About the Project

 

Research

What unites diverse, and at times ephemeral, communities in enabling or hindering heritage? From our perspective, the danger to the world’s heritage is not primarily war, terrorism, environmental change, tourism, or digitalization. Instead, it is the loss of interest or the inability to form and sustain solidarity across differences. The research project “Heritage as Placemaking: The Politics of Solidarity and Erasure in South Asia” (HaP), explores what enables or stymies heritage and the potential of heritagisation to ignite solidaric formations. The cultural dimension of the Sustainable Development Goals lies in the commitment of people to work together, to make place. Likewise, living heritage requires the individuals’ commitment to engage, collaborate, and invest in the joint cultural future of communities. This project is critical of the role of external authorities and experts in the process of sustaining cultural heritage and instead invests in those who identify with heritage, who uphold and maintain its existence. The goal of HaP is to investigate precisely what unites people and what therefore enables them to create heritage as placemaking. 

We acknowledge that many heritage sites in South Asia are decaying due to rapid urbanisation and changing living conditions, as well as labour migration and climate change. The project explores how local and transregional agents use heritage as placemaking to fight eviction, road widening, or real estate development. We see heritage as becoming the political argument over which different stakeholders, cultural owners, and audiences negotiate the future.

The research team, based in Heidelberg, Kathmandu, London, and Delhi, explore how people—through forming temporary and/or longer-lasting groups of solidarity—decide over the formation, preservation, decay, and erasure of heritage. We ask: What informs decision-making when heritage is dynamically framed through engagement with the site itself, as well as with bureaucracy and governance? We question authorities in the discourses of development and advocate for the decolonisation of the heritage discourse to give local voices the weight they deserve, and we find social aesthetics and contemporary uses of the archive inspiring locations for fresh thought. Our study requires us to relationally approach affective and performative imaginaries and practices where nation-building and area-making are invoked in ways that transgress compartmentalized notions of ‘territory’ and ‘place’.

This project contributes to a critical reflection of heritage production beyond developmentalism and preservation. It is situated in the fields of critical heritage studies, new area studies, and transcultural urbanisation studies. The theoretical implications of our empirical studies will lead to a new model of enabling heritage through place-making.

Four theoretical strands

Ruins abandoned in a forest, revived folk dances, infrastructure built around temples to facilitate pilgrims, palaces, and vernacular sites forgotten and contested in a city: at any time in history, it is people’s joint investment in what they declare as worthy of being preserved and cared for that creates, reimagines, or hampers heritage. Heritage as Placemaking seeks to understand the preconditions for heritage, why and under which social and political circumstances heritage becomes a catalyst that enables the social cohesion that sustains it. To this end, our project focuses on four theoretical pillars: bureaucracy, decolonization, commoning, and erasure.

These themes are addressed within a relational and comparative case study approach, with projects in various field sites—three in India, six in Nepal. Each of our eight research projects engages with multiple theoretical strands, and each of the four years of the project focuses on the theoretical development of one of these guiding concepts. Essential to each is their ability to function both separately and simultaneously as tools of analysis: heritage placemaking can be at once understood as a project of decolonization, a condition for commoning, entangled with bureaucracy, and a potential politics of erasure.

  • Whose heritage discourse is assigned global significance?

    One of HaP’s chief objectives is to complicate the notion of decolonization in South Asia. Postcolonial scholarship such as subaltern studies has offered nuanced and critical tools for analyzing colonial entanglements in South Asia. However, within our field sites, such tools have not yet been adequately applied to examine the influence of internal colonization and of neocolonial and soft power (explored, for example, through HaP’s projects based in Bhaktapur, vernacular sites and heritage activism in Lalitpur and Kathmandu, Janakpur, and Lumbini) in framing cultural heritage and its interpretation. Heritage, with its selective and discursive relation to the past (see, for instance, the cases of Varanasi and Bodh Gaya), provides a fertile ground for the political implementation of ideological agendas, such as manifestations of Hindutva nationalism in Ayodhya and Janakpur. Due to the relationship between heritage, place, and identity formation, the ideological persuasion to re-interpret the past has lasting effects on communal harmony and justice, a phenomenon visible at all field sites and thus one that HaP strives to interrogate across the project as a whole.

    Decolonization is the guiding theoretical strand for the public seminar and podcast series of the project’s first year, curated by Sasanka Perera. Applications for contributions to this series are still ongoing; please email Emily Hyatt if you are interested in contributing to the series as a speaker.

  • How is heritage edited into history, and how is it erased?

    Our second theoretical strand, erasure, critically explores inconsistencies between lived and documented heritage. Heritage constitutes a selected past we are currently living with: transmitted over generations, it is ‘constantly recreated by communities and groups in response to their environment, their interaction with nature and their history’, as laid out in UNESCO’s 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. We understand the process of recreating heritage as creative and selective editing. Inconvenient and uncomfortable elements of the past are hidden, forgotten or memorialized, while others are promoted and made highly visible. Our project explores this editing process through the lenses of erasure, invisibility, and neglect. We explore the ruins of lost kingdoms such Mukundapur and Bhaktapur and the demolition of autocratic Rana architecture and colonial architecture.

    Erasure is the guiding theme for the public seminar and podcast series of the project’s second year, curated by Stefanie Lotter.

  • How does solidarity amongst people sustain heritage?

    The theoretical strand of commoning seeks to identify conditions of solidarity that create, protect, or erase heritage. Such conditions impact how diverse communities in shared spaces relate to the past, forging or limiting social relations and lifeworlds. To support respectful placemaking and de-escalate heritage conflict in South Asia in times of intense and entangled social, economic, political, and ecological transformation, it is paramount to understand how status and identity markers such as caste, ethnicity, religion, political affiliation, and gender are mobilized in engagement with cultural heritage. The continuation of tangible and intangible heritage is dependent on those upholding it; without stakeholders coming together to create and protect heritage, it will decay or cease to exist entirely. Despite the urgency of this situation both in South Asia and further afield, very little is understood of the mechanisms that create and sustain heritage-building solidarities amongst various agents, including individuals, communities, advocacy groups, and political formations.

    Heritage as Placemaking therefore identifies conditions required to form solidarity across actors who shape, protect, or even destroy heritage. The project seeks to better understand how solidarities are formed through communities of place, as is seen with heritage activist campaigns and protests that have sprung up around the use of and care for the phalca (communal rest houses) in Lalitpur, or through communities of origin, as with Newar heritage in Lalitpur’s hiti (ritual stepwell) activist movement and Maitili performance traditions in Janakpur. At the same time, communities can be transnational, such as those who gather at pilgrimage sites such as Bodh Gaya, Varanasi, and Ayodhya, or united by a common interest, taking shape as communities of custody or patrimony. Communal conflict frequently arises where these categories are layered in time and space to create complex claims to heritage.

    Commoning is the guiding theoretical strand for the public seminar and podcast series of the project’s third year, curated by Christiane Brosius.

  • What informs communal decision-making when heritage is dynamically framed through bureaucratic and governmental engagement with a site?

    The third theoretical strand of Heritage as Placemaking analyses the role of governance and bureaucracy in hindering and enabling heritage-making. Heritage in South Asia is co-opted into local, ethnic, and national/ist politics to justify claims to place and erase, silence, or marginalize histories of subaltern voices. This renders subaltern heritage invisible and emphasizes a dominant history of political rulers and high-caste superiority. Especially in times of crisis, powerful stakeholders and politicians appropriate the heritage discourse, as seen in Hindutva or Newar Nationalism, while communities navigate bureaucratic frameworks in the attempt to reshape public space and reimagine past futures. Our project attempts to bring to light how the authorized or official heritage discourse is promoted amidst alternative discourses. To do so, all of HaP’s projects are embedded in local processes of placemaking and seek alternative discourses at heritage sites to mark performative and interpretative shifts.

    Bureaucracy is the guiding theoretical strand for the public seminar and podcast series of the project’s fourth year, curated by Sabin Ninglekhu.