Contrary to popular perceptions, cultural heritage is not given, but constantly in the making: a construction subject to dynamic processes of (re)inventing culture within particular social formations and bound to particular forms of mediation. Yet the appeal of cultural heritage often rests on its denial of being a fabrication, its promise to provide an essential ground to social-cultural identities. Taking this paradoxical feature as a point of departure, and anchoring the discussion to two heuristic concepts—the ‘politics of authentication’ and ‘aesthetics of persuasion’—the chapters herein explore how this tension is central to the dynamics of heritage formation worldwide.
Table of Content
List of Figures
Preface
Introduction: Heritage Dynamics: Politics of Authentication, Aesthetics of Persuasion and the Cultural Production of the Real
Mattijs van de Port & Birgit Meyer
Chapter 1.
Aesthetics as Form and Force: Notes on the Shaping of Pataxó Indian Bodies
André Werneck de Andrade Bakker
Chapter 2. Intangible Heritage, Tangible Controversies: The Baiana and the Acarajé as Boundary Objects in Contemporary Brazil
Bruno Reinhardt
Chapter 3. Swinging between the Material and the Immaterial: Brazilian Cultural Politics and the Authentication of Afro-Brazilian Heritage
Maria Paula Fernandes Adinolfi
Chapter 4. ‘Reporting the Past’: News History and the Formation of the Sunday Times Heritage Project
Duane Jethro
Chapter 5. Scaffolding Heritage: Transient Architectures and Temporalizing Formations in Luanda
Ruy Llera Blanes
Chapter 6. Corpo-Reality TV: Media, Body, and the Authentication of ‘African Heritage’
Marleen de Witte
Chapter 7. Heated Discussions Are Necessary. The Creative Engagement with Sankofa in Modern Ghanaian Art
Rhoda Woets
Chapter 8. Iconic Objects: Making Diasporic Heritage, Blackness and Whiteness in the Netherlands
Markus Balkenhol
Chapter 9. Ascertaining the Future Memory of Our Time: Dutch Institutions Collecting Relics of National Tragedy
Irene Stengs
Concluding Comments
Chapter 10. Heritage Under Construction: Boundary Objects, Scaffolding and Anticipation
David Chidester
Chapter 11. Can Anything Become Heritage?
David Berliner
Chapter 12. Heritage as Process
Ciraj Rassool
Index
About the author
Birgit Meyer is Professor of Religious Studies at Utrecht University. She is co-editor of Material Religion. Her recent publications include Aesthetic Formations: Religion, Media and the Senses (ed., Palgrave 2009), Things: Religion and the Question of Materiality (ed. with Dick Houtman, Fordham 2012), Sensational Movies: Video Vision and Christianity in Ghana (University of California Press, 2015), and Creativity in Transition: Politics and Aesthetics of Cultural Production Across the Globe (ed. with Maruška Svašek, Berghahn, 2016).
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