In conflict and post-conflict contexts, heritage sites and objects are often considered as things that should be preserved, restored, and even reconstructed for the benefit of future generations and for the purpose of restoring communities’ shared sense of belonging. On the contrary, this article argues that if we—the cultural heritage community, comprising cultural heritage professionals, academics, and organizations—are really concerned about future generations and intend to employ culture and heritage in rebuilding post-conflict societies in a positive way, then what is urgently needed today is to extend our focus from the visible effect of conflict to the invisible one; to focus on culture in its totality and in its complexity; and to shift our focus from heritage sites and objects to people and from the past to the future. That is, our efforts in conflict and post-conflict contexts should be less about preserving ancient sites objects and more about “preserving,” reconstructing, and creating the “possibilities for better futures.”Footnote 1 In other words, what is urgently needed today is to investigate creative heritage practices that tackle issues that matter to people who are experiencing, or have experienced, conflicts and to support them in building better futures.
This article is a developed version of the argument discussed by the author during the International Council on Monuments and Sites’s (ICOMOS) University Forum workshop, and it reflects on a number of the ideas that were debated during this workshop. In particular, it builds on Erica Avrami’s argument that loss and destruction can provide opportunities for new kinds of heritage making through creative processes.Footnote 2 The article also considers that heritage is a renewable resource and that people’s individual and collective psychological and behavioral tendencies are shaped by their heritage and their heritage is also shaped by them, as discussed by Cornelius Holtorf and Ciarán Benson respectively during the workshop.Footnote 3 Furthermore, the article reflects on the arguments that heritage conservation should be understood as management of change to assert continuity and that it should assume a social role that addresses the transmission of messages and the interpretation of information and ideas, as discussed by Loughlin Kealy and Nino Sulfaro respectively during the workshop.Footnote 4 The article also reflects on Holtorf’s argument that heritage conservation should consider that the future holds not only the risks that we need to manage but also the opportunities that we need to capture in order to make the ideal of heritage preservation sustainable.Footnote 5
This argument can be situated within an emerging literature that defines heritage as more than just inherited things but as a cultural processFootnote 6 and a discursive construction.Footnote 7 Today, theoretical approaches to heritage in conflict and post-conflict contexts have broadened to include politics of memory, international aid, human rights, and the social roles of heritage.Footnote 8 Additionally, heritage-conflict literature now investigates how destruction and loss are part of heritage;Footnote 9 how conflicts can generate new cultural heritage;Footnote 10 and how heritage should be less about preservation and more about embracing loss or change and the subsequent production of alternative forms of knowledge as well as finding creative and empowering ways to adapt.Footnote 11
While the above theoretical orientations and arguments offer inspiring approaches to the questions of heritage in conflict and post-conflict contexts, the situation on the ground is still dominated by conventional heritage preservation practices, which have been largely ineffective in providing sustainable solutions or rebuilding post-conflict societies.Footnote 12 Taking into consideration that violence has both material effects and non-material effects, which Johan Galtung calls cultural and structural violence,Footnote 13 it can be argued that the heritage community has been primarily responding to the top-level effects of conflict—that is, the visible, direct, and material effects. It is even possible to argue that the heritage community’s response to heritage destruction is itself a form of cultural violence as it often ignores local communities instead of supporting their struggle to reconstitute their physical, social, and cultural bases. In the case of Syria, for example, the majority of cultural heritage efforts since 2011 have been focused on, and shaped by, the preservation of iconic tangible heritage, particularly by focusing on the issues of documentation, awareness raising, and the training of cultural heritage professionals.Footnote 14 Yet, by investigating the practices of non-experts groups in Syria, one can find inspiring approaches to heritage in the conflict context.
This article is focused on Syria, and it came first as a reaction—both to the grave events taking place in Syria and to the heritage community’s responses to them—from a Syrian researcher—the author—who left Syria 30 months after the start of the uprising/conflict. The article, however, is not meant to infer that the case study of Syria is a unique case that requires a special response. Rather, the intention is to use the events taking place in Syria to investigate, discuss, and develop new approaches to the questions of heritage and culture in conflict and post-conflict contexts rather than falling back into conventional and arguably counterproductive approaches. The article argues that the utilization of heritage by a number of the grassroots “civil society” groups in Syria offers examples of creative heritage practices that are truly concerned about future generations and can support the rebuilding of post-conflict societies in a positive way. The article commences by introducing the research methodology and context. Next, it moves to discuss how the cultural relief activities of one of the “civil society” groups in Syria is arguably an example of heritage practice that is socially innovative, people centered, and future oriented.
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY AND CONTEXT
Taking into consideration the rural-urban differences and the ethnic and religious diversity of SyriaFootnote 15 as well as the nature of the Syrian uprising—which was centered in small cities, towns, villages, and urban and suburban neighborhoodsFootnote 16—the study applies a case-based research strategy that is focused on the context of the city of Daraa, a small city in the southern part of Syria and my home town. The population of Daraa before the conflict was predominantly Sunni Muslim with a small population of Christians and Shi’a Muslims, yet this population became considerably smaller as a result of demographic changes during the ongoing conflict.Footnote 17
The study employs a qualitative framework through a particular ethnographic research strategy that utilizes Lila Abu-Lughod’s “ethnographies of the particular” by focusing on a particular group of people at a particular point in time in order to challenge the effects of homogeneity, coherence, and timelessness produced by conventional ethnographic studies.Footnote 18 In addition, this ethnographic research strategy complies with both James Clifford’s argument that ethnographic representations are always partial and positioned truths,Footnote 19 and with Donna Haraway’s definition of objectivity as “situated knowledges” that asserts that knowledge and truth are partial, situated, subjective, imbued with power, and relational.Footnote 20 Thus, it should be noted that this study, like all studies, is partial. The study is also situated and reflexive—that is, it is a reading of, and writing from, a particular place, from the perspective of an individual who is personally, intellectually, and politically situated.Footnote 21 Practically, the study is based on two ethnographic fieldwork seasons that were undertaken with the Syrian diaspora in Jordan (November 2015) and Lebanon (July 2016), a remote- “fieldwork” research with female interlocutors from Syrian diaspora in Jordan (April 2017), and online interviews with Syrian activists working on cultural projects in Syria (March 2018), although not all of them were based there. The particular group of people who form the focus of the study includes both ordinary people who lived in Daraa and professionals who have worked in the cultural sector in Syria. The 38 interlocutors who participated in the study were from diverse age groups and religious and educational backgrounds.
Before moving to investigate the utilization of heritage by grassroots “civil society” groups (CSGs) in Syria, it is important to illustrate how heritage is understood in the studied context and how this understanding is being changed as these two points shape the framework in which the practices of CSGs should be understood. First, the ethnographic study revealed that what constitutes heritage for the studied group at this moment in time is the shared beliefs, values, and traditions that shape the attitudes, behavior, and habits of people. In other words, the concept of heritage is mainly understood as knowledge, as a cultural process, and as a cultural product imagined and articulated within everyday sociocultural and religious practices. This is not about emphasizing a “local” concept of heritage against a “global” one. Rather, this is in line with what Ciarán Benson discussed during the ICOMOS workshop, an evolutionary “psychological and cultural” heritage of human beings.Footnote 22 Heritage-from-below studies have illustrated similar results in various contexts.Footnote 23 What is more important in relation to the context of study is that this form of heritage is highly emotional and is always understood as something that can explain, as well as guide, people’s lives by their utilization of it to shape the present and future.Footnote 24 This form of heritage has been a crucial theme in modern Arab thought where the central question is that of cultural authenticity (alasala althaqafia)—in other words, how to maintain an “authentic” connection with the past for all aspects of life while working to catch up with the “developed world.”Footnote 25
Second, the ethnographic study also revealed that the heritage community is not the only strategic cultural player in Syria today but that there are, at least, two other main groups of players—the newly emerged extremist religious groups (ERGs) and the CSGs—who also claim to be working for the benefit of future generations. The ERGs include a large number of subgroups such as Daesh (ISIS), al-Nusra Front, the Syrian Islamic Front as well as other smaller groups that share a similar goal of establishing an Islamic state in Syria but do not share the same means, as they present themselves as “Islamic charity” groups. There are no reliable estimates of the number of these groups, but they number in the hundreds at least,Footnote 26 and they change continuously as they divide, disappear, and appear again. The ERGs are often discussed in relation to the destruction and looting of ancient sites and objects.Footnote 27 However, what is usually overlooked is their extensive ideological reconstruction and manipulation of everyday sociocultural and religious practices as well as cultural expressions and art forms such as poetry, music, hymns (anashid), dance, dress codes, and visual culture.Footnote 28 These ideological reconstruction and manipulation processes function at the same level on which heritage is understood, practiced, and experienced by people, and they are related to collective identity, feelings, emotions, and the production of cultural meanings. The results of these processes are various products such as poems, songs, images, and films as well as practices that usually involve the performance and consumption of these products, such as the singing of a song, the performing of a ritual, or the wearing of certain clothes.Footnote 29 These are the elements of what Thomas Hegghammer calls “jihadi’s culture,” which is produced by ERGs to appear as part of an authentic mainstream local culture through the manipulation of its elements that has some historical precedent.Footnote 30 For example, Elisabeth Kendall analysis of ERGs’ manipulation process of poetry in Yemen shows how an illusion of authenticity and an aura of legitimacy is created around poetry by enabling the primary Arab audience to make connections based on deeply rooted and emotional cultural sensibilities and knowledge.Footnote 31
Moreover, two more aspects multiply the impact of “jihadi culture” on conflict-affected communities. The first is that the content of “jihadi culture” products is created to attract conflict-affected people. For example, one of the critical recurring themes in jihadi poetry, anashid, and films focuses on the human pain and suffering of the innocents, the occupied, and the oppressed, particularly Muslims, and how this is ignored by non-Muslims.Footnote 32 This makes “jihadi culture” very appealing in conflict contexts where human suffering is an everyday reality for the whole society. The second reason is that the heritage manipulation processes of the ERGs are part of their comprehensive governance system, which includes departments for religious education, security, sharia courts, humanitarian and relief efforts, infrastructure and public services, media channels including printed magazines and billboards, and even natural resources management.Footnote 33 That is, the construction of “jihadi culture” is not just part of advocacy projects designed and implemented to persuade conflict-affected communities, but it is also part of ERGs’ coercive policies of public order that people have to adopt as part of their survival strategy.
In short, ERGs work to normalize their concepts in the worldview of the conflict-affected communities and to package, reinforce, and convey specific cultural meanings to them. By this, ERGs seek to change how conflict-affected communities think, feel, act, and interact with others. ERGs provide people with practical and spiritual means to cope with the conflict and to build a new specific identity, an extremist one. By this, they seek to transform how people think about themselves from victims in conflict context to heroes who do not fear death but hope for the best place in heavenFootnote 34 and from passive audiences to active producers of the group’s defined future. The ERGs’ heritage manipulation process is a future-oriented practice that is linked with the production and distribution of hope for what it is made to look like a “better future” (both the short-term one in the world and the long-term one in the hereafter). This side of the ERGs’ heritage practice is what has been overlooked in the conventional discussions of, and responses to, conflict and post-conflict heritage. Yet working within similar parameters of the culture of everyday life, “civil society” groups may represent examples of how to respond to the challenges imposed by ERGs heritage practices as will be demonstrated in the next part.
CSGs
Like ERGs, CSGs also include numerous subgroups. By the end of 2016, more than 800 Syrian CSGs were active within and outside Syria.Footnote 35 The number of these young CSGs also continues to change, and it is extremely difficult to survey all of these groups due to the difficulty in gaining access into the areas where they are operating as well as the inconsistency in the number of groups officially registered in accordance with the different areas of control on the ground. The majority of CSGs in Syria emerged first as activists and community groups committed to non-violent political activism. As violence began to intensify across the country, they turned to focus on providing necessary services and humanitarian aid activities supported by individual donations. Later, a number of these initiatives developed into non-governmental organizations (NGOs), where, in addition to individual donations, they began to receive support from various international NGOs and donors.Footnote 36 The practices of CSGs include diverse sets of programs and activities that utilize culture and heritage as an instrument and resource to provide cultural relief programs that meet the cultural, social, and psychological needs and aspirations of the affected communities, which usually are not covered by humanitarian or heritage agencies. There are several CSGs that undertake this kind of practice in Syria, such as Kesh Malek in Aleppo, My Childhood in Qamishli, and Qabas in Idlib and Olive Branch in Daraa. This part will examine the practices of Olive Branch (OB) in more detail as it operates in this article’s focus area of research—the city of Daraa—and it was possible to conduct interviews with a number of its team members.
OB is a Syrian “civil society” group that was established in November 2012 as a small project in Daraa city in the southern part of Syria. The project was initiated by a few activists from the city with a budget of US $200 collected from individual donations. The activists’ first project was focused on providing education for children in the areas that are out of government control. In later projects, the activists combined educational and entertainment activities and extended their focus to the whole local community. Two years later, OB was registered in Turkey as a NGO that focuses on education, human development, and capacity building and considers that “human beings are the real capital, means and target” of their activities, which seek to build a peaceful society.Footnote 37 As explained by OB managers, the registration as a NGO was mainly needed to manage the financial issues in a professional way after a quick expansion in the funds received.
Today, OB consists of around 900 staff members and volunteers inside and outside Syria. Its organizational chart is typical for a NGO; the top management consists of a Board of Directors, a General Assembly, and an executive director, and there are a number of project departments under them. By transforming to a NGO, OB expanded its sources of funding to include various international donors and NGOs—such as Save the Children and the Norwegian Refugee Council—and, consequently, expanded its programs and activities. By the end of 2017, OB was managing 18 small centers in different towns in the southern part of Syria, publishing a monthly printed children’s magazine, and operating a number of mobile centers hosted in buses in order to reach distant communities. These centers are called Olive Branch Cultural Centers, and they offer various cultural and educational programs that target their local communities with a special focus on children. OB’s staff in every center are usually members of the local community. In addition, OB provides those members who may have previous experience in conducting education and cultural activities with the necessary training to implement its cultural and educational programs and activities. In short, all of OB’s activities and programs are planned, managed, and conducted by, with, and for the local communities.
OB cultural centers offer education for children between the ages of 5 and 13 years old. During the early stages, OB used the curriculum of the official Syrian education system, but they omitted certain curriculum subjects, such as the national education curriculum and parts of the history curriculum because they considered them to be biased and reflect the views of the Syrian government. Later, OB, in collaboration with other organizations, developed a new curriculum for its civil education programs. For OB, civil education can change the future of Syria’s children by providing them with the necessary skills to improve their life and build better futures. The civil education approach of OB seeks to protect children from being mobilized/recruited by extremist religious groups. Yet, in doing so, OB’s civil education does not dismiss Islam and Islamic traditions but, rather, acknowledges them as one of the central aspects of historical continuity in the Syrian culture and the everyday life of the people. For example, Figure 1 shows two pages from OB’s Qaws Quzah (rainbow) magazine. The page to the left introduces the holy month of Ramadan and the Islamic traditions associated with it. The page to the right is a short story that introduces children to the meanings of different colors and how people choose their clothes to represent themselves.
Figure 1. Two pages from OB’s Qaws Quzah (rainbow) magazine (courtesy of OB, 21 October 2017).
In addition to education, OB centers offer various cultural programs such as children’s theatre shows, poetry and music performances, painting workshops, psychological support sessions, and sport activities. These activities are mainly focused on children, but they are usually conducted in public spaces and involve the participation of parents and relatives (Figures 2 and 3). The content of these activities is usually based on shared common knowledge such as popular songs, poetry, and dances. For example, Figure 4 shows one of the activities that introduce children to traditional professions, clothes, and practices. The focus of this activity is on agricultural practices, which have a key position in local heritage and memory. Figure 5 shows an example of performing the traditional practice of storytelling.
Figure 2. Local communities participating in OB activities (courtesy of OB, 21 October 2017).
Figure 3. Children performing poetry and songs to an audience during two OB cultural activities (courtesy of OB, 21 October 2017).
Figure 4. One of the activities that introduces kids to traditional professions, clothes, and practices (courtesy of OB, 21 October 2017).
Figure 5. Storytelling activities performed at an OB mobile cultural center (courtesy of OB, 21 October 2017).
In addition to the non-religious traditions of poetry, music, and dance performances, OB also arranges activities to celebrate socio-religious rituals and festivals such as Eid Aladha, Ramadan, and Eid Alfitr. An example of one of these activities was conducted in OB’s bus/mobile cultural center during Ramadan (the holy month for Muslims) where children conducted a show about the traditions of Misaharaty, which they had not experienced during the conflict.Footnote 38 Similar to the above-mentioned example in OB’s educational magazine, this example shows how OB activities address both socio-religious and non-religious traditions. Both the cultural activities and the socio-religious rituals and celebrations emphasize the attitudes, behavior, and habits that reject violence, reconnect children and the audience with traditions of tolerance, and remind them of the importance of education, knowledge, and critical thinking.
The utilization of socio-religious rituals and festivals reflects OB’s deep understanding of the role and position of Islamic traditions in local societies and OB’s intention to protect such traditions from being manipulated by ERGs to advocate extremist actions. What is also important about OB’s activities is that they do not only utilize common knowledge and traditions but also encourage participants and audiences to reconsider them so that they can appropriate and build on them to overcome the challenges of everyday life. Examples of this approach can be observed in the “who am I?” activity, which encourages children to think about their own personal identity and to express and discuss it with the group so that they get to know each other and shape their collective identity accordingly. Another example is observed in the “we try-we discover” activity, which seeks to develop children’s problem-solving skills by encouraging them to search for and try different solutions for simple everyday life issues.
Of note is the fact that OB utilizes cultural heritage sites and monuments to conduct certain activities. For example, Figure 6 shows the utilization of the Bosra world heritage site—in particular, the Roman amphitheater—as a space to conduct a performance where children performed traditional songs, poetry, and dances with the attendance of local communities. Another way of utilizing heritage sites is related to the stories associated with them. Figure 7 shows an activity that included a visit to the Roman Triumphal Arch, which is locally known as the “Gate of Peace,” in the old city of Bosra, where the activity’s facilitators utilize the stories associated with the site to emphasize traditions of tolerance and promote the values of peace. Other examples of activities conducted at heritage sites include painting workshops, a mobile phone film festival, and awareness raising campaigns about the importance and values of these sites (Figure 8). In this way, OB’s activities link heritage sites to the local heritage and the collective identity after decades of linking them to the nationalistic narrative, which is now contested.
Figure 6. A show performed at Bosra world heritage site as part of the “Back to School” campaign where children performed traditional songs, poetry, and dances (courtesy of OB, 21 October 2017).
Figure 7. A group of children on a site visit with the activity facilitator to the old city of Bosra (courtesy of OB, 21 October 2017).
Figure 8. A group of children giving shape with their bodies to the sentence “with knowledge we build” as part of an awareness-raising campaign that was carried out at the Bosra world heritage site (courtesy of OB, 21 October 2017).
Due to a lack of evaluation studies, it is not possible to assess the real impact of utilizing Bosra’s Roman amphitheater on the activities of OB. Yet it should be noted that, by utilizing Bosra’s Roman amphitheater, Triumphal Arch, and the remains of the old city, the OB team has emphasized the important value of knowledge and of learning from the ancient archaeological past to rebuild Syria. A common statement that was repeated by the OB team during my discussions with them was that if our ancestors were able to build these monuments with the knowledge of their time, we have to be able to rebuild our country when the conflict is over.
Additionally, OB’s cultural centers offer capacity-building workshops that seek to support local skills and knowledge and help conflict-affected communities to transform them into income-generating activities so that they can improve the quality of their life. These workshops are usually focused on what is popular in conflict-affected communities such as traditional food industries and handicrafts and on what is needed such as first aid and computer skills. Moreover, OB’s cultural centers organize informal cultural events that take the form of inclusive public talks and seminars (Figure 9). Usually, these events utilize the emotionally charged oral practice of poetry and performance to celebrate and reconnect people with the values and traditions that they value and are proud of. By this, these events acknowledge the past, provide a space for discussing and imagining a common future and emphasizes the civil character of the society.
Figure 9. Poetry performance event organized by the OB cultural center (courtesy of OB, 21 October 2017).
DISCUSSION
OB responds to local communities’ needs and aspirations by providing them with various cultural relief activities that are accessible with regard to language and content, people centered, community oriented, participatory, flexible, and informal. In implementing these activities, heritage is utilized as an instrument and resource to be used in the process of improving the local communities’ quality of life and to support them in building better futures. In this process, the focus is placed on the lessons that can be learned from heritage, the stories that can be told about it, and the ways of benefiting from it to make a living and to resolve conflicts. Substantially, this utilization of heritage is in line with the local communities’ understanding of it. For OB, the risk that threatens this heritage is the ideological reconstruction and manipulation processes conducted by ERGs. In order to manage this risk, OB emphasizes a selected set of beliefs, values, and traditions to be “preserved” in order to stimulate positive sociocultural changes and de-emphasizes others in order to resist negative changes.
This act of curating is therefore a fundamental technique in creatively preserving a past to assemble a future. In fact, all heritage practices of categorization, curation, conservation, and utilization of the past can be observed in OB’s cultural relief activities. Thus, the OB’s activities can be considered as heritage practices residing in a past-future relation.Footnote 39 However, what should be kept in mind here is that the main goal of the care for heritage in OB’s practices is not about preserving tangible or intangible heritage nor about communicating stories to a passive audience; rather, it is to creatively preserve the conditions under which what we might call sociocultural heritage exists and operates while also taking into consideration the idea that heritage, like culture at large, is itself being transformed by conflict.
OB heritage practices help people to rethink what they have learned before and to learn anew, to express their thoughts and feelings in order to confront the past and present creatively and directly, and to transform their skills and traditions to income-generating sources. They link heritage and culture at large—on the individual and community levels—to the truly future-orientated fields of economics and “development” and generate new forms of governance where activist groups can evolve into NGOs. OB’s heritage practices provide people with a means to cope with the conflict, to build new identities, to regain control and ownership of their everyday lives, and to become active players rather than just victims in conflict situations. They allow people to participate in transforming conflict by transforming perceptions of self and of others and to restore dignity, confidence, and faith in local capacities.
In Arjun Appadurai’s words, OB’s activities provide people with the “capacities to aspire,” which are key required resources for people to change their lives and, consequently, to reconstruct their society.Footnote 40 By this, they increase the conflict-affected communities’ horizons of hope and opportunities to build better futures. Thus, the heritage practice here—and the concept of heritage at large—is reconfigured to encompass engagements with the future by “repatriating” aspirations and hopes to the domain heritage—and culture—instead of managing it as a “matter of pastness.”Footnote 41
Thus, while the heritage community’s efforts in relation to Syria have been primarily focused on the visible effect of conflict, the efforts of both the ERGs and CSGs include significant focus on the invisible and immaterial effect of the conflict. Both the ERGs and CSGs employ people-centered, socially innovative, and future-oriented strategies that seek to reconstruct people, their societies, and their heritage as an undivided whole. Their efforts are designed around people’s needs, aspirations, and everyday sociocultural and religious practices, and they are in line with how heritage is understood, practiced, and experienced by people. Yet there are significant differences between their cultural heritage-related practices. For CSGs, the care for heritage is a process-oriented approach that allows for a creative, reflexive, and critical engagement with the past. Also, it seeks to increase the conflict-affected communities’ horizons of hope and opportunities in assembling their own better futures by providing people with the key required resources to change their life—that is, the “capacities to aspire.”Footnote 42 In contrast, for ERGs, the care for heritage is a process that seeks to assemble a specific future that mirrors their own imposed, exclusive, and ideological interpretation of the past. Thus, for ERGs, the future is strictly defined (that is, to establish an “Islamic” state and a society ruled by “sharia” law as it is believed to have existed during the time of Prophet Muhammad and the great medieval Islamic empires). To assemble this future, ERGs employ coercive and persuading strategies to mobilize people and transform them into extremists in the service of the group’s goal. Moreover, while ERGs consider (certain) heritage sites and objects as things that should be destroyed, CSGs emphasize the importance of linking heritage sites and objects to people’s new collective identity under formation during the conflict.
Arguably, the heritage practices of both ERGs and CSGs represent versions of the “conservation as management of change” paradigm discussed by Loughlin Kealy during the ICOMOS workshop.Footnote 43 They function as a mechanism to manage sociocultural changes and transformations by creatively “preserving,” recreating, and utilizing selected shared beliefs, values, and traditions in order to create “new,” yet authentic, ways of imagining and realizing individual and collective identities/futures. In creating these “authentic” identities/futures, the power and efficacy of the ERGs’ and CSGs’ heritage practices is derived from their ability to empower and engage the local community as producers rather than as passive audiences or observers as well as from their ability to cite and draw upon commonly understood beliefs, values, and traditions. Therefore, the CSGs’ practices should not be evaluated only according to their ability to restore contested symbols, to synthesize a national narrative, or to protect ancient sites. Rather, their success should be measured in regard to their impact on the social, cultural, economic, and political transformations and in regard to the progressive improvements that they bring to the psychological well-being of the conflict-affected communities. Like this, the impact of the ERGs’ practices should not be discussed only in relation to the destruction and looting of heritage sites and objects but should also include the impact on people’s everyday lives and cultural expressions.
OB may be criticized because heritage was not originally a priority in their early plans that focused on education. Yet this criticism is influenced by our (the heritage professionals) profession-led understanding of what constitutes heritage and how it should be practiced since it ignores the fact that the OB’s activities are in line with how heritage is locally understood, practiced, and experienced. Also, the OB’s education activities do not only focus on subjects of mathematics, science, language, and religion. Rather, the OB’s activities are broader, and they reflect awareness of heritage’s role in shaping new identities for societies that are experiencing conflicts. My argument is that the OB’s approach to heritage in the conflict context should be acknowledged and studied, not ignored or considered as irrelevant to the “heritage field.” In fact, being a non-professional heritage actor may have allowed OB to respond to people’s need in a direct and practical way since it did not need to act as a custodian of a specific predefined field, which heritage professionals usually do.
The second aspect that OB may be criticized for is that their activities may appear to be focused on Islamic traditions and to exclude non-Muslim communities. Taking into consideration that the population of Daraa is predominantly Muslim, it is challenging to support or reject this criticism; however, it should be noted that the OB’s team is diverse and includes men and women from diverse religious, cultural, and educational backgrounds. In addition, in my discussions with the OB team members, who perceive themselves as members of a civil non-religious organization, it was stated that the main goal of OB is not to emphasize or re-establish the value of Islamic tradition but, rather, to rebuild a peaceful society and help people build better futures. Thus, the inclusion of Islamic traditions in the OB’s activities is not led by a political agenda but, instead, is part of its response to the local community’s needs. The inclusion of Islamic traditions in the OB’s activities should be acknowledged rather than criticized as it reflects a deep understanding of the important role of Islam in shaping the local culture and values, the psychological needs of people, the sensitivity and importance of the topic of religion during conflicts,Footnote 44 and the dangerous effects of the ERGs’ practices. Additionally, it can be argued that OB also acknowledges Syria’s rich pre-Islamic heritage. For example, the OB team selected the Roman amphitheater as a forum to conduct their activities instead of other available significant locations such as al-Mabrak and al-Omari mosques, which are two of the oldest mosques in the world; the cathedral of Bosra; and the folklore museum, which is hosted in the Ayyubid fortress built around the Roman amphitheater. Finally, OB—like the majority of NGOs around the worldFootnote 45—may be criticized for being dependent on its foreign donors who may influence the activities and direction of the organization; yet, the OB’s activities to this day are arguably creative heritage practices that are people centered, socially innovative, and future oriented.
CONCLUSIONS
Today, while topics of globalization, the decline of the nation-state, the emergence of a new global order defined by transnational networks, and post-national forms of identity are being much discussed in literature,Footnote 46 investigating nation-state solutions seems like an unrealistic task. The ethnic, cultural, and religious diversity of the Syrian society will definitely require diverse solutions and further research that includes other communities. The discussion of the OB’s practices is not meant to illustrate their practices as ideal heritage practices that should be adopted as blueprints in other cities in Syria. Rather, the intention is to illustrate the possibilities of developing a form of transdisciplinary heritage practice that responds to people’s needs and aspirations and to what is locally possible on the ground in order to allow multiple futures to be imagined and made locally. In other words, the OB’s practices may be seen as examples of “situated practices of future-making.”Footnote 47
To conclude, the heritage practices of both ERGs and CSGs invite us to shift our focus from discussing the reconstruction of heritage sites, objects, and monuments to discussing the reconstruction of societies and their heritage as an undivided whole. That is, to relocate our analytical attention on the role that heritage plays in society and the creative ways in which people make use of and experience it. Heritage practices, in conflict and post-conflict contexts, ought to be people-centered, socially innovative, and future-oriented processes that move beyond the visible and tangible towards the invisible, intangible, and experimental in order to provide a “space” for critical, open-ended, and creative practices. These practices should not take for granted that the preserved legacy of the past is a positive thing that needs to be saved. Rather, they suggest a dialogic relationship between heritage and conflict that seeks to critically question, build on, and reconstruct—from within—the beliefs, values, and traditions of the past in a creative and participatory way. By this, our heritage practices can positively contribute to the rebuilding of society by participating in managing the transformation process to post-conflict society.
