PDF Archaeology Cultural Heritage Protection and Community Engagement in South Asia Robin Coningham Ebook Full Chapter

Archaeology, Cultural Heritage
Protection and Community

Engagement in South Asia Robin
Coningham
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://textbookfull.com/product/archaeology-cultural-heritage-protection-and-commun
ity-engagement-in-south-asia-robin-coningham/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...
Climate Refugees in South Asia Protection Under

International Legal Standards and State Practices in
South Asia Stellina Jolly
https://textbookfull.com/product/climate-refugees-in-south-asia-
protection-under-international-legal-standards-and-state-
practices-in-south-asia-stellina-jolly/
Transforming Heritage Practice in the 21st Century:

Contributions from Community Archaeology John H.
Jameson
https://textbookfull.com/product/transforming-heritage-practice-
in-the-21st-century-contributions-from-community-archaeology-
john-h-jameson/
Biota Grow 2C gather 2C cook Loucas
https://textbookfull.com/product/biota-grow-2c-gather-2c-cook-
loucas/
Digital Heritage Progress in Cultural Heritage

Documentation Preservation and Protection 7th
International Conference EuroMed 2018 Nicosia Cyprus
October 29 November 3 2018 Proceedings Part II Marinos
Ioannides
https://textbookfull.com/product/digital-heritage-progress-in-
cultural-heritage-documentation-preservation-and-protection-7th-
international-conference-euromed-2018-nicosia-cyprus-
Gods Heroes and their Story Tellers Intangible cultural
heritage of South India 1st Edition V. Hari Saravanan
https://textbookfull.com/product/gods-heroes-and-their-story-
tellers-intangible-cultural-heritage-of-south-india-1st-edition-
v-hari-saravanan/
Culture conflict and the military in colonial South

Asia First South Asia Edition Gavin Rand Editor Kaushik
Roy Editor
https://textbookfull.com/product/culture-conflict-and-the-
military-in-colonial-south-asia-first-south-asia-edition-gavin-
rand-editor-kaushik-roy-editor/
South Asia in world history 1st Edition Gilbert
https://textbookfull.com/product/south-asia-in-world-history-1st-
edition-gilbert/
Constitutional Foundings In South Asia Kevin Yl Tan
https://textbookfull.com/product/constitutional-foundings-in-
south-asia-kevin-yl-tan/
Lead in Glassy Materials in Cultural Heritage 1st

Edition Bouquillon
https://textbookfull.com/product/lead-in-glassy-materials-in-
cultural-heritage-1st-edition-bouquillon/
Archaeology, Cultural
Heritage Protection and
Community Engagement
in South Asia
Edited by
Robin Coningham
Nick Lewer
Archaeology, Cultural Heritage Protection and
Community Engagement in South Asia
Robin Coningham · Nick Lewer
Editors
Archaeology, Cultural
Heritage Protection
and Community
Engagement
in South Asia
Editors
Robin Coningham Nick Lewer
Durham University Coral Associates Ltd
Durham, UK Skipton, UK
ISBN 978-981-13-6236-1 ISBN 978-981-13-6237-8 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6237-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019933316
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Singapore Pte Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2019
Chapters 1, 5 and 12 are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution
4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). For further
details see license information in the chapters.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied,
with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
maps and institutional affiliations.
Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan
This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Singapore Pte Ltd.
The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore
189721, Singapore
Preface
UNESCO and Durham University jointly established the UNESCO

Chair on Archaeological Ethics and Practice in Cultural Heritage in
2014. The Chair team recognizes that cultural heritage and archaeol-
ogy are drivers for creative economies and that their protection contrib-
utes to sustainable development. It recognizes that heritage can play a
unifying role in post-conflict and post-disaster responses but also that
unethical or unbalanced promotion may alienate communities, gener-
ate conflict and the destruction of heritage. Durham’s UNESCO Chair
addresses this challenge by shaping and contributing to debates on pro-
fessional standards and responsibilities; legal and ethical codes and val-
ues; concepts of stewardship and custodianship; research ethics and illicit
antiquities; and the social, ethical and economic impacts of the promo-
tion of heritage, particularly at religious and pilgrimage sites. To enhance
this programme, Durham’s UNESCO Chair has worked with new part-
ners and sponsors, to meet its mission to:
• develop new guidelines and exemplar material for postgraduate

education;
• devise benchmarks for the measuring social, ethical and economic
impacts of Cultural Heritage;
• provide capacity building to heritage professionals and managers in
South Asia and the UK through workshops and on-site training;
v
vi Preface
• create opportunities for postgraduate research and education in the

UK;
• and generate networks of heritage professionals, academics and
stakeholders.
Community consultations offer the opportunity of exploring ways in

which individuals and groups can be involved in the long-term sustaina-
ble protection of sites of archaeological and historical importance, to dis-
cuss the future sustainable development of tourism and pilgrimage to the
site that benefits the local community, and to establish mechanisms for
continuing community engagement in archaeological excavations, pres-
ervation and protection. This volume of case studies from across South
Asia represents the UNESCO Chair’s first collective steps towards these
collective goals.
Durham, UK Robin Coningham

Skipton, UK Nick Lewer
Contents
1 Introduction 1
Robin Coningham and Nick Lewer
2 Communities and Micro-Heritage in Bhitargarh,

Bangladesh: A Case Study 17
Shahnaj Husne Jahan
3 Awakening Myths, Legends and Heritage 31

K. Krishnan and Vrushab Mahesh
4 Kuragala: Religious and Ethnic Communities

in a Contested Sacred Heritage Site in Sri Lanka 45
Venerable Mahinda Deegalle
5 Community Engagement in the Greater Lumbini Area

of Nepal: The Micro-Heritage Case Study of Dohani 59
Nick Lewer, Anouk Lafortune-Bernard, Robin Coningham,
Kosh Prasad Acharya and Ram Bahadur Kunwar
6 Protecting Heritage and Strengthening Community

Engagement in Nepal 75
Marielle Richon
vii
viii Contents
7 Tourism and Community Engagement in World

Heritage Sites, Nepal 89
Lisa Choegyal
8 Mapping the Intangible: ‘At Risk’ Heritage

Landscapes in Northern Pakistan 105
Zahra Hussain
9 Community Engagement in Natural Heritage

Conservation Stewardship, Nepal 121
Rajendra Narsingh Suwal
10 Reclaiming the Heritage of Bagan: Communities

in Myanmar Learn to Raise Their Voice 137
Kai Weise
11 Communities, Identities, Conflict

and Appropriation in South Asia 151
12 Conclusion 165
Index 187
Notes on Contributors
Kosh Prasad Acharya joined the Government of Nepal’s Department

of Archaeology in 1978, serving as Head of Excavations Branch before
holding the office of Director-General of Archaeology until 2009.
Following retirement, he joined UNESCO as a Consultant and was
appointed Executive Director of the Pashupati Area Development Trust
until 2016, and is an Honorary Research Fellow attached to Durham’s
UNESCO Chair.
Lisa Choegyal is British-Born and has made Kathmandu her home since
the mid-1970s. With a background in the private sector as a Director of
Tiger Mountain, one of Asia’s foremost adventure tourism pioneers, for
the past 25 years, Choegyal has worked as a consultant in pro-poor sus-
tainable tourism throughout the Asia-Pacific region.
Robin Coningham holds UNESCO’s Chair in Archaeological Ethics
and Practice in Cultural Heritage at Durham University and has exten-
sive experience of archaeology and post-disaster heritage interventions
across South Asia. He is interested in sustainable community engage-
ment with archaeological excavations and site preservation, and the bal-
ance between heritage protection, pilgrimage and development.
Venerable Mahinda Deegalle is Professor of Religions, Philosophies
and Ethics at Bath Spa University. He is the author of Popularizing
Buddhism (2006) and editor of Buddhism, Conflict and Violence in
Modern Sri Lanka (2006), Dharma to the UK (2008), Vesak, Peace and
ix
x Notes on Contributors
Harmony (2015) and Justice and Statecraft (2017). His research inter-
ests are Buddhism, Politics, Ethics and Violence.
Zahra Hussain is an architect and cultural geographer based in
Pakistan. Her research focuses on architecture and sustainable develop-
ment particularly in the Mountain Communities of Northern Pakistan.
She leads the Laajverd Visiting School Program that is invested in doc-
umenting, preserving and incorporating local architectural pattern lan-
guage in contemporary mountain architecture.
Shahnaj Husne Jahan is Professor of Archaeology and the Director
of the Center for Archaeological Studies at the University of Liberal
Arts Bangladesh. She has been excavating the archaeological site of
Bhitargarh in Bangladesh since 2008 and developed a blend of strategies
to stimulate public interest in archaeological heritage preservation and
management.
K. Krishnan is Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Professor of
Archaeology in the Department of Archaeology and Ancient History at
the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Vadodara, India. His publi-
cations are in the field of ceramic petrology, archaeometallurgy, ethnoar-
chaeological studies, South Asian Prehistory and early historic urbanism.
Ram Bahadur Kunwar is Chief Archaeological Officer in the
Government of Nepal’s Department of Archaeology. Head of the
Excavation Branch, he has led archaeological projects throughout Nepal,
lectures on Nepali history, culture and archaeology and has published
widely on these subjects. Mr. Kunwar represents the Government of
Nepal in the Japanese-Funds-in-Trust for UNESCO project within the
Greater Lumbini Area.
Anouk Lafortune-Bernard is a Ph.D. student affiliated to Durham
University’s UNESCO Chair in Archaeological Ethics and Practice
in Cultural Heritage. Her research focuses on the social and economic
impact of cultural heritage. She has done most of her research in South
Asia, including sites in Nepal, Sri Lanka and India.
Nick Lewer was Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at the School
of Government and International Affairs, Durham University and is now
Director of Coral Associates Ltd. He has worked widely in South Asia
focusing on community engagement, dialogue processes, education and
project monitoring and evaluation.
Notes on Contributors xi
Vrushab Mahesh is Assistant Professor in the Department of

Archaeology and Ancient History, the Maharaja Sayajirao University
of Baroda. He was awarded a University Grants Commission Research
Fellowship for his doctoral research and his research interests include art
history, cultural heritage management epigraphy, numismatics and eth-
nographic and ethno-archaeological analysis.
Marielle Richon is an art historian, formerly Programme Specialist at
UNESCO World Heritage Centre, member of ICOMOS and lecturer
at IREST Paris 1 Sorbonne, Euro-Mediterranean University of Fes,
Morocco and Aix Marseille University, France. Since 2013 she has been
the Oriental Cultural Heritage Sites Protection Alliance’s Project Leader
for Nepal.
Rajendra Narsingh Suwal is Deputy Director of WWF Nepal and an
animal ecologist specializing in ornithological studies, biodiversity con-
servation, ecotourism and community conservation. Mr. Suwal is an
Ashoka Fellow, past member of Environment Protection Council chaired
by Prime Minister of Nepal, and a member of UNESCO’s International
Scientific Committee for Lumbini.
Kai Weise is a Nepali national of Swiss origin and has a Master’s Degree
in Architecture from ETH Zurich. President of ICOMOS Nepal, he has
worked on architecture, planning and heritage management throughout
Asia. After the recent earthquakes in Nepal and Myanmar he has special-
ized in reconstruction and heritage protection in post-disaster contexts.
List of Figures
Fig. 1.1 Map showing the location of South Asian case studies 4
Fig. 2.1 Plan of the archaeological site of Bhitargarh 23
Fig. 2.2 Excavations demonstrating the presence of archaeological
monuments within gardens at Bhitagarh 26
Fig. 2.3 Performance of Satya Pirer Gan during the Bhitargarh Festival 29
Fig. 3.1 The Bindu Sarovar at Sidhpur 39
Fig. 3.2 Replica of the Rudra Mahalaya Temple’s Kirti Torana
at the Bindu Sarovar Museum 40
Fig. 3.3 The Bindu Sarovar Museum 41
Fig. 4.1 Plan of the archaeological site of Kuragala 47
Fig. 4.2 The Muslim ‘Torana’ beside the rock-cut steps to Kuragala 49
Fig. 4.3 The Department of Archaeology’s signboard at Kuragala 51
Fig. 5.1 Map of key heritage and archaeology sites within
the Greater Lumbini Area 62
Fig. 5.2 Plan of the archaeological site of Dohani with geophysical
survey overlay 65
Fig. 5.3 Samai Mai Shrine at Dohani archaeological site 70
Fig. 6.1 Medieval city of Lo Manthang with its earthen wall 81
Fig. 6.2 Abandoned truck next to chortens (stupas) outside
Lo Manthang 83
Fig. 6.3 Community engagement and reconstruction activities at
Lo Manthang 86
Fig. 7.1 Mahadevi Temple at Lumbini, birthplace of Lord Buddha 97
Fig. 7.2 Industrial plant near Lumbini 98
Fig. 8.1 Map of the Gojal Valley 106
Fig. 8.2 LVS tea session with women 112
xiii
xiv List of Figures
Fig. 8.3 Community map of daily and seasonal routines of women

at Sarat 113
Fig. 8.4 a Heritage Museum at Laspur. b Sketch of Heritage Museum
at Laspur showing how the five columns pattern is used
in the traditional form of house construction 115
Fig. 9.1 One-horned Rhino in Nepal’s Chitwan 123
Fig. 9.2 Map of National Parks, Wildlife Reserves, Hunting Reserves,
Conservation Areas and Buffer Zones in Nepal 126
Fig. 9.3 Amaltari community homestays 133
Fig. 10.1 Traditional farming practised between the temples
and shrines of Bagan 138
Fig. 10.2 Plan of the archaeological site of Bagan 141
Fig. 10.3 Volunteers removing earthquake damage from
the Sula-Mani Temple at Bagan 146
Fig. 11.1 Viaduct foundation for the Orange Metro Line beside
the Chauburji Gateway in Lahore 155
Fig. 11.2 Trainees from the Central Cultural Fund and University
of Jaffna clearing brick and coral blocks from the ruins
of the Kruys Kerk in Jaffna Fort 159
Fig. 11.3 Visitors to the temporary museum exhibition in Jaffna Fort 160
Fig. 12.1 Delegates at the AHRC-GCRF ‘Heritage at Risk 2017:
Pathways to the Protection and Rehabilitation of Cultural
Heritage in South Asia’ Workshop in Kathmandu 167
Fig. 12.2 Archaeology Risk Map prepared for the site
of Tilaurakot-Kapilavastu 174
List of Tables
Table 5.1 Overview of the population of the Greater Lumbini Area

based on Nepal’s 2011 National Population Census Data 61
Table 5.2 Annual visitor numbers at selected sites within
the Buddhist circuits of north-east India and Nepal 63
Table 9.1 Protected wildlife and conservation area types
and area coverage in Nepal 125
Table 12.1 Geographical and thematic coverage of our 11 case studies 168
Table 12.2 Community consultation form deployed at Dohani
in 2018 (Interviewer guiding questions in italics) 177
Table 12.3 ProtectNet pilot framework synchronizing archaeological
investigations with community engagement 178
Table 12.4 Common sense community guidelines for heritage
protection 181
xv
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Abstract Coningham and Lewer chart the interest of archaeologists and

heritage management specialists in engaging with communities associ-
ated with sites of historical tangible and intangible cultural importance.
Drawing from archaeological, social science, development and tourism
literature, international charters and codes of practice, and discussions at
the AHRC-GCRF sponsored Kathmandu Conference Heritage at Risk
2017: Pathways to the Protection and Rehabilitation of Cultural Heritage
in South Asia in September 2017, the chapter notes participatory meth-
odologies used in community consultation and then provides conceptual
and operational issues, questions and themes which inform the backdrop
to this book. The chapter next identifies context-specific and generic
challenges for community engagement which are highlighted through
the case studies in the book, which is the first of its kind to focus specifi-
cally on South Asia.
R. Coningham (*)
Durham University, Durham, UK
e-mail: r.a.e.coningham@durham.ac.uk
N. Lewer
Coral Associates Ltd, North Yorkshire, UK
e-mail: nick.lewer@coralassociates.org
© The Author(s) 2019 1

R. Coningham and N. Lewer (eds.), Archaeology, Cultural
Heritage Protection and Community Engagement in South Asia,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6237-8_1
2 R. CONINGHAM AND N. LEWER
Keywords South Asia · Community engagement · Archaeology
1.1 Introduction: Context
Home to one-third of the world’s human population, South Asia has a
corresponding richness of cultural heritage with 44 properties inscribed
on UNESCO’s World Heritage List and thousands of protected national
properties. Although strikingly rich, South Asia’s cultural heritage is a
non-renewable resource and there have been a series of tragic, high pro-
file events, which have irreversibly damaged that heritage.
Less visible within media reports is the equally concerning widespread
grassroots destruction of South Asia’s heritage monuments, cityscapes
and landscapes caused by increasing pressure from agriculture intensifi-
cation and resource extraction as well as the spread of modern urbaniza-
tion, industrialization and investment in mega-infrastructure. The balance
between heritage and development has been successfully reached at a
number of sites but this is not always the case and there are many exam-
ples of irreversible damage. These range from the impact of the Orange
Metro Line along Lahore’s Grand Trunk Road in Pakistan and aspects
of the reconstruction of Kathmandu’s skyline after the 2015 Gorkha
Earthquake (Coningham et al. 2018) to the recognition that over 50%
of Buddhist sites in Pakistan’s Charsadda District have been damaged
by illegal digging as have two thirds of Buddhist archaeological sites in
Anuradhapura District in Sri Lanka (Coningham and Young 2015: 96).
Motivated by this context, over 180 experts and professionals from a
wide range of disciplines, including archaeology, conservation, architec-
ture, heritage management, development, planning and economics from
across South Asia and beyond along with local stakeholders, including
community members, site managers, army, police and policymakers met
in Kathmandu at the Heritage at Risk 2017: Pathways to the Protection
and Rehabilitation of Cultural Heritage in South Asia between 4th and
7th September 2017 to discuss contemporary issues of the protection of
heritage during natural disaster and conflicts, but also accelerated devel-
opment. The event was sponsored by the UK’s Arts and Humanities
Research Council’s Global Challenges Research Fund (AHRC-GCRF-
AH/P005993/1), with support from UNESCO Kathmandu, ICOMOS
(Nepal) and the Department of Archaeology (Government of Nepal).
1 INTRODUCTION 3
Allowing interaction with, and feedback from, local stakeholders, com-

munity leaders, administrators and key disaster responders and first
responders, the participants co-produced resolutions for the enhanced
protection and rehabilitation of heritage following natural disasters, con-
flict and in the face of accelerated development in Kathmandu and the
Greater Lumbini Area.
These resolutions stressed the collective agreement that community
engagement should be an integral element of heritage interventions but
that it should also be linked with realistic social and economic benefits
to adjoining communities and to a clear strategy related to pilgrim and
tourist activities. It also advocated the undertaking of regular monitor-
ing and evaluation of protection and maintenance processes and the
economic and social benefits that local residents receive from on-site
activities. The delegates also recognized the need for additional tar-
geted exchanges and training, with the adoption of training materials,
to strengthen the capacity of national agencies and NGOs tasked with
the protection of sites and monuments in the face of accelerated devel-
opment. Finally, they recognized the urgent need for the development
of a network of South Asian experts to formulate, share and implement
responses to protect sites and monuments in the face of accelerated
development and climate change.
In this context, community consultations offer the opportunity of
exploring ways in which individuals and groups can be involved in the
protection of sites of archaeological and historical importance, to dis-
cuss the future development of tourism and pilgrimage to the site that
benefit the local community, and to establish mechanisms for continuing
community engagement in archaeological excavations, preservation and
protection. This volume of case studies from across South Asia (Fig. 1.1)
represents our first collective steps towards these collective goals.
1.2 Approaches
There is a causal relationship between heritage, local people and their
well-being. As a result of this bond, local communities and indigenous
peoples are often committed custodians of World Heritage sites, where
they play an important, and sometimes overlooked, role in the stewardship
of the biocultural diversity of their environments. (Brown and Hay-Edie
2014: 5)
Fig. 1.1 Map showing the location of South Asian case studies
Community engagement in archaeological fieldwork and heritage pro-

tection has been of increasing interest to archaeologists and heritage
managers. This is reflected in a literature that includes reports from con-
ferences, a special issue of the International Journal of Heritage Studies
(2010), Little and Shackel (2007), Smith and Waterton (2009), Sapu
(2009), Waterton and Smith (2010), Silva and Chapagain (2013),
Gould (2016, 2018), Brown and Hay-Edie (2014), Carman (2000),
Moshenska and Dhanjal (2011), Perkin (2010), Schmidt (2017),
Schmidt and Pikirayi (2016), Tully (2007), Watson and Waterton
(2010), a number of International Charters and Codes of Practice
including the World Heritage Convention (1972), the Burra Charter
(1999), the ICOMOS Nara Document on Authenticity (1994) and The
1 INTRODUCTION 5
Valletta Principles for the Safeguarding and Management of Historic

Cities, Towns and Urban Areas (2011), and publications from the Getty
Conservation Institute (2009), the Global Heritage Fund (2010) and
UNESCO’s World Heritage Centre (Albert et al. 2012).
Linked to this ‘archaeological’ interest is an established economic
(tourism), conservation, development and social science literature con-
taining broad-ranging debates about what the concepts of ‘community’
and ‘participation’ mean in theory and practice, including Oakley (1991),
Burkey (1993), Chambers (1997) and Kothari et al. (2013) and this has
been referred to by academics and practitioners in archaeology, heritage
protection and tourism sectors (Winter 2009; Crooke 2010). Within this
literature, it has been noted that communities are not usually homoge-
nous or united but often characterized by tensions including issues asso-
ciated with local power and business interests, group identity, access to
resources, political influence, marginalization, religious differences and the
impact of conflict or natural disaster. In the most positive sense, participa-
tion is envisaged as an approach that draws from, and values, local knowl-
edge that can challenge top-down interests and development paths.
Methods used to engage communities include social surveys, opin-
ion and perception polls, participatory and rapid rural appraisal (PRA/
RRA), participatory action research (PAR) and participatory learning
analysis (PAL). In these methods, researchers and practitioners from
outside the communities use a facilitative, empowering and listening
discursive approach that enables them to learn from an engaged com-
munity. However, critics have pointed out that in some cases participa-
tion has been manipulative and may have reinforced Western concepts
and approaches to inclusion. For example, research and analysis that is
designed around a short term project can be defined more by agency
needs and agendas rather than those of the people and community, that
local culture and social relationships are not fully understood, and that if
care is not taken dysfunctional local power disparities are maintained or
even strengthened (Cooke and Kothari 2001).
There remains a challenge for archaeologists and heritage protection
practitioners who want to engage (complex) communities in the exca-
vation, understanding, interpretation, conservation and preservation of
their cultural history. Methods and approaches that tackle such tensions
in a meaningful and sustainable manner are still an issue and require a
multidimensional and multidisciplinary team approach in which disci-
pline interests and priorities need to be negotiated within the overarch-
ing context of ‘what does a community think is best for them?’ and ‘how
might we help them achieve this?’. The balance between site protection
and community needs and interests can give rise to tensions. For exam-
ple, when sites may be linked to community agricultural livelihood or
religious practice, or when funding objectives and priorities do not mesh
with community needs and perceptions of site importance, or when the
local community has no connection with the culture of the site to be
protected and sees it only as a resource.
1.3 Issues and Themes
We have identified the following conceptual and operational issues, ques-
tions and themes which inform the backdrop to this book.
1.3.1 Terminology
The terminology associated with this subject is wide, and definitions of
community engagement vary depending on context. These include:
• Community engagement, community participation, community

consultation, community custodianship;
• Cultural resource management, cultural heritage management,
community-driven heritage engagement;
• Archaeological resource management;
• Archaeological heritage management, community heritage, heritage
conservation, heritage protection;
• Public archaeology, community archaeology.
1.3.2 The Need to Engage Local Communities

In discussions relating to why is it necessary to engage local communi-
ties, a number of reasons have been identified and tried. These include:
• Educating and promoting understanding of what heritage pro-

tection is and why it is important, and the values and meanings of
elements associated with it including historical, archaeological, sci-
entific, economic, social, cultural, religious and political factors
• Explaining the importance of ownership and responsibility, to
strengthen social capital and social fabric and increase capacity of
stewardship of sites;
1 INTRODUCTION 7
• Sharing archaeological skills and knowledge by outside experts with

local people;
• Raising public awareness through outreach activities as to how local
communities can participate in the preservation of sites by identify-
ing risks and dangers and what they can do to protect or mitigate
against these so that communities can become effective custodians
or stewards of sites;
• Disseminating knowledge and information about the site, ongoing
excavation programmes and research findings;
• Discussing methods and processes that will benefit the social and
economic well-being of communities; this may be through local
business enterprise schemes and links with the tourism industry.
1.3.3 Analysis and Understanding of Community Fabric

Underpinning community engagement and the design of partnerships
with local communities is the need to understand social, economic, his-
torical, political and cultural elements that inform both past and pres-
ent contexts. To help with this process, systematic and sustained analytic
methods should be used such as:
• Surveys and mapping to understand the social fabric and social cap-
ital in a local community associated with an archaeological site. This
includes categorizing community identity groups and key stake-
holders and analysing the relationships between them for connec-
tors and dividers;
• Identifying outside stakeholders (regional, national and interna-
tional) and mapping their relationships and interests in the archae-
ological site as well as assessing resources and capacities they might
have;
• Constructing a framework of community engagement to ascertain
who might be involved, and how, in the maintenance and protec-
tion of a site.
1.3.4 Community Engagement Activities

Archaeologists have acknowledged the importance of community
engagement and have implemented activities and approaches that
include:
• Raising awareness and interest in heritage protection through com-

munity meetings, talks by members of archaeology teams, and the
production of information booklets;
• Involving people in excavations and field projects;
• Supporting festivals and cultural events;
• Promoting handicraft and local culture, including provision of small
grants to assist local business opportunities;
• Suggesting and participating in education and vocational skill capac-
ity building, forming archaeology clubs;
• Knowledge exchange between outside experts and local people;
• Tourism development and impact research.
1.4 Challenges for Community Engagement

It is evident from the literature and prevailing practice that many chal-
lenges, context-specific and generic, still remain when designing commu-
nity engagement strategies. These will be picked up by the case study
authors throughout the book but include:
• Community Cohesion: for community-led initiatives to coalesce in

terms of ownership, inclusiveness, trust building and power-sharing,
flexibility and patience is needed to ensure the participation of local
development and peacebuilding NGOs and CBOs.
• Inclusion: broad participation needs to be ensured so that civil soci-
ety is strengthened as a counterbalance to local power structures
which may be perceived as good or bad. In terms of setting up
community engagement processes, important questions that need
to be asked are: who is involved and how are they selected? what do
they do and at what level are they involved—consultation, manage-
ment, decision-making, protection, social mobilization?
• Level of Engagement: the difference between volunteers and
paid workers in community engagement needs to be rational and
explicit.
• Transparent Processes: inclusive public participation is a key to
ensuring community engagement and the strengthening of civil
society.
• Sustainability: community-led processes take time and require a
long-term commitment of support; this might mean longer term
financial assistance, longer term support from archaeology teams,
1 INTRODUCTION 9
continuing education and skills development, and repeated com-

munity surveys. There is also a challenge in keeping a community
interested in between excavations at sites where there is little to be
seen and of no apparent benefit for local people.
• Monitoring, Evaluation and Impact Measuring Mechanisms: a
challenge for community engagement initiatives is the funding of
benchmarking, monitoring and evaluation processes, and for longer
term impact assessment. The combination and linkage between
social and economic data (qualitative and quantitative) requires
interdisciplinary collaboration from the outset of a project.
• Political Interest and Corruption: there may be interference from
political interests on site development and protection and this can
affect the manner in which a community is prepared to become
engaged. It is helpful to ascertain whether political interest is pos-
itive or negative and how close the relationship of local people to
political parties might be and why this is.
• Role of Outside Activist Groups: may mobilize communities to
oppose excavations and agitate for greater community involve-
ment. This takes time and energy from archaeologists and technical
experts.
• Conflict: contested ownership and claim to a heritage location
between identity groups (such as religious) can lead to violence,
political interference and problems for maintenance and protection.
This impacts on how and why local communities become engaged.
• Destruction, Vandalism and Looting: ‘theological’ and cultural
identity attacks on religious sites with or without support of a
local community requires specific types of community engagement
in protection measures. Local communities may be involved in
looting.
• Conflict Prevention and Resolution: setting up new mechanisms or
building on existing processes to resolve conflicts associated with
the site development may challenge existing structures and cause
problems. Approaches might combine traditional methods with
‘newer’ ideas.
• Impact of Tourism: communities may be worried with regard to
increased visitor numbers and their social and cultural impact on
traditions and beliefs and influence on younger people.
• Coherence and Integration: the integration of the different levels
of governance (local, regional, national, international) is needed
to ensure that there is complementarity of action between archae-

ological site excavation and protection measures with the wider
economic and development infrastructure plans. This means regu-
lar consultation between the local community, business and tourism
sectors perhaps designing an integrated framework for these factors.
Deciding on a lead agency, organization or individual for this is
helpful.
• ‘Experts’ Taking Communities Seriously: the engagement of local
community in conferences and feedback loops does not happen
much at the formal level of symposia and ‘higher’ level consulta-
tions. A challenge is to find ways of bringing local people into these
forums so that their voice is listened to so that they have input at
more conceptual and academic level where programmes and pro-
jects are conceived, reported, and assessed.
• Authenticity and Value of Objects: what is a truthful and credible
expression of value (Nara Document on Authenticity)? Developing
a common understanding about objects and land that is of value or
of no-value to people is important. For example, to an expert some-
thing may be interesting, to a villager it might be rubbish. How is
this commodified? Who decides what to keep and what to discard
and on whose value and ethical base is this decided?
1.5 Book Content
Chapter 2 is written by Shahnaj Husne Jahan, who explores Bangladesh’s
national cultural heritage and then takes Bhitargarh as a case study to
present how micro-heritage tourism can become an effective tool to
improve social benefits and participation for the protection and safe-
guarding of the cultural heritage of Bangladesh. Her chapter will illus-
trate strategies for community-based outreach programmes to promote
sustainable tourism as well as to stimulate public interest in micro-
heritage preservation and management for socio-economic development
of the community. To achieve a balance between income-generation,
sound management of heritage and community involvement in heritage
tourism, the collaboration of all stakeholders is paramount.
In Chapter 3, K. Krishnan and Vrushab Mahesh focus on the design
and development of the Bindu Sarovar Museum at Sidhpur in the Indian
State of Gurarat. A sristhal or pious place, Sidhpur is considered one
of the holiest Hindu sites to perform shradha or post-funerary rites for
1 INTRODUCTION 11
one’s mother. In this context, a group of academics, religious practition-

ers, policy makers and community stakeholders came together to fashion
a modern museum, which presents myth, legend and religious and ritual
practices. Drawing from the site’s deep intangible heritage traditions,
this chapter will evaluate whether this development met its stated goals
of satisfying the intellectual curiosity of visitors, develop their sense of
the past and awareness of heritage of the region and, finally, providing
opportunities to generate income for resident populations.
The Venerable Mahinda Degalle addresses religious and ethnic ten-
sions in Chapter 4, relating to the preservation of archaeological heritage
of Sri Lanka with a focus on Kuragala, which has become a contested
sacred site between Buddhists and Muslims. It contains a Buddhist stupa
and a rock shelter, with third Century BCE Buddhist inscriptions, and
also a shrine with a mosque dedicated to a Persian Sufi mystic. The
chapter will consider debates surrounding politicization of ‘sacredness’
of Kuragala site. For Buddhists, the visible Islamization of Kuragala has
been become a political and co-existence related community issue.
Chapter 5, by Nick Lewer, Anouk Lafortune-Bernard, Robin
Coningham, Kosh Prasad Acharya, and Ram Bahadur Kunwar, highlights
the historical and modern importance of the Greater Lumbini Area in
Nepal within the context of archaeological sites and excavations and the
importance of living cultural heritage preservation and protection. Using
Dohani as a micro-heritage case study, the approaches and methodolo-
gies used for community consultation and community engagement initi-
atives will be described and their effectiveness considered.
In Chapter 6, Marielle Richon reviews projects working with com-
munities initiated by the Oriental Cultural Heritage Sites Protection
Alliance. She provides an overview of projects at Lumbini, Kathmandu’s
Itum Baha Monastery and the Medieval walled city of Lo Manthang in
Upper Mustang. The objectives of the Upper Mustang project are the
preservation of its tangible and intangible cultural heritage. The Gorkha
earthquakes in 2015 generated an awareness among the Lopa commu-
nity and stakeholders about the need to undertake preservation rapidly in
order to protect the local culture for future generations. This chapter will
explore the manner in which the Alliance contributed in building har-
mony between all stakeholders.
In Chapter 7, Lisa Choegyal reflects that World Heritage Site man-
agement is a complex task and that heritage resource managers need to
understand the principles of tourism. Firstly, it is necessary to understand
your visitors, as well as your product and attraction. Secondly, it is

important to see the resource through the eyes of the community.
Community consultations have the objective of empowering people to
participate in resource management, heritage protection and tourism.
Choegyal asserts that it is important that communities receive bene-
fits heritage conservation, and a sustainable partnership exists between
resource managers, stakeholder communities and the tourism industry.
Zahra Hussain discusses the mapping of the cultural landscapes in
northern Pakistan in Chapter 8. Focusing on intangible heritage, she
argues that conflicts and disasters pose considerable risk to intangible
cultural heritage which is not always visible and cannot be easily pro-
tected as it requires deep engagement and analysis. This chapter will
discuss how the process of documenting cultural practices and pattern
language was carried out in the northern Valleys of Pakistan. It will high-
light participatory mapping methodologies used in the field and how
communities were involved in the process of generating, producing,
reflecting and exchanging knowledge.
Chapter 9, by Rajendra Narsingh Suwal, describes Nepal’s success
in natural heritage conservation stewardship moving from a protection
regime to a community participatory and revenue-sharing mechanism.
He shows how innovative community projects helped assist animal pro-
tection, anti-poaching activities, habitat management, forest restora-
tion and livelihood activities. Involvement by members of a community
in the planning and decision-making process was essential for the suc-
cess of these initiatives. Suwal suggests that this approach to community
engagement, to which WWF Nepal has contributed, may prove useful
for conservation stewardship of archaeological and other heritage sites.
In Chapter 10, Kai Weise examines community engagement, archae-
ology and heritage protection in Bagan, Myanmar. The chapter charts
the difficult process of nominating Bagan for World Heritage status
and raises concerns about threats to the cultural heritage site. The link
between the monuments, subsurface archaeology and the landscape and
the human activity of farming is noted. Recently, the local community
has been strengthened because of governance opportunities through the
newly elected government. Communities are now taking a lead in dis-
cussing the future of Bagan and this chapter presents a case study of a
community that has only recently been politically empowered and is still
finding confidence in its engagement role.
1 INTRODUCTION 13
Chapter 11, by Robin Coningham and Nick Lewer, examines two

case studies, the Orange Metro Line in Lahore, Pakistan and Jaffna
Fort in Sri Lanka. These examples describe some of the broader (politi-
cal, economic, post-war) problematic and sensitive issues associated with
heritage protection and archaeological excavations in economic develop-
ment and post-war contexts.
Our final Chapter, Chapter 12, reviews and comments on the key
issues and lessons learned, both generic- and context-specific, from the
case studies and discusses challenges for community engagement when
built in as an integral part of the archaeological project process.
We acknowledge the generosity of Durham University and Durham’s
UNESCO Chair in allowing Chapters 1, 5 and 12 to be made Open
Access to reach and influence as wide an audience as possible. Finally, it
should be noted that diacritical marks have been dispensed with follow-
ing the convention of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of India, Pakistan,
Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan and the Maldives.
References
Albert, M. T., Richon, N., Viñals, M. J., & Whitcomb, A. (Eds.). (2012).
Community Development Through World Heritage. World Heritage Papers No.
31. Paris: UNESCO. http://whc.unesco.org/en/series/31.
Brown, J., & Hay-Edie, T. (2014). Engaging Local Communities in Stewardship
of World Heritage: A Methodology Based on the COMPACT Experience. World
Heritage Papers No. 40. Paris: UNESCO.
Burkey, B. (1993). People First: A Guide to Self-Reliant Participatory Rural
Development. London: Zed Books.
Carman, J. (2000). Theorising a Realm of Practice? Introducing Archaeological
Heritage Management as a Research Field. International Journal of Heritage
Studies, 6(4), 303–308.
Chambers, R. (1997). Whose Reality Counts? Putting the First Last. London:
Intermediate Technology Publications.
Coningham, R. A. E., Acharya, K. P., Davis, C. E., Weise, K., Kunwar, R. B.,
& Simpson, I. A. (2018). Look Down, Not Up: Protecting the Post-disaster
Subsurface Heritage of the Kathmandu Valley’s UNESCO World Heritage
Site. In L. A. Bracken, H. Ruszczyk, & T. Robinson (Eds.), Evolving
Narratives of Hazard and Risk: The Gorkha Earthquake, Nepal, 2015 (pp.
159–181). London: Palgrave.
Coningham, R. A. E., & Young, R. L. (2015). The Archaeology of South Asia:
From the Indus to Asoka. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cooke, B., & Kothari, U. (Eds.). (2001). Participation: The New Tyranny?
London: Zed Books.
Crooke, E. (2010). The Politics of Community Heritage: Motivations, Authority
and Control. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 16(1–2), 6–29.
Getty Conservation Institute. (2009). Conserving Heritage In East Asian Cities:
Planning For Continuity and Change. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation
Institute. http://www.getty.edu/conservation/publications_resources/teach-
ing/management.html.
Global Heritage Fund. (2010). Saving Our Vanishing Heritage: Safeguarding
Endangered Cultural Heritage Sites in the Developing World. Palo Alto: Global
Heritage Fund.
Gould, P. (2016). On the Case: Method in Public and Community Archaeology.
Public Archaeology, 15(1), 5–22.
Gould, P. (2018, forthcoming). Empowering Communities Through Archaeology
and Heritage: The Role of Local Governance in Economic Development.
London: Bloomsbury.
Kothari, A., Camill, P., & Brown, J. (2013). Conservation as If People
Also Mattered: Policy and Practice of Community-Based Conservation.
Journal of Conservation and Society, 11(1), 1–15. http://www.conserva-
tionandsociety.org/article.asp?issn=0972-4923;year=2013;volume=11;is-
sue=1;spage=1;epage=15;aulast=Kothari.
Little, B., & Shackel, P. (Eds.). (2007). Archaeology as a Tool of Civic
Engagement. Lanham: AltaMira Press.
Moshenska, G., & Dhanjal, S. (Eds.). (2011). Community Archaeology: Themes,
Methods and Practices. Oxford: Oxbow Books.
Oakley, P. (Ed.). (1991). Projects with People: The Practice of Participation in
Rural Development. Geneva: International Labour Office.
Perkin, C. (2010). Beyond the Rhetoric: Negotiating the Politics and Realising
the Potential of Community-Driven Heritage Engagement. International
Journal of Heritage Studies, 16(1–2), 107–122.
Sapu, S. (2009). Community Participation in Heritage Conservation. In
Conserving Heritage in East Asian Cities: Planning For Continuity and
Change. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute. http://www.getty.
edu/conservation/publications_resources/teaching/management.html.
Schmidt, P. (2017). Community-Based Heritage in Africa: Unveiling Local
Research and Development Initiatives. London: Routledge.
Schmidt, P., & Pikirayi, I. (Eds.). (2016). Community Archaeology and Heritage
in Africa: Decolonizing Practice. London: Routledge.
Silva, K., & Chapagain, N. (Eds.). (2013). Asian Heritage Management:
Concepts, Concerns and Prospects. London: Taylor and Francis.
Smith, L., & Waterton, E. (2009). Heritage, Communities, and Archaeology.
London: Duckworth.
1 INTRODUCTION 15
Tully, G. (2007). Community Archaeology: General Methods and Standards of

Practice. Public Archaeology, 6(3), 155–187.
Waterton, E., & Smith, L. (2010). The Recognition and Misrecognition of
Community Heritage. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 16(1–2),
4–15.
Watson, S., & Waterton, E. (2010). Heritage and Community Engagement.
International Journal of Heritage Studies, 16(1–2), 1–3.
Winter, T. (2009). Tourism and Development. In Conserving Heritage in East
Asian Cities: Planning For Continuity and Change. Los Angeles: The Getty
Conservation Institute. http://www.getty.edu/conservation/publications_
resources/teaching/management.html.
Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction
in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original
author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and
indicate if changes were made.
The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the
chapter’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line
to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons
license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds
the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright
holder.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
and benevolence a virtue. The innkeepers of Palermo obey their
church and spite heretics by selling meat in June, but not in March;
The innkeepers of El Medina spite unbelievers and honor the Koran
by selling meat in March, but not in June. The Buddhist innkeepers
of Lassa sell only salt meat, imported from China, and spite Infidels
by refusing to kill a cow under any circumstances. But Sicilians,
Thibetans, and Arabs would agree that no innkeeper should be
permitted to spite a personal enemy by salting his meat with arsenic.
Nations that totally disagree in their notions of propriety, in matters of
taste, and in their bias of religious prejudice, will nevertheless be
found to agree on the essential standards of humanity and justice.
The “instinct of equity,” as Leibnitz calls the sense of natural justice,
has been still better defined as the “instinct of keeping contracts.” A
state of Nature is not always a state of equal rights. Skill, strength,
and knowledge enjoy the advantage of superior power in the form of
manifold privileges, but the expediency of “keeping contracts”
naturally recommends itself as the only safe basis of social
intercourse. Those contracts need not always be [139]specified by
written laws. They need not even be formulated in articulate speech.
Their obligations are tacitly recognized as a preliminary of any sort of
social coöperation, of any sort of social concomitance. “Give every
man his due;” “Pay your debts;” “Give if you would receive,” are
international maxims, founded on the earliest impressions of social
instinct, rather than on the lessons of social science or of
preternatural revelation. The first discoverers of the South Sea
Islands were amazed by a license of sexual intercourse that seemed
to exceed the grossest burlesques of French fiction; but they were
almost equally surprised by the scrupulous exactness of commercial
fair-dealing observed by those incontinent children of Nature. An
islander, who had agreed to pay three bagfuls of yam-roots for a
common pocket-knife, delivered two bagfuls (all his canoe would
hold) before the evening of the next day, and received his knife, as
the sailors had about all the provisions they could use. But the next
morning, in trying to leave the coast by tacking against a fitful
breeze, they were overtaken by a canoe, containing a desperately-
rowing savage and that third bag of yam-roots. The traveler
Chamisso mentions a tribe of Siberian fishermen who boarded his
ship to deliver a harpoon which former visitors had forgotten in their
winter-camp. Theft, according to the testimony even of their Roman
adversaries, was almost unknown among the hunting-tribes of the
primitive German woodlands. The natives of San Salvador received
their Spanish invaders with respectful hospitality, and scrupulously
abstained from purloining, or even [140]touching, any article of their
ship-stores; and a similar reception welcomed their arrival in Cuba
and San Domingo, the natives being apparently unable to conceive
the idea that their guests could repay good with evil. “Fair play” is the
motto of boyish sports in the kraals of Kaffir-land, not less than on
the recess-ground of Eton College. A rudimentary sense of justice
manifests itself even among social animals. A baboon who wantonly
attacks an inoffensive fellow-ape is liable to get mobbed by the
whole troop. A nest-robbing hawk has to beat an immediate retreat
under penalty of being attacked by all the winged neighbors and
relatives of his victims. Dogs that will endure the most inhuman
methods of training are not apt to forgive an act of gratuitous cruelty.
They may resign themselves to a system of consistent severity, but
refuse to submit to evident injustice.
[Contents]
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
Justice is the royal attribute of noble souls; the most inalienable

crown of their prestige. Men who would defy the power of superior
strength, or envy and depreciate the superior gifts of genius, will do
unbidden homage to the majesty of superior justice. “Mars is a
tyrant,” says Plutarch, in the epilogue of “Demetrius,” “but justice is
the rightful sovereign of the world.” “The things which kings receive
from heaven are not machines for taking towns, or ships with brazen
beaks, but law and justice; these they are to guard and cultivate. And
it is not the most warlike, the most violent and sanguinary, but the
[141]justest of princes, whom Homer calls the disciple of Jupiter.”
History has more than once confirmed that test of supremacy. The
reputation of incorruptible integrity alone has made poor princes, and
even private citizens, the arbiters of nations.
King Hieron of Syracuse thus arbitrated the disputes of his warlike

neighbors. Plato, Phocion, Philopoemen, Cato, and Abencerrage
(Ibn Zerrag) settled international quarrels which the sword had failed
to decide. The prestige of uprightness has made honor almost a
synonyme of an “honorable,” i.e., honest, reputation. The
commercial integrity of Hebrew merchants has overcome race-
jealousies and religious prejudices, and in America the worship of
wealth does not prevent an upright judge from ranking high above a
wealthier, but less scrupulous, attorney.
The consciousness of a just cause is an advantage which, more than

once, has outweighed a grievous disadvantage in wealth and power.
It biased the fortune of war in the battles of Leuctra and Lodi; it
enabled the Scythian herdsmen to annihilate the veterans of King
Cyrus, and the Swiss peasants to rout the chivalry of Austria and
Burgundy. A just cause enlists sympathy, and, as a bond of union,
surpasses the value of common interests, which a slight change of
circumstances is apt to turn into conflicting interests and
disagreement. Strict adherence to the principles of political equity
has preserved small states in the midst of powerful neighbors,
whose greed of conquest is restrained by their hesitation to incur the
odium of wanton aggression. Belgium, [142]Holland, and Denmark
have thus preserved their national independence in Europe, as
Japan and Acheen in the East. In Central Africa the honesty and
simplicity of the agricultural Ethiopians has proved a match for the
cunning of the predatory Moors, who constantly pillage their
neighbors, but as constantly quarrel about the division of their spoils,
and, in the vicissitudes of their civil wars, have again and again been
obliged to purchase the alliance of the despised “heathen.”
The practical advantages of integrity have been recognized in the

proverbial wisdom of all nations, but are not confined to the affairs of
commercial intercourse. In the long run, honesty is the “best policy,”
even in avocations where the perversion of justice may seem to
promise a temporary advantage. A lawyer who refuses to defend a
wealthy knave against a poor plaintiff will gain in self-respect, and
ultimately also in professional reputation, more than he has lost in
direct emoluments. A politician who refuses to resort to chicanes
may miss the chance of a short-lived triumph, but will sow a seed of
prestige sure to ripen its eventual harvest.
[Contents]
C.—PERVERSION.
Justice, in the pristine pagan sense of the word, was too natural and
too manly a virtue to find much favor with the whining moralists of
Antinaturalism. The truth which a modern philosopher has
condensed in the sarcasm that “an honest god is the noblest work of
man,” was recognized already by the ancient historian who observed
that “every nation makes its [143]gods the embodiments of its own
ideals,” though, happily, it is not always true that “no worshiper is
better than the object of his worship.” To some degree, however, the
moral standards of the Mediterranean pagans were undoubtedly
prejudiced by the lewd propensities of their Olympians, and it is
equally certain that the extravagant injustice of Christian fanatics can
be partly explained, as well as condoned, by the moral
characteristics of their dogma-God. According to the accepted
doctrine of the Middle Ages, the administrative principles of that God
seemed to imply a degree of moral perversity which even the poetic
license of a saner age would have hesitated to ascribe to a fiend.
The same deity whom the creed of the Galilean church makes the
omniscient creator of all the physical and moral instincts of human
nature, nevertheless was supposed to punish with endless torture
nearly every free gratification of those instincts, and demand a
voluntary renunciation of a world which his own bounty had filled with
every blessing, and adorned with every charm of loveliness. The
God who endowed us with faculties of reason, of which a moderate
share is sufficient to perceive the absurdities of the Christian dogma,
nevertheless avenges the repudiation of that dogma as an
“unpardonable sin against the authority of his sacred word.” The
most natural action, the eating of an apple, is made the pretext of the
supposed fall of man, and of penalties affecting not only his progeny,
but all his fellow-creatures, and even the lower products of organic
Nature; while the greatest of all imaginable crimes, a Deicide, the
cruel murder of a [144]god, is accepted as a basis of redemption. The
doctrine of salvation by grace made the distribution of punishments
and rewards a matter of mere caprice. The dogmatists of
predestination distinctly taught that the “elect” were not saved by
their own merits, but by an inscrutable, incalculable, and gratuitous
act of divine favor, while others were as inevitably foredoomed to an
eternity of woe. By faith alone, or by faith and the ceremony of
immersion, the guilt of a sinful life could, withal, be cancelled in the
eleventh hour, while the omission of that ceremony doomed even
children, nay, newborn babes, to the abyss of hellfire. “There is no
doubt,” the Solomon of the Patristic Age assures us, “that infants,
only a few spans in length, are crawling on the bottom of hell,” a
doctrine which the historian of Rationalism justly stigmatizes as “so
atrocious, and at the same time so extravagantly absurd, that it
would be simply impossible for the imagination to surpass its
insanity.” Yet for more than twelve hundred years Christians were in
danger of being burnt at the stake for refusing to attribute such
infamies to their creator.
[Contents]
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
Need we wonder that the converts of that creed believed in the merit
of passive submission to the caprices of earthly despots, and
scorned the appeals of justice in their dealings with pagans and
Freethinkers? Why should men try to be better than their God? The
worshiper of a God who doomed the souls of unbaptized children
and honest dissenters, naturally had no hesitation in assailing the
[145]bodies of their unbelieving fellow-men, and princes who loaded
fawning sycophants with favors which they denied to honest patriots
could appeal to the sanction of a divine precedent. Every petty
“sovereign of six faithful square miles” accordingly became a law to
himself. A man’s might was the only measure of his right; the Faust-
Recht, the “first law” of iron-clad bullies, reigned supreme from the
Baltic to the Mediterranean, and the judges of (the only independent)
ecclesiastic courts confined their attention to ferocious punishments
of neglect in the payment of tithes, and the performance of socage
duties and ceremonies. The belief in the divine right of potentates,
and passive submission to even the most outrageous abuse of that
power, were assiduously inculcated as primary duties of a Christian
citizen. Natural justice, civil rights, and the laws of humanity had no
place in that code of revealed ethics.
Such teachings bore their fruit in the horrors of insurrection. In the

Peasants’ War thousands of convents and castles were rent as by
the outburst of a hurricane, and their dwellers had to learn the
inconvenience of having to submit to the powers that happened to
be, by being torn limb from limb, or flayed and roasted alive.
“Si no se obedecen los leyes, es ley que todo se pierde,” is the

Spanish translation of an old Arabian proverb: “If justice is
disregarded, it is just that everything perish”—a doom which the
intolerable outrages against human rights and humanity at last
experienced in the cataclysm of the French Revolution. [146]There,
too, the despisers of natural justice had to eat their own doctrine, the
strongholds of absolutism that had withstood the tears of so many
generations were swept away by a torrent of blood, and the priests
and princes whose inhumanity had turned their serfs into wild beasts
learned the significance of their mistake when their own throats were
mangled by the fangs of those beasts.
The doctrine of salvation by grace had substituted favor and caprice

for the rights of natural justice, and for a series of centuries the
consequences of its teachings were seen in the treatment of nearly
every benefactor of mankind. The prince who devoted the fruits of
his conquests to the feeding of countless convent drones, let
scholars starve and loaded the discoverer of a New World with
chains. His successors who lavished the treasures of their vast
empire on pimps and clerical mountebanks, let Cervantes perish in
penury. The sovereign protector of a thousand stall-fed prelates
refused to relieve the last distress of John Kepler. The moralists who
thought it a grievance that the church should be denied the right of
tithing the lands of southern Spain, had no pity for the sufferings of
the men whose labor had made those lands blossom like the
gardens of paradise, and who were exiled by thousands for the
crime of preferring the unitary God of the Koran to the trinitary gods
of the New Testament.
[Contents]
E.—REFORM.
The perversion of our moral standards by the dogmas of an

antinatural creed is still glaringly evident [147]in the prevailing notions
of natural justice and the precedence of social duties. The modern
Crœsus who deems it incumbent on his duties as a citizen and a
Christian to contribute an ample subvention to the support of an
orthodox seminary, has no hesitation in swelling his already bloated
income by reducing the wages of a hundred starving factory children
and taking every sordid advantage in coining gain from the loss of
helpless tenants and dependants. The pious Sabbatarians who
doom their poor neighbors to an earthly Gehenna and premature
death by depriving them of every chance for healthful recreation,
lavish their luxuries and their endearments on the caged cutthroat
who edifies his jailer by renouncing the vanities of this worldly sphere
and ranting about the bliss of the New Jerusalem. The bank cashier
who would never be pardoned for kicking the hind-parts of a
mendicant missionary is readily absolved from the sin of such
secular indiscretions as embezzling the savings of a few hundred
widows and orphans.
Before resuming the rant about our solicitude for the interests of
departed souls, we should learn to practice a little more common
honesty in our dealings with the interests of our living fellow-men.
Natural justice would be less frequently outraged if our moral
reformers would distinctly repudiate the doctrines of vicarious
atonement and salvation by faith, and hold every man responsible
for his own actions, irrespective of his belief or disbelief in the claims
of an Asiatic miracle-monger. And moreover, the exponents of
Secularism should insist on a truth not [148]unknown to the moralists
of antiquity, that habitual submission to injustice is a vice instead of a
virtue, and that he who thinks it a merit to signalize his unworldliness
by failing to assert his own rights encourages oppression and fraud
and endangers the rights of his honest fellow-men.
[Contents]
CHAPTER XII.
TRUTH.
[Contents]
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
The enemies of Nature have for ages based the favorite arguments
of their creed on the doctrine of Natural Depravity. According to the
theories of that tenet the natural instincts of the human heart are
wholly evil, and its every nobler impulse is due to the redeeming
influence of theological education. The baseness of the
“unregenerate soul” is their favorite antithesis of “holiness by grace;”
and the best test of that dogma would be a comparison of the moral
characteristics of a young child of Nature with the moral results of
theological training. We need not adduce the extreme case of a child
like Kaspar Hauser or the ape-nursed foundling of Baroda, whose
propensities had been modeled in communion with solitude or the
dumb denizens of the wilderness. For, even in the midst of “Christian
civilization,” thousands of peasants and mechanics are practically
pure Agnostics, and ignore the absurdities of the New Testament as
persistently as their deer-hunting ancestors ignored the absurdities
[149]of pagan mythology. At the end of his sixth or seventh year the
offspring of such parents would still represent a fair specimen-child
of unregenerate Nature, and the normal bias of that Nature is
revealed in the honesty, the trusting innocence, the purity, and the
cheerfulness of the young Agnostic, and the absence of every
appreciable germ of the secret vices, the rancorous spites, and the
joy-hating bigotries of the representative Christian convent-slave.
But the most characteristic features of that contrast would perhaps

be the double-tongued hypocrisy of the old Jesuit and the artless
candor of the young peasant boy. The truthfulness of young children
antedates all moral instruction. Its motives are wholly independent of
theological, or even abstract-ethical, influences, and are based
merely on a natural preference for the simplest way of dealing with
the problems of intellectual communication. Truth is uniform,
falsehood is complex. Truth is persistent and safe; falsehood is
unstable, fragile, and precarious. Children instinctively recognize the
difficulties of plausibly maintaining the fictions of deceit, and dread
the risk of incurring the suspicion of habitual insincerity. Hence their
uncompromising loyalty to facts; their innocence of artifice and
mental reservation; hence also their extreme reluctance in
conforming to the conventional customs of social hypocrisy and
polite prevarication.
“Are you not glad Mrs. D. is gone?” Master Frank once asked his
mother in my presence. “Well, yes, I am.” “Then what’s the use
asking her to call [150]again and stay for supper? She could not help
seeing that we were tired of her gabble.” “Well, it wouldn’t do to insult
her, you know.” “Oh, no, but what’s the use telling her something she
cannot believe?”
That last remark, especially, recurs to my memory whenever the

expedience of hypocrisy is defended by the conventional sophisms
of Christian civilization. That prevarications are unprofitable as well
as unpardonable is a truth which Jesuitry has shrouded with a veil of
its choicest cant, but the clear vision of childhood penetrates that
cant, and the “natural depravity” of unregenerate souls may reach
the degree of doubting the merit of simulation even in the interest of
an orthodox creed, as the reverend dogmatist might ascertain by
happening to overhear the recess comments of our American
Sabbath-school youngsters.
[Contents]
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
The Utilitarians hold that motives of enlightened self-interest would

be sufficient to make a man perfectly virtuous. With the conventional
definition of “virtue,” that tenet might require certain qualifications;
but it is more than probable that perfect prudence would insure a
voluntary devotion to perfect truthfulness. In its most aggressive form
the hatred of falsehood may imperil the temporary interests of the
aggressor, but in every other sense the path of truth is the path of
safety. All the ultimate tendencies of the moral and physical universe
conspire to vindicate truth and discredit fraud. [151]
Assertions based on fact stand erect, upheld by the evidence of

experience as an upright building by the law of gravity; deception,
with all its props of plausible sophisms, is tottering like a wall out of
plumb, or a rotten tree upheld by artificial supports which in their turn
must yield to the test of time.
Even from a standpoint of purely secular considerations, truth, like

honesty, is in the long run the best policy. Abstinence from insidious
poisons is easier than temperance, and the lessons of experience
have at all times convinced the most clear-sighted of our fellow-men
that consistent abstinence from the vice of hypocrisy is preferable to
any compromise with the interests of imposture. The non-clerical,
and almost Agnostic, education of the American wilderness seems to
favor that type of moral teetotalism, and among the hardy hill-
farmers of our New England highlands, and Southern mountain
states, one may find men almost constitutionally incapable of
conscious deceit in deed or word, and practicing veracity without the
least pretense to superior saintliness, in a quite untheological and
often, indeed, decidedly profane medium of speech. They stick to
truth from habit, rather than from moral principles, yet among their
simple-hearted neighbors they enjoy a respect withheld from
unctuous hypocrisy, and in emergencies can always rely on the
practical value of a life-long reputation for candor. Their word is
sufficient security; their denial of slanderous imputations is accepted
without the aid of compurgators.
The simple religion of Mohammed has favored the development of a

similar disposition, and on the [152]Austrian-Turkish frontier the word
of a Mussulman generally carries the weight of a casting vote. On
the Indian ocean, too, the verdict of international opinion favors a
preference for Unitarian testimony. “Wish to heaven we could fall in
with some Acheen fishermen,” Captain Baudissin heard his pilot
mutter among the reefs of the Sunda Islands, “it’s no use asking
such d—— liars as those Hindoos and Chinese.”
The love of truth compels the respect even of impostors and of

professional hypocrites, as in the case of that curate mentioned by
the German Freethinker, Weber (author of the philosophical
cyclopedia, “Democritus”). Professor Weber passed his last years in
the retirement of a small south-German mountain village, where his
undisguised skepticism made him the bugbear of the local
pharisees; yet on moonless evenings he was more than once
honored by the visits of a neighboring village priest, who risked
censure, and, perhaps, excommunication, for the sake of enjoying
the luxury of a respite from the sickening cant of his colleagues, and
devoting a few hours to intellectual communion with a champion of
Secular science.
Lessing’s allegory of “Nathan” is founded on something more than

fiction, and there is no doubt that even in the midnight of the Middle
Ages the gloomy misery of the Hebrew pariahs was often cheered by
the secret visits of some intelligent Christian whom the thirst for truth
impelled to defy the vigilance of the heretic-hunter, and to prefer an
intellectual symposium in the garret of a Jewish slum [153]alley to a
feast in the banquet hall of a Christian prelate.
“It is lucky for you that your opponents have not learned to utilize the
advantage of truth,” Mirabeau replied to the taunt of an insolent
Jesuit; and in logic that advantage can, indeed, hardly be overrated.
“They find believers who themselves believe,” and, as the
philosopher Colton observes, a sort of instinct often enables the
simplest countryman to distinguish the language of honest conviction
from the language of artful sophistry. “Our jurymen seem to
appreciate a first-class lie only from an artistic standpoint,”
confessed a lawyer of my acquaintance, “for some of them privately
hinted that they could tell it every time.”
Others, no doubt, lack that degree of acumen; but first-class orators,

as well as first-class authors, have always recognized the wisdom of
not relying on such mental defects of the public. Charles Darwin’s
works, for instance, owe their popularity to their erudition and their
grace of style, hardly more than to the absolute candor of the author,
who reviews the evidence for and against his theories with the
fairness of a conscientious judge, and by that very impartiality has
succeeded in prevailing against the partisan arguments of his
adversaries. For similar reasons our “Christian” temperance
societies can date their triumphs only from the time when they
frankly repudiated the sophisms of their predecessors, who hoped to
reconcile the lessons of science with the teachings of the alcohol-
brewing Galilean. For truth [154]prevails against half-truth, as well as
against absolute untruth.
[Contents]
C.—PERVERSION.
Since the dawn of rationalism perhaps no other literary product of

Freethought has provoked the enemies of Nature to that degree of
rancorous fury excited by the appearance of Moliere’s “Tartuffe.” The
hero of that famous drama is an old pharisee whose resolve to
renounce the “vanities of earth” is constantly tripped by the
promptings of his physical instincts, and who resorts to all kinds of
ludicrous sophisms to palliate the antagonism of two ever
irreconcilable principles:
Le ciel défend, de vrai, certain contentements,

Mais on trouve avec lui des accommodements—
and the drama never failed to attract a jubilant audience; but the
French priesthood moved heaven and earth to stop the performance,
and can, indeed, hardly be blamed for rejecting the apologies of the
author’s friends; for the irony of Tartuffe ridicules the shams, not only
of the Catholic clergy, but of their creed and the creed of their
Protestant colleagues: it is, in fact, a scathing satire on the
absurdities of Christian Antinaturalism. The impossibility of
reconciling the demands of Nature with the precepts of a world-
renouncing fanatic has, indeed, made the worship of that fanatic a
systematic school of hypocrisy and subverted the moral health of its
victims as effectually as the unnatural restraints of convent life
subverted the basis of physical health. [155]
God is paid when man receiveth;

To enjoy is to obey;
says Nature with the poet of reason. “God delights in the self-torture
of his creatures—crucify your flesh, despise your body, disown the
world; renounce! renounce!” croaks the chorus of Christian
dogmatists, and can silence protest only by turning health into
disease or candor into hypocrisy.
The dogma of salvation by faith offers an additional premium on

mental prostitution. By punishing honest doubt as a crime and
inculcating the merit of blind submission to the authority of reason-
insulting doctrines, the defenders of those doctrines struck a deadly
blow at the instinct of free inquiry, and for a series of generations
actually succeeded in eradicating that instinct from the mental
constitution of their victims.
“The persecutor,” says W. H. Lecky, “can never be certain that he is

not persecuting truth rather than error, but he may be quite certain
that he is suppressing the spirit of truth. And, indeed, it is no
exaggeration to say that the doctrines I have reviewed represent the
most skilful and at the same time most successful conspiracy against
that spirit that has ever existed among mankind. Until the
seventeenth century, every mental disposition which philosophy
pronounces to be essential to a legitimate research was almost
uniformly branded as a sin, and a large proportion of the most deadly
intellectual vices were deliberately inculcated as virtues.… In a word,
there is scarcely a disposition that marks the love of abstract truth
and scarcely a rule which [156]reason teaches as essential for its
attainment that theologians did not for ages stigmatize as offensive
to the Almighty.”
And those perversions culminated in the miracle-mongery of the

wretched superstition. If the material universe was at the mercy of
witches and tricksy demons, no man could for a moment trust the
evidence of his own senses and was naturally driven to complete his
mental degradation by an absolute surrender of common sense to
dogma. The history of Christian dogmatism is the history of an
eighteen hundred years’ war against Nature and Truth.
[Contents]
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
The drift sand of the deserts covering the site of once fertile empires
still attests the physical consequences of a thousand years’ reign of
Antinaturalism, but, happily, the time has already come when many
of our fellow-men almost fail to credit the degree of mental
abasement realized during the most orthodox centuries of that reign.
It would be no overstatement to say that for nearly six hundred years
the priests of the Galilean miracle-monger persuaded a plurality of
the Caucasian nations to risk their lives in defense of dogmas the
mere profession of which would start a modern Christian on a
galloping trip to the next lunatic asylum.
Decapitated saints were believed to have emerged from their tombs

and paid their respects to a newly appointed bishop; flying dragons
descended through the air to snatch the bodies of unbelievers and
disappeared with screams that frightened orthodox [157]neighbors to
take refuge in their cellar-holes; swarms of angels carried bones,
crosses, and whole buildings from Bethlehem to Loretto; King Philip
the Second paid a thousand doubloons for a skeleton of St.
Laurentius, and having been informed that a complete skeleton of
the same saint was for sale in the south of Italy, he at once ratified
the bargain and blessed heaven for having favored him with a
duplicate of the precious relic. Thousands of unfortunates were tried
and executed on a charge of having taken an aerial excursion on a
broomstick or a black he-goat; of having caused a gale by churning a
potful of froth and water; of having turned themselves into foxes,
wolves, and tomcats.
The instinct of recognizing the absurdity of even the most glaring

superstitions seems to have become wholly extinct in the minds of
the forty generations from the middle of the tenth to the end of the
fourteenth century; and during that millennium of madness the
suppression of free inquiry encouraged thousands of pious tract-
mongers to devote their lives to the wholesale forgery of saintly
biographies and miracle legends, and disseminate under the name
of historical records insanities too extravagant even for the readers
of a modern nursery-tale.
The war against Truth was carried to the length of suppressing not
only the skeptical inferences of science, but science itself; chemists,
astronomers, physiologists, mathematicians, and bona fide
historians could pursue their inquiries only at the risk of an
inquisitorial indictment; and a cloud of ignorance, which in the days
of Horace and Pliny would [158]have been thought disgraceful to the
obscurest hamlet of the Roman empire, brooded for ages over the
face of the entire Christian world.
For a series of centuries the encouragement of credulity and

imposture almost annulled the value of contemporary records.
Travelers and chroniclers, as well as biographers, accommodated
the popular taste by dealing, not in marvels only, but in miracles;
witchcraft anecdotes, preternatural resurrections, prodigies of skill
and physical prowess, giants, dragons, were-wolves, and no end of
spectral manifestations. It is no exaggeration to say that for a period
of more than nine hundred years the dogma of the Galilean
antinaturalist systematically favored the survival of the unfit, by
offering a premium on mental prostitution and making common
sense a capital crime.
[Contents]
E.—REFORM.
The triumph of the Protestant revolt has ushered in a dawn which, in

comparison with the preceding night, may justly vaunt its era as an
Age of Reason; but the thousand years’ perversion of our moral
instincts has not been wholly redeemed by the educational
influences of a short century. For even eighty years ago the
educational reforms of the Protestant nations attempted little more
than a compromise between reason and dogma, while their southern
neighbors revolted against the political influence, rather than against
the dogmatical arrogance, of their priesthood. Nay, even at present
the fallacies of the compromise plan still hamper the [159]progress of
reform in manifold directions. As an American Freethinker aptly
expresses it: “Truth is no longer kept under lock and key, but is kindly
turned loose to roam at large—after being chained to a certain
number of theological cannon-balls.” Evolution may pursue its
inquiries into specific phases of organic development, but must not
question the correctness of the Mosaic traditions; rationalists may
inveigh against the insanities of the Middle Ages, but must pretend to
overlook the fact that the doctrine of the New Testament contains the
germs of all those insanities; the science of health may denounce
modern fallacies, but must beware to mention the anti-physical
precepts of the body-despising Galilean; Materialists must attack the
hobgoblins of the Davenport brothers, but ignore the hog-goblins of
Gadara; historical critics may call attention to the inconsistencies of
Livy and Plutarch, but must not mention the self-contradictions of the
New Testament.
Yet logic and philosophy will be little more than a farce till the axiom
of a great biologist can be applied to the pursuit of every human
science. “Inquiries of that sort” (the “Descent of Man”), he says,
“have nothing whatever to do with personal tastes or vested

PDF Archaeology Cultural Heritage Protection and Community Engagement in South Asia Robin Coningham Ebook Full Chapter

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

PDF Archaeology Cultural Heritage Protection and Community Engagement in South Asia Robin Coningham Ebook Full Chapter

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Archaeology, Cultural Heritage

Protection and Community

Climate Refugees in South Asia Protection Under

Transforming Heritage Practice in the 21st Century:

Biota Grow 2C gather 2C cook Loucas

Digital Heritage Progress in Cultural Heritage

Culture conflict and the military in colonial South

South Asia in world history 1st Edition Gilbert

Constitutional Foundings In South Asia Kevin Yl Tan

Lead in Glassy Materials in Cultural Heritage 1st

ISBN 978-981-13-6236-1 ISBN 978-981-13-6237-8 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019933316

Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan

UNESCO and Durham University jointly established the UNESCO

• develop new guidelines and exemplar material for postgraduate

• create opportunities for postgraduate research and education in the

Community consultations offer the opportunity of exploring ways in

Durham, UK Robin Coningham

2 Communities and Micro-Heritage in Bhitargarh,

3 Awakening Myths, Legends and Heritage 31

4 Kuragala: Religious and Ethnic Communities

5 Community Engagement in the Greater Lumbini Area

6 Protecting Heritage and Strengthening Community

7 Tourism and Community Engagement in World

8 Mapping the Intangible: ‘At Risk’ Heritage

9 Community Engagement in Natural Heritage

10 Reclaiming the Heritage of Bagan: Communities

11 Communities, Identities, Conflict

Kosh Prasad Acharya joined the Government of Nepal’s Department

Vrushab Mahesh is Assistant Professor in the Department of

Fig. 8.3 Community map of daily and seasonal routines of women

Table 5.1 Overview of the population of the Greater Lumbini Area

Robin Coningham and Nick Lewer

Abstract Coningham and Lewer chart the interest of archaeologists and

© The Author(s) 2019 1

Keywords South Asia · Community engagement · Archaeology

Allowing interaction with, and feedback from, local stakeholders, com-

Community engagement in archaeological fieldwork and heritage pro-

Valletta Principles for the Safeguarding and Management of Historic

• Community engagement, community participation, community

1.3.2 The Need to Engage Local Communities

• Educating and promoting understanding of what heritage pro-

• Sharing archaeological skills and knowledge by outside experts with

1.3.3 Analysis and Understanding of Community Fabric

1.3.4 Community Engagement Activities

• Raising awareness and interest in heritage protection through com-

1.4 Challenges for Community Engagement

• Community Cohesion: for community-led initiatives to coalesce in

continuing education and skills development, and repeated com-

to ensure that there is complementarity of action between archae-

one’s mother. In this context, a group of academics, religious practition-

your visitors, as well as your product and attraction. Secondly, it is

Chapter 11, by Robin Coningham and Nick Lewer, examines two

Tully, G. (2007). Community Archaeology: General Methods and Standards of

Justice is the royal attribute of noble souls; the most inalienable

King Hieron of Syracuse thus arbitrated the disputes of his warlike

The consciousness of a just cause is an advantage which, more than

The practical advantages of integrity have been recognized in the

Such teachings bore their fruit in the horrors of insurrection. In the

“Si no se obedecen los leyes, es ley que todo se pierde,” is the

The doctrine of salvation by grace had substituted favor and caprice

The perversion of our moral standards by the dogmas of an

But the most characteristic features of that contrast would perhaps

Fig. 8.3 Community map of daily and seasonal routines of women

Table 5.1 Overview of the population of the Greater Lumbini Area

1.4 Challenges for Community Engagement