Itineraries,iconoclasm,and the pragmatics of heritage

Abstract

Recent calls across the world for removing monuments to White supremacy have brought widespread attention to the power of images and the role of heritage in society. A more careful examination of heritage’s itineraries and pragmatics—its practical effects—is thus warranted. This paper interrogates the pragmatics of heritage in two ways. First, what are the discourses and rhetorics of heritage—how is heritage invoked and talked about, like a sign of history, in making statements about the world? Second, what does heritage do, as a sign in history, when it is invoked, encountered, and circulated? What does heritage activate, and what are the practical effects of its itineraries? Drawing on the examples of the return of the Euphronios krater to Italy and the removal of Confederate and racist monuments in the US and elsewhere, I argue that while operating in these two modes—as signs of and in history—heritage’s greatest potential for transformational change is when it ceases acting as a rhetorical device and instead becomes itself the center of experiential social action.

Keywords

Heritage iconoclasm object itineraries pragmatics Confederate monuments racism

On May 25, 2020, George Floyd was killed by police when he was arrested on the suspicion of using a counterfeit $20 bill and the arresting officer choked him for eight minutes and 46 seconds. Video of the arrest circulated widely as the latest example of police violence against Black people and set off a series of protests against institutionalized racism across the US and worldwide. These protests echoed those that took place in 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia, and elsewhere which included a movement to dismantle statutes of Confederate soldiers and other monuments to White supremacy (McGreevey, 2020).¹ By early June 2020, dozens of such statues and monuments had been either toppled by protestors or ordered removed by state and local governments, including a statue of Robert E. Lee in Richmond, VA, and one of Confederate Admiral Raphael Semmes in Mobile, AL.²

In the midst of this, Egyptologist Sarah Parcak (2020) tweeted instructions on how to pull down an obelisk that “might be masquerading as a racist monument I dunno,” a not-so-veiled reference to just such an obelisk to Confederate soldiers in Birmingham, AL, that initially drew muted reaction from an archaeological community whose concern for preservation tends to be wary of iconoclasm (see for example the resistance to the “Rhodes Must Fall” movement in the UK by prominent scholars like Mary Beard, as noted by Chigudu, 2018: 55; see generally Kwoba et al., 2018). Indeed, the lack of public statements on the removal of Confederate monuments by professional and academic organizations may be due to there being no clear consensus on the issue among their membership, but likely also the result of their being overwhelmingly White (with various recent surveys putting that number between 97-99%; see White and Draycott, 2020). While the monuments’ removal may be justified, some argued, their relocation to museums or other repositories would be preferable to destruction that might “erase” history (see also Levinson, 1998).

A second concern regarded how far this iconoclasm would go. Protests quickly spread worldwide to target monuments to White supremacy of all kinds. A statue of Edward Colston, who made his fortune in the transatlantic slave trade, was thrown into the harbor of his home town of Bristol, England. Monuments to Christopher Columbus were toppled in Miami and Chicago, decapitated in Boston, and removed by city decree in Camden, NJ, and those of Belgium’s King Leopold II, known for his brutal subjugation of the Congolese, were defaced in cities across Belgium (Rankin and Crary, 2020). Even statues of Gandhi were vandalized and faced growing calls for their removal in cities in the UK and elsewhere (following one such removal from the University of Ghana in 2018) because in spite of his work promoting non-violence and human rights, critics charged that he supported caste differences and his writings included assertions that the Indian race was superior to that of Black Africans (BBC News, 2020). These examples raise renewed questions about the power of images (Freedberg, 1989), and illustrate how the ascription of difficult or “negative heritage” depends on whose point of view is being taken. To the Taliban, Meskell (2002) observes, the Bamiyan Buddhas were negative heritage in the sense both that they were blasphemous and became a reminder of the Western world’s disregard for the plight of Afghan citizens who were suffering the effects of a long-term drought. And after all, if the buildings Albert Speer designed for the Nazi party were dismantled following the Second World War, why not also the US White House or the Pyramids of Giza, both commonly regarded (if somewhat misleadingly, in the case of the latter) to have been built by slave labor,³ or the Colosseum in Rome, which was the site of brutal public executions of slaves and prisoners as entertainment?⁴

These are not facetious questions but are raised to highlight two important points. First, signs are contextual in terms of other signs, but also in terms of the linkages they maintain to each viewer/recipient, and their meanings can be activated in different ways. An object seemingly old and often “unnoticed” can be reactivated as a locus of current heritage contestation and social meaning through renewed human engagement. This is illustrated by the way that these monuments have seemingly suddenly become a locus of demonstrations amid calls for their removal. At the same time, while a sign might be “inactive” to those who have the luxury to ignore it, it may very well be a site of ongoing symbolic violence to others. In the case of monuments of negative heritage such as White supremacist and other oppressive symbols, the ability to “not notice” them is a function of White privilege that those who are targets of the symbolic oppression do not share. As Dickinson (2020) remarks, “these monuments are physical reminders that we do not belong and should not anticipate equity.” So while objects can move in and out of social consciousness more generally, they may be entangled in a variety of ways for different individuals and groups.

That things themselves have social lives (Appadurai, 1986; Kopytoff, 1986) has provided important insight into the ways the values and meanings of heritage objects transform over time (see e.g. Hamilakis, 1999). Recent rethinking of this approach through the concept of object itineraries offered by Joyce and Gillespie (2015a) brings us to a second point, namely that past and present (and indeed, future) engagements with an object are all part of its ongoing and multiple itineraries, and it is only when we collapse these distinctions that we can fully appreciate the intellectual and ethical implications for how an object’s present entanglements are central to, rather than separate from, its archaeological narrative (Bauer, 2019; Joy, 2009; Kersel, 2019; Meskell, 2004).

Indeed, archaeologists have long examined moments of reactivated meaning in the past as important phases of an object’s history, but often regard contemporary engagements with the same objects only through the lens of potential threats to the archaeological record. This is most certainly the case when it comes to activities that destroy the archaeological record such as looting, iconoclasm, and the destruction of sites through development (or even as the result of archaeology itself). In the context of the contemporary world, archaeologists typically position themselves as “stewards” of the archaeological record (Lynott and Wylie, 1995), to protect it from being transformed or destroyed without proper documentation and recovery (though see Lucas, 2001). But this runs the risk of adhering to the kind of “Pompeii premise” that even Binford (1981) criticized, which assumes that an object or site has an authentic and original meaning that should take priority over later transformations, and especially over present engagements. In this way, the Elamite sack of Ur at the end of the 3^rd millennium BCE, during which its statues were carted off to Susa as loot, is an important subject for scholarly scrutiny, but the objects moved through the modern-day trade in antiquities cannot even be discussed or examined in any way beyond wholesale disapproval (Bauer et al., 2007; though see e.g. Gillespie, 2015 and Kersel, 2019, as well as Kersel’s “Follow the Pots” project more generally at http://followthepotsproject.org/).

In this paper, I draw on both the concept of object itineraries as well as on Richard Parmentier’s (1987) distinction between “signs of history” and “signs in history” to argue that a shift to a pragmatic approach to heritage, one that assumes an object’s itinerary is not divided into past and present engagements but continues into the future, allows us to address both how heritage is talked about among different communities of actors, as well as what heritage does to produce effects in the world. The recent iconoclastic movement to tear down White supremacist monuments in the US and worldwide serves as a potent illustration that while acting as both a sign of and in history, heritage’s greatest potential for transformational change is when it ceases acting as a rhetorical device and instead becomes itself the center of experiential social action, such as through its encounter, circulation, or being rendered visible (or invisible).

Discourse and the pragmatics of heritage

It has been more than 20 years since David Lowenthal (1998: xii) remarked that “[a]ll at once, heritage is everywhere” in the opening line of his landmark book, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. But it is clear that references to heritage are even more pervasive today. Heritage has become both an industry and a catchword, itself commodified just like the things it is used to describe (Smith, 2006), with UNESCO’s imprimatur sought after for touristic, geopolitical, and even therapeutic ends (Aykan, 2013; Luke and Kersel, 2013; Meskell, 2012, 2018). It is a way of marketing experiences and authenticity (Churchill, 2006) that are at the same time sanitized, both in the sense of being unthreatening for the consumer (Meskell, 2000) as well as conforming to particular global standards of cleanliness and order expected in a successful tourist destination (Collins, 2008). When invoked so freely, to identify everything from folk songs to flags, ethnicity to eggs, how can “heritage” continue to have salience? And how can we hope to study it, manage it, or preserve it, when it is in so many places and can be so many things? This obvious problem seems not to have deterred the rapid development of policies aimed at regulating and protecting heritage, and it is only now that scholars are beginning to study critically the intentions and effects of such policies both locally and globally.

One set of challenges facing the development of any kind of coherent approach to heritage regards its definition and its disciplinarity. “Heritage,” or perhaps more specifically “cultural heritage,” has historically been divided into two types: “tangible” and “intangible” (Blake, 2000). Tangible heritage includes things like works of art, ancient objects, monuments, historic buildings, and even landscapes, while intangible heritage refers to cultural practices and folk traditions that are not “fixed” but are essentially performed, such as oral histories, music, religious festivals, foodways, and ethno-medical knowledge. While most experts on cultural heritage issues will now admit that this division is neither accurate or particularly helpful, as what makes something “heritage” is its meaningfulness to one or more living communities (see e.g. Munjeri, 2004)—an object is important, for example, because of the cultural practices associated with it (Handler, 2003)—the distinction has been codified in international and national law so that working around it can be bureaucratically complex (Lixinski, 2013). The question of its definition thus continues to get in the way of constructive policymaking, and with so much potentially claimable as “heritage”—and I take the view that heritage is a discursive claim and not inherent—it is no wonder that Lowenthal declared it to be “everywhere.”

This brings us to consider the first way that the pragmatics of heritage may be understood to operate. That is, what are the discourses and rhetorics of heritage (Samuels and Rico, 2015)—how is heritage invoked and talked about, like a “sign of history” (Parmentier, 1987), in making statements about the world? How has that shifted over time, as the term is increasingly invoked to explain and defend a wide range of actions and attitudes, and how do the different discursive communities who speak about heritage engage (or not) with one another? If, to quote Rorty (1989: 7), “the chief instrument for cultural change” is “a talent for speaking differently,” then a key path for productively bridging discursive divides and developing new conceptions of what “heritage” is and how to deal with it would be to provide contexts for those communities to speak to each other, which would require them to hear and confront each other’s languages in the process of translation and communication. In other words, could attempts to communicate across disciplinary, bureaucratic, and political boundaries (among others) help each discourse community to question its assumptions about, and approaches to, heritage?

It can be argued that this is precisely what has happened in the more general move toward use of the term “cultural heritage” over “cultural property,” which had dominated the way heritage was managed and controlled within the law and policy arena for most of the 20th century (Bauer, 2015a). This shift resulted in part from a growing recognition among legal scholars of the inadequacy of the idea of “property,” based as it is in Western legal concepts of labor and ownership, for dealing with a cultural rather than possessive relationship to both tangible things and “intangibles” such as traditional knowledges, languages, and cultural expressions (Blake, 2000; Prott and O’Keefe, 1992), and given forward momentum by indigenous activism worldwide that resulted in new laws such as the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act and the Indian Arts and Crafts Act in the United States in 1990, the Native Title Act in Australia in 1993, and at the UN the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the World’s Intangible Heritage (Brown, 2003) and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007. As an alternative, the human relationship with these cultural (tangible and intangible) expressions has been variously described in terms of stewardship (Wylie, 2005), custodianship (Geismar, 2008), and sustainability (Gonzalez et al., 2006), related to sacred knowledge (Tsosie, 1997) and moral rights (Janke, 2001).

In spite of these rhetorical shifts, however, there has been surprisingly little movement in the thirty years since NAGPRA and other “awakenings” regarding indigenous and post-colonial claims to heritage. While we can point to individual cases of repatriation and the development of more equitable relationships and institutions (such as the National Museum of the American Indian in the United States, and the reconfiguration of the Australian Museum; see Vrdoljak, 2006; Nash and Colwell, 2020), their significance is often overstated (including by this author). The self-declared “universal” museums continue to exist and collect objects, in spite of ongoing critique (see most recently Hicks, 2020a), groups formerly (and sometimes currently) subject to colonialism continue to have a hard time regaining authority over their heritage, and ethnic minorities and indigenous peoples still face existential threats to their being and traditions as a result of global power and wealth inequalities.

A crucial question therefore is why the discursive transformations discussed above have not been accompanied by similar transformations in practice. To answer that question, we must consider heritage in another way, and ask what does heritage do, as a sign in history, when it is invoked, encountered, and circulated? What does heritage activate, and what are its “practical effects”? I want to argue that it is when we consider these questions that heritage’s greatest potential for transformational change is possible.

I am here drawing on Richard Parmentier’s (1987) distinction between signs in and of history, coupled with Rosemary Joyce’s (2015) recent articulation of “object itineraries,” which suggest we consider “the value of circulating objects for the production and reshaping of cultural boundaries and social relations.” “Signs of history,” Parmentier (1987: 11–12) explains, refers to those expressions which “through their iconic, indexical, and residually symbolic properties, record and classify events as history.” These are the signs of historical discourse that communicate and comment upon history itself, effectively relating information about cultural continuity and change as time unfolds. They may be monuments such as the sacred village stones of Belau, representing offspring of the goddess Milad, erected in each of four principal villages to explain to inhabitants and visitors alike how they stand in relation to each other, seemingly part of a naturalized discourse that operated in a long-term historical scale not unlike Braudel’s longue durée (Parmentier, 1985, 1987).

“Signs in history,” in turn, refers to those signs which, “as objects, linguistic expressions, or patterns of action, themselves become involved in social life as loci of historical intentionality” (Parmentier, 1987: 12). These are signs that are meant to do something for someone. They call to mind and bring about certain relationships that might be more immediate and historically contingent, not unlike Braudel’s événement. Parmentier identifies such examples as the beads, bracelets, and other objects used as “money” in Belau that reflect on and act within individual social relationships and transactions. As Parmentier points out, however, no sign acts in just one of these ways. Rather, a sign may be both of and in history, and may shift between the two as it moves in relation to people and other objects.

This movement of an object across contexts, relationships, and over time—once characterized as a thing’s “social life” (Appadurai, 1986)—is better understood through the concept of object “itineraries,” which has mainly been developed in a series of papers by Rosemary Joyce (2012a, 2012b, 2015). Itineraries are “the routes by which things circulate in and out of places where they come to rest or are active” and “extend backward to incorporate the sources from which materials came and forward to incorporate the conversion of wholes into fragments or assemblages” (Joyce, 2015: 29). Unlike the biography metaphor, itineraries do not have clear beginnings or endings, births or deaths, but are open-ended and multidirectional, and include an object’s composition, transformations, fragmentations, and intersections with other objects and their itineraries. Because of these intersections, an object’s itinerary contains stoppages (see Küchler, 2003; or “knots,” as in Gosden, 2006), since it need not be physically moving in space to still be “in motion” (Hahn and Weiss, 2013: 7; Joyce and Gillespie, 2015b: 3). Rather, an object at rest is still moving relative to the other things (animals, humans, objects, the air, etc.) whose own itineraries it intersects. Each engagement with an object seemingly fixed in space can therefore be seen as a new semiotic encounter, in a pragmatic, performative sense (see Crossland and Bauer, 2017; Parmentier, 1997). Just as one can never step in the same river twice, because it is always moving and reconstituting itself, so the concept of itineraries pushes back against specific temporalities and life histories, allowing us to transcend the arbitrary separation of past from present (and future) and explore the ways that entanglements extend out in all directions and even implicate contemporary practices (Bauer, 2019).

This last point is crucial for understanding the ways in which objects and monuments may simultaneously act as signs in history and signs of history, shifting between these ideal positions even when they have not moved physically. Like a river, signs may be “fluid” (Daniel, 1984) but also exist in relation to other signs. What Peirce called “chains” (following the logic of his semiotic) are perhaps better understood as “assemblages” (see Bennett, 2005, 2010), for the understanding of signs depends on their relationship to other signs embedded and mobilized within specific contexts. The itineraries of signs across modalities are not inevitable but fixed, like the village stones of Belau, by authoritative discourse until challenged and destabilized through counter-hegemonic efforts. It is the special quality of objects—their perduring materiality—that demands continual reengagement (Preucel and Bauer, 2001), and so can play a crucial role in both mobilizing and being activated by alternative discourses as they travel along their itineraries.

From signs of history to signs in history: The itineraries of heritage objects

Let us now turn to consider two recent examples where objects of heritage have shifted their status between being signs of and in history, and in doing so highlight the importance of recognizing the ongoing itineraries of objects as central to their story. Such shifts are helpful to identify because they both lie at the heart of conflicting discourses regarding heritage objects, and yet may also provide insight into what remedies are possible and necessary for heritage practice.

The first example is that of a Classical ceramic vase known as the “Euphronios krater,” and serves to illustrate how an ancient object—in this case an object of contested heritage ownership which was eventually repatriated—continues to act as a sign in history through its ongoing itineraries and stoppages. This calyx krater (Figure 1), made in the Attic Greek red-figure style around 515 BCE in the famous pottery workshops of Athens and likely exported to Etruria (in modern-day Italy) for internment in an elite burial, was purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met) in 1972 for the record-breaking sum (at the time) of $1 M (Brodie, 2002; Hoving, 1993). This price not only elevated the ascribed status of what was already a fine example of Greek vase painting, but had a ripple effect across the ancient art market, serving to raise values and, in turn, promote further looting (Watson and Todeschini, 2006: 359; see also Nørskov, 2002). Though the dealer who sold the piece, Robert Hecht, had claimed it had been in a private collection since 1920, rumors soon circulated that it had in fact been looted from the Etruscan cemetery of Cerveteri in late 1971 and given a false provenance to facilitate the sale.

Figure 1.

Euphronios Krater, on display in the National Museum of Cerveteri. Signed by Euxitheos, as potter; signed by Euphronios, as painter. Greek, Attic Krater (ca. 515 BCE). National Museum of Cerveteri. Photo by Sailko, licensed under CC by 3.0.

While its mysterious history and high price kept questions circulating about its legality, it was not until the early 2000s that several developments converged to change the Met’s position on the krater. As a result of a 1995 raid on the Geneva storage space of Giacomo Medici, a dealer long suspected of trafficking in illegal antiquities, firm evidence finally appeared of the krater having been looted. Medici’s subsequent criminal conviction in 2005, and the trial of his conspirator, Robert Hecht, which began that same year, shed light on how widespread the involvement of museums such the Met was in the illegal antiquities trade (Watson and Todeschini, 2006). At the same time, the 2003 conviction of antiquities dealer Frederick Schultz in the US for trafficking in stolen antiquities had a further chilling effect on the trade because it effectively settled the legal question of whether other nations’ claims to own all undiscovered antiquities within their borders would be enforced in the United States (Gerstenblith, 2006; Yasaitis, 2005). Finally, the Italian trial in 2010 of the (now former) Getty Museum curator Marion True for her involvement in the illicit trade showed that even curators were not immune from criminal charges. As a result, the then Director of the Metropolitan, Philippe de Montebello, agreed in 2006 to transfer the ownership of the krater to Italy in a cooperative agreement between them (Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Republic of Italy, 2006).

Meanwhile, the growing public sentiment against looting and for the repatriation of objects to their communities of origin led to a backlash within the community of major collecting museums such as the Met and British Museum, who worried that an existential crisis was at hand. As a result, in late 2002, the directors of dozens of these museums convened in Munich for a discussion that resulted in “The Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums” (Art Institute of Chicago, Bavarian State Museum, State Museums of Berlin, et al., 2004), a statement that sought to defend their continued collecting and ownership of art and antiquities from around the world. Most striking were the opening lines, which show how the itineraries of objects intertwine signs in and of history:

The international museum community shares the conviction that illegal traffic in archaeological, artistic, and ethnic objects must be firmly discouraged. We should, however, recognize that objects acquired in earlier times must be viewed in the light of different sensitivities and values, reflective of that earlier era. The objects and monumental works that were installed decades and even centuries ago in museums throughout Europe and America were acquired under conditions that are not comparable with current ones.

With these words in mind, the krater’s status as contemporary sign in history and not just a sign of history is clear: its initial purchase generated headlines and served as a potent reminder about both the continuing problem of looting soon after the adoption of the 1970 UNESCO Convention aimed at combating it, and how much money could be made in the trade. Its display meanwhile spoke to the Met’s spotty regard for heritage ownership laws and concern about looting, until the moment when the transfer was agreed to and the accession number on its display label changed from “1972.11.10” to “L2006.10,” a subtle but significant discursive shift that indexed that it was now on loan from the Republic of Italy. Now physically returned to Italy, it is currently housed in the museum at Cerveteri, the site of the cemetery where it was originally interred, as part of a specific Italian policy of returning objects to their places of origin.

While the Met may not altogether have been a willing participant in these events, the case of the krater and its return has nonetheless played a role in shifting global discourses about heritage ownership and control. Increased scrutiny and prosecutions have forced cooperative engagement from previously unwilling participants, but the Met’s success in effecting the krater’s return has since been matched by similar efforts by the Getty Museum and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, among other institutions, to repatriate objects and cooperate with nations of origin, offering some hope of what an ethic of sharing might look like (Bauer, 2015b).⁵ In Europe too, there has been growing recognition of the need to redress the wrongs of colonialism through both repatriation and cooperation, as evident in the mission of the Sarr-Savoy report (Savoy and Sarr, 2018) and other developments, suggesting some hope for honest confrontation of this legacy (Laely et al., 2019).

A second example returns us to the events discussed at the outset of this paper, the worldwide protests in support of Black Lives Matter calling for the removal of Confederate and other White supremacist monuments from public spaces and buildings in the United States and elsewhere. These developments illustrate the ways in which even seemingly “fixed” heritage objects move along itineraries where their status can shift between being signs of and in history. But like the Euphronios krater example, it also points to the importance of their removal as a transformative practice. Indeed, a closer examination of these monuments and their itineraries shows how they were established to function not so much as signs of history but rather signs in history—or perhaps more accurately, are signs in history masquerading as signs of history, in order to present a particular White supremacist historical discourse as naturalized and beyond the vagaries of individual human experiences.⁶

As outlined in a 2019 report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC, 2019), the vast majority of the almost 2000 dateable monuments and other symbols honoring the Confederacy were erected not as simple post-war memorials to the dead but as a way of sanitizing and romanticizing the Southern states’ “Lost Cause” narrative (see also Blight, 2001; Cox, 2003) while at the same time committing an act of symbolic aggression against Black people over the subsequent century and a half. In fact, increases in monument building coincide with periods of White aggression and heightened animus toward African Americans. As illustrated in Figure 2, the vast majority of the public symbols documented in the SPLC report were erected during the Jim Crow era of the 1890s–1920s, when states chafing from reconstruction enacted segregation laws to disenfranchise and restrict the rights of recently freed African Americans. This phase coincided with a significant expansion of the Ku Klux Klan, which had been founded just after the Civil War, as its White supremacist agenda was on the rise (SPLC, 2019). Fewer monuments were erected in the period of the World Wars, as this was a time of greater national cohesion and thousands of African American soldiers fought on behalf of the United States. But monument-building activity resumed and reached another, smaller peak during the civil rights era of the 1950s–60s, when segregationists fought back against that movement’s push for equality and justice. In other words, we must take account of their itineraries. The important questions, Bunch (2018) asks, are “Who built these monuments and when? What were the builders’ agendas? What were they meant to represent? What do they represent now?” A statue commemorating a fallen Confederate soldier, placed in a cemetery during or just after the Civil War, is transformed when erected in a public square or in front of a government building during a time of increased violence and resentments towards Black Americans such as the 1900s or 1950s: “The first [case] might be a genuine reflection of loss and sorrow, whereas the latter is a message of intimidation and power” (Baxter, 2020).

Figure 2.

Timeline of Confederate symbols, with explanatory text, from the SPLC 2019 report. Reproduced courtesy of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The debates surrounding the history of the Confederate battle flag’s use in official state symbols was in many ways a rehearsal for the statues debate and the tropes invoked in it of Southern pride and of “misunderstanding” the flag as a racist symbol. Initially designed as a second flag of the Confederacy because it was easier to distinguish from the Union’s “Stars and Stripes” on the battlefield than the official Confederate “Stars and Bars” flag, the battle flag gained prominence during the post war period among those mourning the “Lost Cause” of the South (Coates, 2015; Coski, 2005). In 1894, as the famous Plessy v. Ferguson case was moving through the courts, Mississippi became the first state to use the battle flag in an official capacity, when it incorporated it in its state flag (that flag was officially abolished in June 2020 following the George Floyd protests). It was not used by other states until the middle of the 20th century, following its adoption (along with other Confederate symbols) by the segregationist “Dixiecrat” Party (officially the “States Rights’ Democratic Party”) in 1948 (Ogorzalek et al., 2017), as a symbol to re-assert White supremacy during the civil rights era. Georgia used it in two state flags between 1956 and 2003 (the current flag is based on the first flag of the Confederacy), and the flag was flown over the capitol buildings of South Carolina from 1961 until 2015 and Alabama from 1963 (when the infamous Governor George Wallace unfurled it, declaring “segregation forever”) until 1993 (SPLC, 2019). The timing of these displays shows that they were not simply statements of Southern pride both unintended to be and misperceived as racist (as a kind of “gaffe”; see Hill, 2008), but were set up as signs—a flag being the epitome of an object intended as a sign—to celebrate, as former Mayor of New Orleans Mitch Landrieu remarked, “a fictional, sanitized Confederacy, ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement and the terror that it actually stood for” (SPLC, 2019) and to send a message of White control over Black Americans within those states’ governments.

The Colston statue ripped down in Bristol has a similar history, and shows how discourses of White supremacy—and challenges to them—move in networked relation to each other. It was erected in 1895, shortly after the conservative Unionist government led by Lord Salisbury took power on a platform of imperial expansion in Africa. As Hicks (2020b) points out, “[t]his was a government that oversaw a virulent intensification of British military violence in Africa,” including British aggressions against the Ashanti in 1895–6, a punitive expedition to Benin in 1897, annexation of Sudan in 1898, and the Boer War in South Africa from 1899–1902. This imperial expansion was inexorably bound up in notions of race and civilization (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1991), and included the looting of thousands of artworks from conquered lands and their installation in Western museums in ways that often showed both the value of the imperial effort and justification for subjugating exotic or uncivilized “others” (Schildkrout and Keim, 1998). Hicks (2020b) goes on to make the interesting observation that Bristol both erected the statue of the slave-trader Colston “just a month before Rhodes’ Jameson Raid in South Africa … to celebrate a renewed politics of anti-black violence,” and installed a bronze head looted in the 1897 campaign to Benin in the Bristol City Museum, which was “displayed in order to celebrate, and thus to naturalize, the ongoing dispossession of the global south through anti-black violence.” So the restitution of looted cultural property and removal of monuments are intertwined.

The past decade has witnessed increased scrutiny of these monuments and symbols, and calls for their removal have gained momentum with the Black Lives Matter movement, which emerged in 2013 as a response to the ongoing shootings of unarmed Black people at the hands of White aggressors (Lebron, 2017). In the aftermath of the White supremacist violence in Charlottesville in August 2017, over 100 such monuments were dismantled or relocated (SPLC, 2019). But these efforts have not happened without resistance. From his bully pulpit, Donald Trump has loudly bemoaned, “they’re trying to take away our culture. They’re trying to take away our history” (Greenwood, 2017), a telling quote that simultaneously describes the monuments as signs in (they are “our culture”) and of history (they are “our history”). More generally, this defense of leaving the statues in place appealed to their being part of a regional “heritage,” as if heritage was something immutable and not constructed (pace Lowenthal) and to some extent benign because of the temporal and cultural distance from their original installation. Echoing the Universal Museums declaration’s appeal to the “different values” of the time, such defenses emphasized the monuments’ historical nature and dismissed their potential role in continuing to support racism. As Atalay (2006: 281-282) has pointed out, it is imperative that we “not ignore the effect of past practices by placing the acts in a historical context that works to excuse them … [For] the colonial past is not distinct from today's realities and practices, as the precedents that were set continue” to inform current practice and to perpetuate harm.

What pragmatics underscores is that these monuments were never really signs of history in the way that Trump and others have asserted. For if, as Trump declared, their removal for some risks “tak[ing] away our culture,” then their role as contemporary social actors is not only undeniable but is being explicitly reaffirmed. Authoritative discourse had for so long tried to “fix” these monuments, like Belau’s village stones, as signs of history—monuments simply recording some past historical events. But the iconoclastic movement sparked by the Black Lives Matter movement has undermined this stability and laid bare how objects always act as signs in history—as “loci of intentionality”—within ever-moving assemblages of signs. The protests have brought statues of historical figures into a relationship with present-day murderers, effecting an alternative narrative that enacts them as a locus of both past and ongoing injustice, both signs of and in (a counter-hegemonic, race-centered) history. Moreover, the iconic replication of this iconoclastic move, outside the African-American context through similar protests in the UK, Belgium, and elsewhere, illustrates the ways in which objects continue to move along semiotic itineraries—what Urban (2010) calls “cultural motion”—creating new sign assemblages across shifting social contexts.

Conclusion: Heritage as transformative practice

By invoking these examples, I am trying to point out that the ongoing itineraries of objects are central and not peripheral to their histories, and that we need to develop a pragmatic approach to cultural heritage that understands and prioritizes their practical effects as signs in history when thinking about archaeological practice and taking positions on heritage management. This is not to argue for some unanchored relativism and that present meanings should override historical accuracy. Rather, an ethical account demands that the full itineraries of things be explored and discussed, through and including present contexts. Archaeologists usually regard objects as “signs of history” because they tell us things about the past—the way they operated as “signs in history” for people in the past. But what object itineraries teach us is that to isolate the past from present (and future) stoppages in an object’s itinerary is to pursue an archaeology whose sole aim is to discover a particular past, an “authorized” past (Smith, 2006) that often elides the narratives of minority and other disenfranchised groups within the discipline (consider the lessons from the lack of feminist perspectives in archaeology, as pointed out in Conkey and Spector, 1984; Gero and Conkey, 1991; Wylie, 1992). If instead we acknowledge and embrace how objects act as signs “in history” both past and present, we might better understand their practical and ethical effects as material agents.

A pragmatics approach allows us to consider the ways signs are embedded in a network or meshwork of meaning relations: signs may simultaneously be mobilized in a variety of ways. This is particularly apparent with (though not exclusive to) physical objects whose perduring materiality persists across discursive contexts, creating constellations of affordances, that vary depending on their relation to other perceiving agents. The ways in which we come to terms with and respond to this range of possibilities are in fact not inevitable but a question of ethics, as these engagements are situated in specific contexts and have real effects on others in the world (Bauer, 2019: 341; Keane, 2018: 46). So a Confederate monument may simultaneously celebrate White supremacy to some while to others it reveals a history of systemic injustice to be confronted. How we respond to such signs depends on our context of understanding—the assemblages of signs they are part of—and our particular vision for the future.

As Trouillot (1995) has taught us, silences can be more powerful than the noises of history, and those regarding the past can be just as insidious as those of the contemporary world. The continued display of objects with troubling histories or from damaging colonial policies without discussion of those histories is doubly wrong. So, for example, the American Museum of Natural History in New York City embarked on a special exhibition entitled “Addressing the Statue” that sought to confront the troubling symbolism and legacy of the Theodore Roosevelt statue standing at its entrance (AMNH, 2018), which depicted the former president on horseback flanked by (and towering above) two standing figures, one Native American and one African. While the decision was ultimately reached in June 2020 to remove it altogether, not as a result of the exhibition but in the context of the protests against other offensive monuments, confronting and discussing this statue was an important effort that other museums could learn from, and is a far cry from the almost undetectable change in the label for the Euphronios krater. The fact that an object lacks provenience should be considered part of its story rather than ignored, a point powerfully illustrated by Muscarella (2000) who argues that archaeological understanding of ancient Western Asia continues to be based on a very unreliable data set—and thus may be highly inaccurate—because many scholars have refused to openly address the legacy of collecting and the lack of context (and the related problem of forgeries) that undermines reliable archaeological inference.

Indeed, one of the solutions often offered regarding the Confederate statues and other artifacts of oppression is to move them to a museum or other space where the stories of their origins and contexts are told, so they can be contextualized as signs in history rather than venerated as signs of history (e.g. Levinson, 1998). This is the strategy taken with statues of Lenin in Russia, Hungary, and Lithuania (Baxter, 2019). But even if they are not preserved—after all, there are no Hitler statue parks, as Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (2020) noted—removing or even destroying a few statues will not “erase” history. There are plenty of records and accounts to consult, museums to visit, books to read that cover these events from countless angles (Araujo, 2020; and see e.g. Araujo, 2014). And anyway, as Cain (2016) has incisively asked, even if such objects are kept as didactic tools, “who does the burden of educating fall upon? Who precisely will bear the burden of making those materialized symbols do that work?” A more fair and productive approach might be to replace them with works that memorialized the Black experience of slavery and American history (Ater, 2010), addressing historical memories that actually have been silenced in precisely the ways Trouillot (1995) argued, if not “erased” entirely (certainly much more so than in taking down a statue of Robert E. Lee). Moreover, the act of removal can be a powerful new statement of current social action that can itself be remembered and memorialized: as Classical art historian Mary Beard (2020) (though herself an opponent of “Rhodes must fall”) points out, “iconoclasm can be performance art,” an observation that is cleverly illustrated by Banksy’s proposal that the Colston statue in Bristol be reinstalled with additional sculptural figures posed in the act of pulling it down (Figure 3),⁷ itself reminiscent of Parcak’s instructions for toppling an obelisk.

Figure 3.

Banksy’s suggestion for how to replace the Colston statue. Accompanying the image, he wrote: “What should we do with the empty plinth in the middle of Bristol? Here’s an idea that caters for both those who miss the Colston statue and those who don’t. We drag him out the water, put him back on the plinth, tie cable round his neck and commission some life size bronze statues of protestors in the act of pulling him down. Everyone happy. A famous day commemorated.” Instagram post, June 9, 2020. Available at www.instagram.com/p/CBNmTVZsDKS/.

The itineraries of objects include how they become transformed and incorporated into new objects, how past and present are inseparable and entangled. The past has never stayed in the past—“it’s not even past,” as the oft-quoted line from Faulkner (1994 [1951]: 73) goes—and it “propels” us à la Benjamin (1968 [1955]) towards the future. In other words, heritage is not just about how we regard the past in the present, but about how it enacts the present for the future. And aside from bland rhetoric about safeguarding heritage for “future generations,” it is that futurity that is too often absent from treatments of heritage (though see Dawdy, 2010; Harrison et al., 2020). In fact, I would argue that references to the future are intentionally left unspecified precisely because of the complicated questions they raise around the effects of heritage for different communities.

It is time we confront these questions. Because to see objects and heritage this way should not be considered some kind of forced activism in tension with good academic practice. In fact, it is to recognize fully their position as material agents, which must include questions of ethics (Meskell, 2004; Meskell and Pels, 2005). For whether we choose to acknowledge it, these and all objects have been signs in history all along. The krater’s continuous ownership by the Met was an active symbol of that museum’s (dis)regard for heritage laws and ownership claims, not to mention a lack of concern for the looting of archaeological sites. And as long as Confederate monuments stand, they act to reproduce the ideologies and structures of racism they were undeniably erected to celebrate. As Hicks (2020b) notes, “[s]tatues were used to make racial violence persist. Today, their physical removal is part of dismantling systems of oppression.”

In the end, what these and other episodes show is that all objects of heritage (as all “bits of culture”) continually shift in status between being signs in and of history through their itineraries: their flows and stoppages, their engagements with people, when their labels are changed or they are moved, when they continue to stand up, and when they are taken down. And it is when we think about heritage in this way, about how objects act as signs in history in our contemporary moment—as new stoppages along their itineraries—and so generate practical effects, that we can begin to unleash archaeology’s power for social change in the present.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

This paper was first drafted in the fall of 2017 at the invitation of Bob Preucel and Steve Mrozowski for a session they organized on pragmatism in archaeology at the Society for American Archaeology meetings in 2018. I was asked to write on the pragmatics of heritage, and given that I wanted to discuss the ways in which heritage was activated in the present to effect social change, the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally and counterprotests taking place at that time which invoked the Confederate monuments issue offered an immediate and almost visceral case. When the protests expanded in the aftermath of the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in the spring of 2020 and the movement to remove monuments spread worldwide, I felt compelled to revisit the paper, though not without some degree of uncertainty, as I don’t feel qualified to speak on or for the African-American experience of racism. I have continued forward, though, because I believe that social justice can and should be part of broader academic analyses, such as the application of pragmatism in archaeology, and should not be cordoned off as the domain of a marginalizable “critical archaeology” or other disciplinary metadiscourses. As : 143) remarks, “all archaeological interpretation is in some way political, it is just that some choose to openly address political topics and some are more self-aware about how their research (in positive and negative ways) contributes to both public discourse as well as the construction of competing narratives.” So it is with both hesitation and the certainty of my limitations that I offer this paper, and hope that it has some productive “practical effects.” It is in many ways still a work in progress, as I continue to think through the issues engaged with here. I wish to thank Bob and Steve for their feedback on it, as well as some thoughtful and challenging comments from Anna Agbe-Davies, along with those of the anonymous reviewers. I appreciate their generosity.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biography

Alexander A Bauer is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Queens College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is interested in the Eurasian Bronze Age, archaeological semiotics, and the ethics of archaeology, and serves as the Editor in Chief of the International Journal of Cultural Property.

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