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Nature has been sacred since
the dawn of human consciousness -- that moment in
evolutionary time when people first became aware of
their own existence, when women and men began to
wonder about their place on Earth and in the larger
cosmos. To know that one is ignorant is the
beginning of wisdom, and if we could pinpoint the
instant when our ancestors began to think beyond
themselves, we would know exactly when are species
started to become wise, to become, not just Homo,
but Homo sapiens. The mysteries of the natural world
were certainly the initial impetus for humans to
create (or, if you prefer, discover) the sacred. The
nation of the sacred has since been endlessly
elaborated in human cultures, producing not just the
religious variety have today, but a broadening range
of spirituality, often interfused with the secular,
that cannot be easily categorized as 'faith'. So we
see that the sacred has long been, and continues to
be, a bridge between nature and culture.
If sacredness is essentially an acknowledgement of
mystery, then there is no question that biological
diversity -- the variety of genes, species, and
ecosystem on Earth -- offers plenty of scope to be
considered sacred. It is replete with enigmas:
nobody knows all the details how ecosystems
functions, or how genes work, or even how many
species there are. This should not surprise us,
actually. Fascination with nature may stretch back
to time immemorial, but biodiversity as a rigorous
concept gained currency only in the 1980s.
Reflecting on the global environment data that had
never before been available, scientists realized
that a mass extinction of species, the first ever
caused by people, had probably begun. The critical
point for our discussion is that despite
biodiversity's scientific credentials, the
continuing fervor of interest in it is squarely a
moral response to a moral question: Why should we
care about natural variety? Surprisingly, the
answers that are being offered by scientist often
make recourse not explicitly (see Takacs 1996: pp.
254-70).
The emerging dialogue in biodiversity and the sacred
offers some valuable insights for museum and
heritage practitioners whose work traditionally has
focused on the more 'conventional' forms of sacred
expression, i.e. objects, buildings, and sites that
are consciously designed with religious or spiritual
intent. A brief article such as this can do no more
than touch upon a few of the connections, which are
highlighted below.
The loss of the sacred is profoundly, yet
productively, disturbing. It has been suggested that
the prospect of widespread extinctions and ecosystem
destruction is deeply upsetting to many people, that
the depth of their reactions cannot be explained
solely on materialistic or intellectual grounds, and
that 'such disturbing responses in the human psyche'
are, in truth, 'signs of hope: an awakening of our
forgotten, but instinctual interconnections with
nature. . .'(Golliher, 1999: p.439). Here is
something at work that is very much akin to
spiritual conviction, to a belief in a kind of
sacred ultimacy whose object cannot be compromised.
Under parallel conditions, a similar profound
reaction can take hold within the museum and
heritage professional community, as when the Taliban
ignored pleas from around the world and destroyed
the Bamiyan Buddhas, or when the Iraq national
museum in Baghdad was looted. These acts were quite
properly branded as unconscionable desecrations and
crimes against all humanity. The fact that so many
reacted so intensely, with mixture of horror,
disgust, and anger, should also be taken as a sign
of hope: numerous people regard outstanding examples
of cultural heritage as sacred (or at least
surpassingly valuable) and will take action to see
them protected or restored.
More and more, the sacred is being expressed in a
secular context. The boundaries between sacred and
profane have never been as sharp as is often
supposed (see, e.g., Eliade, 1969: p. 126), but
today one finds the two increasingly mixed.
Protected natural areas, which are the cornerstone
of any strategy to protect global biodiversity,
provide examples that are relevant to cultural
heritage. 'In the modern world; the ethicist J.
Ronald Engel notes, 'the most powerful sacred space
are often "secular" places that implicitly function
in ways comparable to the explicitly religious
places of the past. . . .Today, for many people the
world over, national parks are sacred spaces'
(Engel, 1985: p. 55). This attitude deepens, in a
subtle but important was, that which was expressed
three-quarters of a century ago by John C. Merriam,
a prominent American scientist, when he said that
national parks 'represent opportunities for worship
in which one comes to understand more fully certain
of the attribute of nature and its Creator. They are
not objects to be worshipped, but they are altars
over which we may worship' (Merriam, 1926: p. 478).
Parks as 'cathedrals' where we encounter the scared
are becoming scared in themselves: we may care as
much about Yellowstone, the abstract entity marked
by lines on a map, as we do about the biodiversity
of Yellowstone and the living ecosystem encompassed
by those boundaries. The plethora of non-material
values that people encounter in, or assign to,
protected areas (see Harmon and Putney 2003) attest
to the complexity of our desire to engage nature's
moral import.
In a similar way, many of the institutions that
protect cultural heritage have become fused, in the
public mind, with the objects of heritage
themselves. The world's great public museums and
most prominent cultural monuments and sites have
been 'lifted up' (so to speak) out of their
immediate context and simultaneously placed with
larger context of global heritage. That status,
which add layers of meaning to the site, its
objects, and the way they are administered, is
itself quasi-sacred in the same sense described
above for parks and biodiversity. This is, in fact,
the internal logic that holds the World Heritage
Convention together, and is reflected in its three
categories of natural, cultural, and mixed sites --
many of which are also sacred in their own right, of
course.
The sacred is impermanent and dynamic. Even in a
purely religious context, the sacred is never fixed
in time. Not only does the doctrinal understanding
of the sacred evolve, sacred objects and sites can
be completely desacralized and, sometimes,
resacralized. We have already noted an extreme form
of desacralization with reference to the Taliban,
but this phenomenon has, unfortunately, been around
for thousands of years. For instance, the sacred
groves of the old Roman Empire were systematically
destroyed by imperial edict following
Christianization in the fourth century A.D. (Hughes,
1998: pp. 119-20); no trace of the old worship could
be allowed to remain and compete with the new.
Today, there is new impetus to identity such sacred
natural sites and given them official protected
status (Putney, 2003), effectively resacralizing
them. The recent anointing of biodiversity as one of
the supreme 'goods' of existence is essentially an
act of sacralization.
So new forms of the sacred are constantly emerging,
often being fashioned out of secular experience. Now
consider the following question, which illustrates a
situation many cultural heritage practitioners will
be familiar with: Is the cell at the Robben Island
Prison (now museum) where Nelson Mandela was held
for the bulk of his imprisonment by the apartheid
regime a sacred place? For those who revere courage
and the ideals of democracy, it must be something
close to that. The symbolism is already taking hold:
Mandela himself helped light a votive candle in that
cell to mark the turning of the millennium in 2000.
It is a difficult question to answer, for the
psychospiritual footing is very shaky here. On the
one hand, Mandela is very much alive and therefore
not yet eligible for secular colonization (if we may
put it that way). On the other, there is a strong
potential that he will posthumously attain such
stature, much as Lincoln and Gandhi have. Adding to
the complication, such iconization can be reversed,
even after many years, as has happened with Lenin in
Russia. New forms of the sacred are constantly being
carved out of the secular, but what has been
sacralized can be desacralized and then sacralized
all over again. The sacred aspires to permanency,
but in a culturally dynamic world, never truly
attains it.
*Excerpted from Museum International, September
2003, a publication of the United Nations
Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization
**David Harmon is executive director of the George
Wright Society, an international professional
association advancing the scientific and heritage
values of protected natural areas and cultural
sites.
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