Heritage and globalization

Heritage and globalization - Group of Research on Museums and Patrimony (GRMP) presented at the 3rd International ACME (Arts Culture & Management in Europe) Workshop "Creative Regions 1: Heritage, Creation & Tourism", organized by Anne GOMBAULT, 17-18 dec. 2009, BEM-Bordeaux Management School
by Fabrice THURIOT, co-coordinator of the book with Genevieve VIDAL and with the collaboration of Mathilde GAUTIER, Anne HERTZOG and Frederic POULARD, L'Harmattan, Collection « Administration et aménagement du territoire », 2008, ISBN : 978-2-296-05650-3 • 26 € • 290 pages (in french).
http://www.editions-harmattan.fr/index.asp?navig=catalogue&obj=livre&no=26357

The Group of Research on Museums and Patrimony (GRMP)
•Interdisciplinary and international network founded in 1994 by Jean-Michel Tobelem with about 40 young researchers and professionals in order to discuss informally their works for their Ph.D.
•First collective book : Politics and Museums, L’Harmattan, 2002.
•Second collective book : Heritage and globalization, L’Harmattan, 2008.
•Third project : a seminar and a collective book on the topic of the networks in the fields of museums, heritage and cultural policies.
•http://membres.lycos.fr/arpamus/index.html (first website, not up'dated)
•http://grouprecherchmusetpat.blogspot.com/ (up'dated blog).

The issue
•The project was to show the complexity of the process, not only made of standardization from the western countries, especially the US, to the other ones in the fields of museums and heritage, but also by local adaptations, hybridations and specificities.
•This process is also much more than only commercial and deals with politics, religion, society, values and symbols of the people.
•Some objects, traditions or ideas come from a specific place but are spread around the world by the western countries as their were theirs.
•This process is not new but is wider now with the internationalization of the all world and Internet.

Cultural goods and exchanges
•The preface of the ethnologist Jean-Pierre Warnier tends to point out how cultural goods, which express the characteristics of the people in their family, community or nation, have always been put in tension with the commercial exchanges but the rules were before internal to the partners or imposed by the enemies locally.
•The changes are in the scale and the timing: the entire world can say which and when a cultural good is or has to be protected, shown, visited, lent, rent, sold or even destroyed or rebuilt. The definitions are global but the people resist more or less to this process.
•Is universalism of the dominants versus relativism of the dominated still the rule or universalism of all of the relativisms against the others because of the multiplication of the stakeholders?...

I- More and more internationalization
•The Empires are old with always the same process to conquer and to leave traces.
•Once there are over, other people try to take possession of them. That’s what happen in a way to the egyptian objects but the monuments are not to move and the egyptian museums are egyptian projects and not western ones. Finally, Egypt colonize the world as much as or even more than the opposite.
•The modernization of the french museums has come in a part from the US by the french State since the 50’s with commercial and pedagogical methods for the tourists and the pupils, but the local authorities adapt the new model to their territory with the help of the State.

International and national standards and local applications
•ICOM and ICOMOS are two NGO’s linked to UNESCO respectively for museums and monuments and sites. The first one tends to be more relativist than the other which defends the universalist principles in the way it spread preservation models.
•The States have their own rules but are pushed at the same time by their territories and the global system. However, they remain the references for the application of the national and the international rules, even in a part for the framework of local rules in respect to national ones.
•Local sites and authorities adopted some global methods, especially for communication and events, with sometimes some public-private partnerships.

European influence
•The Council of Europe has been promoted some good practices of integrated preservation at the same time of Unesco with the worldwide heritage of humanity since the 70’s.
•From the 90’s the EU is supporting some heritage projects in the countries or transnationally.
•But EU organizes competition between the projects which have to convince nationally before, such as for the worldwide heritage list.
•The case of Vauban citadels in the north of France, Belgium and Netherlands was finally not chosen for the list of worldwide heritage in spite of all the efforts to fit in the application.

II- Globalization of strategies and practices : competition and co-operation towards uniformization?
•Big museums are duplicating themselves around the world, outside and/or in their own country, with some adaptations however: cf. Guggenheim, The Ermitage, The Louvre, Beaubourg…
•Museums and monuments superstars, such as «blockbusters» exhibitions, pull up the audience thanks to their reputation as much as or more than their content or their commercial strategy (ie the Guggenheims which gather at once emblematic monuments, museums and exhibitions).
•Their name has become a brand all around the world.
•Shops are no more only limited to the visited place but also on other ones. They became an important point of the sites, sometimes autonomous such as the restaurants.

New uses worldwide
•The web is a US technology with the predominancy of the english language but it allows also all the particularisms to express themselves. It is checked for the museums websites or for the same topics, which are promoted from different points of view, collective or individual.
•The digitalization of datas on memories, history, heritage is a new way to share values and perhaps to create «heritage communities» (cf. the Faro convention of the Council of Europe on the value of cultural heritage to the society, 2005) around the world related to cultural diversity.

A question not to conclude:
« diversity in worldwide uniformity » on the opposite of EU: « unity in diversity »?