Speaking on Antarctic heritage at First Argentine Days of Antarctic Humanities and Social Sciences

On 21-23 of April, the Argentine Antarctic Institute and Universidad Nacional de Tierra del Fuego held an online conference - the First Days of Antarctic Humanities and Social Sciences. The conference was held in Spanish and its three days were packed with presentations of all possible topics on Antarctica and Argentine Sub-Antarctic. First intended to be a hybrid event, it had to be taken fully online because of the COVID situation. This was surely lamentable for all of the local participants who would have loved to meet and chat, but made participation certainly easier and more giving to those joining from distance. There were quite many foreigners, but as always, when joining any of the national Antarctic events, I must but lament that so much of this research never reaches scholars in other languages. Almost endemic nationalism of the research about this international and multinational continent is quite lamentable. At all conferences can some works be more intellectually sophisticated and some others more dedicated to searching for elusive details of some old expedition. Not all academic cultures are equally comfortable with high theory and politics which is the dominant Angloamerican mode of academic writing. But it is always valuable knowledge and I feel sometimes truly sorry that not many other people than me can with ease participate at Spanish, Russian, English, Japanese and Scandinavian conferences. Polish, Chinese, French and German are unfortunately off limits for me so far, even if I can figure out quite a bit in written documents in these languages.

This time I presented the work we have done over the last years in the Creating Antarctic Heritage project in tracing the birth of the Historic Sites and Monuments instrument of the Antarctic Treaty, based on the archival evidence from New Zealand (thanks to Bob Frame!), and the documents I’ve collected from Chile, UK and, most importantly, Japan, where the first List was consolidated. Several important discussions appear in the documents: How old is a historic site and monument? How should they be called (what is a vestige?!!!)? How much of the monuments must be preserved to merit inclusion? And can refuges be listed as historic sites and monuments? And of course, when all complicated political hurdles have been passed and the list is ready to be approved, Antarctic Treaty does what it is best at: gets stuck with one insignificant word that has nothing to do with the heritage instrument itself and puts the whole instrument in danger. This time, in. 1970, the word was ‘DDR’ which US could not accept in the documents and Soviet Union refused to remove.

Those who speak Spanish, can listen to the presentation on youtube through the link below. I have to say that one of the hardest moments in working with transnational methodology is deciding how many juicy and rude comments from internal documents should one disclose? I am probably the least diplomatic person ever, but nevertheless feel that if I want to gain the confidence of the diplomatic archives, it is probably best not to quote these statements word for word. Believe me, sometimes this is hard.