A joint international conference of the University of Tehran and the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS, Paris, Fr)

With the support of the Anthropological Society of Iran (ASI), Institute of Archeology (University of Tehran), Center for Tourism Studies (University of Tehran), and Research Institute of CulturalHeritage and Tourism (Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Tourism)

9-10 November 2020

This international conference gathers a multidisciplinary team composed of anthropologists, historians, linguists, and archaeologists to study cultural heritage as an object through various methodological approaches and from case studies mainly, but not exclusively, questioning the Iranian domain. It is a scientific contribution in the MOU frame signed in November 2017 between the EHESS and the University of Tehran. This international conference's transdisciplinary approach will also seek the consideration of multiple scales, from local to global spectrum.  

Cultural Heritage as a collection of tangible and intangible objects is a category so familiar, so frequently used daily that it seems almost imminent. However, the cultural heritage awareness in the modern sense is a relatively recent invention, especially considering the age of some of its objects, such as the famous Kaluts of the Lut desert in Iran. The concern for safeguarding the past traces does not appear in France until the early nineteenth century. It is not a mere coincidence if this process is concomitant with the human sciences' institutionalization and, peculiarly, of the European ethnographic knowledge. This phenomenon is even more recent in Iran.

Far from being passive legacies of a collectivity ([ethnic] groups, nations, humanity) with an immediate substance, these ancestral legacies that belong to the fields of environment, art, monument, objects and/or traditional knowledge and know-how, are also subject to processes of symbolical detachment,  transmission, sharing, and appropriation (individual or collective) that are also rooting for identity construction. These steps have their basis on identification, legitimation, interpretation, and involvement, given their emotional charges. The most recent examples of these cultural heritage institution processes are undoubtedly the UNESCO lists of intangible cultural heritage. This type of heritage includes the living heritage that its experts are not restricted to the outsider scholars but extends to the very practitioners of these traditions. 

This "patrimonial" turning point invites to question further the making processes of cultural heritage. The field appears abyssal: from the monument to its indigenous and/or global exegeses, going through the renewal of its techniques, categories, and objects. Facing this overload of viewpoints, we decided to narrow the focus on three main questions at the core of the contemporary topic of cultural heritage reinventions.

As pointed out by Daniel Fabre, understanding the contemporary modes of attribution of a cultural value requires interrogating the past. That is the dialectical relationship between historical evidence (scriptural, monuments; objects; traditional know-how) and contemporary valorization? Another question will be about the impact of the development of new technologies (geophysical prospection, drones, and so on) on the contemporary valorization of the cultural heritage? How do UNESCO's global policies contribute to these new cultural heritage renewals, and what is their impact?

In order to answer these questions, this international conference is organized according to the following three axes as follow.

1-Cultural Heritage and History: ambiguous relationships?

Within this axis framework, the often ambiguous relationships between cultural heritage and its historical mediums will be analyzed. How can the analysis of the historical and /or archaeological sources available reshape the understanding of a patrimonial object, that is, the exegesis that has usually been associated with it? What are, in return, the effects of such a retrospection on the phenomena of identifying as cultural heritage?

2-New technologies, new cultural heritage?

This axis will examine how the development of new technologies allows professionals (archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists) to rethink the apprehension of cultural heritage, from a methodological viewpoint and its understanding. In the last instance, the aporia inherent to the researcher's positionality will be questioned: readily shaped in today's world as a hyper-scientist, this position remains dependent on technologies in perpetual evolutions as well as the multiple imaginaries on the contribution of these technologies.

3- Patrimonial quests? Between UNESCO's policies and local cultural heritages: varied effects

How do UNESCO's global policies reinvent the logic of cultural heritage awareness at the national and local levels? From an analysis mainly focused on the Iranian field that will be examined against other examples, we will seek to grasp the dialectic between these different scales.

Conference Committee

• General Chair: Emilia Nercissians (Associate Professor, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Tehran)
• Chairs of Academic Board:
• Claudine Gauthier (Professor in Anthropology, IIAC-LAHIC (EHESS)/University of Bordeaux
• Mehrdad Arabestani (Assistant Professor, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Tehran, President of Anthropological Society of Iran),

Academic Board (In alphabetical order)

• Pooya ALAEDINI (Associate Professor, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Tehran)
• Mostafa DEHPAHLAVAN (Archeologist, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, University of Tehran)
• Sébastien GONDET (UMR 5133Archéorient, Univ Lyon, CNRS/Lyon 2 University)
• Alireza HASANZADEH (Anthropologist; Research Institute of Cultural Heritage & Tourism, Tehran)
• Sylvie SAGNES (CNRS, IIAC/LAHIC, EHESS)
• Sepideh PARSAPAJOUH (Anthropologist; CNRS CR, CéSor; EHESS, Paris)
• Fabrizio SPEZIALE (Professor at the EHESS, CEIAS)
• Hamed VAHDATI NASAB (Associate Professor, Tabriat Modars University)

Publication and medium

 The proceedings of the international conference will be published at Brepols (Turnhout, BE). The medium of the conference is English.

Online access

The meeting will be through Big Blue Button online conferencing platform. To access the "Webinar EHESS/UT Reinventing Cultural Heritage", follow https://webinaire.ehess.fr/b/gau-67z-y2e and login with your name.

Contacts

Fariba Seddighi ( This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. )

Mehrdad Arabestani ( This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. ).

Mehrdad Arabestani

Chair of Academic Board

Reinventing Cultural Heritage International Conference

Brochure of Conference

Panel 1: Heritage Fabrication (11-12:30)Panel 2: Dialectics of Cultural Heritage Within Today's Society (13:30-15:00)Panel 3: Archeology and Technologies (15:30- 17:00)Panel 4: Living Heritage 1 (11-12:30)Panel 5: Living Heritage 2 (13:30 – 15:00)Panel 6: Archeological Horizons (15:30- 17:00)General discussion and closing remarks (17:00-17:30)

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 9

SCHEDULE (BASED ON IRAN STANDARD TIME, GMT +3:30)

Welcoming Speech and Report (10:45-11:00)

Mehrdad Arabestani, Claudine Gauthier

1. The Shifting Concept of Cultural Heritage, from National to Global to Local, and the Impact of UNESCO's Law-making

Janet Blake (11-11:20)

1. Cultural Heritage: Afterwardness, antagonism, and hegemony 

Mehrdad Arabestani (11:20-11:40)

1. How can Cultural Heritage be Shaped and Reshaped by Oral Tradition? The case study of some Zoroastrian holy shrines of the Yazd province

Claudine Gauthier (11:40- 12)

Discussant: Nahal Naficy (University of Allameh Tabataba'i) (12:00- 12:30)

The Shifting Concept of Cultural Heritage, from National to Global to Local, and the Impact of UNESCO's Law-making

Janet Blake

This paper will begin with an examination of the historical development of the idea of cultural heritage, starting with the national project and moving towards a concept of global heritage to revaluing local heritages. This review also addresses the evolving role of the state and non-state actors. Following this, the different stages of policy- and law-making for cultural heritage in UNESCO will be examined along with the significance of the transitions from protection to safeguarding, tangible to intangible and universal/global to local. In addition, the significance of the much-expanded role played by anthropologists in the development of international heritage policy and law will be addressed. The implications of these changes both for the idea of heritage itself as well as for heritage bearers, along with the paradigm shift in heritage safeguarding that has occurred over recent years, will be considered.

Keywords: Cultural heritage, Heritage policy-and law-making, Protection, Safeguarding, Tangible and intangible.

Cultural heritage: afterwardness, antagonism, and hegemony

Mehrdad Arabestani

Cultural heritage includes the resources that influence our sense of social orientation and are usually considered as the essential roots of cultural identity. Nonetheless, rather than an objective and consensual set of elements, cultural heritage is subject to afterwardness; in a way that any given identity forms its cultural repertoire as its basis. Furthermore, afterwardness implies that the significance of various elements of cultural heritage is a matter of constant interpretation as culture evolves. Therefore, antagonism is intrinsic to any discourse of cultural heritage, where, to borrow Laclau and Muffe's terms, the very presence of ‘other' prevents the identities from being totally themselves. By drawing upon specific ethnographic studies, this paper is going to represent the mechanism of afterwardness and antagonism based on the interpretation of cultural heritage, as well as the political implications of such antagonisms, through examples from the existing data.    

Keywords: Cultural heritage, afterwardness, antagonism, hegemony

Dotted history: from mobilization to occultation in Cathar country

Silvie Sagnes

For Investigating the social uses of the past, the ethnologists have not been confronted with indifference to the new knowledge brought by history professionals (archaeologists, archivists, and historians). By doing so, at a time when territorial development finds in tourism, and thus in history and memory, one of its main resources, competition imposes to enhance this past with a label or another or even to claim supreme consecration: inscription on the World Heritage List. However, the expert evaluation of the OUV (Outstanding Universal Value) can not be complied with without taking into account the opinion of the specialists. Thus, after the first failure in 1985, the candidacy of the City of Carcassonne, in 1997, was based on the recommendations of the Icomos and, weighting the initial argument of an authentic fortified medieval town, put forward the restoration by Viollet-le-Duc in the nineteenth century. Finally inscribed, the City continues to surf the wave of medievalism ... and even in the new Unesco candidacy which encompasses it, namely the candidature of the castles known as "Cathars", as a serial property. There, its viollet-le-ducian character is still overshadowed, the hoped-for inscription not being conceived as anything more than an adjunct for the revival of the "Pays Cathare" territorial development program. But the celebrated "Cathar country" is less a reflection of the past than historical and territorial fiction, offered to all resemantizations, religious, spiritual, esoteric, romantic, political, etc. Thus, the place given to the historical discipline tends to be reduced to a simple instrumentalization, for purposes of serving as a guarantee. Going beyond this simple observation, we will try to understand the complex relationships between specialists and heritage entrepreneurs.

Keywords: Dotted History, mobilization, occultation

Bahareh Torshizi is born in 1982, AA in Archaeology at the University of Tehran. BA in English Interpretation at university of Applied Science and Technology. MA student undergraduate in Iranian Studies at university of Tehran. English teacher, Persian to English and vice versa translator and interpreter. Research interests: Culture, Identity, Cultural heritage, Tangible and Intangible cultural heritage, cultural heritage preservation, Media, Intercultural communications, migration, women.

Bahman Moradian works as an independent researcher and is the founder of Bondahish Research Center: Iranian Languages and Zoroastrian Studies. Mr. Moradian's publications include: "Review: Les livres de l'Avesta By Pierre Lecoq" (Gozaresh Miras, Tehran, 2019); "Water in the Yasna 68 paragraph 6" (Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies, Tehran, 2015); "The Day of Mehr, the Month of Mehr and the Ceremony of Mehrizad in Yazd" (Aram Society for Syro-Mesopotamian Studies Periodical 26, Oxford, 2014).

Claudine Gauthier is Full Professor of Anthropology at the university of Bordeaux and Researcher with tenure at IIAC (interdisciplinary Institute of Contemporary Anthropology, UMR 8177, CNRS-EHESS, Paris, FR). She is notably the 1^st Vice-president of the French National Council of Universities (20^th section) and co-responsible of the international agreement between the university of Tehran and the EHESS.

Csaba Prónai is an Associate Professor and the Head of the Department of Cultural Anthropology since 2006. He is the Director of the Hungarian and the English Cultural Anthropology MA Program. Recently he is the Vice-dean for General and Foreign Affairs at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Eötvös Loránd Univerity. He is giving lectures and seminars: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, Theory and Methods in Cultural Anthropology, Contemporary Challenges for the Society, Visual Anthropology. He has done participant observation among Gypsies/Roma in Hungary and Slovakia, among migrants in Malta and in Italy, and among Walsers in Italy.

Elham Farnam has graduated with D.D.S Degree, Doctor in Dentistry and Surgery, in 1999. She received her B.S Archaeology in 2017 and M.A. Prehistoric Archaeology in 2020, from University of Tehran she is currently a PHD student at the University of Tehran and Supervisor of anthropology department of Institute of archaeology of University of Tehran and She teaches physical anthropology and osteology in Pars University and Institute of archaeology and has worked with Institute of archaeology as physical anthropologist in the last 3 years.

Fariba Seddighi  has received her PhD in anthropology from the University of Tehran, and she teaches Anthropology 101 at Yazd University. She is interested in minority groups and how they construct their identity in Iran.

Sébastien Gondet was born in 4^th July 1979, 40 years old. CNRS member, archaeologist of the Ancient Near East and specialist of landscape archaeology. Member of the UMR 5133 Archéorient team part of the Maison de l'Orient et de la Méditerranée research center of Lyon 2 University. Since 2015, co-director of the joint Iran-France archaeological project at Pasargadae and its surrounding territory.Associate researcher at the Institut de Recherche Français en Iran (IFRI) of Tehran

Grégory Chambon is Directeur d'Etudes (Professor) at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales / Paris in Assyriology. His main research interests belong to the History of science and technology of the Ancient Near East, with recent work focusing on the use of measures and numbers in their social context, and accounting and bookkeeping practices in the third and second millennium BC Syria. This Ph.D. thesis Normes et pratiques : l'homme, la mesure et l'écriture en Mésopotamie was published in 2011. He is also the author of a book on ancient wine (2009) and a book on the management of grain in Old Babylonian Mari (2018). He is the co-director of the Journal Asiatique, which concerns historical studies on all the cultures of Asia (near East, Iran, China, Anatolia, Japan, etc.).

Hossein Vahedi holds a Masters' degree in archeology from Shahrekord University. He is the supervisor of the archeological project of Sefid Kuh Makran (Sistan and Baluchestan), the supervisor of the Master Plan of Ethnoarchaeological and Archaeological Studies in the Makran Sefid Kuh Area, and the supervisor of Research Project on Pottery Community Identification in South East of Iran (Sistan and Baluchestan Province). He is interested in research on Epipaleolithic, Neolithic, and Chalcolithic Ethnoarcheological folk; in the field of Ethnoarchaeology for four years, is active in Balochistan.

Iman khosravi is a PhD candidate of archaeology, University of Mazandaran. He Has a short-range and UAV photogrammetry degree from Apsis Institute in Tehran. He Has a diving monostar certificate for underwater archeology.
Janet Blake is Associate Professor of Human Rights Law at the University of Shahid Beheshti (Tehran) where she is also a member of the Centre of Excellence for Education for Sustainable Development and the Centre of Excellence for Silk Roads Studies. She is a member of the Cultural Heritage Law Committee of the International Law Association and of the editorial boards of two leading international journals in the field of heritage studies. Dr Blake was involved in developing, drafting and implementing the 2003 Intangible Cultural Heritage Convention and is a Global Facilitator for UNESCO's Capacity-building under the 2003 Convention. She has published eight books and 48 articles (in English and Persian), including International Cultural Heritage Law (2015) and UNESCO's 2003 Intangible Heritage Convention – A Commentary (2020) both published by Oxford University Press.

Maryam Heydari is a geochronologist with a background in physics, geophysics and a PhD in physics of archaeomaterials. Her research focuses on the application of Bayesian modelling in the field of trapped charge dating to improve the precision of chronologies established for some critical Palaeolithic sites in Iran.

Mehrdad Arabestani is an assistant professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Tehran (Iran). With a background in Medical Sciences, he shifted his study to anthropology and received a Master's degree in anthropology from the University of Tehran (Iran) and a Ph.D. from the University of Malaya (Malaysia). He has carried out extensive fieldwork among the Orang Asli- the indigenous people of Peninsular Malaysia- and the Mandaeans- an ethnoreligious minority in Iran and Iraq- and among the Kurds of Iran. His research interests are ethnicity, minorities, religion, power relations, identity, and subjectivity. He is also interested in psychoanalytically informed ethnography. For the time being, he is the president of Anthropological Society of Iran (ASI).

Michaël Guichard is professor at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (Université Paris Sciences et Lettres) since 2014. He participates in the publishing of Mari's palatial archives. He published La Vaissellede luxe des rois de Mari (volume 31 of the Royal Archives of Mari), 2005 and L'Epopée de Zimrî-Lîm, 2014.

Pooya Alaedini  is Associate Professor of Social Planning at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Tehran. His areas of interest are urban and regional planning, social policy, industrial and employment development, and tourism planning.His co-edited volumes include: Industrial, Trade, and Employment Policies in Iran: Towards a New Agenda (Springer, 2018); Quality Services and Experiences in Hospitality and Tourism (Emerald, 2018); andEconomic Welfare and Inequality in Iran: Developments since the Revolution (Palgrave, 2017). He has also (co-) authoredFrom Shelter to Regeneration: Slum Upgrading and Housing Policies in I.R. Iran(UDRO, 2014).

Reihaneh Shahvali is a Ph.D. student in sociology at Alzahra University. Her area of interest is the intersectionof tourism and culture. For her dissertation she is focused on rendering authenticity in local tourism lodges and how it can affect cultural economy.

Sajjad Samiei was born in 1993. He received his MA in prehistoric archeology from the Marlik Institute of Higher Education of Noshahr (Iran) in 2018, with a grade point average of 18.43. The title of his master's thesis is "Analysis of site Formation process in the northern slope of Alborz based on Experimental Archaeology Approaches and objective observations." He is interested in experimental archaeology, and he is more interested in the Near East Neolithic period, the architecture, and stone tools of the course work.  He is the first to write a paper about experimental archeology and its importance in Iran, and the first one is academically pursuing experimental archeology. He has participated in several archaeological excavations in northern Alborz.

Samira Ebrahimpour is Graduated Student of Archaeology, the University of Tehran. CEO of the Company, Sustainable Development of Cultural Heritage. Founder of Hamataa. Interested in "Public Archaeology," In Order to Introduce the Past to the Public Focusing on Introduction and Awareness about Cultural Heritage. Working on "Archaeology for Kids," Which Is One of Two Main Sub-disciplines of Public Archaeology.

Shadi Kalantar was born on 16 January 1992 in Isfahan, Iran. She was a member of Iran`s national canoe/kayak team, and also she is a certified diver. As soon as she started studying archaeology at the University of Tehran, she got interested in traditional technics of ship and boat building, nautical archaeology, and in general, maritime archaeology. So far, she has published some articles about maritime archaeology and has attended to several UW archaeology workshops and field works.

Shirin Gholamalamdari Is born in Tehran, and driven by her passion for art, history and literature, she got her bachelor's degree in Persian literature and master's in History of Islamic Art from University of Tehran, where she wrote her thesis on "the necessity and process of museum objects digitization in the Islamic world".

Sylive Sagnes is an Anthropologist, researcher at the CNRS, president of the Ethnopôle GARAE. Sylvie Sagnes was initially concerned with understanding the representations attached to "roots". Today she pays attention to the desire for sustainability of our contemporaries, which she apprehends in different fields of heritage. At the same time, the construction of scholarly identities and its translations in terms of intellectual kinship and memory are of particular interest to her.

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