told me that people who are for Wyclef are tired of the seasoned politi-cians who keep promising change and don’t deliver. His financial success is another reason why many insist that he will be a leader of a different kind, less likely to engage in corruption

Forgiveness of Haiti’s debt.• Greater transparency on the part of both Haiti and the United States regarding the terms of current relationship between the two nations.• Public debates (at home and abroad) concerning Haiti’s future that actually include real oppositional voices and not the usual suspects who claim to represent the nameless.• Recognition of and partnership with local grassroots organizations to ensure expedient delivery of relief.Indeed, nothing would be a more fitting requiem for the dying than a sus-tainable Haiti that will not crumble in the future from the man- made dis-asters that are currently under way.

Haiti could be a country that in its industries and labor relations ceases to exploit its workers and stops reinforcing the extreme gap between the rich and the poor

a more peaceful synthesis between Vodou and the Catholic Church in Crescent City cemeteries. All Saints’ Day, the Catholic feast day on No-vember 1 when New Orleans residents visit, decorate, clean, and cele-brate the gravesites of their ancestors, is still a major holiday in New Orleans, and the two religions share signifi cant thematic similarities in their death rituals. Robert Florence writes about these similarities and the West African roots of Congo Square religion and music:In a city whose largest cultural infl uences are Roman Catholic and West African—two traditions that involve an interplay with death—this spiri-tual disposition naturally imbues the cities of the dead. . . . Many people in New Orleans are conditioned by their environment and upbringing not to run from and shun death, but to embrace and celebrate it. New Orleans cemetery traditions are joyful; many paths leading there are paved by jazz funerals, and the popularity of New Orleans’ All Saints Day is a defi nite Ameri can anomaly. . . . New Orleanians oft en go to the cemeteries not so much to mourn and lament but to pray for solace and to achieve com-munion with deceased friends and loved ones.116

Although jazz funerals are dynamic, improvised performances that change over time to reinterpret new substitutions of religion, music, history, and politics from black America and the African diaspora, analysis of selected narrative ac-counts of the connections between churches and the Africanisms in early jazz funerals reveals the historical signifi cance of St. Augustine Church as a site for Congo Square music and the ancestral rituals in Big Chief Tootie Montana’s contemporary jazz funeral. As we shall see, the historical memory of jazz funerals and Congo Square music and religion has been infl uenced by Black Christianity in New Orleans.

Whenever improvisation is a performative strategy in ritual, it places ritual squarely within the domain of play. It is indeed the playing, the improvising, that energizes people, drawing them into the action, constructing their relationships, thereby generating mul-tiple simultaneous discourse.10

Introduction

We need proactive international programmes for inventorying cultural patrimony not only to locate and document sites but also to assess current and future potential impacts. We must work with governments and funding institutions and make the case for the critical need to undertake such studies.

Working together as a global community to maintain our links to the past must be a priority, or these links will perish, and all hope of a peaceful coexistence with them. In pursuance of this goal, the nature of the contemporary world and the skills, attitudes, and knowledge citi-zens need to be responsible and reasonable participants in managing our collective patrimony must be considered, along with ways of protecting, studying, and presenting the past (Messenger and Enloe, 1991). If we impart nothing else, we must be successful at delivering the message of respect and value for our differences and commonalities.

However, this situation is changing, with many professional archaeolog-ical societies adopting principles addressing the right that people have to connect to their own past in a meaningful way (Baird, 2014; Silverman and Ruggles, 2007; Smith, Yu and Shen, 2018; Watkins, 2018). Although such concerns have also been codified into laws, such as, in the United States, the 1978 Religious Freedom Act, the 1979 Archaeological Resources Pro-tection Act, and the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repa-triation Act, control and management of the past is still primarily vested with the state. This occurs in many countries where antiquities belong to the state: for example China (Law of the People’s Republic of China on the Protection of Cultural Relics (1982, amended 2000)) (Chen, 2014), Cyprus (Antiquities Law (1935, amended 1986)) (Kaldali, 2014), and Poland (Law on the Protection of Cultural Property and on Museums (1962)) (Marciniak, 2014).

In the United States, for over 100 years, various pieces of federal, state, and local legislation have been put in place, documenting that the past is important to and is valued by the American people and must be pro-tected: such institutional values are important in efforts to protect the past (Hutt, Blanco and Varmer, 1999; Soderland and Lilley, 2018).

2 Valuing and protecting the past in contemporary societyGeorge S. Smith

he US government recog-nises them as quasi-independent nations and, since the passing of NAGPRA (North American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act) in 1990, they have gained a significant measure of control over their cultural remains. However, this has not stopped development from devastating their herit-age. Legislation, especially that predating 1990, is permeated with Western values that fail to recognise the significance of places and objects to Indig-enous culture. In order to effectively represent all stakeholders, Watkins recommends following a community-based participatory research model following an eight-point plan that ensures that the community directs and controls the project, with the experts acting as a nexus between the com-munity and developers.

Archaeologists must continue to carry out the tasks they have always done, such as inventorying and documenting, but their role needs to be greater. They also need to work with governments, agencies and communities to ensure that heritage is not just recorded but is actively used to promote social equity and respect for all cultures so that no one’s past is left behind.

As Pyburn (Chapter 9) reminds us, we should not mistake poverty for tradition, or deny subaltern communities the opportunity to benefit from modern technology. It is about allowing cultures to thrive as living entities, adopting new practices as they wish, in keeping with their own value system (Koohafkan and Price, Chapter 6).

Local knowledge can be branded as obsolete because it is not scientific.

Thus, the threat to the local community comes not only from the event itself but potentially also from the international response to it.

The enforced connection with outside interests may represent a threat to their cultural integrity that far outweighs any poten-tial benefit. Local communities can find themselves unwilling participants in economic development plans based on principles that form no part of their value system and that may catastrophically interrupt finely balanced local structures (Douglas, Chapter 15)

or many people, personal identity is no longer predicated solely on passport and residence. Increasingly, heritage can be claimed by a broader group whose members may be located anywhere (Hassan, Chapter 3). The binary division of being inside or outside a community has given way to more complex definitions that recognise different roles and degrees of affiliation. Members of a com-munity are often described as ‘stakeholders’ but even this definition has its limitations as it assumes that each person has predominantly one role, that will remain largely unchanged, and that each stakeholder group will share a broadly common viewpoint. Whilst the concept of ‘stakeholder’ allows for degrees of affiliation and the recognition of different roles, it often fails to capture the dynamic, multivariant nature of social relations in the 21st century (Pyburn, Chapter 9). Sontum (Chapter 4) describes how immigrant groups in particular can see cultural identity as a protean characteristic, continually in flux. Patterns of movement have also led to more heterogene-ity, particularly in urban areas, such that it is often more accurate to talk of ‘communities’ rather than ‘the community’ in a given area

The large-scale movements of population after the Second World War have complicated the picture: from lesser developed countries to developed countries; from colonies to the metropole; from rural to urban settlements; and from one part of a nation to another, large numbers of people have been moving.

1 IntroductionValerie Higgins and Diane DouglasIntroduction