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This paper focuses on how colonial heritage is envisioned and understood today by different actors in Intramuros, Manila. While the past is often forgotten, the future is unknown, and the present is unsettled, decolonial discussions do not (as yet) take central stage in this case.

Paper Abstract:

This paper focuses on how colonial heritage is envisioned and understood today in Intramuros, Manila, Philippines, and what meanings are written into it by urban dwellers, activists, and state actors.

With the recent rise of heritage initiatives in Manila, the discourse about the past of the city is changing. Yet, it is worth noting that a decolonial critique of the Spanish and/or American heritage is not very present in these initiatives. Because the material remnants of the past are most often demolished or forgotten, the main focus of grassroots’ advocacy groups is to save heritage buildings and their history.

In the case of Intramuros, the “heritage community” – if we understand it as dwellers of this part of the city - is to a high extent composed of informal settlers, migrants to the city, who came to the Old City after the war destruction. The people’s presence is what brings life into this heritage space, and yet their voice is not taken into account. Every new administration's term and every new project starts with a discussion about how to drive the informal communities out. Yet, no relocation plan is ever realized, and so Intramuros, Manila, remains a place where the past is forgotten, the future is unknown, and the present - with its ongoing discussion about the built (and intangible) heritage - is still unsettled.

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Through a comparison between two temples in the region of Shekhawati in Rajasthan (India), this paper explores the different dynamics of renaming/re-invention of structures as they are ‘restored’ either by the local community, or state sanctioned expert bodies.

Paper Abstract:

Questions of heritage are central to approaching the largest open air art gallery in the world – the painted towns of Shekhawati. Complexities of preservation of these fresco covered structures are linked to these not being protected as heritage by the state; are too numerous for blanket heritage rules; and are often lived-in private property. How does one then approach questions of heritage in a region which is culturally rich and gaining attention both in the sphere of tourism and academic research?

Through the case study of two temples from the region, this paper will explore the processual aspect of evolving identities of structures. The first instance will be of the curiously named Dakan Temple, or the Temple of the Witches. This 1850 structure was supposed to be a Krishna temple, but as the colour from the stucco figures decorating its outer walls faded, the figures acquired an association with witches rather than gods. Recently, the upper-case groups of the local community, ashamed of this association, re-painted and re-moulded the stucco decorations.

Similarly, a 1920s Arya Samaj temple, was recently ‘restored’ by the Delhi based heritage body- INTACH. This ‘heritagization’ led to a change in the name of the temple to Veda Temple. This plays into an insidious civilizational discourse.

Through a comparison between the two temples, I will explore ideas of labelling; variations in heritagization discourse between the insider and the outsider; restoration as re-invention; and links between ideology and heritagization.

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UNESCO and other Western institutions define "objects" from former colonies as heritage. This paper reveals that translating "heritage" transculturally has a negative connotation for Maasai and clashes with their concept of imasaa, highlighting different understandings of materiality and temporality

Paper Abstract:

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, European colonial powers acquired ethnographic collections in the countries and communities they dominated. The UNESCO, the ICOM and other Western institutions defined these “objects" as (cultural) heritage. Based on modernity’s conception of time, which constructs a fundamental rupture between past and present, they are nostalgically categorised as “relics” of long-gone cultures. However, what conceptual difference does it make if the term „heritage" is translated transculturally and used in the context of communities of origin? What alternative means of transmitting and preserving culture do people in these communities have at their disposal that ensure a lasting and functional relationship between persons and their belongings? How do they conceive temporality and determine change over time without following an understanding of linear progressive movement of time inherent in modernity? Drawing from ethnography with Maasai communities in northern Tanzania, this paper responds to these questions to show that heritage is a contested concept. I argue that, among my Maasai interlocutors, „heritage" has a negative connotation. When used for Maasai “objects” from the colonial context that now are housed in European museums, it describes belongings stolen or taken by force through killing the owners. I show how this term caused “affective dissonances” when I applied it during my fieldwork. The term is at odds with the Maasai concept of imasaa (belongings), which is founded on a different theoretical and practical understanding of materiality, spheres of existence, and the relationship between past, present and future.

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Cape Verdean and Portuguese activists in New England create museums, exhibits and cultural projects to reclaim migrant history narratives. These recent memorialization projects challenge state-level cultural collaborations, shaping local power relations and international cultural diplomacy efforts

Paper Abstract:

Cape Verdean and Portuguese community activists in New England have been involved in recent efforts to create museums, exhibits and cultural projects that reclaim narratives of their migrant histories. With continuous and ongoing international labor mobility flows over the past 100-plus years, these communities have long been involved in partnerships with international state governments, including the Estado Novo dictatorship, as well as in the post-colonial context of post-dictatorship Portugal and independent Cabo Verde. Twentieth century efforts on the part of the Estado Novo included collaborations with immigrant civic and cultural organizations to create celebratory nostalgia projects through museum exhibits and cultural memorialization intended to influence international policy. The creation of one popular heritage site, at Dighton Rock, Massachusetts, erased the indigenous origins of petroglyphs to speciously argue for the 15th century settlement of Portuguese in the region (part of white nationalist power discourses of belonging in the "movement to Americanize the immigrant"). Other heritage projects celebrate Portuguese maritime "discoveries" including earlier Estado Novo cultural diplomacy efforts in the US that have a counterpart with contemporary Portuguese democratic state projects. Several contemporary immigrant cultural memorialization initiatives, however, have challenged these discourses by creating critical nostalgia projects including Cape Verdean museums, oral history collection, and cultural exhibits that find new pathways for immigrant communities to reshape narratives and critique celebratory hagiographies. The paper examines the complexity of narrative constructions in which local community organizations critique local power discourses while sometimes soliciting funding and collaborations with international state actors pursuing their own interests.

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What has the term “heritage” historically addressed? Does it affect how we can “unmake” or “remake” it today? This presentation interrogates the term’s European genealogy, and uses experiences with Taiwanese heritage to assess what may promote or inhibit heritage democratization and diversification.

Paper Abstract:

Everyday conceptions of practices covered by the term “heritage” – authorized, discursive, or not – are often celebratory, and even when part of critical heritage studies, may leave implicit to what the term refers. If heritage must be democratized, do we want to remake its pasts, its locations of expertise, its audiences, or something else in the social relationships it forged in the course of its globalizing career? If so, what of its legacies do we want or need to “unmake”? This presentation of the term’s genealogy provides a sketch of the shifts in the materials, practices, audiences, scales and temporalities that “heritage” was made to address, in an effort to assess what kinds of “unmaking” of heritage are possible, and how this may promote or inhibit forms of “remaking” heritage in more democratic and diverse ways today. The first part of my presentation departs from the European origins of the term, and its peculiar shift from 19th-century nationalist origins, through 20th-century “World Heritage”, to 21st-century forms of (sometimes, but not always, decolonial) “unmakings” of the term’s referents in museums and other authorized heritage institutions. The second part provides alternative views by drawing on my recent introduction to heritage practices in post-WW2 Taiwan and what it suggests about excessive monuments, the forging of “national” identity, and their relation to a history of colonialism, human rights abuses, and the recognition of indigenous minorities.

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We investigate the role of ICH in unmaking rigid heritage narratives in the Western Balkans, post-conflict region still coping with unweaponized identities. When refocused on renewal, ICH is found to serve as a potent catalyst for reconciliation and development, contrary to our academic skepticism.

Paper Abstract:

In resonance with the panel's focus on the "unmaking" and "remaking" of heritage narratives, and drawing inspiration from the panel's exploration of contesting heritage definitions, the presentation delves into how ICH paradoxically becomes a key arena for challenging established narratives of collective identity in the troubled region of the Western Balkans. The exploration highlights the agency of local heritage communities in the Western Balkans in reshaping, reclaiming, and revitalizing their intangible culture - the "core" of collective identities - through unauthorized and critical forms of heritagization. We found that ICH serves as a vehicle for unmaking the dominance of state-sanctioned expertise, thus renewing labels, expertise, and temporalities associated with both "whole nations" and with the troubled region globally known for identity-based bloodshed. Central to the analysis is the role of ICH in challenging binary divides and fostering a sense of shared heritage. This presentation addresses the transformative potential of ICH for reconciliation among diverse communities who share-while-contest similar set of ICH elements. ICH there serves as a bridge, transcending geographical and political boundaries, but also that of local academic methodological nationalism(s), thereby contributing to the broader theme of renewing (that encompasses academia as an important heritage stakeholder). In doing so, it offers insights into alternative approaches to heritage, emphasizing the dynamic role of ICH, contrary to the fears predominant in the critical heritage studies discourse that it is always already conservative.

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The article concerns unauthorized and critical forms of heritagization in the region of Polish Spisz, undertaken by the local "heritage community", which challenges the authorized forms represented by external experts. The authorized symbolic violence meets resistance “from below”.

Paper Abstract:

Polish Spisz is a multicultural border region characterized by Polishness and to some extent Slovakness and Hungarianness. This is related to the long history of the region, dating back to the Middle Ages, which until 1918 was part of the Habsburg Monarchy. Since the beginning of the political changes of the end of the 20th century the region has been experiencing a cultural revival, inspired by local social elites, but also by external experts (ethnographers, historians, musicologists, choreographers). The experts play an important role, who act as arbitrators deciding on the value and usefulness of specific cultural content, products and practices. Their influence often means imposing choices from the resources of the regional cultural heritage. In the light of postcolonial studies, it is possible to indicate the oppressive nature of their activity in the field of cultural policy, simply showing the ways of practicing the regional culture. Sometimes this is combined with political pressure to make this multicultural border region part of an ethnically homogeneous Polish society. This type of symbolic violence meets resistance “from below” of some region’s activists and inhabitants who do not accept the values, forms and cultural content arranged by professionals into the form of classical kastom. They reject treating their own heritage in the form of an unchanging, staged fossil and promote an attitude of creativity, independence, agency of local cultural practices and forms of creativity not constrained by an oppressive kastom scenario.

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For migrants & Spaniards whose lives straddle the Mediterranean, everyday heritagization of Muslim Spain narrows the nationalistic chasm of ‘home’ & ‘unlike home’. The blurring of this binary presses upon authorised heritage defenders to again work to refute formerly discarded views of this past.

Paper Abstract:

For migrants and Spaniards whose lives have straddled the Mediterranean, narrating the Muslim history and heritage shared between southern Spain and the MENA region has long collided with the national-Catholic version of Spain’s medieval past. As an alternative representation to the official State and Church history of the Fascist dictatorship, their collective memory dissolves key dominant historical interpretations, blurring entrenched binaries of Europe (and the West) and its Others; European Judeo-Christian secularism and foreign Islam. Consequently, the everyday ways in which they’ve engage with this past – including their academic scholarship, their rejection of most local commemorations and their occupational connections to this past – are often discredited, dismissed by scholars, politicians, and even their own neighbours as a ‘romanticisation’ or idealisation of Muslim Spain, or simply ignored. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I consider the everyday practices; historical narratives; and engagements with this past of residents in Granada, Spain – North African migrants, Spanish converts to Islam and left-wing activists – who have considered both Spain and the MENA region as ‘home’ at different life stages. For this disparate group, the medieval Moorish quarter of the Albayzín with its built heritage becomes a space in which the distance between the strict nationalistic distinction of ‘home’ and ‘unlike home’ is shortened and assuaged. Their everyday heritage not only connects those with Iberian origins to wider subaltern views of this past that entirely unsettle hegemonic epistemologies, but also tempers anti-Islamic racism that those of North African descent face in their new home.

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This presentation explores the meaning of home for Turkish-Dutch allotment gardeners through the lens of rural heritage. In re-defining heritage as an everyday and emotionally charged practice, it seeks to 'unmake' the assumptions underpinning authorized discourses of heritage.

Paper Abstract:

This presentation seeks to contribute to ongoing debates on the meaning of home, heritage and belonging within the Dutch context within which migrant loyalties are constantly questioned. While social scientific discussions of home aim to move beyond dualities of ‘roots’ and ‘routes’, the recent populist victory of the Partij voor de Vrijheid in the Netherlands demonstrate a greater need for nuance in understanding the experiences of home among minoritized communities. Based on participant observation and object interviews conducted with Turkish-Dutch allotment gardeners, I aim to demonstrate the ways in which their sense of home is informed by and intertwined with their rural heritage. Building on earlier works of critical heritage scholars, I understand rural heritage as an embodied form of relatedness to nature that includes the cultivation of land as well as the forming of intimate relations with humans and non-humans. Through everyday practices of gardening and food sharing, which are instrumental in mediating social relationships, Turkish-Dutch gardeners re-imagine the village life as they remember it in order to create a sense of home that incorporates multiple temporalities and scales, offering new ways of thinking about ‘roots.’ In an attempt to ‘unmake’ the assumptions underpinning institutionalized discourses of heritage, which seek to define heritage outside everyday contexts, I argue that heritage can be a mundane and emotionally charged practice that can be mobilized in order to foster a sense of home.