Rethinking Heritage in Precarious Times

Nick Shepherd

Aarhus University and the University of Pretoria ns@cas.au.dk

Sitting at home during the Covid-19 lockdown, simultaneously frustrated and deeply concerned by the run of contemporary events, I decided to do a volume that grappled with these events from a heritage studies perspective. My approach was to contact some of my favorite people—people whose work has inspired me and my students over the years—and to ask them to write short, punchy essays in which they describe their understanding of ‘the moment of the now’ and plot a future agenda for heritage studies. The result is a collection of essays of which I am really proud, under the title of Rethinking Heritage in Precarious Times: Coloniality, Climate Change, and COVID-19. It includes essays by many of the ‘big names’ in heritage studies, by key thinkers from the global south whose work should be compulsory reading but who remain outside of the mainstream circuits of Anglo/ European/ US scholarship, by Indigenous thinkers and knowledge holders, and by younger scholars and practitioners who are busy making their mark. Here is a short extract from the conclusion to the volume:

‘Drawing from the arguments presented by the chapters in this volume, it becomes possible to state two strong conclusions that emerge from the collective endeavor presented here. First, the political struggle of the contemporary moment is the struggle for multilateralism, dialogue, and collective action in the face of those who would use a historical moment of uncertainty and danger for narrowly sectarian ends. It is also the struggle for social justice, solidarity, and restitution in the face of the manifest injustices of the past, many of which are compounded by contemporary events. From a heritage perspective, the question of relevance becomes: How do we use heritage perspectives and understandings in support of open, creative, inclusive, just, and sustainable futures? In other words, how do we use heritage perspectives in support of the broad set of strategies and responses that hold the possibility of the greatest good for the greatest number of people? Moreover, how do we do this in the context of ‘the moment of the now’, a world in which, to greater and lesser degrees, precarity has become a universal human condition.

Posing questions such as these offers a rich, open-ended, and future-oriented agenda for the field of Heritage Studies. Moreover, the core duty of care, deep timelines, and invitation to think in both immediate and abstract terms offered by the field of Heritage Studies means that it is uniquely placed to deal with the scale and ambition of such questions. However, a second, inevitable conclusion follows. It is this: Setting such an agenda for Heritage Studies involves, in many ways, rethinking heritage against the grain of its own history. Many authors have made the point that modernist framings of heritage have historically overwhelmingly been in support of notions of national destiny and exceptionalism—and this remains by far the dominant form in which we encounter heritage tropes and images today (Gnecco, this volume; Holtorf, this volume). Dominant framings of heritage—authorized heritage discourse, in the felicitous phrase of Laurajane Smith—turn around the concept of authenticity, in a hermeneutic loop in which to be deemed as heritage is both to require and confer authenticity as a core attribute (Smith, 2007). Falling back on fixed, essentialized identities and innate values—and operationalized around a set of key binaries (cultural versus natural, tangible versus intangible)—such conceptions of heritage almost by definition orient us towards in-group identities and the set of responses characterized here as the inward turn. However, if this is generally the case, then it is not inevitably the case, and the chapters in this volume offer many fine, subversive uses of heritage that think and practice against the grain to unsettle traditions, deconstruct national historiographies, act in support of Indigenous claims to territory and sovereignty, support process of restitution, reveal hidden histories, and grapple with the nature and effects of the climate emergency. Mapping an agenda for heritage against the grain involves picking up on a substantial and growing body of work, much of it gathered under the heading of Critical Heritage Studies—but by no means confined to the Critical Heritage Studies project. On the one hand, this involves opening the repertoire of heritage to focus on forms that are less concerned with national sites and symbols. This might include, for example, the heritage of human rights, the heritage of anti-racist and anticolonial struggles, the heritage of peacemaking, the heritage of the extraordinary vaccination campaigns of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the heritage of labor rights and workplace reforms, transgender heritage, the heritage of the struggle to protect biodiversity and threatened habitats, and the heritage of science itself and the extraordinary advances in knowledge that it has enabled, understood as shared human achievement.

On the other hand, it involves working conceptually to reframe core heritage attributes and ideas. There are many examples of conceptually exciting projects that rework notions of authenticity and value, to focus instead on everyday, ubiquitous, inauthentic, and ‘found’ heritage, include drift matter and anthropogenic debris (see the work of Cornelius Holtorf, Thora Petursdottir and others). Other projects rework conceptions of time and the inbuilt historicity of authorized heritage discourse to focus on contemporary heritage, future heritage, and heritage-in-the-making (in the work of Marcia Bezerra, David C Harvey, and others). Still others contest the anthropocentric framing of dominant conceptions of heritage, and put into play ideas of multi-species heritage, more-than-human heritage, and posthuman heritage (for example, in the work of Christian Ernsten, John Schofield and J. Kelechi Ugwuanyi). Some of the most conceptually exciting and important work in this direction comes out of the growing salience and visibility of perspectives from the global south (a by-no-means-complete list would include the work of Cressida Fforde, Cristóbal Gnecco, Steve Hemming, Duane Jethro, Merata Kawharu, Lia Kent, Laura Mayer, Daryle Rigney, Hayley Saul, Laurajane Smith, Paul Tapsell, Divya P. Tolia-Kelly and Emma Waterton). A growing body of work contests the universalist framings of authorized heritage discourse and global heritage protocols, in favor of local understandings of heritage, practices of stewardship, and research priorities and agendas (for example, the work of Marica Bezerra, Alejandrio Haber, Jesmael Mataga, Innocent Pikirayi, and many others). This body of work also alerts us to the life-worlds and institutional contexts of practice in the global south—and to the interests and concerns that preoccupy researchers and students. Allied to this, has been the growing salience, visibility, and importance of local, traditional, and Indigenous knowledges, practices, and perspectives. Many of these contest universalist frameworks and understandings of heritage, with the added dimension that they invite us to think and practice outside of modern, Western understandings of time, place, personhood, and relationality—and to consider and take seriously other ways of knowing and being. Many commentators have made the point that the roots of Anthropogenic climate change and the contemporary climate emergency lie in a set of mentalities and values that came to the fore in early modern Europe through a complex set of social, political, economic, and cultural processes including the Enlightenment, rapid industrialization, the secularization of knowledge and science, racial slavery, colonialism and imperialism, and many other historical processes. These mentalities and values were exported globally as part of historical processes of colonialism and imperialism, obliterating much of what lay in their path. Their contemporary legacy lies in two directions. On the one hand, they underwrite, authorized, and enable the relentless extraction of ‘resources’, destruction of habitats, and war on nature that has brought us to the current impasse. On the other hand, they are foundational to the forms of knowledge reproduced through university-based disciplinary knowledge systems, and to contemporary ways of being. Trying to find solutions to the climate emergency by thinking and practicing from within these forms of knowledge and ways of being becomes a perverse exercise, filled with dissonance, magical thinking, and dismay, in which we ask deeply entrenched mentalities and values to think/ practice over/ against themselves. Non-Western, non-modern ontologies and epistemologies offer an enormously important and exciting set of riches, not because they offer a blueprint for alternative living, but because they offer clues, beacons, and points of inspiration which, interpreted correctly, offer a way out of the maze. The growing focus on local and Indigenous knowledges and practices feels like an overdue, necessary historical corrective, whose implications are profound.

The climate emergency and the ongoing struggle for social and environmental justice present us with the kind of existential challenge for which, in quite specific ways—culturally, temperamentally, institutionally—we seem to be unprepared. It becomes vital that we find a language through which we can talk about ultimate things, not in an abstract way, but in relation to our individual lives, and the changes small and large that we will choose to make, and that will be compelled upon us. Our world is changing quickly, in ways that many of us are just beginning to understand. As we exile ourselves from the Holocene—the garden in which our civilization flowered—and embark on an ambiguous new epoch, we will need to be resilient, adaptable, creative, and kind.’

From: 

Shepherd, Nick. 2023. ‘Conclusion: When the taps run dry/ Heritage as a site of struggle’. In: Shepherd, Nick. (ed.) Rethinking Heritage in Precarious Times: Coloniality, Climate Change, and Covid-19. London: Routledge.