(Dis)placed Heritage: Memory, Museums, and Ecologies of Agency

Negotiating heritage is a highly political endeavor. It is clearly linked to cultural, historical, and political locations that determine what counts as ‘worth’ being remembered and protected in a context of positive evaluation of identity. Certain aspects of a community’s past are ‘sacralized’ and given the status of cultural heritage. This can be tangible or intangible. Likewise – and in a dynamic that enhances the problematic distinction between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ – human communities decide what counts as ‘natural heritage,’ as a ‘monument’ of other-than-human ‘history’ that carries meaning and significance from the perspective of humans. What is more, material, tangible pieces of human heritage, with a clear function at their places of origin, are physically relocated to public audiences elsewhere.

As has been pointed out in critical heritage studies, as well as in recent debates in museology, these distinctions and negotiations are fraught with issues of hegemonic power. The authors take up these critiques and discuss their implications with reference to religion and place. They argue that heritage discourse is in need of radical decolonization that reflects on the place and positionality of all actors involved in the designation and ‘sacralization’ of heritage. These actors include the nonhuman ‘subject–objects’ (Karen Barad) in a situation that is qualified as an ecology of agencies. While landscapes and natural monuments are ‘emplaced’ in a concrete way, movable pieces of value are ‘displaced’ and exhibited in museum settings. Looking at concrete cases from western Europe and its colonial entanglements, the authors discuss the question of how ‘memory’ and ‘museum’ would look like if we would take the agency of objects seriously and move from an anthropocentric understanding of heritage to a biocentric one.