Short Abstract

This panel explores how heritage and memory are mobilised in far-right and counter-cultural movements to produce and resist polarisation. We seek ethnographic cases from across Europe and the Global South to discuss heritage as both a tool of exclusion and a field of potential reconciliation.

Long Abstract

This panel examines the dynamic relationship between heritage, memory, and polarisation in a world increasingly shaped by neo-nationalist and extremist discourses. Far-right movements strategically mobilise heritage—places, traditions, and myths—to construct nostalgic imaginaries of belonging, reinforcing insider–outsider divisions and deepening social fractures. Yet heritage is also a site of counter-narrative and resistance, offering spaces to challenge polarisation and imagine new modes of coexistence.

Drawing on comparative ethnographic research, our panel explores how the everyday heritage of social movements—manifest in music festivals, urban interventions, and material traces such as political stickers—reveals both the affective power and political volatility of heritage-making in polarised times. These vernacular and ephemeral forms of tangible and intangible heritage show how everyday practices of commemoration, protest, and belonging can simultaneously reproduce nationalist imaginaries and generate counter-responses grounded in irony, care, and critique. Such cultural forms circulate between online and physical sites, outlining a contested terrain where heritage becomes both a vehicle for exclusion and a resource for resistance.

By situating individual cases within broader discussions of entanglement and multipolarity, we invite contributors to think beyond binary frames of right/left, past/present, inclusion/exclusion. We ask: How can anthropologists study polarisation with curiosity and care, without diminishing difference? What forms of engagement, translation, and collaboration might foster social resilience in divided communities?

In bridging critical heritage studies and sociocultural anthropology, this panel invites interdisciplinary contributions that unpack the generative and transformative potential of heritage in times of disintegration—foregrounding the ways cultural memory can both fracture and heal our shared worlds.

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