The “Cultural Heritage” working group took a critical look at an overview of the working methods and opportunities of HAdW academy projects with regard to cultural heritage in research. The following aspects and objectives were the guiding principles:
- Inventory
- Discussion and criticism of the concept of cultural heritage
- The Academy's responses to points of criticism
- Perspectives on maximizing the visibility and sustainability of the Academy's internal research
On 13.06.2022, a results paper was presented at the HAdW board meeting and adopted there.
Results paper of the working group
The German academies' research approach to cultural heritage is unique in its breadth and depth, with over 180 research centers worldwide. In their own competitive and purely science-driven competition for excellence, the academies strive to patiently, thoroughly and sustainably open up valuable and rare material as well as difficult issues for research and the public. The following aspects and objectives are the guiding principles.
1. Inventory
The topic of 'cultural heritage' is booming. The EU declared 2018 the 'Year of Cultural Heritage', degree courses are being created on the subject, in Germany there are at least twenty collaborative projects on the subject as well as UNESCO professorships in Europe. The eight science academies jointly funded by the federal and state governments have also made preserving cultural heritage research a central part of their work. Following a highly competitive selection process, they open up historical resources from various cultures that have not yet been studied, or only in part, in long-term projects lasting an average of 15-20 years, mainly in the humanities and social sciences, known as the Academies' Program. Around 900 employees work in this internationally unique, openly advertised program, which comprises a total of 123 projects in 181 workplaces and an annual financial volume of around 70 million euros. The selection of topics and materials is subject solely to the criteria of excellence and freedom of science. In addition, cultural heritage is the focus of many of the academies' scientific lectures and working groups.
Like almost all research institutions, the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (HAdW) also conducts basic research, sometimes in cooperation with other academies. Among other things, it compiles lexicons, such as the German Legal Dictionary or the Goethe Dictionary; complete editions such as the writings of Karl Jaspers; detailed commentaries on literary works by Malalas or Nietzsche; extensive editions of correspondence from the early modern period; inscriptions in Buddhist China, European antiquity or the Middle Ages; literary cuneiform texts from Assur; pre-modern documents from Nepal; broad topics such as the spatiotemporal migratory movements of hominids in the period from 3 million to 20,000 years ago; the structures and functions of temples in ancient Egypt or monasteries in the European High Middle Ages. This work on the fundamentals can only be done by patiently examining the subject matter. What is needed is the exploratory work on fundamental linguistic facts (e.g. in dictionaries) or on specific texts relevant to the cultures being researched (in editions) or on specific places and material cultural objects (in excavation projects and the handling of objects) - this is precisely what makes the projects special. Such an approach requires longer time frames that go beyond the usual project funding of a few years, because otherwise the necessary expertise cannot be developed and the goal of the well-founded development of large corpora or material collections is missed.
In the corresponding examination of such objects, the projects and thus the academies therefore make a very specific and therefore indispensable contribution to a genuine understanding of the other in the world of the 21st century, both synchronously and diachronically. Much of what truly constitutes cultural heritage is indeed collected, presented and made available for further research in a sustainable manner. But it is precisely in this form that it is not only respected as the heritage of certain groups, but also understood as part of the universal heritage of human civilization(s), as a material and immaterial wealth of its own kind, as a central store of knowledge for the future, science and the public, and as an indispensable contribution to documenting the cultural memory of mankind.
2. Discussion
With its focus, however, the academy program is also in the midst of a growing discussion and criticism of the concept of cultural heritage. On the one hand, there is the openness of the term 'cultural heritage', which can include almost anything. The UNESCO list alone is long. It includes objects (e.g. buildings, monuments, artifacts), knowledge (texts, traditional medicine), places (cities, landscapes, historic towns, archaeological sites, ruins, parks and gardens) and practices (craft techniques, dances, music). Within this diversity, a distinction has also been made since the 1980s between 'tangible' (buildings, objects, manuscripts) and 'intangible heritage' (festivals, songs, literature, rituals, theater, dances, oral traditions, languages), cultural heritage and natural heritage, official (state) and unofficial cultural and natural heritage.
This dramatic increase in the definition and declaration of cultural heritage has led to a particularly significant penetration of the past into the present. This has resulted in a wealth of knowledge of considerable economic importance, which includes museums, libraries, monuments, galleries, archives, digital and analog collections as well as new research projects and conferences. Last but not least, cultural heritage is a factor in the attractiveness of locations and tourism.
Of course, these activities are themselves historically conditioned. Prepared by the ideas of the Enlightenment and historicism, the idea of cultural heritage emerged in the 18th and especially the 19th century together with many of the institutions mentioned, which are now widespread worldwide. In particular, museums and archives shaped by national states go hand in hand with the methods of typologically, geographically and chronologically exorbitant classification and ordering that also characterize modernity, to which extensive databases contribute to a considerable extent.
However, this now ubiquitous remembering, collecting, organizing and preserving of historical material is, in its abundance, a phenomenon of modernity. In a certain sense, cultural heritage becomes a mirror of the present, which is perceived as fragile. It is based on a fear of irrevocable loss, destruction, erasure and forgetting, which, according to a widespread understanding, seems to be inscribed in modernity through the permanent economic and scientific need for change and renewal.
The topic of 'cultural heritage' thus faces a number of challenges: the broad definition, which makes clear distinctions difficult; the concept of infinite preservation, which, with digitalization, hardly allows for forgetting; the Western origin of the concept in conjunction with a corresponding understanding of globalization, which often ignores non-Western attitudes towards the past; the danger of cultural heritage being used for political activities, for example in iconoclasms, or the sometimes politically explosive question of who actually 'owns' cultural heritage, which leads to restitutions and copyright issues that are also relevant to the academy.
3. Responses
In its special focus, the academies' program addresses these recurring points of criticism. The HAdW and its sister academies agree with the principle that cultural heritage serves to ask in the present what from the past should be preserved for the future. In the broadest sense, this is to be understood as that which has been handed down from the past, which continues to have an effect in the form of 'cultural memory' and determines basic patterns of perception and behavior in the present, not least in order to prevent undesirable developments. However, the academies set much more specific frameworks in their work by concentrating on larger resources in order to grasp larger contexts and explore the material in depth. For them, there is no collecting without scientific, exemplary exploration using a variety of methods and possibilities, without a high and therefore rare level of expertise. This form of critically exploratory collecting and compiling limits any claim to completeness.
Furthermore, the academies do not avoid the question of who owns the cultural heritage. On the contrary, they cultivate international cooperation, work on material with colleagues from the countries of origin and thus engage in a kind of shared heritage and shared scholarship, in which their own and other traditions are developed through international exchange and dialog. In this way, research is also largely removed from political or populist access. In principle, the projects have a universal or global (and not Eurocentric) perspective, which forces us to engage with complex phenomena from completely different (and initially foreign) cultures. They stand at a spatial, temporal or normative distance from us. Against culturalist and identitarian tendencies, which only allow those who belong to them to deal with such phenomena, the academy members and project staff attempt to explore these phenomena for themselves and others using the tried and tested methods of science, which are open to innovation per se. In view of the aforementioned distance and the resulting hermeneutic challenges, patience and patience are also required in dealing with what is initially very strange or necessarily unknown, since no particular view should be imposed on it.
The long-term projects are therefore not the 'playgrounds' of renowned scientists, but are created in various forms of cooperation and are critically monitored by commissions made up of members of other research centers and international experts who have a knowledgeable view from the outside - which is also rather rare in the scientific process. Moreover, because the research centers must constantly confront the questions of cultural and social relevance in a tough selection and review process, they do not assume an intrinsic value of cultural heritage and a naive dogma of preservation. In many cases, the publication of research results from academy projects is what makes cultural heritage visible and globally available in the first place, especially in open digital formats.
4. Perspectives
The long-term projects are working to make their results available to both the research community and a broader public through the greatest possible visibility and sustainability, for example through permanently accessible publications and databases of the highest quality.
So if we as an academy insist that we are already doing what is demanded from various sides, then we should emphasize more clearly (and also in the knowledge of various deficits) that we can tap the potential that lies in our work even better and make the aforementioned contribution even more efficiently. To this end, we propose
- to link the various projects and research centers even more closely together, especially in view of the inevitable specialization;
- to network them digitally within and between the academies, breaking up isolated digital solutions where possible and seeking interoperable solutions, keeping research results openly accessible beyond the duration of a project, creating synergies, for example via linked data and ontologies connected to CIDOC CRM, and/or making greater use of the possibilities offered by the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) or other consortia;
- to increasingly involve actors from the cultural milieus with which we are concerned in such networks;
- to contribute to fundamental and current debates and theories on the challenges of cultural heritage;
- to make our work visible in the public sphere again and again (and more than is already the case);
- and to speak out in particular when our expertise allows us to understand a specific current (political) constellation more adequately.