Lisa Spinelli is a PhD candidate in anthropology at Lisbon ISCTE and Nova Universities, working for the research centers CRIA and CCCM, and winner of a scholarship for academic research from FCT foundation. She is currently conducting research concerning popular music in everyday life, education and micropolitics in Nepal.
Lyrics from the song by Adriano Celetano. Screenshot from YouTube.
My reflections concerning the Spring School "Heritage as Place-Making," 2024, sparkled from a comment made by Prof. Abhi Subedi. During his speech, he recalled a sentence he heard from some passersby during the re-enactment of a traditional performance in an ancient neighborhood of the city of Kathmandu. "It's as if I could hear again the wind rustling through the leaves of the tree that once stood here," one of them had said. This image made me think of a popular Italian tune from the '60, by singer songwriter Adriano Celetano. The refrain goes: "There where once there were green fields, now lies a city… and that little house in the green, today, where will it be?" ("Il ragazzo della via Gluck," 1966, my translation.) Both images talk of treasured memories of "green" spots that are long lost due to rapid urbanization, and of the heartfelt need of keeping alive places and social habits that are dear to us, in spite of historical processes that seem to take them out of our hands. But how to revert the course of such undesirable events, or else —in the terms proposed by the Spring School— how to keep our heritage alive?
While the answer Prof. Subedi vouched for was closer to the concept of revitalization of the "heritage" itself, the following considerations verge towards the opposite end of what I see as a continuum that from heritage flows into "place-making."
First and foremost, I briefly summarize the main sources from HaP Spring School that influenced my thinking on this relevant topic. Dr. Monica Mottin, Dr. Monalisa Maharjan and Dr. Binita Magaiya helped the participants witness significant events —from the continuing practices of ancient rituals in ancient spaces, as in the case of Charya, Jhijhiya and Harisiddhi dances, to the modern interpretations of local folk that we witnessed at the festival Echoes of the Valley. We were therefore presented with a variety of examples of what a living heritage might be like: a cluster of more or less traditional practices, vividly kept alive by groups of concerned people. In order to do so, these reappropriate or reinterpret often deeply transformed spaces within contemporary urban landscapes, in negotiation with local authorities and a broader spectrum of socioeconomic forces. Prof. Tulasi Diwasa raised a fundamental issue: whose heritage do we tend to see more prominently in our daily lives and studies, and, equally importantly, to whom does the heritage actually belong? As eloquently pointed out by authors as Stuart Hall, these issues are connected to the long lasting effects of all sort of colonizations, where the heritage of the less privileged is often incorporated and reinterpreted, independently from their will, along the lines of the history of the hegemonic social actors ("Whose Heritage," 2007). Here, the perspective proposed by Prof. Padma Sunder Joshi, according to whom heritages should be kept alive by the communities they belong to, fits well. If history and power conflicts take the decisional power away from the communities with a weaker voice on the public arena, the key to keeping alive cherished traditions in an equitable way, might consist in reinvigorating such human groups by granting them more rights and political agency over the spaces they inhabit.
While my opinion on this topic doesn't differ substantially from this view, I believe more considerate reflections on what is meant by living heritage, and what is actually important in it, are due. To come back to Prof. Subedi's anecdote, I wonder what the real issue at stake should be: being able to remember the wind rustling though the leaves thanks to the re-enactment of a heritage, or to be able to plant a new tree?
Youths stage protest outside Kathmandu Metropolitan City. Photo courtesy: Desh Sanchar.
I delve in a short excursus, before coming back to this issue. While the question that the Spring School organizers suggested us to answer is "what keeps the heritage alive," I find it easier to continue my reflection by first considering what is it that "kills" it.
In brief: political, economic, and cultural hegemonies, or else, all the forces that exclude certain voices from the public arena. Killing someone's heritage equate quite precisely with denying their agency in affirming their past, and in determining their life patterns, as often happens when political powers limit the freedom of choice of certain segments of the population.
Tibetan folk dance. Photo courtesy: Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts.
A clear example might be the treatment of Tibetans by both Chinese and Nepali authorities. They are denied citizenship in exile, and within Chinese borders, freedom of expression or of religious affiliation. Economic forces equally play a dominant role, as one can notice in the huge exclusionary urban transformations due to the workings of capitalistic markets and processes of gentrification. A last and less obvious example that I wish to mention here are the effects of some forms of heritagization of "lived" cultural phenomena. Such processes often leads to stagnation of the heritage in discussion, which leads to a formalization of a practice that once was more variable and flexible. This often brings about the exclusion of the practitioners whose style is not ‘heterodox’ depriving them of the benefits that the heritagization was meant to bring about to the whole community in the first place. Ethnic and other forms of tourism might contribute to the transformation of a heartfelt practice to a profitable, fix phenomenon, therefore taking ‘life’ out of it. It is therefore not surprising that anti-heritagization movements are arising worldwide (Patricia Rangel, "Patrimônio cultural em disputa," 2017). An example is Fado music, a style of folk music practiced in Portugal, that besides being subjected to the mentioned disadvantages after turning Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2011, has the infamous history of having been appropriated by the aristocratic Salazar's Regime from the lower social strata and made a symbol of the Portuguese nation despite the bitterness of many of its practitioners (Rui Vieira Nery, "Para uma História do Fado," 2004).
What "keeps heritage alive," then, are all the forms of policy and social action that contrast such forces, by limiting the obliterating power of hegemony and including weaker voices in the public arena. Good examples could be policies that give people the power of deciding concerning their space and communities —as in collaborative urban planning or by granting financial aids towards communal initiatives—, or that give people the power of deciding concerning their time —for instance, by limiting economic exploitation and inequalities. Even policies that protect the material heritage of their or other communities worldwide, by limiting illegal trades or promoting repatriation policies in case of theft, are going a long way in terms of keeping "heritages" alive (Smith, E, "The ongoing quest to return Nepal's looted cultural heritage," 2022).
But the core of the issue hare at stake is not limited to a visualization of the practical meanings and instruments necessary for "keeping heritage alive." It also fundamentally consists in understanding what do we refer to when we mention heritage, and making it explicit what heritage in particular should we strive to protect and why.
Let me return to the meaning of living heritage itself. Firstly, perhaps a bit obviously, it is important to notice that in cases as the ones that we have been considering in HaP Spring School and that are aimed at in heritage politics in general, we are generally speaking of endangered cultural forms or spaces. The heritages of a nation are already well protected into its political system and social structures. The phrase "keeping heritage alive," likely refers to protecting and giving engendered heritage (back) to whom it belongs to.
Nepal’s LGBT community takes part in a gay pride parade in Kathmandu on August 8, 2017. Photo Courtesy: AFP via Hindustan Times
Secondly, the word "heritage" and policies concerning it, make an indirect claim to the positive value and to the ownership of objects, places and tradition on the basis of a supposed ancestral link that connects specific people to them. However, there are a few —again, perhaps obvious— contradictory aspects within this conceptualization of heritage. It is not difficult to recall aspects of such traditions that, to a contemporary (perhaps Westernized) eye, do not seem legitimate at all. We could think, for a concrete example taken from Prof. Joshi's conference, to the role of women in Newar collective festivals: they were not allowed to be on the streets, but only watch from windows, confined into domestic spaces. Moreover, how to frame the importance of new collective rituals and habits in a framework that gives importance to heritage, as an ancient form of culture? Are phenomena as the queer Pride Parade, that is taking place in Kathmandu only since a few years, less important, less worthy of protection from the polity? Finally, how to frame the issue of belonging, of a practice, or to a place when, worldwide, economic globalization has such a capillary impact and when migration (incoming and outgoing) has become an ingrained phenomena shaping the population of both rural and urban centers?
When we talk about "living" heritage, we talk about vibrant, heartfelt practices and social spaces. But for this notion to be incorporable into contemporary life experiences, change (historical, social, cultural) must be included into the mix. What is "living," indeed, is what is felt as needed and desirable in the lives of people that live today. The term "heritage" can likely be stretched to reach such experiences as well, but some carefulness is due while using it, since the term itself could be misleading, since it carries a heavy (and in many cases undesirable) legacy (Hall, 2007).
Within "living" practices or spaces, the past stretches flexibly into the future, sometimes flowing into it, sometimes being subjected to drastic alterations, and what really matters is what people wish to happen within their lives and in the spaces they inhabit. In other words, the importance of the whole issue surrounding heritage, in my opinion, consists in protecting and (re-)creating what is valuable for people living today —whether it comes form a more or less easily claimable tradition or from a new cultural movement. In this sense, what I see as deeply precious in heritage is that, in today politics, it might function as a key to unlock precious material and immaterial resources. These might enable less advantaged groups of people to live the life that they desire and grant them protection against hegemonic cultural and economic forces, which might otherwise too easily incorporate or erase their voices. In this view, "heritage" might be seen as a form of political activism, that has as a general goal "living," or granting groups of people with a weaker public voice the right to live in a closer way to their wishes. To bring back the term "place-making," in my view, heritage politics is most importantly one of the many routes that might help people to gain some form of political agency, especially over the spaces where they live.
Photo courtesy of the author.
Heritage politics fundamentally works towards the diversification of lifestyles possibilities within cultural hegemonies, the de-centralization of powers from the hands of dominant social actors, and a generally easier access to political agency for a wider population. From this point of view, this kind of political action is likely to bring about desirable results. However, many issues remain open. Delineating criteria for belonging to a heritage-based community, especially if place-based, and accounting for the variety of voices that might claim, refuse or be denied this right, is not an easy task. As mentioned above, there are many cases in which the heritagization of a cultural phenomenon lead to further discriminations, to the illegitimate appropriation of it by hegemonic actors, and to the straight away devitalization of it. As is often true, it could be agreed that the value of the creation of a form of heritage depends on how it is implemented according to the case.
To conclude with Prof. Subedi's and Celentano's cherished green "spots", in the "best possible world", heritage as a form of place-making might equate to the possibility of planting a new tree, while engaging in our chosen lifestyles in its shade. In the grey area between this rare luck and the worst case scenario, we might be able to remember the tree while still being able to perform some (ancient or contemporary) forms of expression where it stood. Or else, witnessing trees, together with little houses in the green, disappearing without being able to oppose resistance, can indeed be a sad experience.
I owe some heartfelt thanks to the organizing team of the HaP Spring School for a great experience on the field and for having generated a space of dialogue for the participants that inspired many interesting ideas.
