Short Abstract

How can anthropologists participate in public and collaborative approaches to history and heritage? We invite contributions that challenge polarised interpretations and representations of the past and imagine collective futures beyond the impasses of the present.

Long Abstract

This roundtable invites anthropologists to explore how collaborative approaches to ‘making things public’ can contribute to developing critical discussions around interpretations, representations and usage of the past in the public domain. From museums to zines, from city tours to video installations, anthropologists have increasingly engaged in new forms of collaborations with activists, public institutions, artists and citizens’ organisations. These collaborations have been pivotal in reimagining our fraught present and in redefining what anthropology is and what it might be good for. This reimagination has contributed to a radical rethinking of the role of history in public domains beyond mere narration. Yet this rethinking is entangled with profound polarisations as certain histories and their material and immaterial renderings are preserved, curated, or restituted, while others are erased, marginalized and silenced— raising urgent questions around the problem of history and the use of heritage.

Thinking through the broader dynamics of restitution, silencing, curating and resurfacing, we ask how the past is grounded in material, institutional, and theoretical practices as well as political realities—and where we might identify tensions, fractures, and gaps, even within heritage arenas themselves. By attending to the interconnections that shape how heritage is produced, curated, and interpreted, and by troubling dominant chronologies and categories of historical knowledge, anthropological approaches can challenge the hardened polarizations that currently shape debates about who owns the past. What new possibilities emerge when anthropologists work across disciplinary boundaries, institutional contexts and different medium? How do anthropologists work with historians, heritage institutions, citizens’ organisations and activists? How might such collaborations help us imagine collective futures beyond the impasses of the present and with it rethink anthropology as well as public history and heritage as intellectual, political and public endeavours?

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