Paper long abstract:

For some time, I have followed discussions in the heritage context about the original functions of certain threatened buildings, objects, places, and spaces that may require improved physical integrity, such as protection and preservation. A part of this discussion, as DeSilvey (2017) showed, stems from the protection and preservation paradigm, which remains on a silenced material transience bound with an official memory linked to perceptual encounters with a world of entities (Bennett, 2004). I folded the discussions into my motivation to share my observations about issues related to the concept of heritage, and consider a wider range of ideas about the entities that would have a positive effect on the tendency to rethink standards of classification. This would allow us to conceive what heritage constitutes in the Central Asia context more broadly, and whether we need to value the heritage practice of buildings woven into Soviet social life.

Thus, the paper reconsiders such anthropological notions as the decay, demolition, memorial presence and historical values of buildings in Bishkek, including the Planetarium, the hotel Issyk-Kul, and the Ak-Kula hippodrome by tracing the high economic value of their commercial use in everyday life during the early Soviet period to consider lost value and unnecessary representation. In this vein, it identifies the emergence of distinct post-materialist ways of understanding the buildings in relation to the highly specific sociopolitical and cultural trajectories of the Soviet past. The paper also contextualises programs of historical monuments to understand that it is difficult to fathom what human heritage remains in a preserved building.

References

DeSilvey C. (2017): Curated decay. Heritage beyond saving. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Bennett J. (2004): The force of things: Steps towards an ecology of matter. In: Political Theory 32(3), 347-362.