Border-Straddling Heritages

In the era of global connectivity, the dynamics of mobility and globalization reshape social relations in unprecedented ways and across multiple scales. This reshaping continues to challenge usual understandings of concepts of borders and sovereignty, directly influencing transformations of identities and heritages. This points to the importance of developing better understandings of the relationship between heritage and borders. Exploring the intersection of the two concepts, this Introduction identifies a complex conceptual terrain where heritage and borders co-constitute one another. To this end, the chapter highlights two properties—processualism and relationality—common to understandings of heritage and borders. The emphasis is on a "soft" approach to defining borders, encompassing borders, boundaries, and frontiers, to avoid circumscribing the exploration to nations-states and to allow the import of cultural, symbolic, and disciplinary delineations across different scales. The Introduction proposes the idea of heritage-border complexes, as an analytical framework that integrates time, space, and power, and challenges essentialist and exclusionary narratives. Seen from this perspective, heritage is at once a tool of boundary-making and a means of crossing and redefining borders. It thus calls for a more nuanced understanding of and approach to heritage from within Critical Heritage Studies. This Introduction concludes by highlighting the common themes and concepts that cut across the rest of the volume.

Karelia presents a challenge for heritage. In Finland, everyone has an idea of the region. Karelian heritage, however, is not one thing but a collection of regional and nostalgic imaginaries that are both living and lost in the aftermath of the Second World War. Borders and heritage have a complex relationship that becomes apparent in how border regions are imagined and reinterpreted. Engaging with how such complexities are propagated and change over time, this chapter poses a simple question. Where is Karelia, and why does it matter? To this end, the chapter plays with the idea whether Karelian heritage can be imagined without borders, real or relict – an idea that might seem impossible since it sits on the border and is filled with borderlines of different ages. Theoretically, the chapter argues that any place can seem both relational and territorial in terms of heritage and borders, in that they push each other into existence. The act of describing or constructing heritage teases out bounded space, but these heritages must be understood as relational, scalar, and parallel since there seldom is on clear bounded space from where to draw heritage practices. Aside from recounting the history of Karelia at the borders, empirically, the chapter builds on interviews with regional museums in South Karelia to uncover, first, why, for some, the ceded Karelia turned into Karelia, second, how museums reconstruct relational regional and borderland heritages and, third, what are the potentialities of imaging Karelian heritage without borders as a region not lost. 

This chapter explores heritage-border complex by emphasizing an approach that is rarely included in the studies of bordering practices or scaling processes, namely how heritage-border configuration is about a negotiation between the self and the other. In this chapter, a heritage-border complex is about the heritage that people can relate to or identify with, whether it is ‘theirs’ or ‘other’s’ heritage. In such an approach, the key is the connectivity. The article argues that heritage has the potential to connect people across spatial and social borders and scales. This does not mean that the heritage enabling connectivity would be ‘shared’ or ‘common’. Instead, the connectivity and the negotiation between the self and the other draw on the ability to feel empathy evoked by heritage and to connect one’s experiences and life-space to those of others. The chapter’s empirical exploration draws on interviews with visitors of two heritage sites, the Great Guild Hall in Estonia and Kamp Westerbork in the Netherlands, by analyzing how the visitors emotionally engaged with the sites’ transnational heritage narratives, such as those of the Holocaust, the fight against the occupation, and forced immigration, and how they were able to empathize with people in those narratives, particularly when the visitors were not themselves directly part of those heritage communities. As a result, the article highlights the positive connections between emotions, empathy experiences, and understanding enabled by heritage, but on the other hand, acknowledges that these connections contain many challenges and ethical dilemmas.

Borders exist in political and apolitical ways. They connote harmony but also create disharmony. They endure as formal and informal separations, but their creations also invite interrogation of such divisions. Hotly contested in political contexts, borders as communal spaces and transitions can be captured in hybrid artistic and cultural works that engender a consolatory effect. In this essay, I argue that a collective past can find new meaning through art in borderland communities that were once unitary, but that politics and international diplomacy tore asunder. Despite the imposition of modern frontiers that produced new ideologies and political identities intended to reinforce differences through rigid boundaries and ethnic markers, art recovers a buried but shared heritage that reconnects contemporary communities to a familiar – if contested – past. I assess the history of boundary-making between the Republic of Azerbaijan and Iran, which emerged in the aftermath of the cataclysmic Russo-Persian Wars of the nineteenth century and juxtapose it against contemporary artistic interpretations of these political divisions. 

It is the fate of every present condition to be afflicted by the phantasmagorical with heritage no exception. Equally inescapably, heritagisation makes and remakes borders. In drawing these two assertions together this chapter recognises that there are borders beyond those of the nation state; beyond both the political (narrowly defined) and physical. It seeks too to work with and beyond the boundaries between recognised and unrecognised heritage; between loose and more constrained forms of space.

This chapter takes the boundary fence, its ruination and presence/absence as its focus, to further explore questions of the possibility of unrecognised and latent forms of heritage (Robertson, 2019). Immediately after World War One a series of land invasions erupted across the Scottish Highlands and Islands to which the British government reacted by introducing legislation which sought to legitimise such actions in the form of land settlement schemes across the region. As a consequence of the nature of crofting agriculture these schemes required large areas of common grazing which in turn required boundary fencing.

These post and wire fences represented and materialised borders between different forms of land use and ownership, different ways of life and different and often competing sets of tenants and landholders. But the physical boundary could not be sustained and fell into ruin. It is the heritage qualities of this absence and loss with which this chapter engages. Explored through a series of ‘vignettes of the fence’, what is left behind, this chapter asserts, is a spectral and loose form of heritage that does ‘heritage work’, even unconsciously. This work, it may be suggested, is no less the powerful for the fact that the fence/heritage may well pass unrecognised all around us, for in this looseness is a reservoir of heritage meaning and heritage futures.

The direct targeting of heritage in the Middle East and North Africa, most notably that undertaken by the so-called Islamic State, has highlighted the role of heritage in formations, as well as (attempted) dissolutions, of nation states. A core component of that heritage in Iraq has been the ancient and religious heritage associated with the Assyrian peoples and their empire. The heartland of the Assyrian community in what is today the Nineveh Plains straddles the borders of both Iraq and the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), with Assyrian communities living both within the Iraqi government and Kurdish territories. Due to ongoing contestations over places, territories and borders, Assyrian heritage and the villages in which they have predominantly lived have become increasingly politicized. This chapter focuses on the heritage of the Assyrians as it is deployed across borders in current contestations of identity, territory and power.

Drawing from focus group discussions with Assyrian youth, alongside a series of semi-structured interviews, this chapter explores the spatio-temporal dynamics of Assyrian heritage as it is employed and deployed by various factions. Through a focus on encounters with Assyrian heritage across these varied and complex sovereignty-scapes, we highlight how heritage is co-opted in contestations to build power and control. By recognising how global conceptions and relationships to heritage feed into approaches and values at the local level, we emphasise the political and affective dimensions of heritage to illustrate how heritage operates beyond bounded localities and the nation state.

The chapter adds to the exploration of heritage-border-complexes by problematizing Europeanization in war heritage-making in three different geohistorical border contexts: the German-Polish, the Croatian and the Finnish-Russian borderlands. Europeanization is often understood in the context of heritage-making related to cultural policies developed since the 1990s as an effect of European institutional integration. To move beyond such limited understanding, we engage with various scales of war heritage-making to explore in what ways past events and legacies of borders are entangled with processes of Europeanization in their relation to local, regional, national and transnational narratives.

In two of the case studies we explore, the Polish-German and the Finnish-Russian, Europeanization is closely related to national heritage-making and articulate in attempts to open towards common European experiences as well as common European values. Despite such similarities, such processes have quite different connotations, related to how one borderland is internal to the EU while the other involves an external EU border. The Croatian example is also located at the external border of the EU, yet here Europeanization is articulated in regionally anchored heritage-making narratives of imperial Europe, thus shedding another light on the relations between borders, heritage-making and Europeanization. The different versions of war heritage-making all straddle across borders, yet they are still bordering, and they do not necessarily contribute to inclusive memory spaces.

By opening towards such multiple and multiscalar versions of the Europeanization of heritage-making, the chapter aims at broadening current understanding of the relationship between bordering, heritage and Europeanization, thereby underlining the importance of (even) more inclusive, border-crossing approach of using and making heritage.

The article presents the Walk of Peace, a hiking trail, memorial network, and heritage assemblage. It consists of locations, artefacts, institutions, governance and administrative structures, projects, individuals, and contains a variety of practices. It is rooted at the Slovenian-Italian border and connects various remnants of the First World War Isonzo Front from the Julian Alps in Slovenia to the Adriatic Sea in Italy. It has been developed from local initiatives and was established by the Walks of Peace in the Soča Region Foundation. These materialized through the partnership working of several projects; local, national, and European funds, the self-motivated collaboration of several institutions, along with local communities and individuals. The merging of bottom-up and top-down initiatives at local, regional (cross-border), national and continental (European) scale was essential. 

The authors observe the Walk of Peace cross-border heritage work and its attempts to transform the difficult “war heritage of the hostile nations” into a less contentious one of building “peace among nations”. They describe its path from local initiative, cross-border cooperation facilitator, to an actor of diplomacy at the state level in Slovenia, and to a lesser extent in Italy. As well as an international actor in the transnational commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of the events of the First World War. In recent years the collaboration of actors along with the balancing of contentious intersectoral and interscalar power geometries has proved to be robust enough for pragmatic institutional (cross border) heritage management, coupled with the development of a brand and ambition to replicate this, not only in Italy, but also in other European territories. 

Borders are constantly being negotiated reflecting not only fluctuating relations between nations but also changing affective narratives of collective identities. Over the past two decades, the growing field of Heritage Studies has revealed similar boundary-making uses to which heritage is put. Not surprisingly then an area of enquiry has arisen exploring the bordering effects of heritage and the heritagization of borders (Källén 2019, this volume).  It is the effect of both heritage and borders to sharpen differences and condense othering dynamics where one identity ends, and the other begins that has been the focus of attention.  In this chapter, we explore how a heritagescape (encompassing a geographical territory as well as a symbolic space) can act as both a bellwether of trends in identity politics and a heterotopia – after Foucault – mirroring while simultaneously upsetting what lies beyond. To explore these dynamics, we present our mapping of the evolving heritagescape of the Demilitarized Zone of Korea (DMZ). We pay particular attention to the so-called ‘Security DMZ Tour’ that has been taking visitors to the area since the 1970s, since 2000 with the adage of ‘Peace’ to its name. Analysing the visual messages and discursive uses of cultural heritage sites allows us to assess the degree to which the heritagescape of the Paju DMZ contributes to the representation of peace and reconciliation that the tour aims to convey.

The border between the U.S. and México west of the Río Grande is an unnatural line defined only by the artificial grid of longitude and latitude.  For the people who live and work along this line, including scholars, the international frontier is in one sense very artificial, but at the same time a very undeniable reality.  A mix of Española and English, tortillas and white bread, Norteño and Country Western music, and El Pollo Loco and Kentucky Fried Chicken define a zone that is culturally neither the United States nor México but simultaneously both with a shared heritage process that the unnatural line seeks to deny. Yet there is nothing fuzzy about the line slashed through aboriginal territories, dividing Native Nations, and leaving the heritage of ancient pasts unnaturally sundered. This line both impacts and structures the social relationships that generate the heritage of the border.  Europeans sought to create the United States and México as essential entities after they conquered and subjugated aboriginal peoples.  Each settler state constituted national heritages and borders that legitimated this conquest and defined the place of Native peoples, Mexicans and Euro-Americans in the heritages of the respective states.  Archaeologists participated in the development of the national heritage in both countries and these heritages also defined the practice of archaeology.  The heritage process on the U.S. – Mexican border, crafts a complex space where different competing heritages converge to create ambiguous, paradoxical, and contradictory social, cultural, political, and economic relations.