Heritage Void and the Void as Heritage

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ArchaeologiesJournal of the World ArchaeologicalCongress ISSN 1555-8622 ArchDOI 10.1007/s11759-013-9245-0

Heritage Void and the Void as Heritage

Reinhard Bernbeck

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Heritage Void and the Void as Heritage

Reinhard Bernbeck, Institut fur Vorderasiatische Archaologie, Freie Universitat

Berlin, Huttenweg 7, 14195, Berlin Germany; Department of Anthropology,

Binghamton University, Binghamton NY, USA

E-mail: [email protected]

ABSTRACT________________________________________________________________

This paper is an analysis of practices in the heritage field that I call

heritagization, de-heritagization and re-heritagization. I use the case of the

destruction of the Buddha statues in the Bamiyan valley of Afghanistan to

analyze these processes in a Lacanian theoretical framework. In the course

of my argument, I provide elements of the history of destruction of the two

statues, as well as of attempts to reconstruct them. Different kinds of

discourses that accompanied these processes form another part of my

contribution. Finally, I discuss the ‘problem’ of the heritage voids by

emphasizing emerging collective desires to replenish them.________________________________________________________________

Resume: Cet article est une analyse des pratiques patrimoniales que je

qualifie de « patrimonialisation », « depatrimonialisation » et «

repatrimonialisation » (respectivement heritagization, de-heritagization et re-

heritagization en anglais). Je prends pour exemple le cas de la destruction

des statues de Bouddha dans la vallee de Bamiyan, en Afghanistan, pour

analyser ces processus dans un cadre theorique Lacanien. Dans mon

argumentation, je developpe l’histoire de la destruction et des tentatives de

reconstruction de ces deux statues. Puis, une autre partie de ma

contribution traite des differents types de discours qui ont accompagne ces

processus. Enfin, j’aborde le « probleme » des vides laisses dans le

patrimoine, en soulignant les desirs collectifs emergents de les remplir a

nouveau.________________________________________________________________

Resumen: El presente documento es un analisis de practicas en el campo

del patrimonio que denomino patrimonizacion, despatrimonizacion y

repatrimonizacion. Utilizo el caso de la destruccion de las estatuas de Buda

en el valle Bamiyan de Afganistan para analizar estos procesos en un marco

teorico lacaniano. En el curso de mi argumentacion, proporciono elementos

de la historia de destruccion de las dos estatuas, ası como tambien los

intentos de reconstruirlas. Los diferentes tipos de discursos que

acompanaron estos procesos forman otra parte de mi contribucion.

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� 2013 World Archaeological Congress

Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress (� 2013)

DOI 10.1007/s11759-013-9245-0

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Finalmente, trato el ‘‘problema’’ de los vacıos patrimoniales haciendo

hincapie en los deseos colectivos emergentes para llenarlos._______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

KEY WORDS

Heritage, De-heritagization, Afghanistan, Bamiyan, Lacan, Anastylosis_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The Times of Heritage

In March of 2001, two huge statues of Buddha in the central Afghan valleyof Bamiyan were dynamited by the Taliban. Building on the terminologyof the editors of this volume, I call this episode a (sudden) process of ‘de-heritagization’, or maybe more correctly, attempted de-heritagization. Thenotion of ‘heritagization’ (de Cesari 2010:307–308; Smith 2006)1 is animportant one since it injects into ‘heritage management’ a temporal ele-ment of formation and unfolding. But this change in the conceptualizationof heritage is insufficient since heritagization is presumed to be a one-waystreet. An object, monument, practice or type of knowledge can by declara-tion, through a slow historical change and final recognition become ‘heri-tage’, and it is important to analyze the multifarious processes thatcombine to lead to such a result. However, I am concerned here with thereversal of this process: de-heritagization.

UNESCO has developed a mechanism of de-heritagization for WorldHeritage sites, called ‘de-listing’, which has only twice been mobilized(UNESCO Guidelines 2005:51–52); one case is an oryx sanctuary in Oman,the other the Elbe Valley around Dresden, Germany.2 However, declaredor undeclared, nationally or internationally recognized heritage sites may atany point undergo a process of de-heritagization independently of officialstatus and management. The recent destruction of tombs of Islamic saintsin Timbuktu makes the point for a World Heritage site. The demolition ofthe Palast der Republik, former East Germany’s house of parliament in Ber-lin, is another example of the same process (Birkholz 2008).

Heritagization and de-heritagization relativize the dominant perceptionof the unchanging nature of heritage. Indeed, if heritage does not carry initself the potential for a lack of change, it cannot be heritage. Heritage is aninhuman and ‘unnatural’ concept, since it pretends that change, after allthe main characteristic of humanity and of life itself, can be frozen throughprocesses of conservation and preservation. Heritage has, in its ideal, noinherent time. It is a state of (claimed) inalterability.

However, cultural anthropology and related fields assert that objects andmaterial culture have ‘biographies’ or ‘social lives’ (eg. Appadurai 1986;

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Gosden and Marshall 1999; Kopytoff 1986). What does this imply for theconcept of heritage? The metaphor of an object’s ‘life’ suggests that its sta-tus as inalterable heritage equals religious belief in post mortem eternalhuman life. Paradoxically, change in an object’s status—‘heritagization’—isneeded to excise a monument from its context, whether a landscape, a sta-tue or a smaller object, in order to turn it into unchangeable heritage. Ifwe remain within the metaphor of ‘social life of things’ this can only meana social death of those things. Consequently, the destruction of heritageparallels the desecration of a corpse. Some of the comments by culturalheritage officials after the destruction of the two Buddha statues in Bami-yan suggest a subconscious equation of exactly this kind.

Theoretical Background: Heritage as Symbolic Order

In the following analysis, I will set the events of 2001 in Bamiyan and theiraftermath into a theoretical framework that sees de-heritagization as a spe-cific type of modification in the symbolic order. My point of departure is Jac-ques Lacan’s (1977) vocabulary of the Symbolic as one of his three realms ofthe human world, the other two being the Imaginary and the Real. Spacedoes not permit me to go into great detail about Lacan’s complex terminol-ogy. In a rather counterintuitive manner, Lacan defines the symbolic order asthe sphere that quotidian parlance would call ‘reality’, while ‘the Real’ forhim is a set of desires that can never be reached and thus remains firmly out-side of reality. The Symbolic is a sphere grounded in language. Lacan’s con-ceptualization of the Symbolic refers to de Saussure’s theory of signs and thedifference between signified and signifier. For Lacan (1988:29), making senseof the world is a process of linguistic categorization that, to take an archaeo-logical example, distinguishes an object called ‘axe’ from another named‘jug’, because we know it is not a ‘jug’. He calls such distinctions a ‘signifyingchain’. In principle, the chained differentiation operates simply on the levelof presence and absence: something is X because it is not Y. At the same time,there are multiple options to formulate the presence–absence distinctions inthe symbolic order. For example, the axe is on another level a weapon, lead-ing to a signifying chain that separates weapons from jewellery or heirlooms.A symbolic presence is always necessarily built on absences. For Zizek(2005:45), who takes most of his analytical terminology from Lacan, ‘theSymbolic is above all a place, a place that was originally empty and subse-quently filled with the bric-a-brac of the symbolic order’.

Most important in the conceptualization of the symbolic order is theidea of a primordial absence, a void and traumatic space, called by Lacan‘das Ding’ (Zizek 1989:199–120), referring to Freud’s Oedipus complex.Ernesto Laclau’s (1996:36–46) political interpretation of signifiers and their

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environment, and particularly empty signifiers that are ‘present as thatwhich is absent’ in order to anchor other signifiers, is more useful in thefield of cultural analysis (Laclau 1996:44). The relation of the signifier tothe signified, in turn, is described as ‘a field dominated by the desire for astructure that was always finally absent’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985:113).

Thus, there is potentially a triple absence of meaning in the symbolicorder: the lack of a signifier tout court, the lack of a clear relation between sig-nifier and signified, where the relation is the traumatic element, and the lackof relations within the realm of signifiers, where the ‘empty signifier’ (calledby Lacan point de capiton, see Laclau and Mouffe 1985:112) is traumatic. InGerman, one might call these three instances ‘Sinnlosigkeitsbedrohungen’,anxieties concerning holes in the dense network of the symbolic order. Theylead to historically situated and thus specific cultural reactions.

It should be clear that all ‘cultural heritage’ is securely located within thesymbolic order, since a precondition for something to be turned into heri-tage is that there be a mutually constitutive relation between signified andsignifier and a highly specific discourse that relates such entities to others inthe category ‘heritage’. Before discussing the conscious play with anxietiesin the symbolic realm in the case of the Buddhas’ destruction by the Tali-ban, I give a brief historical outline of some forgotten or suppressed con-stellations and events shortly before and after the spring of 2001.

Blind Spots in the History of the Buddhas’ Demolition

Mullah Omar’s 26 February 2001 edict prescribed the destruction of allhuman representations in Afghanistan. In the following weeks, two enor-mous Buddha statues from the mid-6th to early 7th centuries CE (Blans-dorf et al. 2009), carved into the cliffs of the Bamiyan valley, were blownup, and other human sculptures in Afghanistan were destroyed as well.The reaction was a worldwide storm of protest, from UNESCO to artists,cultural workers, academics, journalists and Islamic clergy in Egypt, Iraq,Pakistan and elsewhere (Bernbeck 2010; Meskell 2002).

The government of the ‘Emirate of Afghanistan’, as the state was calledduring the Taliban’s rule, did not always reject Afghan antiquities. Whenthe local commander Abdul Wahed prepared the dynamiting of the smallerof the two Buddhas in the Bamiyan valley in 1998, Mullah Omar orderedits protection for the international Buddhist community, and by that indi-rectly consented to the orthodoxy of global heritage values. However, polit-ical relations with the United Nations and most foreign countries exceptfor Pakistan deteriorated fast, and after the imposition of UN sanctions inJanuary 2001, Mullah Omar and his ministers launched a course ofintended confrontation, especially with the West. Morgan (2012:3–4)

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describes this move as a ‘bizarre and shocking volte-face’, even thoughimportant shifts within the Taliban power structure are known to havetaken place in the months before (Bernbeck 2010:38; Zaeef 2010:128–130).

A major neglected international dimension of Taliban politics was thepolitico-religious conflict between Pakistan and India. In 1990, a rath yatraor public pilgrimage from Somnath, the site of a Medieval clash betweenMuslims and Hindus, went to the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya. Two yearsafter that event, in another bloody conflict, Hindu fundamentalistsdestroyed the Ayodhya mosque completely (Bernbeck and Pollock 1996;Pannikar 1993; Ratnagar 2004). Unsurprisingly, the Taliban took sides withIndian Muslims in the rising tensions. After blowing up the Buddhas inBamiyan, Mullah Omar announced that the Taliban wanted to be knownas ‘destroyers of idols, not sellers of idols’. This sentence was a quote froman earlier iconoclastic Afghan leader, Mahmud of Ghazni, who in 1026 haddevastated the Somnath temple3 that gave the Hindu fundamentalists theirpoint of departure on the murderous rath yatra of 1990. Thus, an early actof de-heritagization by a Muslim ruler in the 11th century was followed bya late 20th century revenge by Hindu groups. This mutual creation ofmaterial voids was continued by the Taliban who equate all Eastern reli-gions that have figurative representation.

Western public and even academic discourse has rarely commented onthis background (however, see Flood 2002), but has rather been concernedwith the insult caused by the event to both the West and to Buddhist com-munities. A major symbolic void is the connection between the events inBamiyan and Ayodhya: discursive silence surrounds British colonialism andits demise culminating in the conflictual partition of India and Pakistan,including large-scale migrations and violence. On a more fundamental level,the lack of concern for a web of historically grown relations internal toSouth Asia underscores Edward Said’s contention (1978) that Orientalismconsists in a binary constituting relation between Europe and a constructcalled ‘Orient’. The ‘Other’ is simply an entity that is seen in its relation toa discursive western ‘Self’, and that Self is universalized through institutionssuch as UNESCO. Conceiving of the destruction of the Buddhas in Bamiyanmainly as a reaction to UNESCO or western politics is itself a colonialistendeavour, no matter whether the arguments attempt to produce an expla-nation of the Taliban’s actions (eg. Falser 2010) or a plain condemnation.4

The complexity of relations within Afghanistan that played into thedecision would equally merit attention and has been treated elsewhere(Bernbeck 2003:292; Centlivres 2008:§25–26; Nojumi 2002; see also Rashid2000). The most important in this respect is that even within the smallautocratically ruling leadership in Afghanistan, two powerful shuras orcouncils existed, one in Kandahar with Mullah Omar as the head and theother in Kabul with Mullah Mohammad Rabbani Akhund. Rashid (2000),

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one of the few observers with detailed insights into the Emirate of Afghani-stan’s politics at the turn of the century, had already commented on themoderating influence of the Kabul shura. Abdul Salam Zaeef’s account (Za-eef 2010:128–130) of the deputy leader Rabbani is much more detailed andpersonal than Rashid’s, and provides an insider’s reconfirmation of Ras-hid’s conclusions. In a more recent assessment, Rashid (2008:18–19) alsocontends that Osama bin Laden encouraged the destruction of the statuesto further the international isolation of the Taliban leadership to increasepolitical dependence on his organization.

Elias (2007) is one of the very few others who engage directly with dis-courses in Afghanistan and notes that the Islamic calendar played a majorrole in the events of early March 2001, since the destruction of the statueshappened in the run-up to the ‘Eid al Adha or Festival of the Sacrifice.According to the Qor’an, Abraham followed Allah’s orders to sacrifice hisson Ishma’el and was only stopped at the last minute, replacing the sonwith a sheep. Temptation of Abraham by Satan to resist the sacrifice playsan important role in Islamic tradition.5 Elias reads into the events aroundthe Buddhas’ destruction the story of the sacrifice of that which is dear tooneself. The association of the offer to buy the statues with Satan’s tempta-tion in the religious account sheds a very different light on the staunchrefusal by the Taliban to even negotiate with non-Afghan actors. The influ-ence of the religious calendar on the events is undeniable, since destructionwork stopped on the main day of the ‘Eid al Adha, only to resume after-wards.

Taliban Discourses of De-Heritagization

Much has been made of the fact that the Taliban destroyed the statues forreligious reasons and that their iconoclasm implies their belief in somesupernatural power of these figures. Wakil Ahmad Mutawakil, the Talibwho then served as Foreign Minister, said that ‘we are destroying the Bud-dha statues in accordance with Islamic law and it is purely a religious issue’(Sabahuddin 2008: 29). Mullah Omar stated that ‘these idols have beengods of the infidels, who worshiped them, and these are respected evennow and perhaps may be turned into gods again. The real God is onlyAllah, and all other false gods should be removed’ (Anonymous 2001).There is a palpable fear in the quote that the statues have a powerful sur-plus in the realm of the Symbolic and a conviction that their destructionwill do away with that surplus. Such an interpretation is underscored bythe fact that the Taliban had prisoners place the dynamite into holes of thestatues with which they were, after much vain effort by artillery, eventually

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destroyed. Apparently, Taliban commanders displayed some distant respect,if not fear, in the course of producing this figural absence.

The destruction of the signifier, so they apparently believed, annihilatesthe signified. On the theoretical side, Lacan’s assumption that the realm ofthe Symbolic does not need a specific anchoring in reality implies that thesphere of discourse is a universe in and of itself. This became manifest toany casual observer of the aftermath of the demolition: the radical act ofde-heritagization mobilized a stream of international comments that needsonly a hint of a reminder to flare up again, even after more than 10 years.The destruction of tombs of Islamic saints in Timbuktu in early July 2012is almost obsessively connected with the Taliban’s action in Bamiyan inMarch of 2001 (for one exemplary commentary see Soares 2012).

The destruction of the Buddhas was, as I have argued elsewhere (Bernbeck2010), in the first place nothing but Kulturpolitik, albeit politics driven bystrictly non-western values. The Taliban’s offence to Western values was thedestruction of materializations in the realm of the Symbolic. Feeling offendedby the destruction, as were almost all heritage officials and politicians at leastin Europe and the U.S., also reveals a fundamental correspondence of think-ing with the Taliban, namely that the removal of the material referent for asignified threatens what is signified itself. Interestingly, the Buddhist commu-nity in Asia and elsewhere reacted very differently to the events since theirreligious belief system minimizes the importance of materiality for humanlife (see Colwell-Chanthaponh 2003:87–88).6

If the Symbolic occupies an empty space, as noted initially, then such adestruction of material elements of the Symbolic order is not just the produc-tion of a new void, it is rather a reminder that a void can return where it hasbeen replaced by a symbol. This thought leads to a dimension of the actionthat I have not encountered anywhere in discussions of the events, but thatplays a subconscious role in some comments. Taking Lacanian theory notjust seriously on a discursive, but also on a material level should remind us ofa background emptiness that has been deeply buried and hidden: for the lon-gest time since human beings entered the Bamiyan valley, the cliffs weresmooth and uncarved. This is the Zizekian hidden ‘place that was originallyempty and subsequently filled with the bric-a-brac of the symbolic order’.

Interestingly, Western commentators felt driven to indirectly mentionthis original condition for the possibility of heritagization. Without beingfully aware of it, they refer to the uncut condition of the cliff when theydescribe the work of producing the statues. Geoffroy-Schneiter (2002:13)bemoans ‘the memory of the masses of unknown sculptors and painterswho carved the caves out of the cliff in order to ennoble it’, and Danziger(2001) evokes ‘the human sweat, love and endeavour with primitive toolsthat created this monument that has stood for 1,500 years’. Power(2005:73) remarks on the ‘the vast wooden scaffolding, the echoes of

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hundreds of picks and chisels realizing the huge bodies from stone’. Whatshines through is compassion for labourers’ now vain efforts in the distantpast. Labour for monumentality is not forgotten by such authors. However,despite this welcome move, they differ radically from Brecht and his ‘ques-tions from a worker who reads’. Where the poet Bertolt Brecht asks: ‘GreatRome is full of triumphal arches. Who erected them?’ and implies sweatand tears, Danziger imagines sweat and love. Post-destruction discoursecannot even imagine the original carving of the Buddhas, their coating andpainting as the result of painful and oppressed labour. Rather, the cliffswere transformed into a massive monument of the symbolic order by joy-ful, hard-working labourers with an affirmative mindset. This constructerases any possibility to imagine the attraction of the erstwhile empty spaceof a bare and smooth cliff.

The above comments assume an unquestioned and unquestionablemeaning for the statues. The Taliban followed the same assumption by rec-ognizing their danger as ‘idols’. However, Mullah Omar went even furtherwhen he announced that ‘if people say these are not our beliefs but onlypart of the history of Afghanistan, then all we are breaking are stones’(Anonymous 2001). Thus, if the void created with dynamite had initiallybeen depicted as a meaningful one, since the niches of the former Buddhaswere interpreted as the emptied space of religious symbolism, this citationrenounces their participation in the symbolic order altogether. They arelifeless, shapeless stone, nature without meaning.

Zizek interprets such discursive moves as a Hegelian negation of a nega-tion (Zizek 1999:76–77). De-heritagization is a praxis that aims to expelmeaning, in our case by destroying the signifier7; the negation of such apraxis is not a replenishment of its former space with symbolic content, butrather the post hoc denial of any participation of the destroyed materiality ina symbolic world. Negation of a negation is not at all a return to meaningful-ness, but rather the denial of any meaning of that which has been negated; inour case, the denial of any symbolic content of the Buddha statues.

The romantic composer Robert Schumann’s Humoreske is adduced byZizek (1997:203–205) as a prototype of this process. Schumann wrote apiano piece with the usual upper and lower lines for the two hands, andinserted a melody between these lines that is to be read but remains silent.This ‘inner voice’, noted but not played at all, forms a present absence.The negation of the negation occurs when, later in the Humoreske, thesame music is repeated—but without the inner voice between the lines.Thus, where the first occurrence is marked by a perceptible void or ‘innervoice’, the second negates a silent voice.

The discourse of the Taliban, and Mullah Omar in particular, vacillatesas well between the recognition of a problematic relation between(destroyed) material monuments and their symbolic surplus and the

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complete denial of any symbolic value. Whether their switching betweenwhat I have called above two kinds of Sinnlosigkeitsbedrohungen (threats ofmeaninglessness) was intentional or due to specific interview situationsmust remain unclear. However, the result was a fierce reaction from theoutside. One of the reasons is that the two-pronged comment, that thestatues were unacceptable idols on the one hand, and just stone on theother, was equal to an attack on a similar vacillation in western heritagediscourse: on the one hand, aesthetic ideas and corresponding value-basedjudgments are close to those of religion (Centlivres 2008); on the otherhand, the belief in the objectivity of science is used as a way to explain theobjects according to reproducible standards. For example, a recent reporton the making of the statues is purely natural science based and employs arhetoric that corresponds closely to Mullah Omar’s ‘just stones’-notion ofthe rock-cut figures (Blansdorf and Melzl 2009).

This same play with a negation of negation was mobilized by the Floridapastor Terry Jones who set up a ‘trial’ against the Qor’an at his church.After finding it ‘guilty’ of promoting violence, a copy was soaked in kero-sene and burnt, after considering other choices such as destruction by a fir-ing squad (Banks 2011). More than a year later, on the occasion of a repeatattempt, he claimed that ‘all we did was burn a book’ (MacAskill et al.2012). If the book has in a first round such a threatening power that it war-rants a trial and a metaphorical death sentence, it becomes later on just anassemblage of paper and is denied any place in the realm of the Symbolic.

Western Discourses of Re-Heritagization

The Taliban’s goal was the undoing of figures which they believed to con-tain a danger of symbolic surplus. Enough has been written about Westernresponses to the Taliban (eg. Bernbeck 2010; Centlivres 2008; Colwell-Chanthaponh 2003; Meskell 2002) and the historical context of heritageconstructs. My main interest here lies in what could be called a desire for‘re-heritagization’. We live in a world that is driven by a general attempt atpreserving the past for the future, a state of mind that is the effect of apostmodern loss of time depth and a concomitant demise of utopia. Butwhen heritage is destroyed, a strong drive for re-heritagization develops iftwo preconditions are fulfilled. The first is a minimum temporal depth ofthe material in question. Anything from somewhere around the 18th cen-tury and before, whether a booklet, the fragments of a plate or a castle, isinherently attributable to heritage. Age is a sufficient precondition for re-heritagization processes to occur. The second precondition for re-heritagi-zation efforts is political correspondence to dominant ideologies. SaddamHussein’s statue at Ferdowsi Square in Baghdad was torn down, and the

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Iraq Museum looted. The radically different fate of the two monumentsmakes the point well. For ideological reasons, the sculpture of the dictatorcould disappear without trace, while the international community orga-nized search teams, conferences, databases, restoration workshops andinvolved Interpol in an attempt to reconstruct and restitute the ancientobjects that had been stolen from the museum. Similar examples aboundin post-1989 Eastern Europe, where Lenin statues have largely disappeared.

Where heritage is deemed fit for re-heritagization, a specific aestheticdiscourse develops. This is particularly evident for the Buddhas of theBamiyan valley (see also Bernbeck 2010:46–48). For Harding (2001), theywere ‘magnificent colossi […] in the remote and beautiful Bamiyan valley’;Danziger (2001) sees in them ‘a magnificent example of great art inspiredby religion’, Geoffroy-Schneiter (2002:13) a ‘grandiose abode which isimbued with radiating, pure light’, and Morgan (2012:4) ‘exceptionallyimpressive monuments’. Superlatives appear in descriptions of the figuresas ‘extraordinaires […] l’apparition lumineuse d’une culture greco-boud-dhique, ou bouddhique-apollinienne—Apollon devenu Bouddha’ (Faye2001:36–37), and even ‘the universe, mapped in human form, cut from theliving rock’ (Power 2005:71).

That such assessments of the Buddha statues’ aesthetic value actuallydepend on their prior destruction is clear when we look into pre-2001descriptions by art historians such as Andre Godard (cited in Olivier-Utard1997:86), who was one of the first to systematically document the Buddhas.He compares the smaller Buddha with a stick puppet and refers to thehead of the figure as monstrous. Robert Byron is even more extreme: ‘Nei-ther [of the Buddhas] has any artistic value. But one could bear that; it istheir negation of sense, the lack of any pride in their monstrous flaccidbulk, that sickens’. This kind of judgment has a long tradition, sincealready Goethe, without ever having seen them, judged the Buddhas as ‘dieverrucktesten Gotzen in riesenhafter Große’ (Goethe 1999 [1819]:280).

Aesthetic evaluations before and after the destruction of the Buddhasshow how much our appraisal of the qualities of ‘heritage’ is dependent onthe cultural biography of the objects in question. I could only find one authorwho describes the Buddhas post-destruction in a derogatory way: ‘The Bami-yan Buddhas were ungainly and inflated. Their central function seems tohave been to dominate the landscape’ (Stewart 2004:258). The few otherswho are aware of the ambivalent aesthetic evaluation try to declare the ques-tion moot, but then resort to a surrogate beauty of the landscape: ‘The qual-ity of the Buddha statues can no longer be argued about, because they aregone. But the valley of Bamiyan and its surroundings […] is one of the mostbeautiful sites and spectacular views of this world’ (Grun et al. 2004:181).

When war but especially ‘rogue’ regimes create heritage voids, Westernrhetorical strategies resort to an aesthetic revaluation of the ‘lost’ items as

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extraordinary, well proportioned and appealing. This discourse of aestheticrevaluation is driven by the desire for a second heritagization. The possibil-ities and abilities of the profession of restoration are pushed to theirextremes in such cases.

It is sufficient to consider a recent successful re-heritagization process, the10-year labour of refitting the sculptures from the north Syrian site of TellHalaf which had been destroyed by an incendiary bomb dropped on the Ber-lin Halaf Museum in 1943. Before that, Agatha Christie muses about a visitto the Halaf museum in the 1930s: ‘With lack-lustre eyes I examined the vari-ous extremely ugly statues which had come from Tell Halaf’ (cited in Maenteland Zier 2011:267). An authority such as Paolo Matthiae (1991:375) charac-terizes the art from Tell Halaf as ‘formal weniger ausgereift’ than contempo-rary works, Collon (1995:124) as ‘crude but lively’.

In 2011, the exhibition Gerettete Gotter opened at the Pergamon Museum,after the statues had been painstakingly reassembled. Now, one authordescribes the sculptures as having ‘an incomparable aura’ and continues:‘With her stony smile the seated grave sculpture […] is posing an eternal rid-dle to the observer’ (Geisel 2011; transl. RB).8 Henri Frankfort (1996[1954]:292), one of the best known historians of art of the ancient Near East,thought of this statue as ‘primitive’ and ‘deplorable’. The exhibition cata-logue describes the art as ‘spektakular und sensationell’ (Eissenhauer2011:12), as ‘respekteinfloßend und außergewohnlich’ (Tanyeri-Erdemir2011:373). The weekly Der Spiegel writes about Tell Halaf in its usual hyper-bole: ‘It is a find that has marked Near Eastern archaeology more than anyother’ (Anonymous 2011; transl. RB).9

Both Bamiyan and Tell Halaf are part of a complex, multi-step heritagi-zation process. The reversibility of the process is of prime importance andshows the following pattern: academics and other cultural workers declareexcavated or standing monuments as heritage. This heritagization leads toa material state of desired inalterability, and thus to a newly created addi-tional layer of the Symbolic around an object or monument. But de-herita-gization always looms as a threat, and its realization is felt to be one of theworst offences possible, indeed comparable to murder, if one reads someof the comments around the destruction of the Buddhas in Afghanistan.10

The inalterability created via heritagization seems to protect a symbolicallycharged materiality and its accompanying ‘signifying chain’ from any fur-ther threat of emptiness. However, when such emptiness suddenly returns,a collective shock is felt. Then, discursive moves re-heritagize the obliter-ated materials, in most cases successfully. The process of heritagizationcannot be undone easily, not even by material destruction.

With enough discursive momentum, a practice of re-heritagization setsin, best exemplified by the reassembling of the Halaf sculptures. To turnback to Bamiyan again, specific possibilities for a reconstruction for the

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Buddhas from Bamiyan are fairly limited. A variety of proposals for howto deal with the empty niches in the cliff of the Bamiyan valley includedrebuilding them from different materials, virtual Buddhas in the form oflaser beams by the artist Hiro Yamagata, the sculpting of them in 1:1 size,using traditional methods, at other places in the cliff by Afghan artistAmanullah Haiderzad, as well as smaller scale reconstructions (see Petzet2009:46). However, the dogma of the Venice Charter prescribes anastylosisin its article 15,11 that is, the refitting of monuments and objects from ori-ginal fragments, especially for World Heritage Sites such as Bamiyan. In2011, anastylosis was excluded for the larger of the two Buddhas, and whiletechnically possible for the smaller one, the Afghan government hasrejected such a proposal (UNESCO 2012).

In a more general sense, it seems to me increasingly important to differ-entiate ‘primary anastylosis’ in the original process of heritagization from a‘secondary anastylosis’ in re-heritagization schemes. Such processes are notonly prominent in the case of the Halaf sculptures, but also form the baseof the reconstruction of the recently re-opened Neues Museum in Berlin(Harrap 2009), a ruin since World War II. In general, a brief glance atsuch reconstructions reveals that demolition and re-heritagization are pro-cesses that sharply increase the symbolic surplus of monuments and otherobjects. Seen from this perspective, Taliban Kulturpolitik failed utterly.

Prospects: Doubly Arrested Historicity

Heritage reduces materiality to an ahistoric inalterability. When historyviolently returns, voids and fragments are re-evaluated as particularlyimportant. A second effect is nostalgia for the lost timelessness. Weencounter a paradox. Several authors admit gradual changes of the Bud-dhas through time: ‘By the end of the twentieth century, they had enduredmore than a millennium of natural degradation and human neglect’ (Mor-gan 2012:4; see also Bernbeck 2003:299; Power 2005:71).

On the other hand, proposals for what I call ‘secondary anastylosis’ aimfor an ‘anastylotic present’ whose problems parallel those of the so-calledethnographic present in cultural anthropology (Fabian 1983; de Pina-Ca-bral 2007). This anastylotic present can be defined as the state of an objectwhich is the ideal behind the re-fitting of the fragments in question. Totake the case of the Buddhas: Mujahedin and Taliban commanders hadalready badly damaged the two figures before their final dynamiting, andthey had undergone more or less rapid changes over the centuries. Whichparticular state of the statues should, therefore, be taken as the ‘right’ one?The answer of three projects converges around the year 1970, the anastylot-ic present for the Buddha figures. When the Archaeological Survey of India

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restored the figures between 1969 and 1976, they were preserved in theirthen present state (Sengupta 1989:205). A Japanese expedition documentedthe same aspect for photogrammetric reasons in the years 1970–1978 (Hig-uchi and Barnes 1995:290–293), exactly the same time slice used post-destruction by Grun et al. (2004:182) who based their work on photo-graphs by Robert Kostka from 1970 (Kostka 1974).

Nowadays, most of the photographs that show up in media reports onBamiyan depict the Buddhas around the time of 1970. In Bouse’s(2002:10) apt words, photographs suggest that ‘the way things used to be[…] is how they ought to be’ (emphasis in original). This then turns into asort of ‘historical truth’ that is just an arbitrary point in time. In the caseof Bamiyan, the frequent passing through of Western tourists around 1970is certainly the most important factor in this act of arresting time. If everanastylosis is applied to one or both of the Buddha figures, this will notinclude elements that were already detached in the 19th century or earlier.

Heritagization is an act of bestowing meaning on materiality by evicting his-tory. The reversal, a re-entry of de-historicized materiality into a condition ofdecay and finally, of a void, produces in a Western cultural environment fun-damental anxieties. They set a discourse in motion that attempts to reverse de-heritagization, to dominate time again. Otherwise, a threatening hole wouldopen itself in the realm of the Symbolic. The array of means to counter de-her-itagization has become so massive that iconoclasms and similar processes haveno chance of success anymore. With more than 100,000 images of the BamiyanBuddhas in the internet, with almost half a million hits in a Google searchunder the keywords ‘Bamiyan Buddhas’, forgetting them is literally excluded.Means to mend a potential gap in the sphere of the Symbolic have been forti-fied so much that the upholding of a gap in the symbolic realm has become animpossibility. Already without any reconstruction, the Buddha statues of theBamiyan valley are among the best known prodigal sons of heritage.

Will the niches remain voids forever? My assessment is that, with theHalaf case in mind, the empty niches create a constant and intense desirefor replenishment. Unless the fragments are blown up further in futureconflicts, or global heritage ideas change fundamentally, the re-erection ofa Buddha would make the Taliban’s production of cultural voids more tol-erable. Gaps in the symbolic order that result from the destruction of time-less, history-less materiality seem to produce extreme feelings of insult anda strong drive to fill them. The main reason for a 2011 decision not torebuild is simply due to Afghan internal politics. At the time of this writ-ing, President Karzai’s political position, more than ten years after Westernmilitary interference in Afghanistan, is very shaky. A costly project for heri-tage preservation, in a geographic milieu of a Shi’ite Hazara population,would offend an increasing number of Pashtuns, potentially sympathizerswith the Taliban. An end to this de/re-heritagization story is not in sight.

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Acknowledgments

I thank Claudia Naser, Cornelia Kleinitz and Stefan Altekamp for theirinvitation to contribute to the workshop ‘Global Heritage—Worlds Apart:The Cultural Production, Appropriation and Consumption of Archaeologi-cal Heritage Spaces’ within the Excellence Cluster Topoi. The meeting wasexceptional for its spirited discussions. Many observations and critiquesafter the oral presentation helped improve the content of this paper. Asalways, I thank Susan Pollock, whose sharp eye found inconsistencies andgaps in an original version of the text.

Notes

1. Poria (2010:218–221) uses the notion in an unusual fashion to denote theprocess through which a viewer builds a feeling of identity with a monumentor object.

2. Since the world has at present 981 World Heritage Sites, most of them cul-tural monuments, the likelihood of being de-listed for any site is minuscule(World Heritage List 2013).

3. In an intricate and in-depth analysis of the sources for this event, Thapar(2004) retraces the politics of amnesia and memory and their political impli-cations in colonial and present-day India.

4. That the Taliban had their own mechanisms of Othering becomes evident inMullah Zaeef’s rendering of the events when various international actors triedto stop the destruction (Zaeef 2010:126–128).

5. It has turned into the important ritual of ‘stoning the devil’ at Mina duringthe Hajj (Bianchi 2004).

6. This accords well with the antipathy towards the notion of a ‘Self’ in Thera-vada Buddhism (see eg. Rutz 2010).

7. The statues were, as representations of Buddha as a human, signifiers; at thesame time, not only reports about the statues, but also copying them pro-duced a linguistic and material discourse where the statues function(ed) assignifieds. I focus in my paper on this latter understanding.

8. ‘[…] eine unvergleichliche Aura […] Die ‘Sitzende Grabfigur’, […] gibt demBetrachter mit ihrem steinernen Lacheln ein ewiges Ratsel auf’.

9. ‘Es ist ein Fund, der die Archaologie des Vorderen Orients wie kein anderergepragt hat’.

10. The International Criminal Court calls the destruction of shrines in Tim-buktu a war crime. It has convicted Pavle Strugar for war crimes in the caseof the destruction of Dubrovnik’s old centre (The Hague Justice Portal n.d.;see also Maass 1999:110–111).

11. The original text of article 15 reads: ‘All reconstruction work should how-ever be ruled out a priori. Only anastylosis, that is to say, the reassemblingof existing but dismembered parts can be permitted. The material used for

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integration should always be recognizable and its use should be the least thatwill ensure the conservation of a monument and the reinstatement of itsform’ (Venice Charter 1964).

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