Heritage, Its Border Bridges and Border Walls: One Side to the Same Coin

by Elaine McIlwraith

One of the recent issues of AJEC offers a special forum (McDermott & McDowell, 2021) addressing questions of the political, cultural, social and symbolic construction of borders and the strength of bridge and wall narratives in border space intergroup relationships with the rise of populist politics. My article, “Bridges or Walls? Or Bridges are Walls?” is one of various articles, that when considered together, outline multiple characteristics of borders that make us re-examine whether the idea of bridges and walls, despite their assumed difference of positive and negative connotations respectively, are in fact simply different reiterations of the idea of a border. Self and external recognition of the boundary construct the extent of the division. Each boundary has different dynamics that groups must navigate to foster positive cross-border relations, drive the division deeper, or sustain the border. And while bridges often serve to build these positive connections and transform relationships, the border is still a division over which the bridge is constructed. Both bridge and wall narratives are intimately connected to how the border is imagined (Anderson, 2006). The bridge is, therefore, as much a part of how the border is constructed as divisive wall narratives are.

Peacebuilding efforts across the Cypriot Turkish/Greek border presents the case of a bicommunal approach to heritage site protection, as Amy Reid (2021) discusses, where the approach successfully brought groups from either side together to work towards this common cause. Yet, Reid closes by pointing out that non-participants in these efforts may still engage in divisive narratives. The continued presence of a division amongst groups gives example of how exclusionary borders can be durable despite building successful cross-border connections (Donnan, ibid). Even when boundaries of nation-states and empires shift, narratives of division or connection can remain long after. In Spain, early democratic attempts to make economic and cultural connections across European borders with the Arab-Islamic world were rooted in an Islamic past during which such a geopolitical division didn’t exist. This connection is remembered, but was adapted in light of more recent extremist attacks. This shared cross-border heritage became a tool to reduce growing tensions across the same contemporary division (McIlwraith, 2018).

Bridge narratives tend to be viewed primarily in a positive light, as a number of our contributions observe. Carsten Wergin (2021) elaborates on a shared restitution project in which the bodies of Yawuru & Karajarri ancestors held in German ethnographic museums were returned to their Indigenous groups in Australia. The care and respect for the cultural practices on both sides of this process gave this heritage project “transformational potential”, as Wergin describes it, and opens up a reflective “third space” to reconsider cross-border connections. Instead of being an extractive, colonial space, the border becomes imagined as a productive, healing space of contact between groups. Like this “third space” in Wergin’s work, the reclaiming of the Arab-Islamic past in southern Spain allowed for the recovery of a version of the past different from the national-Catholic fascist narrative of the Reconquista – the eight-century push south to gain territory by successive reigning Christian monarchs. This appreciation for and understanding of the Muslim history has nurtured a deeply-felt connection to the Arab world for some groups and individuals while remaining within the borders of Europe (Hirschkind, 2021; McIlwraith, 2018).

Similar to these first two contributions, Giada Laganà and Timothy White (2021) compare peacebuilding cooperative projects established across two boundaries: the political border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, and the cross-cultural one within Northern Ireland between the main political (religious-cultural) identities. Here, the cross-border projects were more successful than internal cross-cultural ones. Political and territorial boundaries produce different relational dynamics than social and symbolic borders inside a country. The reasons for the group inclusion and exclusion of people within the country also differ. Distinction between cultural or ethnic groups may not be as clear. Building connections over an imagined bridge between groups at home that are engaged in the struggle over defining narratives of the past, identities, and policies and institutions, that align with their own views, presents its own set of challenges. In my own forum contribution, I address these fuzzy group boundaries and less than solid foundational footing on which the idea of a bridge between Spain (and Europe) and the Arab-Islamic world is reproduced. Even when borders seem fixed, group narratives inside a national border that challenge local widely-accepted bridge discourses can seem to do more to connect people than its official counterparts.

Narrating fuzzy boundaries, however, still engages a bridge discourse. In Seamus Montgomery’s (2021) contribution, European Union civil servants narrate the “erasing” of internal national borders by way of an origin story in which EU institutions and its cooperative economy defeated nationalism’s wars over reified borders. Still, Montgomery points out that even these internal fuzzy boundaries can be closed to undesirable groups when convenient; when the discourse, institutions and policy makers of a member nation-state selectively shift towards nationalist ideologies of exclusion. In Spain, a shift towards the national-Catholic historical narratives and the reified Catholic-European identity that were dominant throughout the fascist dictatorship, although alarming, is consistently available. The official bridge narrative of the Muslim past, coupled with the concepts of dialogue and tolerance, also recounts the expulsion of Muslims and Jews, and glorifies the Catholic unification of the territory that later became the nation. Cross-border connections established over the bridge through shared cultural heritage however don’t create an externalised permeable border for economic, political and climate migrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea (Casa-Cortes et al., 2014).

The idea of closed borders and their accompanying wall narratives may be considered as opposite to bridges. Yet, David Farrell-Banks’ (2021) piece on how right-wing historical constructions of the Siege of Vienna – narrated as a historical battle that expelled Islam from Europe – justify a hardened nationalist division. This version of the past crosses international borders, utilised by extremists to justify violent right-wing attacks in Norway and New Zealand, and do not promote EU unity but nationalist ideologies. Barth (1969; Jakoubek, 2021) argues that for a boundary to take form, recognition of a group is required by both its members and those outside of the group. These right-wing international confirmations of internal constructions of Europe serve to reinforce the border externally. Similarly, in New Zealand, four major historical figures of the national-Catholic Reconquista narrative acclaimed by the right-wing, figures involved in expelling medieval Islam from Europe, were also inscribed on the attacker’s weapons (García Sanjuán, 2019). Yet, the official commemoration of the Catholic capture of the last-standing Muslim city, Granada, still engages both this divisive narrative and the bridge narratives using the Muslim past.

Each of these contributions to AJEC’s special forum on borders, bridges and walls present what seems like group engagement with various aspects of heritage in a different type of border space. Some deal with cross-border spaces, group contact over a political/territorial border, either present and seemingly erased; others, internal spaces of border creation and maintenance. Yet each touch upon various observed characteristics of borders, border construction and reinforcement, each adding the subtle social and symbolic distinctions needed to understanding the “rules of behaviour” that assure a border is sustained and the “how and why people distinguish themselves from others” (Donnan, 2015, p. 762).

Dr. Elaine McIlwraith is an early career researcher affiliated with the Department of Anthropology at The University of Western Ontario in London, Canada. Twitter: @DrElaineMac

References:

Anderson, B. (2006 [1983]). Imagined Communities. Verso.

Barth, F. (1969). Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference. Waveland Press.

Casas-Cortes, M., Cobarrubias, S., & Pickles, J. (2014). ‘Good Neighbours Make Good Fences’: Sehorse Operations, Border Externalization and Extra-territoriality. European Urban and Regional Studies, 23(3), 231-251. https://doi.org/10.1177/0969776414541136

Donnan, H. (2015). Borders, Anthropology of. In J. D. Wright (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (2nd ed., pp. 760-764). Elsevier.

Farrell-Banks, D. (2021). Crossing Borders and Building Walls in Right-Wing Uses of the Past. Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, 30(1), 104-113. https://doi.org/10.3167/ajec.2021.300107

García Sanjuán, A. (2019, March 19). Don Pelayo en Nueva Zelanda. El Diario. https://www.eldiario.es/andalucia/en-abierto/don-pelayo-nueva-zelanda_132_1646922.html

Hirschkind, C. (2021). The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and Andalusia. The University of Chicago Press.

Jakoubek, M. (2021). A Breakthrough of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries – Reality or a myth? (On amnesia in ethnic studies). Ethnicities, 0(0), 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1177/14687968211047052

Laganà, G., & White, T. J. (2021). Cross-Border Cultural Cooperation in European Border Regions: Sites and Senses of ‘Place’ across the Irish Border. Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, 30(1), 153-162. https://doi.org/10.3167/ajec.2021.300112

McDermott, P., & McDowell, S. (2021). Cultural Heritage Across European Borders: Bridges or walls? Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, 30(1), 96-103. https://doi.org/10.3167/ajec.2021.300106

McIlwraith, E. (2021). Bridges or Walls? Or Bridges are Walls? Hegemony, Situational Selection and Counter Narratives at the Boundaries of Spain and Europe. Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, 30(1), 134-143. https://doi.org/10.3167/ajec.2021.300110

McIlwraith, K. E. (2018). On Convivencia, Bridges and Boundaries: Belonging and Exclusion in the Narratives of Spain’s Arab-Islamic Past [The University of Western Ontario]. London, ON. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/5450/

Montgomery, S. (2021). Building Bridges over Troubled Waters: EU Civil Servants and the Transcendence of Distance and Difference. Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, 30(1), 114-122. https://doi.org/10.3167/ajec.2021.300108

Reid, A. (2021). Heritage, Reconciliation and Cross-Border Cooperation in Cyprus. Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, 30(1), 144-152. https://doi.org/10.3167/ajec.2021.300111

Wergin, C. (2021). Healing Through Heritage? The Repatriation of Human Remains from European Collections as Potential Sites of Reconciliation. Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, 30(1), 123-133. https://doi.org/10.3167/ajec.2021.300109