LAUSR

Recent debates on heritage-making have approached heritage as an ongoing process involving diverse stakeholders, contestations and debates in the production and revitalization of communities experiencing and reflecting change. Moments of crisis and disaster (e.g. migration, earthquake, war or poverty) play an important role in this formation, bringing to the surface globalized practices and reified notions of maintaining the fabric of a social group or society. Heritage formation is thus a positioning of social agents in time and place, a means of orientation and self-reflection, not a linear outcome. Oftentimes, such processes go unnoticed, under the radar of “official” cultural heritage. The ensemble of perspectives that constitute this “conversation” pays attention to the initiatives of both “stakeholders” and researchers to shift attention from a position that presents a conclusion (“this is heritage”) to that of a more rhizomic, open field of multiple qualities of what Mattijs van de Port and Birgit Meyer call “politics of authentication” (van de Port and Meyer forthcoming). This issue of “In Conversation” evolved from a panel entitled “Heritage in Times of Crisis. Transcultural Approaches to Reconstruction and Revaluation in Post-Earthquake Nepal.” The panel took place at the annual conference “Making, Sustaining, Breaking—The Politics of Heritage and Culture” at the Cluster of Excellence, Asia and Europe in a Global Context, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), at Heidelberg University in October 2016. Its focus was on the diverse dimensions of the Nepal earthquakes of 25 April and 12 May 2015, and how people responded to them through the ensuing and altering ideas of cultural heritage in relation to reconstruction and regeneration. One of our aims was to contribute to a reorienting of seemingly given binary oppositions such as “local” and “global,” “tangible” and “intangible,” “high” or “five star” heritage and “ordinary” heritage. Instead of seeing them as poles between which interlocutors navigate, we consider them as mobile forms of relationality and as emergent, that is, entangled by a vivid traffic of ideas and notions, institutions and people. The different voices in this conversation reveal grades of dominant and demotic discourses that can best be recognized and further explored through “close looking” and being there. The contributors have had first-hand experience of being both observer and participant in the cases they present. The earthquake of 2015 affected us both personally and professionally. The experience of destruction and loss has led the interlocutors of each case study to develop different strategies of positioning themselves in the shaping of heritage. They look at social and aesthetic responses to the earthquake from different disciplinary and auto-biographical positions, again placing heritage as a means and not a final repository. They stress how cultural and religious heritage came to play a substantial if not existential role in the recovery and regeneration of people affected by the earthquake, as means of coping with trauma and loss, as sources for resilience and strengthening of social relations. Each contribution pays attention to the intrinsic relationship of materiality and practices, to translocal relations and coeval temporalities. This is not without tensions arising from controversial understandings of heritage’s “meaning.” For example, we can read of the auto-orientalist desire for material authenticity of official stakeholders that collides with pragmatic visions of reconstruction efforts, using “foreign” materials, but also with local traditions that have always been transformed, and “modernized,” but are not considered suitable to be seen as innovative and contemporary. On the other hand, some of the stakeholders do not even use the terms “heritage” and “culture” and yet are discussed as producing or caring for it by the authors; aspects often referred to as intangible heritage, such as ritual function and use, play a more prominent part, while destruction may not necessarily be considered as harming the value and meaning or function of a building or object. For us, the intimate relationship and interstices between tangible and intangible heritage ought to be considered by stressing social agents’ perspectives, such as those of craftsmen, artists, or devotees. In this light it seems worth mentioning that there is no term for “heritage” in Nepali, something telling and underlining that our use of such concepts must be handled with care because it might push our research towards a specific narrative. We have nevertheless chosen to stick to heritage dynamics Christiane Brosius is professor of visual and media anthropology at the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies. Her current research focuses on Delhi and Kathmandu, in particular on urban spaces and change, cultural heritage and artistic production in the twenty-first century. [email protected]