Co-founder of Heritage for PeaceCSMC Receives Generous Donation from René Teijgeler

21 December 2021

Photo: René Teijgeler

The internationally renowned researcher and advisor in the field of Critical Cultural Heritage has recently honoured the CSMC with a donation of special written artefacts. A few days ago, the objects were received by Jan van der Putten and Roberta Zollo in Utrecht.

Among other things, Teijgeler’s donation includes a rare Batak manuscript. Such a manuscript marked the beginning of his scientific career in the early 1970s. As a student, Teijgeler worked as a conservator at the National Library of the Netherlands, where he came across an inaccurately catalogued Batak manuscript. The find provided the impetus for field research on Sumatra, home of the Batak people. Looking back, Teijgeler considers his publications about this research ‘my first academic achievement’.

It was the beginning of an extraordinary career. Teijgeler initiated and contributed to numerous projects for the preservation of cultural heritage, initially primarily in Asia. In the process, he grew highly perceptive and cognisant of the limits of the European (and thus his own) perspective, and became convinced that conservation measures cannot succeed without direct dialogue with the people on site. This participatory approach has become central to his work. ‘Whatever you do for me without me, you do against me’, he writes, quoting Gandhi, in his contribution ‘Ethics in International Cultural Heritage Interventions’.  

The willingness to engage in dialogue presupposes the willingness to immerse oneself in complicated situations and, as a result, to bear personal risks. Teijgeler even went to war zones to prevent or at least limit the loss of cultural heritage. Although a pacifist, he worked as a specialist in the protection of cultural heritage for the Dutch military during the war in Iraq and served as a senior advisor at the American Embassy in Baghdad from June 2004 to March 2005.

In 2013, he co-founded the NGO Heritage for Peace with Isber Sabrine. Their first mission was to work with various actors during the Syrian civil war to save as many of the country’s cultural treasures as possible from destruction or looting. ‘In a hotel-basement on the Turkish side of this combat-scarred frontier, a group of unlikely warriors is training to fight on a little-known front of Syria’s civil war: the battle for the country’s cultural heritage. The recruits aren’t grizzled fighters but graying academics, more at home on an archaeological dig than a battlefield’, the Wall Street Journal wrote with a mixture of bewilderment and admiration.  

Today, Heritage for Peace operates in many countries in the Middle East and beyond, including Afghanistan, Tigray and Myanmar.

The CSMC receives René Teijgeler’s generous donation with great gratitude. In due course, we will report in more detail about the objects that, a few days before Christmas, have now arrived in Hamburg.