MEMORY WITHOUT MONUMENTS: VERNACULAR ARCHITECTURE
Author(s): Stanford Anderson
Source: Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review , FALL 1998, Vol. 10, No. 1,
MANUFACTURING HERITAGE AND CONSUMING TRADITION: Development, Preservation
and Tourism in the Age of Globalization: Sixth International Conference, December 1519, 1998, Cairo, Egypt: Conference Abstracts (FALL 1998), p. 12
Published by: International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments
(IASTE)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41757409
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12 TDS R 1 O . 1
Asian materials, the paper examines contemporary
socio-cultursented Egypt's
past and Egypt's present in particular ways - and
al mechanisms which promote the expansionthe
of
co-production
this sense
of the of
late Victorian and Edwardian tourist as
ownership in a series of appropriations such that
the internaspectator-voyeur,
as consumer-collector, and as sovereign-subject
tional middle classes, especially the intelligentsia
and
It then
showscultural
how similar spaces and subject-positions are
tourists, seem to act out the dictum that used invoked
to bebyfacetiously
a late-twentieth-century discourse of tourism in order
attributed to Communists: "What's yours is mine,
andcontinued
what's
to guarantee
access to a supposedly timeless, "authen-
mine is my own!" Ironically, education, media,
andIntravel
tic" Egypt
both cases it is suggested that cultures of travel are
constituted under the sign
of a colonial present.
opportunities have promoted this culturally self-confident
sense
of "ownership" of the inherited and created traditions of the
whole world, so that the international middle classes assume
HOUSING
permission to consume them. Yet these sameHERITAGE
peopleAND
may
not IN GURNA
Timothy
want to give permission to the original "owners"
ofMitchell
those traditions to move into their built environment back home.
The history of New Gurna in southern Egypt, Hassan
Fathy's iconic experiment in twentieth-century vernacular
MEMORY WITHOUT MONUMENTS: VERNACULAR
architecture, has always been involved with the problem of
ARCHITECTURE
the world heritage industry. The desire of archaeologists and
Stanford Anderson
officials to evict the Gurnawis from houses built among the
tombs and tourist sites of the Theban necropolis was the
both Fathy's opportunity to build the model village
First distinguish between social memorysource
andofdiscipli-
the setbacks the project subsequently faced. Fifty
nary memory. In monumental architecture and
byofrecognized
later the conflict
professionals, this distinction could always years
be made,
but over Gurna has been renewed.
Attempts
remove the Gurnawis are underway again, this
changed historically: disciplinary memory grew
intosignifito multicolored
concrete parodies of Fathy's domed
cance, and the two memories increasingly time
separated.
These
mud-brick
dwellings. This
paper examines what the struggles
changes facilitated growth of the architectural
discipline,
but
may also prove destructive.
over Gurna have to tell about the dynamics of the heritage
industry, international
Putting similar questions to vernacular architecture,
I dis-tourism, and local and national politics in relation to vs.
the built
environment.
tinguish between vernacular architecture in pre-literate
literate societies, and suggest a cohesion of social and
disciplinary memory in buildings of pre-literate societies.
Artifacts provide information about the past, but that past is
not as much separate from, as subsumed in, the present.
literate societies can develop records of their past - a past
set apart, inducing inquiry and skepticism about past and pre-
sent. We return to memory in monumental architecture, but
not so abruptly. We recognize vernacular architecture in literate
societies, relatively ahistorical societies to intensively historical
ones. An institutional marker for these differences is the prevalence and type of archives. Thus, we find a continuity from the
forms of memory associated with vernacular architecture in preliterate societies, through variations of vernacular architecture in
literate societies, to the issue with which we began - memory
in the architecture of literate, intensely historical societies.
COLONIAL NOSTALGIA AND CULTURES OF TRAVEL:
SPACES OF CONSTRUCTED VISIBILITY IN EGYPT, 1840-2000
Derek Gregory
This paper explores the continuities between the cultural
practices of North American and European tourism in Egypt dur-
ing the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It begins by mapping
both the production of spaces of constructed visibility - the
emergence of itineraries and sequences of sites/sights that pre-
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