‘Intangible’ and ‘tangible’ heritage A topology of culture in contexts of faith Inaugural dissertation (PhD thesis) to obtain the academic degree of a Dr. phil. submitted to the Institute of Geography Faculty for Chemistry, Pharmacy and Geo-sciences (09) Johannes Gutenberg-University of Mainz Germany Britta Rudolff of Siegen, Germany Mainz, 2006 Britta Rudolff ‘Intangible’ and ‘tangible’ heritage A topology of culture in contexts of faith “As soon as we have the thing before our eyes, and in our hearts an ear for the word, thinking prospers. Few are experienced enough in the difference between an object of scholarship and a matter thought. (…) He who thinks greatly must err greatly. We never come to thoughts. They come to us. From such companionship a few perhaps may rise to be journeymen in the craft of thinking. So that one of them, unforeseen, may become a master. (…) All our hearts courage is the echoing response to the first call of Being which gathers our thinking into the play of the world. (…) What is spoken is never and in no language, what is said. The oldest of the old follows behind us in our thinking and yet it comes to meet us. That is why thinking holds to the coming of what has been and is remembrance. (…) But poetry that thinks is in truth the topology of Being. This topology tells Being the whereabouts of its actual presence. Singing and thinking are the stems neighbour to poetry they grow out of Being and reach into its truth.” Martin Heidegger: The Thinker as Poet (Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, 1947) Preface ‘Intangible’ and ‘tangible’ heritage – a topology of culture in contexts of faith, was researched, written, reflected upon, revised, criticised, affirmed and finally submitted as a PhD thesis to the Institute of Cultural Geography, at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, in December 2006. The submission was of course merely the very last step of a work, which was prepared throughout a three-year period from 2004 to 2006. My working basis during this time shifted between my office – offered by the Institute of Cultural Geography – at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany; my temporary office – provided by the School of Canadian Studies, Programme of Heritage Conservation – at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, where I spent the first half of the year 2006, and my favourite spot in the Umayyad Mosque as well as my lovely little roof-terrace nearby - kindly offered by ‘Um Za- heer’ who like ‘my’ mosque welcomed me with ever-growing gentleness the many times and altogether about eleven months I stayed – in Damascus Syria. In all three places I had the pleasure of encountering people that became very special to me. I found inspiration from writers, colleagues and friends who provided me insights into their thoughts, their meaning-making processes and their understanding of cultural heritage. My writings have also strongly been influenced by people I never met – and will never meet – but whose legacy in writing provided me with ideas and understanding and who – despite not being connected to the three places of my work – now also have their topoi in my thoughts. I would like to point out two au- thors in this context, first the late Martin Heidegger, a German philosopher, whose writings gave me much inspiration, although he would very likely dispraise my way of reading his words and my chosen approach to heritage. Despite my high esteem for his philosophical concepts, his fascinating language and his ‘unconcealing’ explica- tions, I wish to take the opportunity to distance myself from his political orientations and reported anti-Semitic positions. The second is Wilfred Cantwell Smith, a Cana- dian scholar of comparative religious studies, whose works influenced the conceptual formulation of heritage of faith that became a central subject of my writings. He taught me to encounter people as practitioners of faith rather than members of (a) religion. Considerations on the subject – the interrelation of tangible and intangible heritage and opportunities of integrated approaches for heritage management – already started in 2003, while I was working for the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM) in Rome and with interest observed the evolution and adoption of the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage. Already at this time I had many discussions with colleagues who confirmed the growing relevance of such a study. At vii preface present, almost four years later, I have gained the impression that so many scholars have taken up the subject during the last three years that there remains hardly any- thing new to say. On the other hand, an integrated approach is far from being achieved and I hope that my writings can contribute to this ongoing process. My German mentor Anton Escher, who encouraged me to leave Rome and take up the project of writing a PhD thesis in Mainz, kept all his initial promises. He was of great assistance in generously providing a comfortable research infrastructure – including financial support for the many trips to Syria – and the encouragement which I needed in the desperate hours of this long-term research. As a scholarship holder of the research training group ‘Space and ritual – function meaning and use of places of sacred intention’ I was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) dur- ing the first eighteen months of my research. Subsequently the Centre for Intercul- tural Studies (ZIS) of the Johannes Gutenberg University offered me the position of a coordinator of the research project ‘Norms and values as cultural negotiation prod- ucts in UNESCO’ which fortunately overlapped in content with my own research aims. By the end of 2005 the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) granted me another scholarship which allowed me to spend a term as visiting scholar at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada and to conduct yet another trip to Damascus to finalise my empirical topological studies. Without the support of these individuals and institutions the research which led to this work would not have been possible; and this assures my gratitude to all of them. In Mainz, I also took advantage of the discussions I had with students and colleagues in the framework of a graduate course on World Heritage, which I conducted, as well as a field project in Damascus. I want to particularly mention five students, who sup- ported me in doing interviews for this thesis during a two-week period in Damascus and who are responsible for hundreds of pages of interview transcript that I found on my desk after my return from Syria. In Ottawa, I was supported by my Canadian co-mentor Herb Stovel – also my for- mer boss at ICCROM – who had meanwhile accepted the job of a professor at the heritage conservation programme. Our discussions were extremely helpful during the phase that the structure of my writings was finalised and it was he who – though unintended – made me discover Heidegger in the context of my research. In addi- tion, our many email exchanges forced me to continuously reflect on my approach to heritage and the applicability of my concepts and the fact that he often refused to agree with my point of view urged me to scrutinise my work again and again. Thanks Herb, for these often stimulating, sometimes provoking and occasionally confusing but almost always encouraging reflections. A crucial and lasting encounter during my stay in Canada was with Julian Smith, a conservation architect and – as I only found out much later – son of the earlier men- tioned Wilfred Cantwell Smith. That means, both father and son entirely independ- ently had an immense influence on my research, but I think that the impact of Julian Smith was even more substantial. Although he might not share this perception, I viii preface consider him the inventor of the concept ‘topologies’, which I have merely renar- rated as the synthesis of a long lunch conversation in an Indian restaurant in Bank Street. He never talked about topologies – at least not before I proposed the term to him – but about cultural landscapes, which he defined in an unfamiliar and multilay- ered way. He told me that his interest in cultural landscapes emerged during his time in India where landscapes, that where quite strange to begin with became more and more familiar, a story that fully reflected my experiences in the Umayyad Mosque. I have not referred to his definition in my entire writing, because I wanted to strictly avoid confusions between topologies and the established definitions of cultural land- scapes. On the other hand, it so much affected my conceptual approach that I do not want to withhold his thoughts and this might be a good place to give Julian the floor: “I fundamentally disagree with the definition of cultural landscapes (…) as a geographical terrain that exhibits the interaction of humans and the environment. In my mind that could be a definition of a landscape, but a cultural landscape, I think, partly exists in the mind and therefore is in a sense a mental construct related to a place. It is a sad relationship. I often define a cultural landscape as ideas embedded in place. And the idea is what is cultural about a place and not the landscape. The example I gave to my students is that if you grow up in this country [Canada] and you have a grandmother, who still lives in an old Victorian home, and you go to your grandmother’s house, and you enter, and you see the heavy curtains, and even on a bright sunny day it is a dark room, and it has high ceilings, and she invites you for a tea for which she gets out her silver tea set, and it is very formal, and you have a cube of sugar and a few of her handmade cookies.