Cultural Security's Import for Memory and Identity

Erik Nemeth introduces to the terrorism studies literature the field of cultural security, defined as the unique intersection of issues in art, politics, and counterterrorism. Nemeth’s essay, “Cultural Security:  The Evolving Role of Art in International Security,” is published in Terrorism and Political Violence, Volume 19, no. 1, Spring 2007, pp. 19-42.

Nemeth charts the historical course of cultural property in terrorism and political violence. The framing of trafficking and destruction of antiquities and cultural property has evolved from the spoils of war to a bargaining tool in international diplomacy, to a form of ethnic cleansing, over the course of the World War II, Cold War, and post-Cold War eras. Nemeth also describes efforts to protect cultural identity, for example through the aptly named UNCESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage 2003, which expanded attention to practices, representations, expressions, and knowledge and skills passed intergenerationally. Nemeth devotes specific attention to the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Valley Buddhas, and the resulting political impact. Ultimately, Nemeth argues that as a tool of terrorist groups to further ideological goals, cultural property, in addition to being at risk, also can generate risks to international security.

Working from the assumption that we live in a symbolically constituted world, rhetorical scholarship would argue that cultural security is a unique proposition deserving focused study and elaboration.  Archeological artifacts are material objects around which people co-create and share meanings of their history, culture and government. Such discourse explains the particular contexts in which people place themselves.  The archeological artifact, therefore, has an important role in the formation of identity and cultural representation; in cultural ownership and the exercise of voice within the public sphere; and as a visual rhetoric.

George Herbert Mead, in his 1934 Mind, Self, and Society, challenged prevailing egoistic notions of identity.  Writing more than six decades later, Stuart Hall posited that identity is strategic and positional, allowing for both the existence of a stable core and a dynamically constituted process of becoming through historical memory, language and culture. [See Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (London: Sage, 1996, 1-17.]  In the 1970s and 1980s, the question of how identity motivates and sustains social action moved to the foreground, exploring how political myths and protest rhetoric constitute “a people.”  [See for example Maurice Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Quebecois,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 73, no. 2, May 1987, pp. 133-150 and Michael C. McGee, “In Search of ‘the People’:  A Rhetorical Alternative,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 61, no. 3, October 1975, pp. 235-249].

Subsequent and current work has emphasized the rhetorical resources that individuals and groups have available to them, that is, how they exercise voice and social agency to negotiate relationships and public discourse. Historical memory and culture serve ably in connecting to rhetorical resources. M. Lane Bruner’s Strategies of Remembrance:  The Rhetorical Dimensions of National Identity Construction is among the most comprehensive treatments of the topic:  “National identities are not only assumed to be expressed concretely in property, institutional infrastructures, economic policies, and laws; but they are also assumed to be malleable fictions, assembled out of available historical resources and incessantly negotiated between state and public representatives offering competing accounts of national character” (p. 3).

While Bruner’s emphasis is the analysis of controversial public speeches, one needn’t dig too deeply to unearth the importance of historical and cultural artifacts to the process of nation building and recovery from conflict. Ownership becomes a double entendre.  To physically possess the artifacts is a prerequisite to rhetorical ownership of one’s national and cultural identity.  At best, the absence of such artifacts constrains participants within the public sphere as they seek to negotiate their sense of self.  At worst, the absence can lead to fragmentation resulting from the rhetorical misappropriation of historical events and cultural memory.   

Archeological artifacts gain their historical and cultural meaning through discourse.  Their function as an ideological and persuasive force in society is the domain of visual rhetoric.  As a form of rhetoric, the artifacts contribute to “doxa,” – the general knowledge upon which judgments of “good reasons” and arguments within the public sphere can be based.  If the linkages between doxa and its referents become too tenuous, a crisis of legitimacy within civil society could result. 

Scholarship employing rhetorical-critical theory suggests that both the physical and symbolic dimensions of archeological and cultural artifacts influence how people and societies renegotiate identity.  Such renegotiation is a common and continuous process, of cultural import during periods of societal renewal.