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SUMMARY:How do African states think about heritage? Historical and ethnogr
 aphic views from southern Africa  - Dr Rachel King\, UCL
DTSTART:20191125T170000Z
DTEND:20191125T180000Z
UID:TALK134341@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Victoria Jones
DESCRIPTION:Scholarship on heritage – its management\, conservation\, pr
 otection\, and inscription – in Africa tends to juxtapose global convent
 ions with local sensibilities. Research grounded in historical and anthrop
 ological methodologies highlights where international principles\, funding
 \, and regulations imported by colonial governments and agencies like UNES
 CO have interfaced with grassroots perspectives\, foregrounding conflicts 
 between Euro-American conceptions of heritage and African indigenous ones.
  Often missing or muted in these discussions is the recognition that polic
 ies outlining what to do with heritage in African states have never been s
 olely colonialist relics or responses to UNESCO. Following decolonisation 
 in many states\, the future of heritage conservation was part of debates i
 ntimately tied to changing bureaucratic cultures\, nationalist regimes\, r
 egional and pan-African politico-economic initiatives\, and (eventually) t
 he function of neoliberal governance in cultural life. I argue that greate
 r historical and ethnographic attention to state and parastatal views of h
 eritage – its function\, potential\, and value – is essential to decen
 tre imported Euro-American conventions as driving forces behind African he
 ritage conservation and to provide more contextualised understandings of w
 hat heritage has meant and done on the continent. Focusing on southern Afr
 ica\, I consider what bureaucratic archives can reveal about how heritage 
 was imagined and mobilised to respond to distinctly regional and national 
 concerns over intellectual property protection\, labour migration\, intern
 ational aid\, and living culture preservation in the 1960s-1990s. These un
 der-appreciated views of heritage provide new insights into what would bec
 ome the SADCC bloc and the Organisation of African Unity\, and help to re-
 frame heritage in roles defined within and for the African continent. 
LOCATION:Seminar Room S1 Alison Richard Building\, 7 West Road\, Cambridge
  CB3 9DT
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