Introduction: The Power of Place at the U.S. Overseas Research Centers, Heritage Diplomacy, and Archaeology

Abstract

In her formative work, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History, Dolores Hayden (1995) argued convincingly for the inevitable connection between the natural environment of a location and the people who occupy it. The U.S. Overseas Research Centers (ORCs) are the very embodiment of Hayden's power of place—a space for people, foreigners and locals, to engage in a single location. For over a century, the ORCs have been the primary setting where American researchers in the humanities and social sciences and in-country scholars, students, and locals meet each other and foster the seeds of collaboration. In so doing, not only are these places key incubation areas for academic knowledge production, but also nodes of heritage diplomacy. The hope of the respective ORCs is that they provide neutral spaces for active, dynamic, and positive exchanges of ideas that inspire on-the-ground research and educational engagement. Ideally, ORCs put scholars “in the thick of things” and fulfill a diplomatic mission of the U.S. government: people-to-people interaction and the establishment of long-term networks, which promote mutual understanding and respect. Contributions in this issue establish that ORCs are powerful places in the eastern Mediterranean. In this issue, we have asked individuals who interact routinely with ORCs to reflect on their experiences. Contributions discuss a robust lecture series, typically standing room only, attended by Jordanians and foreigners, the conservation and documentation of a monument in Egypt, an excavation co-directed by an Armenian and a U.S. national, an educational space to explore the archaeology of the region by Cypriot and U.S. undergraduates, and multi-sited research forming the basis for a PhD dissertation. While acknowledging the colonial past of many of the ORCs, this collection illustrates the changing nature and missions of these organizations.With a current emphasis on empowering local researchers, students, and others through collaborative projects and shared interests with U.S. contemporaries, the following articles highlight the networks that can and do arise from fellowship programs at the American Center of Oriental Research in Jordan (ACOR), the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE), the American Research Institute of the South Caucasus in Armenia (ARISC), the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute (CAARI), and the Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC). These case studies depict the ORCs through a progressive lens, slowly shedding their colonial foundations with greater emphasis on these places as shared spaces of consultation, negotiation, and partnership between individuals dedicated to research into the past and present of not only specific countries, but also the region.The legacy of the ORCs begins with the traditional triad of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens (1881), the American Academy in Rome (1894), and the W. F. Albright Institute for Archaeological Research in Jerusalem (1900) (see Luke and Kersel 2013: 19–25). As might be expected of these late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century creations, they were very much colonial enterprises, and very much linked to the burgeoning and increasingly dominant perspectives in the U.S. academy on classical scholarship, the interaction between religion and the past, and archaeology. Established as outposts in foreign lands, the centers supported U.S. academic endeavors, while also displaying a commitment to culture, furthering one of many U.S. diplomatic goals (Luke and Kersel 2013). With the changing geopolitical realities in the region, the establishment of new states and territories, World War I and its aftermath, the ORCs attempted to refine their missions and thus shed their identities as bastions of colonialism. Rather than remain (whether real or perceived) agents of the state, they sought to be more inclusive, collaborative, institutions with a primary focus of mutually beneficial and local scholarly interaction, exchange, and oversight.If the first wave of ORCs responded to the growing influence of the United States in foreign affairs in the early twentieth century, the second wave of ORCs responded to the internationalism embedded in the post-World War II climate. It was also a moment of intense U.S. cultural influence and financial capacity. The combination of monetary assistance under the U.S. Marshall Plan (European Recovery Act) and private philanthropy in places like Egypt, Greece, and Turkey offered renewed hope for an increased U.S., non-governmental, presence in the region (Luke 2018). The formation of ORCs in Cyprus, Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey was part of this wave, but subject to financial crises and foreign priorities (Luke and Kersel 2013). By the early 1970s, the momentum generated from the Nubian campaigns had inspired not only the 1964 Venice Charter and the formation of the International Council On Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), but also reignited the groundwork (stemming from the 1931 Athens Charter and various recommendations through the 1950s) of the 1972 World Heritage Convention (Luke, forthcoming). These international, collaborative efforts sought to re-focus the world's attention on the preservation and protection of natural and cultural landscapes. States enacted national laws aimed at protecting many aspects of cultural heritage including the preservation and safeguarding of artifacts, sites, monuments, museum collections. New regulations resulted in the decline of partage (the division of finds, see Crewe for a discussion of partage in Cyprus) agreements. International outrage over the looting of archaeological sites, theft of cultural items, and the illicit trade in antiquities, culminating in the Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property 1970, further amplified the power of the ORCs in uniting locals and foreigners over shared interests in protecting the past for future local residents.A result of the shifting character of national legal regimes for protecting local cultural and natural heritage resulted in the need for North American researchers to conduct more of their studies in-country, where the finds and sites are located. This changing ethos paralleled the expansion of the ORCs' sphere of interests beyond the traditional investigations of the ancient into the contemporary through the study of international relations, political science, sociology, and anthropology. No longer focused exclusively on the past, the ORCs switched their attention to research activities that included the present and analyses of implications for the future, thus creating institutions relevant to a wider variety of local constituents. In fact, it was this more inclusive aspect that also inspired the establishment of additional ORCs in West Africa, Eastern Europe, and Asia, reflecting a growing emphasis on globalization. Rather than perpetuating a model of colonialism—a slice of the United States in Senegal, for example—through the continued process of engaging with, reacting to, supporting ongoing in-country policies, and including local voices in institutional decision-making, today the ORCs hope to act as conduits between national and the international communities. Many of the ORCs' staff and boards of directors are comprised of in-country and U.S. individuals bringing local and U.S. perspectives to ORC governance, missions, and programming. With an emphasis on inclusivity in principle and practice, the ORCs have distanced themselves from their colonial roots.Hayden (1995) contends that only by being in a place and encountering things and people “in place,” can a sense of identity be created. Many of the created spaces of the ORCs have grown from inaccessible fortresses behind fences and gates to inclusive places for both formal and informal get-togethers. It is the notions of people and place that brings this collection of essays together. The long-term commitment to local people, communities, and spaces allows ORCs to move beyond heritage work being for communities to collaborative work with communities, jettisoning the hierarchical notion of community embedded in much heritage work highlighted by Gentry (2013). Since the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries, the ORCs have been the persistent entities creating a place for foreigners and locals to research, to collaborate, to produce knowledge, and of course to gossip.In our volume, U.S. Cultural Diplomacy and Archaeology: Soft Power, Hard Heritage (Luke and Kersel 2013) we made the case for the ORCs as integral elements in the foreign relations toolkit of the United States. Through the lens of Nye's (2004) “Soft Power” paradigm we asked how ORCs contribute to U.S. leverage in targeted regions of the world—those “of interest” to the U.S. government and her associates. In their recent report on cultural diplomacy and soft power in the United Nations Office at Geneva, Doeser and Nesbitt (2017: 14) state, “the terms cultural diplomacy and soft power are often used interchangeably and are often thought to be controversial due to their associations with colonialism, imperialism, and propaganda.” Cultural diplomacy and soft power remain murky concepts that often result in confusion, controversy, misunderstandings, and definitional dilemmas. Contributions to this volume reveal that ORCs are no longer merely elements of the U.S. diplomatic arsenal, especially as they change into places committed to local engagement with a united purpose in the realms of international research, scholarship, and knowledge production (Kersel and Luke 2015). As stressed in their mission statements, a main purpose of the ORCs is mediating the flows, exchanges, and engagements between local researchers and foreigners. The ORCs carry out this role through support for research projects, public lectures, access to reference libraries, programming (see Corbett, Crewe, and Scott), fellowships (see Franklin and Babajanyan, and Thum), and residential spaces (short and long-term). The goal for these formal features is to offer pathways for reciprocal academic research. To be sure, ORCs also host informal social occasions, frequently centered on food and drinks, the “gastrodiplomacy” of Doeser and Nesbitt (2017) or what we (Luke and Kersel 2013) refer to as “the Tea Circuit.”It is during these informal moments that national and foreign researchers leave their library perches (or come in from fieldwork) to share ideas about modern and ancient events. In fact, these opportunities for conversation pave the way for ORCs to act as ambassadors of goodwill. The result of a CAORC Multi-Country Fellowship, Thum's unique contribution is an excellent example of the power of place in informal networking and relationship building, particularly in nations without a formal ORC. Multiple fellowships from the ARISC have allowed Franklin and Babajanyan to explore the Medieval landscape of Vayots Dzor, Armenia. Their collaborative project has resulted in an enduring friendship and insights into a period of time and in a place often considered on the fringes of traditional inquiry. Corbett's contribution on the ACOR in Jordan and Crewe's paper on CAARI reveal the long-term commitment to sustainable local empowerment and collaboration on projects related to Jordan and Cyprus. Scott details ARCE's adjustment to a new political landscape in the aftermath of the uprising in the spring of 2011. Despite their foreign policy and colonial beginnings, this collection proves that ORCs can and do provide impartial spaces for collaborative efforts and evolving networks, which allow for a wider range of local and foreign voices to be heard.Exactly how such networks develop, of course, is often intangible, flexible, fluid, and immeasurable. This intangibility in deliverables creates a tension precisely because a nice, neat package with an outcome in sustained cultural diplomacy may not always be possible. In fact, because the results of a stay at an ORC are not always visible, the important power of place often goes both undocumented and unacknowledged. For these and other reasons, there is always insecurity embedded in the annual U.S. Congressional budgeting process. Without concrete “diplomatic deliverables,” making the case for the funding of the ORCs is increasingly difficult. Yet, a potential decrease or cessation of financial support for the ORCs impedes local interaction and may reinforce perceptions that the United States does not care about culture. Under the umbrella of the Council for American Overseas Research Centers [CAORC], there are 24 ORCs which: [P]romote scholarly exchange, primarily through sponsorship of fellowship programs, foreign language study, and collaborative research projects. They facilitate access to research resources, provide a forum for contact and exchange, offer library and technical support and accommodation, and disseminate information to the scholarly and general public through conferences, seminars, exhibitions, and publications. (CAORC Mission Statement, https://www.caorc.org/)OCRs receive funding through a variety of sources, including governmental, public and private institutions, and individual support. Money dedicated to supporting the ORCs is often uncertain. In the FY 2018 budget, the U.S. president proposed to reduce the allotted amount for the U.S. State Department's Educational and Cultural programs from $634 million in FY 2017 to $285 million for FY 2018. In the budget breakdown for the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA), the Administration proposed to zero out CAORC and the centers. Not all the cuts proposed were enacted into law that year, but every new budget cycle going forward is a challenge to the funding for CAORC and the ORCs. Termination of funds could result in demise of the centers, which would result not only in a loss of a persistent U.S. presence abroad, but also of the enduring relationships built on shared interests, reciprocal understanding, and respect, all fostered by being in place.Since 1881, the ORCs have maintained a sense of place for fostering mutually beneficial long-term relationships between researchers with common interests. They provide a congenial atmosphere where long-lasting friendships are constructed. Co-authored by local and U.S. researchers, directors, former directors, staff, senior and junior scholars, the following articles are heritage diplomacy in action, demonstrating the power of place and the enduring potency of the ORCs.