The UNESCO World Heritage Committee meeting at Krakow, Poland, 2017. Global convenings like it are increasingly the sites of what PIK Professor Lynn Meskell calls a "massive reckoning" in terms of conserving cultural heritage. (Photo courtesy Lynn Meskell)
In 2014, the Islamic State began a targeted campaign against heritage, destroying artifacts, toppling monuments, and looting antiquities, broadcasting its destruction in conquered territory in Iraq and Syria. In the aftermath, international organizations like UNESCO—the United Nations’ education, science, and culture agency—poured millions of dollars into reconstruction efforts.
Underlying the influx of aid and technical expertise was an assumption that rehabilitating cultural heritage sites goes hand in hand with restoring peace and stability in war-torn regions. So in 2021, Lynn Meskell, a Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor in Historic Preservation and Anthropology who is also a curator in the Asian and Near East sections at the Penn Museum, set out to test that assumption.
“We asked people what they want,” explains Meskell, whose team surveyed 3,200 locals in Mosul and Aleppo. The findings demonstrate a huge gap between the priorities of the international actors and people on the ground. Specifically, locals said that heritage restoration was a relatively low priority, compared to other, more basic needs. They also preferred to have damaged structures modernized to meet community needs, and that the reconstruction efforts be led by Iraqi or Syrian nationals, respectively. In short, they’re seeking the right to tell their own story, and determine a future for their past.
It's this kind of approach that Meskell encourages in her course Ruins & Reconstruction, which is cross-listed in historic preservation, anthropology, classical studies, and Middle Eastern languages and cultures. She wants to get students thinking about the ethics of preserving heritage under the worst circumstances imaginable—in the wake devastation caused by conflict or natural disasters.
The course is also informed by Meskell’s latest book, A Future in Ruins: UNESCO, World Heritage, and the Dream of Peace, in which she considers the ways in which the processes of conserving, interpreting, and managing cultural sites are embedded in politics and leveraged for power. At Cambodia’s Angkor Wat, for example, the inscription bolstered the brutal Khmer Rouge regime’s territorial claims and political legitimacy in the international sphere. Meanwhile, the work of inscription—preparing the site for Western tourism—involved new restrictions, land clearance, and the forcible relocation of local people by the Cambodian state.
“With students, my question always is, ‘Who wins and loses? Whose heritage matters or doesn't? Who’s silenced?’” says Meskell.
“Reconstruction has so many political and economic agendas, from what companies are involved to what consultants are hired,” she explains. “And when I teach, I’m sitting in a room with people who will be those consultants, and evaluate the UNESCO nominations, do the World Monuments programs, that might be employed by the World Bank. They are those people. And to get them thinking ethically about that is so important.”
For Esosa Osayamwen, a first-year Master of Historic Preservation student at the Weitzman School, it’s a matter of authenticity and agency. Osayamwen chose to take this course due to her longstanding interest in reconstructing demolished architecture tied to anti-Black violence.
Her interest in the subject was initially spurred by a 2021 digital reconstruction by The New York Times of Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood, which 100 years earlier had been completely destroyed in a racist attack by a white supremacist mob.
Her final paper explores the ethics of reconstructing sites connected to racial violence, engaging directly with the limitations of The Times’s project. “I’ve never seen an effort to reconstruct a lost site before—I didn’t know it was possible. But from taking this class, I’ve realized there are still limitations in authentically representing Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood.”
She explains that of the 119 lots that made up the Greenwood neighborhood, only 20 are reconstructed by the Times. In addition to time and resource constraints, The Times reporters also encountered silences in the historical record: namely, lower class, poorer members of the community are less likely to leave a documentary trace. Part of her ethical argument is that reconstructing inaccurate or incomplete stories about the past could perpetuate harm in the community in the present.
Through conversations in the classroom about Lynn’s work in the Middle East, Osayamwen also realized that the “heritage gaze” can be limiting.
“People are more obsessed with heritage than the people and lives that have been destroyed,” she says. “Does it make sense to focus on the actual place, the ruin, and not on the fact that Tulsa is still an area impacted by extreme income inequality and poverty or the actual needs of the local population?
Meskell brings decades of experience to the classroom, which has involved attending World Heritage Committee meetings as an official observer for the last 15 years. As a practicing anthropologist, her ethnography incorporates the perspectives of a wide spectrum of interested parties: everyone from generals and NATO officials to human rights experts to local informants on the ground.
“If I had ever done graduate classes,” says Meskell, “I would have loved somebody to have said, ‘Well, I was at the meeting where that got decided,’ or ‘I spoke to the people who nominated that site’ or ‘I visited that site to see what happened to local people afterwards.’ I’m trying to give [students] that vantage.”
“I like the fact that Lynn speaks out very honestly and openly in class,” says Annie Liang-Zhou, a first-year Master of Science in Historic Preservation student. “I think that’s extremely important in us developing a more objective and comprehensive perspective on what’s happening in this discipline.” Before coming to Penn, Liang-Zhou served on the junior board of World Monuments Fund, an international NGO based in New York City that works closely with UNESCO on heritage conservation projects around the world.
Meskell’s students also learn that being responsive to the needs of local residents isn’t just a matter of ethics. It’s a requirement for maintaining peace. In collaboration with Vit Henisz and supported by Penn’s Global Engagement Fund, Meskell examined trends of conflict and cooperation at 1,200 UNESCO World Heritage sites. Using artificial intelligence to analyze millions of data sources in 80 languages, the team found a pattern where UNESCO inscription more often led to increased conflict in a 50km radius around the site.
PIK Professor Lynn Meskell presenting at UNESCO’s conference “Cultural Heritage and Peace: Building on 70 years of the Hague Convention,” held at The Hague, Netherlands, in May of 2024 (Photo courtesy Lynn Meskell)
“This is devastating,” says Meskell. “It’s a very grim statistic.” She’s been sounding the alarm bells at NATO, at UNESCO, and elsewhere that the work of conserving our global heritage is facing a massive reckoning.
As a salient exception to this rule, Meskell points to the World Monuments Fund for doing culturally-inclusive work that produces cooperation instead of conflict.
“A lot of what we do involves educating the public and training local craftspeople and artisans on restoring their own heritage,” says Liang-Zhou, who is already taking on an even larger role in the organization. During the course of the fall semester, she has been traveling to China frequently to set up WMF’s China office, which will greatly expand their ability to take on projects in that country.
Despite the course’s difficult subject matter, Liang-Zhou says that Meskell’s teaching inspires the class to look forward and not back. “It really gives me hope that people like us, who are learning about the subject, and who are working in this field, could help to change some of the future practices.”
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