and North Africa; III) Epigraphy, Philology and Dialectology; IV) Numismatics; V) Scientific Methods and Technologies in Cultural Heritage Research; VI) Museums and Museology; VII) Cultural Heritage in the Digital Era; VIII) Cultural Heritage and Local Communities: Research, Capacity Building, Management, and Sustainable Development; IX) The Legal Frameworks of Cultural Heritage; X) Cultural Heritage in Times of War and Crisis; XI) Intangible Cultural Heritage in a Changing World.
The book is impossible to read in one go. One should use it as a kind of encyclopaedia in which everybody might find something of interest. Thus, I enjoyed articles on the perceptions of monuments (article 7), the Roman city (10), the agrarian landscapes of Jordan (11), contested heritage (31), reconstruction of tablets from Raqqa in Syria (34), heritage as a resource (40), the city of Amman (41), illicit trade (47), threats against heritage (49), the possibility of using heritage in reconciliation (51) and intangible heritage and forced immigrants (55)—others would of course prioritise differently. If the reader is looking for an overview, Hayajneh's Introduction provides excellent summaries of all contributions and each article begins with an abstract in English and ends with an abstract in Arabian. The publication, however, cannot escape some critical remarks. It is fair to question if a single heavy volume mediating the conference proceedings is an appropriate solution to the needs of the present scientific community. Perhaps the contributions would better come into their own by being presented in minor and smaller volumes devoted to different themes. In this book, investigations are rather randomly mixed with pure presentations or descriptions of ‘this and that’ related to heritage, archaeology or the past in general because the concept of cultural heritage is used very broadly. Paradoxically, the conference and the publication insist on the concept of cultural heritage, whereas the foreword and the last article—both by the anthropologist Christoph Wulff—claim that nature and culture in an age of the Anthropocene cannot be separated any longer.
The geographical approach might also be questioned. Most articles relate to Jordan, some relate to what is denoted the Near East, West Asia, the Orient, the Middle East, the Levant or MENA (Middle East and North Africa), Israel for some reason is almost totally absent and there are individual articles related to Greece, Portugal, Romania, Switzerland, Mexico and Japan. Perhaps a greater focus on solely the Middle East or MENA would have been more meaningful, regardless of the quality of the other contributions.
The volume of Cultural Heritage is in itself a monument; but, while one has to recognise the effort taken to create it, this monument should be used diligently and with a questioning approach.
