1 - Introduction: Finding the Grain of Heritage Politics

Summary

This volume is a collection of papers from the second conference in a series of three. This series of three conferences was first envisioned to look into what we call “the cultural politics of heritage-making” in Asia. In positing the notion of “heritage-making”, we foreground “heritage” as a dynamic process, a product that is unfinished and always in the making, akin to Harvey's (2001) assertion that the term is a verb, that is, something that is done. We further recognize that this process of heritage-making is embedded in contesting political interests that seek to present “heritage” as a finished product, a noun that becomes appropriated as a form of cultural capital, broadly speaking. Or to put it another way, “heritage” becomes the manifest material and symbolic anchor for culture, and one must have a “heritage” as one must have a nose and two ears (to borrow Gellner's simile) if one is to be recognized and recognizable in the international, national and sub-national arenas. Thus, “heritage” implies the process of heritage-making, and this process, when we consider the politics of recognition that is at stake, is embedded in cultural politics of multiple scales (see Harvey 2014).

These multiple scales, ranging from the local to the national and international levels — which we do not assume are discrete arenas of social action — involve different players with different degrees of agency and interests. In a generic way these players include the state, local actors at the grass-roots level, and international organizations and experts. Again, we do not assume that these actors or the arenas that they operate in are discrete. Often we may find actors reprising roles across the different scales, which hints at the complex assemblages that produce what we call “heritage”. Without foregoing the multi-scalar complexities involved in the process of heritage-making, but with a view to foregrounding in turn the different sets of actors involved at different levels of the heritage-making chain, each of the conferences in the series focused on one set of players respectively. Thus, the first conference, held in Singapore in January 2014, focused on the role of the state.