Introduction - The heritage and decoloniality nexus: Global exchanges and unresolved questions in sedimented landscapes of injustice

More than ever, heritage narratives, policies, and objects are being questioned because of the colonial legacies that still permeate public spaces (e.g., Knudsen et al., 2022). From the eruption of protests and claims to heritage objects, places, and monuments in former colonial powers, to the emergence of Indigenous peoples’ heritage curatorship of land, and resources activism, new efforts are challenging racialized social orders and persistent exclusionary regimes. Protests echo long-running questions about social structure, voice, and ability to shape lives and the future, linking heritage to broader questions of rights, resources, and redistribution. Both academic scholarship and grassroots politics prompt us to interrogate the entrenched politics of representation, socio-material interactions, and the unfinished business of decolonizing heritage institutions and practices.

This conversation started within the framework of a networking seed grant project promoted by the University of Geneva and the University of Exeter.1 The project aimed to broaden the conversation on the intersections of cultural heritage, identity, and landscape sustainability by bringing together scholars addressing different configurations of heritage regimes, discourses, and practices from various regions of the world (Figure 1). Focusing on the connections, as well as contradictions, that characterize social spaces caught up between local and global policies and practices, this led to a powerful interdisciplinary and comparative outlook on the complexities of decoloniality. The anthropologically informed multiregional focus enabled us to explore the entanglements between place-based research, long-term practices of inhabiting and remembering, and the transnational valuations and expectations underpinning official heritage management (see Dominguez, 2017). The complexity of “authorized heritage discourse,” as originally defined by Smith (2006), is arguably augmented in contemporary frictional spaces of developmentalism, from the widening of global extractive frontiers on natural, cultural, and intellectual materials, to the spaces into which Indigenous peoples and ethnic or rural minorities are pressured to conform to international organizations’ and state-sponsored development models (e.g., Coombe and Baird, 2016; Larsen et al., 2022). The collective effort, as this dossier reveals, led to the identification of unexpected commonalities as well as new horizons for collaboration across disciplines, areas of practice, and diverse perspectives.

The exchanges on heritage and decoloniality taking place across several meetings revealed a common aspiration to unpack heritage politics through their multiple historical, juridical, emotional, and spatial dimensions. Colonial heritage matters are not merely historical events and material remains of the past that can simply be acknowledged or rejected. Rather, they emerge from the remediation of difficult pasts that radically challenge the hierarchical taxonomies and practices used to categorize people, objects, and landscapes. This discussion resonates with the call for “a rhizomatic cosmopolitics” (Papailias and Gupta, 2021, 964) to the extent that it aspires to disclose opportunities for more equitable worldings through anthropological knowledge.

Specifically, a core focus gradually emerged in the quest to navigate and overcome the legacies of privilege, raciality, and inequality in both material and relational senses. A number of shared questions guided the conversation: How do we systematically move beyond the grammars, languages, and immediate symbolic acts of defiance, popular mobilization, and protest? How, and under which conditions, can the goals of decolonization be achieved within and through heritage? Do profound ontological and epistemic barriers prevent emancipatory grassroots heritage politics to work in practice? What is, indeed, needed for heritage to become a practical tool for disenfranchised people to “embody history,” as theorized by Fanon (1963, 40), and to channel “an uncoercive rearrangement of desires,” as Spivak (2004, 526) advocated?

We propose three interrelated lines of interrogation for this collection of essays (Figure 2). The first line of exploration concerns the divergent ways in which decoloniality has emerged or been mobilized in different national and regional contexts. The second line of investigation concerns the concrete manifestations and consequences of addressing decoloniality in contemporary heritage practice. The third line of inquiry explores the practical implications, lessons, and opportunities for transformative and collaborative actions. We will return and expand on these three key points after briefly introducing the individual contributions in the next section.

The resulting papers of our exchanges raise multiple questions, practices, and tactics at the intersection of discursive and material approaches to look at the links and frictions between heritage and decoloniality from a variety of settings and perspectives.

The first set of papers explores the collaborative encounters enabled through heritage and the practical consequences of dealing with decoloniality in the field. Leïla Baracchini and Julien Monney draw attention to the “aesthetic persuasion” that limits institutional and grassroots movements to decolonize heritage in Guadeloupe. They suggest that the creative act of juxtaposition and mixing heterogeneous times and materials nonetheless matters to intertwine past and present, tangible and intangible elements into spaces and poetics of reflection, reparation, and resignification of difficult inheritances. Similar insights are provided by Roberta Burchardt in her evocative and intimate piece unraveling the performative legacies of a Luso-Brazilian house through material connections and sensorial attachments. Revealing a site of enduring colonial privilege, she offers a pathway to “relearn to love from those who can see trees as monuments to past civilizations.” Writing on behalf of the Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Collective of Catamarca's High Valleys (CIIVAC), Alejandra Korstanje unveils the potential of incorporating slow methodologies and community collaborations into archaeology to produce better practice and situated knowledge on heritage, identity, and territory claims of peasant and Indigenous communities in Northwest Argentina. Through shared decision-making and effective communicative strategies, she pinpoints the establishment of trusting relationships enabling scholars and local communities “walking together” in mutually sustainable initiatives. Blurring distinctions and hierarchies of expertise discloses connections between heritage and other fundamental rights, such as education or health, within the common ground of “thinking-feeling” and taking care of the land.

The interactions of heritage, rights, and disenfranchised communities are further considered by several authors from a more discursive and equally critical point of view. Lucas Lixinski reflects on the uneasy relationships between heritage, the law, and racial capitalism in the case of the constitutional recognition of quilombolas, Afro-descendant communities in Brazil. He argues that the authorizing register of legal discourse is by and large unable to live up to the aspirations of heritage as a decolonial tool. Nonetheless, it can still be somewhat promising strategically for historically oppressed groups. Bryony Onciul focuses on the potential of heritage to support Indigenous rights and responsibilities in Canada, arguing that heritage needs to decolonize and broaden its conception to enable meaningful, action-based connections between past, present, and future that further anticolonial efforts.

What decoloniality may imply in non-Western settler contexts was another subject of considerable discussion. Florence Graezer Bideau and Pascale Bugnon focus on the dynamics of official heritage management in China, offering a different perspective from which to reflect on international practices and taken-for-granted assumptions of decolonial work. They highlight the process of “social engineering” in which heritage policies are enmeshed with hierarchies and racialized narratives in a nation-building project and explore the significance of decolonial practice. The contribution is relevant here to underline how the tropes of decoloniality must be seen in the context of hierarchies of values and hegemonic heritage practices that reinforce rather than challenge logics of discrimination. This concern is echoed in the conversational piece by Hasini Haputhanthri, Gill Juleff, and Sanathanan Thamotharampillai as the authors hinge upon their experiences in conducting archaeological and museum research and artistic engagements in Sri Lanka during and after the civil war. They foreground the difficulties of working/reworking concepts and practices within an enduring colonial system of knowledge that allocates space for minorities without challenging meaning and authority but preventing the “recoding” of heritage as a means to resistance and social justice.

Finally, the collection is complemented by three interviews with people involved in the practice of the decoloniality and heritage nexus. The current director of the Museum of Ethnography of Geneva (MEG), Carine Ayélé Durand, points to the changing role of ethnographic museums and anthropology at large in favoring the move toward decoloniality through the resignification of collections and meaningful public engagement. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy's delegate, Brennen Ferguson, provides an important testimony of a process leading to the restitution of sacred items from this museum, highlighting the importance of “respectful and good-faith” collaboration to determine the future of museum objects collected from Indigenous territories. ICCROM's director general, Webber Ndoro, focuses on the colonial nature of heritage discourse and practice in Africa, underlining persistent global asymmetries and the importance of anthropology in bringing other voices to the table.

As these cases show, competing issues in accessing and creating knowledge (who has the right to speak about heritage) and what is done with expert knowledge (whose expertise counts) are symptomatic of entrenched and enduring power relations. Altogether, the contributions demonstrate how the long-term effects of colonial experiences and heritage-making practices are intricately entangled with modernist imaginaries, community lifeworlds, and nation-state building.

Through the focus on the heritage and decoloniality nexus, the participants in this forum interrogate different genealogies and persistent expressions of heritage in the naturalization of ethnic and racial hierarchies of knowledge, power, and being. Unraveling the entangled structures of control, resources, and embodied attachments with deep roots in (and sometimes preceding) the foundations of nation-states is a complex and even doomed task if the structural violence of their modern classifications and temporalities remains unchallenged (Pels, 2022; Trouillot, 2002). To unpack such layers of structural violence, efforts to excavate the similarities, confluences, divergences, and cross-fertilizations of different postcolonial contexts and scales remain as relevant as ever. How to make sense of the “variations on the theme of destruction and creolization,” as Trouillot (2002, 233) put it, through which the “savage slot” allocated to cultural and ethnic minorities in official heritage policies and institutions can be acknowledged, challenged, and prompted to deploy its transformative potential? Diversity in trajectories, we insist, should not be a deterrent for comparison but a catalyst to expand perspectives on a concrete political issue (Stengers, 2011).

Building on the long-standing scholarly debates on postcolonial practices, discourses, and modes of being, we argue that a focus on decoloniality—as the complementary side of modernity/coloniality (Mignolo and Escobar, 2013; Mignolo and Walsh, 2018)—enables us to interweave a diversity of historical and regional contexts, with their colonial ambiguities and specific power structures and dynamics, while maintaining a sensitivity to the nuances and creativity derived from contextual and performative heritage engagements. It is important to revisit the inextricable political, economic, and cultural links between modernity and colonialism, which continue to reenact and reproduce power asymmetries, epistemic injustices, and ontological discrimination. This suggests that for the decoloniality and heritage nexus to overcome narrow geographical and historical scopes, it must acknowledge that the “colonial matrix of power … has to be central to any discussion of contemporary global inequalities and the historical basis of their emergence” (Bhambra, 2014, 119).

Within these ecologies of discussions and reflexivity, we pose the questions: How can decolonization in the heritage field become more than a metaphorical gesture (Tuck and Yang, 2012, 1)? How do we move beyond narrow disciplinary historiographies, quick fixes, and therapeutic tools to build care, reciprocity, and tolerance in a hostile world undermining such aspirations in practice?

At stake are distinct temporalities, spatial manifestations, and highly diverse implications for heritage practice. In grappling with decoloniality as a common yet heterogeneous perspective, we bring attention to subaltern histories, material and discursive narratives, and political aesthetics to identify and further interrogate the recurrent “colonial toxicities” (Stoler, 2018, 543) underpinning contemporary heritage discourses and practices (Shepherd, 2018). There are clear risks with grand narratives that reduce all (post)colonial subjectivities and experiences to similar challenges and expressions (Fowles, 2016; Rivera Cusicanqui, 2014). Addressing such divergences and granular differences is critical to redefining the conditions necessary for more equitable future heritage trajectories.

Ranging from the politics of curating colonial legacies in museum exhibitions to everyday practices of taking care of nested sacred landscapes, what is striking is the uneven capacity to undo legacies of privilege, let alone to influence the wider public sphere in which they are located. Decolonial heritage practices are confronted with the risk of expertise provoking further displacement, not least by expanding the toolkit of new methodologies and conceptual frameworks to deepen collaboration and co-creation of knowledge (Boast, 2011; Rizvi, 2020). Actual practice is too often hindered by notions that essentialize knowledge “types” that need to be “bridged,” rather than recognizing the shifting “knowledge spaces” (Turnbull, 1997, 553), unequal relations, and perspectives involved in collaboration (Green, 2015; Springgay and Truman, 2018; Watson and Huntington, 2008, 275). How “seriously” counter-hegemonic subaltern knowledge, practice, and ontologies are taken—the old issue that Spivak (1988) notoriously framed as the question “Can the subaltern speak?”—at the end of the day often depends on the timelines, hierarchies, and budgets of “heritage as usual.”

Faced with such realities, is decolonizing (through) heritage then even possible? Is this then a matter of conciliatory rhetoric “domesticat[ing] decolonization” (Tuck and Yang, 2012, 3), depoliticizing and ultimately pacifying the unsettling potential of critical perspectives on heritage and rights? Disruption is needed to challenge depoliticization, bureaucratic obstacles, and the essentialization of cultural diversity by creating space for alternative affective practices, ontologies, and politics of heritage. It is crucial to question a purely prescriptive ethos and approaches that seek conciliation through common heritage management and one-size-fits-all solutions. Dissonant and contradictory encounters with heritage objects and sites can be the source of renewed critical thinking and political action.

The wealth of experience of people deeply involved in contested territories over decades showcased in this section highlights the seemingly incommensurable challenges posed by the dual nature of heritage as tangible “things” as much as intangible “process,” revealing networks of attachments (to objects, places, memories, people, other species, and beings) that create unique configurations and trajectories. In our own engagements with Indigenous peoples, descendant communities and minorities (Larsen, 2015, 2018, 2022; Lazzari, 2008, 2011; Lazzari and Korstanje, 2013; Orlandi, 2022), we have witnessed how the tropes of heritage rights and conservation have been repurposed and reshaped to curate pasts that matter for imagined futures. The bricolage of distinct place-based fluid dynamics with often long-established anticolonial taxonomies emerges as pathways toward “re-existing” and “de-linking” from Western/metropolitan aesthetics and modes of classification (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018, 7).

Decoloniality, in this sense, also intersects with non-anthropocentric understandings of heritage, the humanities, and social sciences (e.g., Harrison and Sterling, 2020), insofar as we need to challenge the modernist assumption relegating the nonhuman to being rounded up, shackled, classified, and packaged for consumption (as commodities, as knowledge, as data). Moving against this, Mignolo and Walsh (2018, 1) argued for “vincularidad … the awareness of the integral relation and interdependence amongst all living organisms (in which humans are only a part) with territory or land and the cosmos.” A multispecies, ecological, and future-oriented disposition is part and parcel of the heritage and decoloniality nexus as it provides orientation on making kinship and crafting alliances to survive on, and care of, an endangered planet (Haraway, 2016).

If one agrees that “the self-determination of the other is the other-determination of the self” (Viveiros de Castro, 2015, 11), vincularidad does not need academics to manifest itself. Our exchanges foregrounded a genuine desire for vincularidad in exposing the emotional space where encounters with heritage are experienced (Wetherell et al., 2018). Undoing privilege and disrupting representations are ongoing quests and pathways to move away from old regimes and their unending afterglow: open, exploratory, and hybrid interactions abound and with heritage generate multiple productive conversations about hierarchies of past, present, and future realms of experience, values, and being(s). If heritage governance across these diverse and rugged terrains is frequently profiled as a colonial anachronism, it must be asserted that heritage-triggered conflicts can be potential vehicles for building communities of solidarity and cultivating resistance strategies stemming from the cracks in established normative spaces and the very act of rethinking them.

It is with these considerations in mind that we lean on decoloniality as a “concept or work in progress” to highlight that it is not a state to be claimed in singular moves but an interrogation that remains relevant to even the most sympathetic and attuned theoretical frameworks and across multiple practices (Sundberg, 2014; Todd, 2016). Such a process may be considered a protective modus operandi, for navigating the toxic environments where colonial logics and regulatory legacies continue to be deployed under new guises. What we do with it, where and how we address heritages in the plural, makes a difference.

Through the “heritage matrix of power,” dividing lines are cemented between that which is worth preserving, protecting, and enshrining and that which is outside the realm of attention and dedication. By categorizing people, materials, places, and beings in varying degrees of visibility and future-worthiness, heritage expresses, magnifies, and crystalizes the vectors of differentiation of race, gender, and class, reflective of enduring colonialities (Quijano, 2007). Such a matrix draws its continued efficacy from the “coloniality of being” (Maldonado Torres, 2007): individual and collective positions mutate, reverse, and diverge, responding to a myriad of factors and changing relations, while the embodied experience of exclusion often persists across such changes, exceeding what can be effectively put into words.

The question “On whose behalf are we talking?” remains open, as Kenyan archaeologist and postcolonial heritage scholar George Abungu pointed out in our first online meeting, a point that is further underlined by the evolving field of cultural rights. This question acquires a new urgency as we struggle to find ways to productively engage with the wider public, experts, and heritage stewards in a broad and inclusive sense. Commonalities notwithstanding, all the contributions in the special section on heritage and decoloniality agreed on the necessity to unlearn what colonization and decolonization may mean in mainstream contexts and relearn how these terms may make sense in practice and in different places (Tlostanova and Mignolo, 2012, 7).

The collection of papers and interviews that compose this dossier demonstrates that one size certainly does not fit all to unmake the persistent toxicities and hierarchies that have shaped the world we inherited. Rather, it presents a call to urgently reinforce both academic and institutional spaces for decoloniality as a field of practice for critical inquiry and new ways of world-making through—and despite—heritage.