COOPERATING FOR CULTURAL HERITAGE CONSERVATION

Many courses of anthropology, ethnology and archaeology in Italian Universities have set up long term research project in many countries of the world addressing the conservation and valorization of the cultural patrimony jointly with local partners in Africa, Asia, Europe and Oceania. The idea of putting up this panel stemmed from an urgent need to highlight the role universities can play in carrying out activities of cultural cooperation; these are similar but different from activities of cooperation to development. The latter are mainly driven by the desire to address specific problems for their solution while the former stems from a shared interest in investigating aspects of tangible and intangible cultural patrimony within a country. The experience of participating to long term Ethnological Missions in Malawi and Mozambique (MEIMM) as well as to activities of cooperation for development suggest to highlight a number of differences whose added value should be considered carefully. The long term relations set up among researchers and academics in the countries of the research usually are long lasting good and exponentially durable relations of intellectual interchange among the partners. Research is usually an activity that entails personal passion for the personnel involved and it creates communication among the researchers of the different countries that lasts beyond financial limits. The long term cultural relations between the actors involved could also be considered an added value in the relations between countries whose outcomes of soft diplomacy1 could be viewed as an important added value of a financial investment in these cultural activities