Paper short abstract:

This paper explores heritage politics in post-war Sri Lanka as a renegotiation of social boundaries. By drawing on ethnographic fieldwork it thereby highlights the performative construction and contestation of novel or re-invented forms of legitimacy.

Paper long abstract:

Post-war contexts are often characterized by a revision of social boundaries with implications for power constellations. In the wake of these transitions, new or re-invented forms of legitimacy come into being. In this paper I will address the politics of heritage in post-war Sri Lanka as an alleged means to stabilize power relations by redrawing boundaries between groups and by crafting a re-imagined nation. This post-war heritage politics crystallized in a notable rise in celebrations of the (new) nation to mark a historical junction and to mold novel forms of legitimacy, while thereby often silencing alternative post-war narratives.

An analysis of such "celebrations" will serve as an example to scrutinize the underlying pattern of post-war rhetoric, which seeks to mark a rupture but in the same vein, to link up with a pre-colonial past to carve out a niche for legitimacy. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I will however trace spaces of subversion and contestation of this legitimacy in betwixt and between. By closely examining examples of post-war "heritagization", I will argue that heritage politics provides a rich field to delineate the performative construction and contestation of notions of legitimacy.