The Articulation of Cultural Memory and Heritage in Plural Societies.

The Articulation of Cultural Memoryand Heritage in Plural Societies

Saphinaz-Amal Naguib

Prologue

In his novel Salam, the Saudi writer Hani Naqshabandi revisits the myth ofal-Andalus in Arab cultural memory. There, it is perceived as a Golden Age,a kind of paradise lost; a time when arts, sciences and philosophy blos-somed; an era of tolerance, harmony and peaceful cohabitation betweenMuslims, Christians and Jews. The main character in the book is a Saudiprince who, like many rich North Africans and Middle Easterners nowa-days, spends much of his time in his vast properties around Marbella. Oneday, after a lengthy visit to Granada, the prince decides to have an exactcopy of the Alhambra build on a hill in Saudi Arabia so that the heritage ofthe Arabs is “brought back to where it belongs”. His project is challenged byan ageless dervish called Salam, which means peace in Arabic, who remindsthe prince that the myth is just an illusion, a fiction that does not correspondto the historical, cultural and social realities. He contests the validity of themyth and questions the prince about whose cultural memory he is going touphold and whose heritage he is intending to reproduce. Is it the Arab,Berber, Spanish, Muslim, Christian, Jewish or an eclectic mixture of allthese various cultural components? And how will he disentangle the onefrom the other? The queries of Salam address a number of current issuespertaining to cultural memory and heritage in plural societies today.

The present essay considers some of the ways cultural memory and her-itage are being used to elaborate various strategies towards stable socialcohesion in plural societies. My reflections are mostly limited to materialculture and tangible forms of heritage and to how the many-voiced accounts,objects and documents of what Arjun Appadurai defined as a society’s

Naguib.The Formative7_Museumsbok 2010 23.02.15 12.18 Side 221

“shared past” and Manuel Castells calls “shared experiences” are communi-cated.1 These shared pasts and shared experiences denote cultural resourcesencompassing many conflicting memories that are usually set within a com-mon normative framework. They mean different things to different groups.Each group emphasises its own views and, whether or not it is aware of theothers’ interpretations, it tends to underrate their importance. In the follow-ing, I begin by briefly reviewing the notion of cultural memory. I then go onto reflect on the ways cultural memory and heritage are negotiated in vari-ous types of plural societies. Thereafter, I discuss the role of museums ofcultural history in shaping new forms of cultural memory and heritage. I amespecially interested in their treatment of questions tied to migration andexemplify my points by examining the configurations of immigrants’ cul-tural memory and heritage in two national museums. The first one is theNorsk Folkemuseum (The Norwegian Museum of Cultural History) in Oslo,which was founded at the beginning of the twentieth century and is todaythe largest Norwegian museum of cultural history. The second is the Muséede l’histoire de l’immigration in Paris, which was inaugurated in 2007.

Reviewing Cultural Memory

In his seminal books Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (1925) and Lamémoire collective (1950), Maurice Halbwachs argued that it was throughtheir connection to a social group – be it through kinship, religious member-ship or class affiliation – that individuals are able to acquire, localise andrecall their memories. Every recollection, however intimate and private itmay be, even events that one witnesses alone, thoughts and feelings thathave never been expressed openly, exist in relationship to a whole set ofnotions that are shared by many others. For Halbwachs, what binds memo-ries together is that they form a group’s common fund. So groups provideindividuals with the frameworks of their memories. Moreover, Halbwachsmaintained that memory is both action and representation and that it relieson specific written and oral texts that should be considered cognitively asavenues of ideas. Memory studies got a new boost during the 1980s in par-ticular thanks to the influential works of Pierre Nora, who coined the expres-

222 SAPHINAZ-AMAL NAGUIB

1. Appadurai, “The Past as a Scarce Resource”, 1981; Castells, The Power of Identity,1998, 29f.


sions lieux de mémoire, or sites of memory, and milieux de mémoire, orenvironments of memory. Nora posited that sites of memory are topoi, thatis, both places and topics, where memories converge, agree or clash anddelineate relationships between the past, the present and the future. Thesesites of memory may be material or immaterial. They may be consolidatedin material objects like archives, landscapes, monuments and museums orconveyed through rituals, commemorations, and modes of behaviour.2Reflecting on how collective memory is activated, James Wertsch hasrecently suggested that in order to avoid mixing “memory in the group” and“memory of the group”, one should examine how memory is distributedsocially in group interaction and instrumentally through active agents andtools that mediate the act of remembering. Tools that trigger memories are ofvarious sorts; they include insignificant artefacts as well as a society’s tangi-ble, intangible and natural heritage. Wertsch notes that the stress on medi-ated action means that it would actually be more correct to talk about collec-tive remembering, thus stressing the active recollection and reassessment ofthe past, rather than collective memory.3 However, the latter being the morewidespread terminology in academic writings, I will continue to use it here-after. To name all the scholars who have contributed to the field of memorystudies would largely exceed the limits of this article. I will therefore con-centrate on the notion of cultural memory and the works of Aleida and JanAssmann. They explain that cultural memory is based on different forms ofknowledge, both tacit and learned, and that it ties the present with a past thatmay be thousands of years old. The Assmanns propose two main categoriesto memory: kommunikative Gedächtnis or communicative memory, and kul-turelle Gedächtnis, or cultural memory. Communicative memory is relatedto the social aspect of the individual’s memory. It pertains to episodic mem-ory and as such is autobiographical and based on personal experiences. Ithas a short time span and links three to four generations together. Con-versely, cultural memory has a very long time perspective. As Jan Assmannwrites: “With cultural memory the depths of time open up”.4 It is tied to thecollective and is not necessarily enclosed within geographic and nationalboundaries. It may very well be transnational. Aleida and Jan Assmann go

THE ARTICULATION OF CULTURAL MEMORY AND HERITAGE … 223

2. Nora, “Entre mémoire et histoire”, 1984, XVII.3. Wertsch, Voices of Collective Remembering, 2002,118f.4. J. Assmann, Religion and Cultural Memory, 2006, 24. Jan Assmann further explores the

connection between cultural memory and sense of history in his contribution in this vol-ume, see p. 121f.


on to differentiate between two modes of cultural memory and what theydescribe as Speichergedächtnis, or “storage memory”, and Funktions-gedächtnis, i.e. functional memory. Stored memory serves as an archivewhere memories are kept. It is passive and encompasses traditions. Func-tional memory is active and works as the canon, thus offering a normativeframework. It sets stored memory in motion in such a way that it becomesrelevant to the present. This happens because a society’s cultural memorycan be fixed upon some common material and immaterial elements that areassociated with a group’s identity and that may be revitalised at given timesand places. Aleida Assmann notes that:

The institutions of the canon emphasize the past as present while the institu-tions of the archive preserve the past as past. While the objects of the culturalcanon are preserved within a canonical time that claims and affirms their undi-minished value, beauty or relevance, the objects of the cultural archive are pre-served within an historical time of pure storage. In both cases, the objects/textsexist in a state of latency: they need to be brought back into the realm of the pre-sent – either by the obligation of the canon to actualize the potential of a text byreading, interpreting, staging or performing it, or by the incentive of the archiveto rediscover and reframe the text/object in a new context.5

Thus, the different types of memory coexist. They are connected, build oneach other and are being shaped by continuous multidirectional flows ofinformation. In plural societies, cultural memory is shaped by the collectivememories, or rather collective remembrances of the various groups. Thesememories/remembrances are bound together by common elements thatbelong to a society’s “shared past” and “shared experiences”. When rekin-dled they may, depending on the context and the circumstances, eitherbecome factors of strife and destruction or of peace and social cohesion.6

Memory implies forgetting, selecting which events are to be enhancedand which to store or discard. There is, in my view, also a collective forget-ting, hence we may talk about a cultural forgetting which is tied to social,political and cultural contexts in time and space. Paul Connerton distin-


5. A. Assmann, “The Religious Roots of Cultural Memory”, 2008, 280. Italics are theauthor’s.

6. See Zorgati in this volume for a telling example. In the Epilogue of the present book,Terje Stordalen argues that various moments of the Trail of Roses evoke ceremonialpractices that have been performed in post-War Norway and Oslo.


guishes seven types of forgetting.7 The first one, repressive erasure, is com-mon in totalitarian regimes. It can be used to deny historical events or, as inthe case of revolutions, to mark a rupture with the past and promote a histor-ical break and the beginning of a new era. This is followed by prescriptiveforgetting, which is also enforced by those in power in the belief that it is ineverybody’s interest. For instance, after a civil war, the act of not remember-ing is normally resorted to as a strategy towards national reconciliation.Spain is a salient example of this kind of policy. Any action that may jeopar-dise the pacto de olvido or pact of forgetting is seen as a threat to the stabil-ity of the country. This explains why the investigations by the judge BaltasarGarzon into the crimes perpetuated during the civil war and Franco’s regimehave been suspended. Indeed, accused of having overstepped his authorityin ordering illegal wiretapping, the judge has been disbarred for elevenyears.8 Then comes forgetting that is constitutive in the formation of a newidentity. Here the emphasis is put on the creation of something new and theshaping of fresh identities rather than on what is lost. This is the kind of for-getting we find in the context of long-term migration and exile. It involvesprocesses of dislocation and relocation related to departures, arrivals andadaptation of some sort. It is also the type of amnesia one finds in post-revo-lution, post-colonial and post-civil-war settings in a society’s endeavour toestablish a democratic system, as has been the case in post-apartheid SouthAfrica. The fourth kind of forgetting in Connerton’s typology is structuralamnesia. It is the result of a lack of information and knowledge, like the sit-uations described in Bernhard Schlink’s novels Der Vorleser (The Reader)and Die Heimkehr (The Return), which deal with the difficulties of manyGermans growing up after WWII in what we may describe as an atmosphereof general whispering and secrecy while they try to comprehend and cometo terms with the choices made by their parents. On a more prosaic level, wemay think of occasions when we try to prepare a special dish that our grand-mother use to make and we don’t remember all the steps. We may consult acookbook, but it always seems that something is missing and the taste isnever the same. Next, we find forgetting as annulment, which is due to anexcess of information and has become a common feature of today’s worldwith its over-abundance and saturation of social media; and forgetting as


7. Connerton, “Seven Types of Forgetting”, 2008.8 http://www.presseurop.eu/en/content/press-review/1497951-end-road-judge-garzon [con-

sulted 12.02.2012]


planned obsolescence, which is tied to the consumer market and a product’slife cycle. The last type of forgetting in Connerton’s model is forgetting ashumiliated silence. This is a recurrent post-war condition and is tied toshame. This kind of forgetting is a prevalent traumatic effect after a defeat,as has been the case in Egypt in the aftermath of the 1967 war. In Norway,the debates surrounding the publication of books like De som falt (Thosewho fell) by Eirik Veum actualise a different aspect of this last type ofremembering-forgetting by focusing on the lives of those who chose tochampion the “wrong” side during World War II.9 In the same vein, the OsloMuseum set up an exhibition entitled Forelsket og foraktet – Norske kvinner– tyske soldater (In love and despised – Norwegian women – German sol-diers) which dealt with the fate of Norwegian women who had beeninvolved with German soldiers during WWII, and the plight of the children,among them the Lebensborn, born from these relationships.10

Generally speaking, we may infer that silence – the non-said (at leastloudly) and empty gaps – are recurring elements in all these types of forgetting.Some, like prescriptive forgetting, structural amnesia and humiliated silence,have been revisited and have given rise to a wave of official governmental actsof apology and rituals of reconciliation about oppression, discrimination, segre-gation, slavery, genocides and war crimes. However, the “politics of regret”, asJeffrey Olick calls it, may have repercussions contrary to those expected andreinforce a sense of “resentment”. 11 Geoffrey Cubitt rightly remarks that

public “silences” over the memory of certain events are not always andinevitably the implicit markers of oppression and exclusions, but may some-times be a necessary (and even to some extend an agreed) condition for thehealing of social wounds.12

The Quest for Heritage

There is a permanent interplay between cultural memory and forgetting, andthe two are continuously being shaped and reshaped. Cultural memory


9. Veum, De som falt, 2010.10. http://www.oslomuseum.no/bymuseet/bymuseet-utstillinger/forelsket-og-foraktet,

(22 October 2013 to the end of December 2014) [accessed on 21 July 2014].11. Olick, The Politics of Regret, 2007, 121f, 154f.12. Cubitt, History and Memory, 2007, 230.


entails the selection and transmission of values, narratives, beliefs, bodies ofknowledge and ways of being in general. In other words, cultural memory isconcurrently a main repository and a producer of heritage. We may, how-ever, reiterate the question put by Stuart Hall and ask: Whose heritage is itwe are dealing with? According to Michael Rowlands,

we are encouraged to think of heritage as a discursive practice, as a way that agroup slowly constructs a collective memory for itself by telling stories aboutitself. These stories constitute a tradition which in the structure of a narrativeestablishes a relation between a past, a community and an identity to define theright of a group to exist.13

Laurajane Smith questioned the notion of heritage and provocativelydeclared that “[t]here is, really, no such thing as heritage”.14 To her, heritageis a cultural and political process and practices that are dependent on shift-ing power relations and not a thing with fixed values and meanings. Thereis, in her opinion, an “authorised heritage discourse” (AHD) that establishesa conceptual framework about a common national legacy and sets of intrin-sic values, and emphasises the materiality and the alleged universal value ofheritage. She points out that many of the moves to include and representminorities in, for instance, museums still do not change the methods andconditions through which heritage is defined. Minorities may be given aplace within the authorised discourse, but in the majority of cases alternativeideas of what constitutes heritage have still not taken hold. How, then, arecultural memory and forgetting and heritage negotiated in plural societies?And what do we mean by plural society?

Heritage is primarily based on the idea of possessions – both materialand immaterial – which are to be kept, managed and transmitted in theirintegrity, hopefully also augmented, to the next generations. It is first andforemost an economic, histori cal, cultural and natural legacy that is definedby the concrete reality of its objects, their financial value, their spiritual andtheir documentary importance, as well as by their emotional significance. Somuch so that heritage may be used as a therapeutic tool in trying to heal thewounds after historical traumas and upheavals such as colonialism, occupa-tion, wars and civil wars.15 The notion of heritage continues to be deeply


13. Rowlands, “Heritage and Cultural Property”, 2002, 108.14. Smith, The Uses of Heritage, 2006, 11.15. Meskell and Scheermeyer, “Heritage as Therapy”, 2008; Naguib, “The One, the Many


tied to ideas of nationhood that were developed during the nineteenth cen-tury. However, these ideas have during the last three decades of the twenti-eth century been strongly challenged by complex and often dissonant defini-tions of identity, or rather identities, and polymorphous collective memories.The ensuing contentions emphasise that heritage is always tied to politicsand power, to who decides what is worth having the status of heritage con-ferred upon it, what is not – and why.16 Moreover, heritage is constructed inthe present as an afterthought, a reflection and an explanation of the past.The past is used to answer present concerns, which are projected unto thefuture.

With the rise of memory studies during the 1980s, in a kind of synergeticeffect, we witnessed a growing interest in heritage studies. The title of DavidLowenthal’s book The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (1998) istelling. He describes this “crusade” as an expanding form of secular religion.Using religious metaphors, he claims that heritage is no longer the preoccu-pation of elites but has become “a major crusade to save and celebrate all thatwe inherit from the past”. The French historian François Hartog explains thatwe are in an era where the heritage wave has taken on such proportions that ithas reached what he calls le tout-patrimoine in the sense that almost anythinghas become part of a common heritage worldwide. This inflation of heritagehas brought about a “museification” of daily life. It means that we are nolonger operating within the logic of the unique monument or work of art butrather within the rationale of the multiple, polyvalent, decentralised and glob-alised heritage where the tangible, intangible and natural heritage of othershas become part of ours.17 UNESCO has been the prime mover in the elabo-ration of transnational policies regarding the preservation of heritage on theinternational plan. The 1960s marked a turning point for the perception ofheritage. At that time, UNESCO launched a worldwide campaign to rescuethe monuments of Nubia. Countries all over the world were engaged in thesalvation of monuments and sites under threat of being submerged by thewaters of the Nile as a result of the construction of the High Dam in Aswan.Heritage then took on a new dimension, and from being national it became


and the Other”, 2008a, 14; Macdonald, Memorylands. Heritage and Identity in EuropeToday, 2013.

16. The collection of articles in Graham and Howard, The Ashgate Research Companion toHeritage and Identity, 2008, address different aspects of the relations between heritage,identity and memory.

17. Hartog, Régimes d’historicité, 2003, 196f.


universal. It belonged to all of humanity, and as such pertained to a transna-tional cultural memory. Since then, movements of cultural preservation havetriggered awareness in public opinion worldwide concerning the need to pro-tect tangible, intangible and natural heritage in its various forms. Legislationwith a view to financing the protection, reconstruction and conservation ofmonuments, artefacts, urban historical centres, dwellings and religious build-ings, rituals and various bodies of knowledge, skills and arts that are trans-mitted orally, by gesture or by examples, as well as cultural landscapes andnature, has been adopted by several nation-states, and there is a strong com-petition to have elements of the national heritage registered on UNESCO’slist of World Heritage. Today, heritage is a major cultural resource with pro-grams of sustainable development in which (cultural) tourism and the her-itage industry are main assets and where museums play a major role.

Models of Plural Societies

The rising interest in collective memory and heritage coincided with thethorny question of multiculturalism. Discourses on multiculturalism,prompted mostly by increased immigration and the growing presence of “vis-ible” minorities from old colonies and developing countries, have been at theheart of many heated political debates in a number of Western countries sincethe 1980s. Views on multiculturalism have usually been based on essentialistand territorial understandings of culture. Accordingly, multiculturalism isconsidered by many as a series of cohabitating ghettoes and communitiesperceived as self-enclosed, living behind solid thick walls and ensconced intheir “own” traditions.18 But as Ghassan Hage points out, plural societies andcultural diversity are not new phenomena, and there are many forms of multi-culturalism(s).19 In their book Pluralising Pasts: Heritage, Identity and Placein Multicultural Societies, Ashworth, Graham and Turnbridge suggest fivemodels of multicultural societies, which they classify into the assimilatory,integrationist or single core model, the melting pot model, the core+ model,the pillar model, and the salad bowl – mosaic – rainbow models.20


18. Pieterse, “Multiculturalism and Museums”, 2005, 167.19. Hage, “Analysing Multiculturalism Today”, 2008.20. Ashworth, Graham and Turnbridge, Pluralising Pasts, 2007; see also Turnbridge, “Plural

and Multicultural Heritages”, 2008.


The assimilatory, integrationist or single core type of society acceptsthe valid existence of only one set of common values, social norms andpractices, and ethnic cultural characteristics as rightly determining the iden-tity of a nation-state. Accordingly, indigenous minorities and new ethnicand/or religious groups are absorbed into, or expected to let themselves bedissolved into, the single core without changing it. The motto is one people,one nation. There is a closure around a single legitimate linear “grand narra-tive”, a uniform cultural memory to which everybody is compelled to con-form. France, Greece and Turkey are often taken as examples of such soci-eties. France, however, follows a politics of so-called “civic universalism”,which favours assimilation and integration into what are considered to be“universal values”.21 Regarding heritage policies, this model is applied byincorporating all the different heritages into the core. For example, ancientGreek temples and theatres in Turkey are labelled as Turkish by the localauthorities. Another approach common to single core model societies is tomarginalise the non-conforming groups through museification and exotifica-tion, as has been the case with the Sami heritage in Norway prior to WorldWar II. Sami cultural artefacts were first kept at the University’s Ethno-graphic Museum together with other alien and so-called “primitive” cul-tures.22 These were transferred to the Norwegian Museum of Cultural His-tory during the 1950s and consequently incorporated into the national her-itage of Norway. A third strategy is to deny the existence of such groups byignoring them, as has been the case with the heritage of the Rom andRomani in several countries in Europe. Denial may go as far as concealingor destroying the heritage of unwanted groups and erasing any reminders oftheir presence in past times. The destruction of the Buddhas of Bamyan in2001 illustrates well how far a politics of denial can go.

The melting pot model, or what we could call the tabula rasa model,represents the forging of new, pristine national identities. The term wasdevised in the United States in the early 1900s and has been applied in threedifferent types of contexts. The first one is the settler society in which immi-grants from different backgrounds endeavour to create a homogeneousnational identity and an original and unique new product. We find thismodel in the USA, Canada, Australia and Israel. The second type of meltingpot society is to be found in old colonies at the time of their struggle for


21. Ashworth, Graham and Turnbridge 2007, 25.22. Naguib, “Autres temps, autres regards”, 2007, 148f.


independence and their need to form a new, unique national identity from anexisting very diverse population, as in Indonesia, Iraq, Rwanda or SierraLeone. The third type of context is when governments or groups try tochange society from within and establish new social and political identitiesfor a segment of the population. This reflects visions of a promised land, a“new Jerusalem”, and the founding of a new and better society, such as theones symbolised by the ideal of the homo sovieticus, or by religious groupssetting up enclosed communities clearly separated from the rest of society.These novel societies are envisioned as flourishing, taking over and trans-forming the old, decadent ones. Heritage in melting pot societies is usuallyan original construction that unifies the entire population. This is a very del-icate task, and various methods have been tried out, some more successfullythan others. Common to all is the choice of one or more “official” languageand the establishment of common symbols like flags, national anthems andmonuments. For instance, Israel resorted to the distant past and the revivalof Hebrew as a spoken language. Sierra Leone has had to select sites andobjects that were significant to all parties involved. In his analysis of the sit-uation in that country, Paul Basu underlines the difficulties that confrontedthe Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in its attempt to build up acommon heritage for the country.23

Central to the core+ model is the presence of a consensual core identity,the “leading culture” to which a number of distinctive groups are connected.The objective is not the definitive assimilation of the various groups into a sin-gle core or melting pot. As long as they do not threaten the core, unlike theKurds in Turkey and Iraq or the Basques in Spain, the “others” are accepted ashaving a legitimate and continuous presence. They may be viewed either asquite distinct and even irrelevant to the majority, as for example are theYazidis of Mount Sinjar and the Sabeans of the Marshes in Iraq, or as con-tributing to enriching the core, as is the case of the Sami and the nationalminorities in Norway.24 In core+ societies, heritage is used to maintain the


23. Basu, “Confronting the Past?” 2008.24. Naguib, Naguib, S.-A., “Une minorité qui dérange la Norvège. Presentation of the special

number of Ethnologie Française 2009/2: Norvège. Vues de l”intérieur”, Paris, 5 May,2009 (unpublished). Norway recognises six minorities. The Sami constitute the indige-nous population of the country. The other five are national minorities. Two groups, theRomani or Tatere and the Roma or gypsies, are “travelling people”. Two other groups, theKvener and the Skogfinner, are people of the borderlands who originally came from Fin-land. The fifth group, the Jews, is a religious group composed mostly of urban people.


predominance of the majority culture as well as to promote its values and, atthe same time, to make the heritage of minorities known to the core. Thus,cultural diversity is often used to support and open up minority cultures so thatthere is more interaction between the different groups through, for instance,taking part in each other’s festivals and pilgrimages, visiting each other’s her-itage sites and special museums, patronising ethnic restaurants and other com-mercial venues. There is in core+ societies an incentive from the centralauthorities towards ethnisation and indigenism or, to quote Adam Kuper,towards a “return of the native”25, which has spurred the proliferation of spe-cial museums and heritage sites in many countries. In Norway, the Sami andthe recognised national minorities have established or are in the process ofestablishing their own museums and cultural centres which, nevertheless,receive funding from the state, the county or the municipality.

In the pillar model, society is conceived as a set of pillars, some moreslender than others, but all of the same height. The pillars are self-containedentities and have little contact with each other. Collectively, however, they allsupport the same superstructure of a unified nation-state which requires a min-imal uniformity, thus allowing each group to more or less organise its owncultural, religious, social and educational institutions. Sometimes individualpillars, that is communities or groups, can even establish their own economicand political organisations as long as they do not threaten the superstructure.The Ottoman Empire with its millet system exemplifies this model. Colonisedcountries were normally subjected to such a system. South Africa during thetime of apartheid is another example, and lately Belgium seems to be goingthat way, too. When it comes to matters concerning heritage, each group tendsto build up its own heritage. There is, nevertheless, a “superior” heritage towhich all the groups can subscribe, a sort of common roof that covers the


The notion of national minority has been used in a number of international docu-ments. Attempts to establish a common definition have all failed, and each country inter-prets it in its own way. However, according to the most authoritative definition, anational minority designates a group of persons who live in a State, are citizens of thatState and have long and durable ties to that State. These groups have specific ethnic, cul-tural, religious or linguistic characteristics that distinguish them from the majority of thepopulation. They want to preserve the symbols of their common identity, in particulartheir culture, traditions, religion and language. It takes 100 years (approximately fourgenerations) of continuous presence in Norway for a community to be allowed to for-ward a request to be granted the status of Norwegian national minority.

25. Kuper, The Reinvention of Primitive Society, 2005.


whole and keeps the different elements together, especially in colonial andpost-colonial situations. In her study on the uses of heritage, Nabila Oulebsirremarks that during colonial times in Algeria, the French authorities empha-sised the importance of the Roman heritage instead of the Islamic one. Thisstrategy helped establish an unbroken line of European presence in the coun-try. After independence, Algerians reappropriated their multifarious past andincluded the Roman period and its monuments as an integral part of their ownheritage. 26 In Egypt, the Pharaonic heritage served as a unifying medium dur-ing the national struggle towards independence at the beginning of the twenti-eth century, and again as a kind of revival since the 1990s in the government’sefforts to bridge the gap between the different political and religious factionsand to secularise public spaces.27 The Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Courtin Cairo designed by the architect Ahmed Mito is a striking example of thistrend. The building, which was completed in 2000, recalls ancient Egyptiantemples with their tall papyri-shaped columns and their colossal pylons sur-mounted by the winged sun (fig. 1).

The salad bowl – mosaic – rainbow models have taken over during thelast four decades or so. They share the basic idea that the diverse groups thatconstitute a society are brought together and collectively create a wholewithout losing their distinctive features. The salad bowl conveys the idea ofdifferent elements put in the same vessel to create a dish without destroyingthe taste and texture of the various ingredients. Canada is often described asa salad bowl society. The problem here is to find a sturdy enough bowl and asalad dressing that would suit and unite all these ingredients and enhance thetaste of the salad as a whole. The cultural mosaic model brings forth theimage of different small tesserae, which together form a pattern while eachpiece remains unchanged and individually identifiable. Here, too, one has tofind a solid framework and a good adhesive to keep the pieces in place.More recently, the expression rainbow society has been introduced. Thisreflects the idea of different colours forming a pattern by remaining distinctwhile merging into each other at the edges. When in 1998 France won itsfirst football World Cup, it was thanks to a generation of players who werehailed as the representatives of the country’s so-called black-blanc-beurpopulation. This sports achievement became a social experience, and sincethen, echoing the famous declaration of Bishop Desmond Tutu about South


26. Oulebsir, Les usages du patrimoine, 2004.27. Naguib, “Et blikk på Egypt”, 2011.


Africa being the “rainbow nation”, the expression la France arc-en-ciel(rainbow France) has been frequently used in political debates regardingissues related to cultural diversity. The metaphor of the rainbow suggestssomething more fluid and intangible than a salad bowl or a mosaic.

In the salad bowl – mosaic – rainbow models, cultural diversity is seenas opening up ways to share similarities and differences within the frame-work of the nation-state by conforming to common “universal” values. Fur-ther, they emphasise the benefits of cross-cultural contacts and hybridity. Inmy opinion, the salad bowl – mosaic – rainbow models denote the come-back of cosmopolitanism in a new form or rather the acceptance and prac-tice of plural cosmopolitanisms that we may describe as everyday cos-mopolitanism or vernacular cosmopolitanism. Being cosmopolitan is,according to Ulf Hannerz, a state of mind, a way of managing and of partici-pating in a plurality of cultures to some degree on one’s own terms.28 Every-


28. Hannerz, Transnational Connections, 1996, 102f.

Fig 1: The Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court in Cairo, designed by thearchitect Ahmed Mito. Photograph: Raymond Collet.


day cosmopolitanism is notrestricted to urban elites, fre-quent travellers and acade-mics. It combines roots withroutes, and “the global doesnot exclude the local”.29 Asan analytic approach, every-day cosmopolitanism offersalternative perspectives forexploring the ways peoplefrom various backgroundsshare a common space,inter act on a daily basis andpractice glocalisation bymixing the local with the

global. As Chan explains, it entails examining “the unspectacular, practical,usual, everyday life fusion and hybridisation that happens when groupsshare a neighbourhood, a history and memory based on simply livingtogether and solving the practical problems of living that require a certaintranscendence of group identities”.30 The spreading of a “cultural hyphen-ation” and the articulation of a kind of dual-focused – even multi-focused –cultural memory and heritage is another aspect of everyday cosmopoli-tanism where a sense of belonging to a plurality of cultures and the enhance-ment of one’s multiple roots does not exclude one’s attachment to thenation-state, the region, the locality and the ethnic/religious group. 31 Thus,we notice the promotion of, for instance, Native-American and Afro-Ameri-can heritage trails in the USA, of Sami, Kven, Romani (Tater) or Jewish her-itage in Norway, or of Muslim-Pakistani-British heritage in the UK. The pic-ture of the punk Sami girl at the Norsk Folkemuseum sums up the ways aperson’s multiple identities may be visualised (fig. 2).


29. Chan, “Both Sides, Now”, 2008, 207.30. Chan 2008, 206.31. Ashworth, Graham and Turnbridge 2007, 124f.

Fig. 2: The Sami “punkgirl” at the Norsk Folkemu-seum. Photograph: MarziaVarutti.


Before going further, I want to underline the fact that, like all systems ofclassification, the typology presented here is arbitrary and may only be usedas an aid during a first stage of analysis when one tries to organise theempirical material and put some order into the tangle of plural societies.There are several overlaps between the models. All societies are subject tocontinuous changes and may adopt different models, sometimes concur-rently. Of course, there are many examples of unassimilated, unintegratedand un-melted groups. For instance, Native Americans, Afro-Americans andAsians32 in the United States, the Inuits in Canada, the Aborigines in Aus-tralia, and Maoris in New Zealand were not included in the melting pot,although they had been present all the time and even preceded the time ofthe settlers. Further, in all the types of plural societies cited above, eventhose that were colonised or were subject to foreign military occupation, andthose where systems of segregation have been most rigorous – like SouthAfrica at the time of apartheid, India under the caste system, or societiesadhering to strict sexual segregation as in Saudi Arabia – there always havebeen spaces for encounters or “contact zones”, to use the expression coinedby Marie Louise Pratt, where people from different backgrounds, of differ-ent generations and gender meet. Contact zones may be located in the pri-vacy of homes or in public spaces like urban districts, religious buildingsand sites, offices of state bureaucracy and public institutions such asschools, hospitals, museums where the heritage of the various groups is keptand displayed, cafés, restaurants, hotels and other types of establishments.33

Contact zones can also be of a more immaterial kind. Language, or ratherthe choice of language, is one of the most significant and common contactzones in plural societies. For instance, in several post-colonial contexts, thelanguage of the coloniser has been taken over as one of the dominant lan-guages and is used as a medium to hold society together. It is important tokeep in mind that contact zones are by no means peaceful spaces but ratherare ramified fields of tension that may be transformed into conflict zones.

Let us now turn to institutions that manage and safeguard the differentcultural memories and heritages, namely museums of cultural history.


32. People of Japanese origin were interned during WW II.33. Naguib, “Heritage in Movement: Rethinking Cultural Borrowings in the Mediterranean”,

2008b.


The Configuration of Cultural Memory and Heritage in Museums

Museums are privileged places where heritage, whether universal ornational, tangible, intangible, e-tangible and natural, is collected, classifiedand displayed. These institutions, especially museums of cultural history,have played and still play a key role both as archives and as producers ofcanon. They are often depicted as places of cultural memory. But selectivecultural memory is perhaps a more accurate description because, normally, itis the decorous, edifying side of the nation-state that is displayed rather thanthe shadier sides of its history and blood-stained records. Museums of cul-tural history create images about “self and other”, and endorse what CarolDuncan has called “rituals of citizenship” in the sense of prompting a senseof belonging to a nation-state.34 As stated above, citizenship in plural soci-eties reflects the emergence and practice of various forms of cosmopoli-tanism. It is acquiring new meanings and is in the process of becoming mul-tiple, global, regional and local concurrently. The conventional view of amonolithic national identity is now divided into a plurality of identities. The“other” has become “others” which may be differentiated by citizenship,ethnicity, religion, class, gender, age and lifestyle.35 Taking my cue fromKratz and Karp, I consider museums “in terms of process and interaction”.36

As such, museums are active agents in ongoing political, economic andsocial processes. They are continuously redefining their roles in society andadapting new ideas and methods to their museological endeavours. One ofthe main issues museums of cultural history have to address nowadays con-cerns the representations of cultural diversity and how to harmonise betweenthe polyphonic cultural memories embodied in their collections and exhibi-tions; how to manage the transition from being authoritative institutions ofestablished knowledge and learning to become what Feuchtwang called“authorities of recognition” and play an increasingly active role in promot-ing social cohesion in plural societies.37 The project Les Portes du Temps(The Doors of Time) that was initiated during the summer of 2008 in Franceis an example of this new direction taken by museums. The main objectiveof the project has been to make heritage sites and museums in France known


34. Duncan, “Art Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship”, 1991, 88.35. Pieterse 2005, 165.36. Kratz and Karp, “Introduction: Museums Frictions”, 2006, 1.37. Feuchtwang, “Loss, Transmissions, Recognitions”, 2003.


and accessible to children and adolescents from so-called zones urbainessensibles, or difficult urban districts. The project aims at developing a senseof belonging in young people from various cultural backgrounds so as toimprint on them the feeling of being an integral part of France’s cultural his-tory and memory. One of the heritage sites and museums involved in theproject is the Musée de l’histoire de l’immigration (Museum of the Historyof Immigration) in Paris, which I will come back to later. As I explain in thetwo case studies chosen here, museums normally frame their exhibition pro-grams within given regimes of representation and visibility that refer to thedifferent national historical, political and cultural contexts as well as toongoing debates.38

Including the Foreign at the Norsk Folkemuseum

The first case study deals with the inclusion of immigrants’ life histories atthe Norsk Folkemuseum (The Norwegian Museum of Cultural History). Themuseum was founded in 1894 by the Norwegian librarian and museumdirector, Hans Aall (1867–1947).39 Aall was greatly inspired by the ideas ofArthur Hazelius (1833–1901), who in 1891 created the first open airmuseum of cultural history, namely the Nordiska Museum, also known asSkansen in Stockholm. At the time, Norway was still struggling for indepen-dence from the union with Sweden, and the period was permeated by theNational Romantic movement. The Norwegian museum was established onthe peninsula of Bygdøy in Oslo in 1898, and it was officially inaugurated in1901. The exhibition scheme focused on Norwegian folklore and rural cul-ture from the sixteenth century to the twentieth century and concentrated onthe inland and the central regions of the country. Life on the coastline, urbanlife and minorities were not included in the representations of Norway. Thepolitical climate in Norway changed significantly after World War II, andnew views on the rights of minorities were emerging. The indigenousminority, the Sami, contested the fact that their culture was representedtogether with other non-European/Western “primitive” and exotic cultures atthe Ethnographic Museum of the University of Oslo. In 1951, the University


38. Naguib, “Engaging with Gender and Diversity in Museums of Cultural History”, 2011b;Varutti, “Gradients of Alterity”, 2011.

39. Amundsen, “Men of Vision”, 2011.


of Oslo decided to deposit the collection of Sami objects at the Norsk Folke-museum, and the transfer was ratified in 1956.40 During the 1990s, theNorsk Folkemuseum’s exhibition policies changed, and it was decided to setup a permanent exhibition of Sami culture, to incorporate presentations ofurban life and to treat questions related to immigration.

Old town buildings were relocated to the grounds of the museum, and in1998 the Oslo Cooperative Housing Cooperation (OBOS) offered the NorskFolkemuseum an old three-storey brick apartment building from 1865. Thebuilding had been situated at Wesselsgate 15 in downtown Oslo between theWest End and the East End of the city. It was a typical apartment buildingfor the residential quarters in the older parts of the city and had been mostlyinhabited by middle-class people. The reconstruction of the building withinthe grounds of the museum was completed in 2009. As it stands today, thebuilding contains eight flats in addition to a licensed liquor store on theground floor. The purpose of relocating Wesselsgate 15 was not merely topreserve an old building and to keep up the memories of past times bytelling stories of everyday life and living conditions. It also seeks to showhow the differences of styles in home interiors reflect changes in fashionand taste as well as cultural diversity. Each flat represents a home with itsown narrative. One of these homes is the Pakistani flat. It was furnished incollaboration with a Pakistani family living in the eastern part of Oslo. Theinterior of the flat mediates a sense of both familiarity and foreignness.Familiarity is communicated by the architecture, the lay-out of the roomsand by the furniture, which can be bought locally in Oslo. Foreignness isexpressed in the details, the types of spices put on display in the kitchen, thekind of textiles covering the furniture and used for curtains, the pictures onthe walls, small artefacts here and there. Actually, the Pakistani home at theNorsk Folkemuseum illustrates well how everyday cosmopolitanism is prac-tised (fig. 3, p. 240).

In addition to including urban life and a Pakistani home among its per-manent exhibitions, the Norsk Folkemuseum arranged temporary exhibi-tions on a variety of themes. It also set about to create an archive about therecent history of immigration to Norway. Several documentation and dis-semination projects were initiated by the museum, and Norsk i går, i dag, imorgen? (Norwegian yesterday, today, tomorrow?) was one of these pro-jects. It was started in 2002 and was conceived in collaboration with Oslo


40. Naguib, “Autres temps, autres regards”, 2007, 153.


Museum’s Intercultural section and representatives of the different immi-grant communities, in particular among the population of Pakistani, Turkishand Bosnian origin. Thus, the focus was on individuals rather than on wholecommunities. The researchers involved based their work on interviews andthe collection of life stories from representatives of these communities. Aphotographic archive based on collections of private pictures was built up.In order to have a broader and more in-depth knowledge of the immigrants’backgrounds, researchers and photographers travelled with their informantsto the latter’s countries and places of origin.41 Thus, the museum applies acombination of what the French philosopher Olivier Remaud describes astranslation and familiarisation approaches, which represent important char-acteristics of everyday cosmopolitanism.42 Translation, as the prefix trans-


41. http://www.nyenordmenn.no/ [accessed on 15 December 2011].42. Remaud, “On Vernacular Cosmopolitanisms”, 2012.

Fig. 3: The living room of the Pakistani apartment at the Norsk Folke museum.Photograph: Saphinaz-Amal Naguib.


indicates, implies to carry across, to go over. It indicates a shift from oneform to another whether it is a language, a style or a medium. In my opin-ion, it denotes an etic description by an observer from the outside. In thecase of museums, it means to explain, for example, minority cultures fromthe standpoint of the national and the majority. Familiarisation comes fromwithin. It is an emic description and considers cultures or religions in termsof their own understandings and concepts.

Emphasising Assimilation at the Musée de l’histoire de l’immigration

The museum of immigration in France, also known as the Palais de la PorteDorée, has a complex history. It is situated at the east of Paris in the districtof the Porte Dorée in the twelfth arrondissement. I have treated the historyand transformations of the building elsewhere and will not go into the detailsof its biography.43 Suffice to say that it was built for the International Colo-nial Exhibition of 1931.44 The surface of the façade is sculpted in high reliefin what has been called the “great stone tapestry”. It shows how, thanks totheir manifold riches, the colonies contributed in building up the Frenchempire. The reliefs depict scenes of daily life, people, fauna and flora fromdifferent parts of the world. Ships in the major ports of Africa, the Antilles,Asia and Oceania are being loaded with goods on their way to France. Themuseum’s interior was designed in Jugendstil. The scenes painted on thewalls in the rooms on the ground floor are conceived in a dialogic relation-ship with those on the façade.45 Facing the main entrance is the large Salledes Fêtes (Hall of Festivities), where the main theme of the wall paintings is“France and the Five Continents”. The frescoes show the “benefits of colo-nialism” and are a tribute to France’s mission civilisatrice (civilising mis-


43. Naguib, “Reconciling History and Memory at the Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immi-gration in Paris”, 2010.

44. The main architect, Albert Laprade (1883–1978), chose a modernist style of classicalinspiration. The surface of the museum is 16,000m2 with an 89 meter long façade. Thesides are 64 meters long, and the height of the building is 19 meters. Alfred Janniot(1889–1969) was responsible for the outer decoration.

45. The great vestibule runs along the whole façade. At each end there is an oval room. Oneis assigned to Africa and the other to Asia. The frescoes on the walls picture the cultural,intellectual and spiritual contributions of these two continents to the Western world. Thepaintings in the African room were made by Louis Bouquet, while those in the Asianroom were painted by André-Hubert and Ivanna Lemaître.


sion). The scenes illustrate how France has bestowed moral values, intellec-tual accomplishments and economic prosperity upon its colonies. These giftsare depicted allegorically by eight European-looking women dressed intunics and symbolising science, justice, freedom, peace, work, art, industryand commerce.

In 1935 the building was called Musée permanent des colonies (Perma-nent Museum of Colonies) and was placed under the Ministry of Colonies.After World War II the museum was renamed Musée de la France d’Outre-Mer (Museum of Overseas France). However, that was also the timecolonies began their struggle for independence and new nation-states wereestablishing themselves on the international geopolitical map. In 1960,André Malraux, then Minister of Culture, changed the concept of themuseum. It became the Musée national des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie(National Museum of African and Oceania Arts, MAAO) and was placedunder the Ministry of Culture. This affected the status of the museum’sethnographic collection, which was thus promoted to the rank of art. In Jan-uary 2003, as part of president Jacques Chirac’s museum reform, theMAAO closed its doors for good. The collections were transferred to thenew ethnographic Musée du Quai Branly. Only the tropical aquariumremained in the basement of the museum.

At the end of the 1970s and during the 1980s, several French intellectualscalled for France’s recognition of its colonial past and the need to integratethe history of immigration into the Grand National Narrative of the Republic.After many debates, political swings and innumerable delays, it was decidedin 2003 to transform the Palais de la Porte Dorée into a Cité nationale del’histoire de l’immigration (CNHI). The programmatic slogan of the project:“Leur histoire est notre histoire” (their history is our history) states clearly itspurpose, which is to provide an exhibition space that is a mixture of a forumand a cultural, information and research centre in the spirit of the CentrePompidou. The Cité was inaugurated in October 2007 and, interestingly, itwas placed under the authority of three ministries namely, the Ministry ofCulture which is the major contributor in funding, the Ministry of NationalEducation and the Ministry of Social Affairs. From January 1, 2012 the nameof the museum was changed to Musée de l’histoire de l’immigration(Museum of the History of Immigration, MHI), but the scope of the museumand its museological programme remained the same. The idea behind themuseum is to construire le patrimoine de l’immigration, that is, to build the



heritage of immigration.46 It was decided to concentrate on two centuries ofimmigration to France from the nineteenth century to today. The museum didnot have a pre-existing collection and is in the process of constituting one.The permanent exhibition Repères is organised around three major themesand nine sub-themes. The main themes are: Departure and arrival; TheFrench melting-pot (le creuset français); France as a mirror of diversity.

The museological approach at the Musée de l’histoire de l’immigrationrevolves around three axes, which are image, object and art, and relies onwhat James Wertsch has called “cultural tools”.47 In the museum the culturaltools are narratives that correlate episodic and instrumental memory, artinstallations and interactivity. The exhibition makes use of texts, pho-tographs, videos and different objects consisting mainly of personal belong-ings, mementoes and souvenirs of all sorts. These may be official paperslike birth or marriage certificates, diplomas and travel documents, or suit-cases, books, letters, clothes, musical instruments, kitchen utensils andworking tools. The documents exhibited are modest things that are easy tomove and to carry along while travelling from one place to another. Never-theless, they have an archival value that is strongly laden with emotions (fig.4). The display enhances the objects’ resonance and affecting presence, touse the expressions of Stephen Greenblatt and Robert Armstrong respec-tively, and conveys the idea of the objects’ power of evocation and of reach-ing the beholder’s feelings and understanding.48 In her essay in this book,Aleida Assmann observes that, in a figurative sense, resonance signifies “theevoking of images, memories, emotions and meanings” and, she adds, “it isthe element in the foreground [in our case the objects on display] that trig-gers the background and fuses with it”.49 At the same time, the objects havea presence of their own. They bring forth their own materiality, individualbiographies and interwoven historical, cultural and religious contexts. Thus,


46. The choice of the name is significant. This was going to be a somewhat unusualmuseum. The word cité does not refer to the numerous ghettoized suburbs of largerFrench cities where the majority of the population is of foreign origin but to the ancientGreek agora or Roman forum. The epithet nationale indicates that the project is wellanchored in the French political landscape. As for histoire, it denotes that the mission ofthis new institution is based on research and the investigation of historic perspectives.Personal communication from Marianne Amar and Laure Barbizet-Namer.

47. Wertsch 2002, 52f, 55f. In the current volume Wertsch further consider narratives asdeep cultural tools, see p. 162–164.

48. Armstrong, The Affecting Presence, 1971; Greenblatt, “Resonance and Wonder”, 1991.49. See Aleida Assmann’s article in this volume.


in its conception the exhibition plays on the combination of emotions andintimacy prompted by singular voices, pictures and other personal docu-ments and documentaries, giving the wider picture of events. Selectedmoments of life retrace the various particular trajectories, and in all the per-sonal accounts there is an impact event, whether in the form of war, persecu-tion, poverty, adventure or simply love, that has brought about disruptionand change. Silence, the non-said , is also telling and is part of the exhibi-tion scheme as it strongly conveys the sense of exile, of shifting identitiesand the need to forget. Interestingly, all the individual life stories presentedby the museum are those of people who have managed to overcome thenumerous obstacles they encountered along the way. No “losers” are repre-sented, only individuals who have “managed in life” and who contributepositively in one way or another to French society. However, when treatingmore difficult subjects, such as precarious living quarters or the scarcity ofjobs, loneliness and loss, the museum has had recourse to art installations.50


50. Naguib 2010.

Fig. 4: Everyday objects at the Musée de l´histoire de l´immigration. Photo-graph: Saphinaz-Amal Naguib.


Concluding Reflections

At the core of concepts such as multiculturalism, plural societies and cul-tural diversity there is the idea of movement, of cultural encounters that mayturn into clashes, and of changes that transform a society and affect its col-lective memory and forgetting. These processes are situated in the juxta-posed temporalities of Fernand Braudel’s “almost motionless time” of thelongue durée, that is, the long time perspective in which alterations occurwithout being felt.51 In this essay I posited that heritage is shaped in the pre-sent to bridge between the past and the future. However, as pointed out byFranҫois Hartog, the past does not invariably stand as a model to emulate.The present is more and more tied to immediacy and simultaneity, while thefuture tends to be envisioned as unreliable and a burden with all sorts oflooming catastrophic threats (climate change, economic crashes, wars etc.)demanding preventive measures to be set in place.52 In plural societies,museums of cultural history play an important role in forming a multiplexheritage that will resonate among the various groups. When setting up exhi-bitions, museums of cultural history such as the Norsk Folkemuseum andthe Musée de l’histoire de l’immigration rely on the interaction between thecultural memories of individuals and groups, the instrumental memory pro-vided by cultural tools and the wider national and international contexts.The narratives they present are often structured around collective and indi-vidual memories of displacement and adaptation. They reveal that culturalmemory is not frozen in time. Rather, it is constructed and incessantly beingrevisited and enriched by new experiences and changing contexts. Ulti-mately, however, as for other national museums of cultural history world-wide, it is the Norsk Folkemuseum and the Musée de l’histoire de l’immi-gration that select whose cultural memories and heritages are going to beshown publicly and decide which regimes and frames of representation touse in order to influence the politics of memory and amnesia.

This also means that heritage is never established once and for all, but isin a continuous process of being shaped and reshaped. As Aleida Assmannand Terje Stordalen posit in their respective articles in this volume, impactevents have a major influence in the shaping and reshaping of heritage andmemory sites. The materiality of absence is enhanced; absence is given


51. Braudel, “Histoire et sciences sociales. La longue durée”, 1958.52. Hartog, “Le présent de l’historien”, 2010.


presence and a location.53 A salient example of this is the transformation ofGround Zero in New York into a memorial place. In Norway, a similarprocess is going on after the shattering events of the 22nd of July, 2011.Strong voices demand that the government building in Oslo, or “tall build-ing”/“high-rise” (høyblokka) as it is commonly called, should be restored toits previous state and become an iconic sample of 1960s architecture.Although no final decision has yet been reached, the reconstruction of theedifice and adjacent buildings seems to indicate the Norwegian govern-ment’s determination in preserving it as a reminder of the tragic events forfuture generations in spite of the opposing voices calling for its demolition.The island of Utøya where so many young people were massacred willprobably continue to be used as a rallying point for the youth of the LabourParty, endowed, however, with an aura of recollection, meditation and intro-spection. The debates going on in the country suggest that, in time, bothplaces may be listed as heritage sites. They will then serve to materialisenew narratives of remembrance and forgetting.


53. Meyer, “Placing and Tracing Absence”, 2012.


The Articulation of Cultural Memory and Heritage in Plural Societies.

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