4 - Responding to Culture in Conflict

Summary

INTRODUCTION

There is potentially no limit to the geographical reach of an organisation that engages in the pursuance of its governing instrument’s obligations. Certainly the concept of ‘cultural diplomacy’, now recently relabelled ‘cultural relations’ (see, for example, Battle of Ideas 2009), is one that permits any organisation whose existence is based in collections of cultural property, however defined, to attempt business in another country without apparently falling foul either of the competing interests of public diplomacy or of its own, more narrowly cast, remit. This chapter surveys the reality of responding to conflict around the world, from the Andes to China, by way of sub-Saharan Africa and Burma and, ultimately, Iraq. The types of conflict encountered are as varied as the countries in which they have taken place and the responses discussed are likewise manifold, rooted as they are in the possibilities afforded by the 21st century for the preservation of material and the dissemination of its content.

This chapter, therefore, contains a series of case studies rather than an exegesis on theory, and reflects on the issue of how to respond to conflict and iconoclasm, or in this case largely biblioclasm, from the perspective of a cultural institution. Statements made and case studies selected are informed by the nature of the British Library, in particular its dualistic remit. While the British Library is a library with immense heritage collections of undoubted worldwide significance, it must give access to the content of its collections as much as to the collection items themselves. The British Library is thus a particular type of cultural institution: not expressly a museum, though with significant museum-type characteristics, but also a public service, in some respects at the wholesale end of culture and knowledge.

Drawing this ostensibly artificial distinction between content and object is crucial in enabling the Library’s prompt response to acts of destruction and iconoclasm; and enabling it, moreover, to go about that response in a very 21st-century way. Collaboration by the sharing of digital copies, preservation through digitisation, virtual reunification of texts online, the copying and redistribution of oral histories: all sit alongside the Library’s more traditional forms of response, from capacity building to professional leadership.