Heritage and corruption: the two faces of the nation-state

Abstract

Nation-states’ investment in heritage supports Benedict Anderson’s thesis that nationalism offers collective immortality in the face of individual mortality. By the same token, however, corruption – a metaphor based on the impermanence of the flesh – corrodes the official face of heritage, offering more covert and carnal understandings of urban life and of its architectural beauties while also affording opportunities for kinds of profiteering that damage the very fabric that heritage policies seek to celebrate. Both these aspects of social reality represent the ‘cultural intimacy’ that governments seek to deny or suppress but on which their citizens’ loyalty often depends. It thus becomes imperative for scholars of heritage to recognise that heritage and corruption represent two closely interrelated dimensions of the management of the past in the present, and that theories of heritage therefore cannot afford to ignore the concomitant implications of local ideas about corruption and the practices on which they rest.

Keywords:

• heritage
• corruption
• nationalism
• cultural intimacy
• Original Sin
• Italy
• Greece
• Thailand

Notes

1. See, e.g. Il Messaggero, 26 February 2010, 1, under the headline ‘Tangenti per i restauri delle chiese: Mazzette romane, trovati 50mila euro’; http://www.pupia.tv/modules.php?name=News&file=print&sid=7935 (accessed 30 December 2012).

2. For the context, see the film Monti Moments (Herzfeld 2007). The architect indicates that the real beauty of Rome lay in the frequency with which formal rules were broken. This is very different from official doctrines of urban ‘beautification’ such as I have observed in Thailand; in these programmes, strict regulation often suppresses or opposes eruptions of innovative or externally derived aesthetics; see, e.g. Thompson (1979, 50); and now Mack (2012). Interestingly, both of these examples address immigrant groups that rejected the streamlining of neighbourhoods desired by government planners in, respectively, England and Sweden. In Thailand, the imposition of ‘beauty’ (khwaam suay ngaam) on the city of Bangkok rejects instead a highly localised version of Thai culture in favour of a centralised and homogenising vision (see Herzfeld 2006).

3. Nor has it achieved the status of a common goal that seems to animate at least some sectors of the population of Luang Prabang in neighbouring, socialist Laos (Berliner 2010).

4. David Kertzer (1980, 1996) has argued forcefully for recognition of the strategic adoption of Catholic symbols and rituals by the former Communist party. While this is not a nation-state issue, the key role played by the communists in Italian national politics makes their superficially surprising (but strategically sensible) adoption of their greatest enemies’ ritual vocabulary a further indication of how, in Italy par excellence but throughout the world to some degree, political entities design their bureaucratic practices in terms of pre-existing cosmological concepts.

5. See, e.g. http://www.tovima.gr/society/article/?aid=310947, last accessed 19 July 2014. He was accused of suborning witnesses in a marijuana-production case; during my fieldwork, he was described as doing the same for animal-rustlers.

6. This is not to revert to the ‘allochronism’ with which Fabian (1983) has taxed anthropologists; I do not mean that temporalities are radically different, but simply that the cultural mechanisms for expressing and managing them may differ in important respects.

7. For a fuller discussion of this concept and its relationship to monumentality, see Herzfeld (1991).